rock, rope, and purchase

I came home and drank a beer. Then I drank a second beer and sat down to write. I listened and then read a few articles about the death of JD Salinger and recalled the last copy of Catcher in the Rye I owned. As I recall, V Daddy was reading it in Wyoming, at the Simpson Street place. This may be wrong but the image would be enough for me to think that yes, this is where it happened and as I remember he really liked it. Behind him would have been the large picture window with a view of the Snow King ski resort and the Gros Ventre range behind that. This would be it. Earlier in the day the sun had peeked through the clouds as I watched from the fourth floor bughouse east view just before a short spat of flurries turned into white out conditions. I set the camera up and left it running then drove to Siberia, otherwise known as RIT and taught a class. On the way home I thought about memory and subversion and how time doesn't wait so I don't wait. I thought about who I could give my time to and who I could leave behind. Almost everyone bubbles back to life and my thoughts about thoughts delay moments otherwise just there to experience. I want certainty and then I catch a lie I tell for the sake of a better story and then I catch a lie my other tells for the sake of an even better story. That's where it, life and loyalty, gets dumb and there is nothing more dumb than permitted ignorance after the call. My family. There are those there that will stay with you as you fall, those are your family. There are those that will permit your fall, those are your family. There are those that will await your fall and pick you up, those are your family. So I want to say and I can just say here but it won't have the same impact as how successfully I mean it that what I have wanted and so thoroughly failed at is insisting the other be family though instead fall to fail. In other words I have wanted no other option but have permitted all options and have seen those options exercised on me too. Those options, that other, is not your family. What's more is I see it in you too. And this keeps me plugging. So it goes in rock twenty ten. And it's snowing again thank God.

From the Horn of Africa

Every time I think about telling you a story now my heart beats slower and time gets shaken up. In fact, the story itself is halted from my own self awareness. The same pitiful self awareness I wish you had when I started. I could chalk it up to the examined life but that would be it. Nothing else is similar. My love.
Who? Who is the love?
You. You know that.
I do? Who is you?
My lord.
And what is your lord made of?
Silence and love and history.
How do you know that?
Because it is written and because there is longing.
Longing for what?
For certainty (pause), or for more love.
And what does that look like?
I know what you are doing?
Oh yes? What am I doing?
You are answering before the question is even formed in that same proverbial way. You are telling the faith before it is realized.
Then why do you resist?
Do I? For want.
(silence)

The best view is from the summit of a snow filled valley on a very cold night. On those nights the heat of the blood reaches its high peak and we wait for the strong to pull through. The weak perish and the strong mourn the weak. The cold will take the waiting and the poor of health.
Why such bullshit prose? Why always with the damn death and him beget that shit. Your man-ness is not so important to others.
I see, then what?
Then what? You know, head to the grind stone. Don't ask. Travel, live, worry about the ones who need you.
What if no one needs me?
Then make someone or help the old you selfish prick.
I am. I do.
Then do, I am.
(sigh)
(silence)

Rising

All signs point to moving on, to the getting of going, to the wherefore and how, up to the big house in the bigger sky. Then I see fire and right here feels just about good enough. Except for the discomforts preceded by subtle self deceptions and of course lies. That's all there is to it but that's enough to halt all dreams on stationary road - the kind where one sits idle and not the kind that supplies. Mack told me after the last round of horseshit and fear the next true thing that would keep my bronze lifeboat afloat until the next big change. He said, "Well, one of these two things could happen; It could get worse and then you'll look back on this as really good times or it'll improve and these will look like bad times. In either case we're still breathin'." Good point, I thought, breathing in the bitter cold early afternoon midwinter air. Snow everywhere and deep. Bah, reading back on these posts even a few months I imagine a future diagnosis and some pill that would have taken care of the whole situation had I'd known about it. I got out my Van Gogh action figure, the one my brother bought me after seeing the retrospective at the Met. His head shoots off from a lever in his back and an alternative head with a bandaged ear pops in. What a thing, I sat fiddling with it, sort of half chuckling. Dude put a bullet through his own belly and died. Fuck. Writing this just now I play Bonnie's Beware and sit back sipping a beer in the early hours, watching the cloud cover catch the rising red, purple, pink and yellow sun rays. It's -10 °F, according to the thermometer on the window.

William Nowik performing Crimson Flame (+).

Swinging a Dead Christmas Tree

In this video I swing a dead discarded Christmas tree in a circular rotation on New Year's Day 2010. Yea!