hollydaze

Western Ky. No matter how hard you try you’ll always be from the place in which you are from. I moved a six hour drive, one time zone, and several cultures away from all things pertaining to the first 19 years of my life. It worked for a while. Then I had the bromance of my dreams. He’s a piano player, an artist, and a fellow socialist revolutionary(you’d be surprised how hard those are to find in Knoxville). The only catch in our man love sage is that his home town isn’t an hour and a half from mine. This honky has my number. I can’t bullshit him. He drove an hour to the same neighboring town on the weekends as I did. We shopped at the same malls, ate at the same Applebee’s, and played in strip mines owned by the same coal company. I had just started to tell stranger’s that I was originally from Tn. I’ve even contemplated changing my middle name to Tennessee. Then I fall for this guy. His very presence prevents all my self promoting and half lying and egocentric smoke and mirrors. Marta says that real friendships are based in vulnerability and honesty. Yeah, I know Marta, I wasn’t looking for a friend I was looking for street cred. Sometimes when you’re foraging for mushrooms you find truffles.

Thanks Levon for being a better friend than I was looking for.

i heart arbitrary

In                                                                                                      Out

 

Rolling Stones                                                                   Bob Seager

painting                                                                               drawing

running                                                                                 yoga

house venu                                                                        bar venu

cliques                                                                                community

apathy                                                                              socialism

Macbooks!                                                                 intentional poverty

This rad band i heard at a house                                        grizzly bear

cruz farm                                                                              soy milk

houses                                                                             apartments

eating meat                                                                            cruz farm

monday

Walking the same gravel path for days on end, his feet remember where to land. Every dip and hill are recorded in his muscle tissue. It changes only slightly with the rain, low places becoming rivers and lakes. This afternoon is no different, his mind is somewhere else. On previous days he noted the flowers still blooming in late September. Today crows fill the branches of a large elm tree to his right. They seem to be vying for his attention, calling directly to him in their indiscernible language. In considering the meaning of their cries he fails to consider the fist-size stone sailing toward his temple. The sickening thud of a melon collapsing on a tile floor is followed by an agonizing din, and the taste of bile.
In his nauseated stumble home his muscles find their way over every bump and dip, soft ridge of gravel. Blood and peppermint run the length of his neck and stain his shirt, while he struggles to hold the contents of his bladder. Every fallen leaf is painfully radiant in this heightened state of awareness. The crunch of the rocks underfoot bounces off the inside of his swollen skull. Passing out on the couch in his den, his only consolation the fact that he’d left his wallet at home by mistake, he holds the image of the assailant with the soapy fingers of a damaged rage. It is fated to be lost.

high school reunion.

The din, smoke, and draft fail to numb as advertised. When he sees a ghost it scares him, drunk or sober.   Swallowing hard and falling like a full book-sachel into his alotted space, he is absorbed into the sinful mass at the table.  Weeks or months make no difference, their conversation is that of a Latin Mass; rote and performed with the same conviction at every gathering.  The truth of their lives floats about them as immaterial as smoke, ignored and incorporeal, the stinging in his eyes the only indicator of it’s presence at all.  The pieces of his heart regained since the last fruitless wake are chipping away: He sips his beer.  Tales are shared, and the same jokes made as always, comfortable, sanity-loosening repitition  ticks in metronome fashion as he tries to count in his head how many times he’s recounted this very story.

She hates mayonnaise.  She won’t eat chicken salad.  She threw up in the limo.

He throws up a little with it’s telling.  Swallows it in a mass of cold regret drained from a plastic cup.  This, like all evenings it’s kin, ends quickly.  Small comfort, that taste in his mouth will be there tomorrow– it pairs well with the adrenaline residuals tapping at the base of his skull.  It haunts the following days and casts long shadows over him as he lurches his car off the shoulder and tries to gain ground forever lost.

the sea and the black

Swimming through the thickness of July (sweat, rippling folds of carbon dioxide, waves of light and sound, the little bits of smog that stick to the cilia in your lungs) seems endless to most.  In my own heart however, I feel the tension of changing seasons.  Just beyond my physical horizon is the redness feared by sailors of old.  The trees resonate my dread.  An 800yr old live oak I climbed a week ago sang to me,

“wind and sleet consistent as sunset

days of slate sky turn to years

nights swallow and solitude consumes

men like leaves wither

dew collects and fog creeps

i am awake while the whole sleeps”

Holding to its bark my eyes cloud and I can see for centuries.  My grip becomes panicked  as I feel the earth tilt and slow it’s rotation.  Here and the hereafter are merging day and night as we move farther from the sun.  Thousands of feet of ice will coat the artifacts in my home.  Eternity will see us floating towards the black, gasses will trail for miles as our orb molds to oval and holds it’s velocity perfectly in vacuum.  While somewhere beyond this sea, I will stand and watch myself through the screen of a digital camera and with an uncanny sense of deja vu, plan my next trip to the ocean.

working my way down

The sand finds it’s way between my toes, just as the silver leafed waves find their way to the edge of the ever-shrinking sand. The wind, contrary to cliche does not cut through me like a knife. Instead it wraps me in a soothing balm. My sunburn retreats, my headache is quelled, and the pain my soul endures is for a moment massaged into abyss by this softest and most iridescent of breezes. Words fail my mind.  Surreal doesn’t begin to describe the eastern rim of this barrier island.  I am swallowed by the vast Atlantic, my whole being taken under, swirling and tumbling.  My mind is swept in a rip tide, smeared on sand and rock, crushed under the the weight of innumerable gallons of salt and water, stretched across a billion years of tides flowing in and out again.  Waves colliding from here to forever vibrate in my core until memories flood my mind. Of rope and wood and grit so close they’d become family,  of tastes and sights so far gone that I fail to recognize form and must simply trust the warmth of fire and brandy that my fellow man had sparked and drank on this very shore before the light bulb and cell phone drove us to seek out such memories. The sand between my toes completes the circuit of my mind and heart.  It pulls the end to the beginning and stretches my ancestor to my heir. Threads compose twine, compose fabric, compose the one endless quilt of sense/emotion/ thought/being.  Heat waves in the dessert force wind to cool my sun stretched face and the one and only moon reflects the light of the one and only sun; myself and those literally half the world away walk beaches by this same light and dwell.

all the kings men

Okay.  This is going to sound political, but I swear it’s not.  Well I’m at least not advocating for a one party over another.   Recently the supreme court made it legal for national campaigns to be funded by corporations as well as labor unions.  I could ramble on about the various motivations for this action for hours.  In the interest of time I’ll distill my rantings down to this.

We the people… are fucked.

If a politician has been purchased by a corporation or a union or any special interest for that matter it makes no difference whether they ride to washington on a donkey or an elephant.  They will not be concerned with the needs or desires of the people of this nation or even the concerns of their party.  Their only concern will be pleasing the pocket they live in.  This is not a victory for freedom of speech.  No matter what the law says Starbucks is not a person.  Wal-Mart is not a citizen.  Blackwater doesn’t have a social security number.  They DO NOT deserve the same rights as a human being.  The founding fathers of this nation never intended for gigantic corporations to run this country.

What the hell should we do?  Can we protest?  Can we revolt?  Can we convince everyone in America to vote against the most well-funded candidates?  I hope and pray.  I am calling on all of you, conservative, liberal, whatever, we have to fight this together.

“The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant, that few stood against many, and that by the time this war was over even a god-king could bleed.”- Leonidas

parting clouds

Blah blah blah.  Insightful look on situation.  Blah blah blah.  A little heart-felt introspection.  Blah blah blah.  Jaded comment on politics.  Blah blah blah.  Token spiritual insight.   Blah.  Blah. Blah.

less like a puzzle, more like a broken mirror

Sometimes you have everything in common with a human being and you still can’t stand to be around each other.   Occasionally you have relatively little in common with a dear loved one.  Most of the time you disagree about this and that yet you can tolerate human beings in small doses.  This would make sence if reality as we knew it was an accident.  Gases and dust and nebulas and shit colliding forming spheres dancing around a star like trailers in a tornado.  Chemicals reacting billions of times over until by chance creating the perfect environment for moss to grow on a rock.  Yeah chaos like that I understand.

A loving creator.  Purpose.  Meaning.  A story with a beginning and eventually and end?  Then why am I hated by those  who are indwelled by the same spirit as I am?  Why do I return their hate with hate?  Why do they hate the helpless?  Why do I hate the morally upright?

I know, I know, we have an enemy.  We’re all fallen, broken, dysfunctional.  That doesn’t offer any solace.  It seems more like an excuse than a reason.  I don’t think that the devil makes every douche bag in the world a douche bag.  It also seems like a broken person would just not work right.  A broken car won’t start.  A broken tv won’t show you a picture.  But a broken human hurts you?  No. A broken human isn’t able to talk, or is blind, or deaf, or mentally disabled.  Being broken doesn’t explain why people say horrible things to one another.  It doesn’t explain how a person can drive by a homeless man and hate him.  Not just apathy.  Hate.  They can feel like the homeless man is some how victimizing them.  If my microwave breaks it won’t cook food.  It’s not going to start lobbying against my demographic.  It won’t profess to love Jesus and then loath the vagrants who live the same lifestyle that Christ did.

Tom Waits says we’re all just monkeys with money and guns.  I think if we were on an evolutionary track we wouldn’t have either.

she completes me

My wife has gone out-of-town to celebrate her birthday with some friends and I am dieing slowly.  Two days and nights in a row without her is like walking around with a pillow duct taped to my face.  I can’t breath, I forget to drink water all day, I walk into a room and forget why. I can’t feel anything.  If Dan didn’t have work for me to do I think I’d just sleep till she got home.