best of: August 2003 Archives

three circuits 1.7 1.7 1.7 three times the mountain cannot explain this i've only ever done three once before, once and then i went right back to two i remember thinking ahh i see three, no, two yes. seven years ago twenty pounds ago god knows how many packs of cigarettes ago i thought that.

there were two resons one was the inexplicable fact of the matter of needing oh so very much less air my lungs were the same it was the rest of me changed and changed almost overnight? almost. other one was the song, the one i put at the end of the cd at the time where two circuits end a slow song an old song also it is the song that i've always allowed myself to feel and to each his own it's plain to see to walk alone you have to be and in feeling the allowable feelings i found not sadness but some searing energy to power the escape on and up and fast, i go up faster each time, there's no sense to this i'm old i'm wrecked i never expected this never expected it to be ... easy. it's easy.

and the third time 'round and down it is dusky purple ocean mist breeze the light the air the music pink floyd art is everything i see and physics within, matter into energy i am feeling this molecularly and it is almost almost too much i slow to a wander entranced in rapture there are nearly tears it is too beautiful it is way way too beautiful it is innocent beautiful a miracle it is explosive beautiful ignition liftoff earth falling away it is beautiful like birth and death and the aftermath the starlight and all other things long dead which live.

i almost couldn't stop at the car forced myself fell into the seat literally bathed in sweat i mean soaking soaking wet and as the interior lights faded in the silence it was perfect and i was already mostly an orgasm and it seemed the thing to do ease the seat back unbutton the buttons slide my hand down i mean i was already completely engaged in the process of arousal it was sex before i started it and by the time i finished it oh right out loud and bursts of color convulsing pulsing energy it was fission it was fusion it was blinding it was birth and death and the aftermath, it is an hour later now and still i am less a physical thing with mass and density than i am say the gilttering notes of a soft guitar spilling into the night sky.

every saturday morning they come with their machines, buzzing chopping roaring (always much too early for my taste, thank you); it is like clockwork ticking off another week, living here. in the minutes it takes to open these reluctant eyes i go skipping down the the intervals, connected to form a path through the recent past, a collection of annoying golden mornings running together and suddenly sweeter than i can bear to remember. it is the sensation of continuity, of waking knowing nothing's changed, even when that means what it's meant here, kind of a cozy blanket of stifling hopeless hurtful security. it is a weekend beginning the same as the hundred or is it hundred fifty before it in a life that's changed too often but not enough.

change. of course it is for the better but right now right this minute that doesn't matter, not when i'm sitting here and on just one of these two suddenly shaky hands i can count the number of times i'll be openening my reluctant eyes to this familiar yellow light as my sleepy head fills with grumpy thoughts and fights the noise and loses and my son comes bouncing through the room all laughing energy and against my will a quiet cheer rises through the raucous cacophony of the gardeners and their machines and i think i would endure a hell you cannot imagine if that hell meant i wasn't losing the rudely beautiful awakenings that are saturday mornings.

i often wish for the ability to reliably explain my self and have that work out as in message received. but no. it's always a process of fits and starts, of mistakes and retractions, of reacting to reactions that i didn't expect because the reactions reflect something i didn't mean to say in the first place. it's better with time to think, to compose, but even then, even if i take hours editing and clarifying and distilling the essesnces it's still like beaming a greeting into an alien civilization and it turns out 'greetings from earth nice to meet you' translates phonetically into the equivalent of 'your mother fucks transients for a couple swigs of night train'.

so i suppose the upside is when i'm in fullon inspired mode and not writing anything directly to anyone just expressing things generally, there is this abstract feel about it and that's been called poetic, which i've always found odd since to me it's just the most basic journalism, just me reporting the facts as i see 'em, as plain and direct as i can manage.

and there is so much more than i can say, since it must be said with these words which are of course defined by other words and all of this is contained within flat spaces, screens and pages, while these things i have to express possess additional dimensions, depth and extent that is not available within this thing we call language. sometimes i think i should have gone into physics instead, i have ideas like mulitdimensional arrays plotted in curved spacetime and illustrated in terms of spectral frequencies. i understand these things by the way they displace the living energy within me, in fact this phenomenon is the source of many things i perceive and cannot explain, you might call it an extra sense, though it isn't extraneous at all. and i can be on fire vivid eloquent and describe what i envision to perfection, and it is received as an abstraction from almost any other perspective, a symbol without a referent.

and you know, i can't complain. in the course of trying to explain i've found a truth, that is, i wouldn't have it any other way.

something in what i just attempted to express has resonance in this, in a way, not one i can explain:

what it is

there's a purpose, there's a goal,
there's a virtuos, and immoral,
there's a reason for all of this,
and I don't know what it is

I am one, and plural too,
I accept them but they exclude,
I could make sense of all of this,
but I don't know what it is

the seeds of inspiration never germinated in my mind,
the beacon of awakening is somewhere that I can't find, so
I don't know what it is

there's a beginning, and there's an end,
there's a climax, some would contend,
there's a way to signify this,
but I don't know what it is

~greg graffin, bad religion

the day drifts down mean to its own end and bitterly settles into memory. i drift into this dazed sense of ennui punctuated by spikes of fight or flight like whitehot sparks. and more and more i find i'm defined by the pinholes this leaves burnt into my consciousness, and yes there is a pattern, a loop slowly closing in on itself. and what am i doing while being undone by some recursive reference? well, at the moment, not a fucking thing. to calculate why, you would need some numbers, as in years spent relentless against this error, raised to the power of all the things i lost in the process divided by the things that passed by while i was incapacitated by the futility. divide the answer by the sum of my past, then subtract the resulting percentage from what i have left of this life, and maybe you'll understand when i say i'd rather accept this decaying orbit and its inevitably messy ending than waste any more of my self struggling against it.

i just want less loss.