confessionals, in the ass

The lord speaks in wonders and so it is as I leave Rochester Chicago bound only to find a flight delayed and grounded in Philadelphia as a storm built on the eastern seaboard. Fleeing to safety I find the other Pete and Kate and hunker down post liquor store and watch as the clouds form to ice to downpour to blizzard to a foot then an additional foot of snow. We talk and the next action becomes clear, then more clear, piling up like inches. We talk and I sit to write.

I wake up sometimes thinking I'll find my wife beside me. In the haze I reach over and remember, vaguely now, the feel of her, her presence. I know now for certain that these thoughts will linger with a person forever, with me until I die. There will never be a time that the thought and dreams of pure love and original connection and vows and belief will disappear. They will always be there and be there in want and desire, at least the story I had planned it to be in fantasy. Love conquers all and delight is the reward. At the same time I also know that this story could be any story. I also know that chemically Buttercup was my girl. I doubt there was or will be any two people with the capacity to melt into one another than she and I had. If you ask her it may be a different story but for me it was true. Softness is not wetness, it is the bond two people have when their chemistry matches like bone marrow. Buttercup was the moon and she'd keep me up till 3AM or all night with it. I knew it and never came inside of her. That was her deal, you can't cum inside me until we are married and then you get my ass too. You can have me in the ass and cum inside me if we stay together in the eyes of God. Some God but I respect her for it and I never did either. And this will haunt me. But it should not be underestimated the force of what I first set out to tell - that with a man is love for his bride (if it is true), that when definite and failed will go on forever. It will go on with more force of forever than as such to any living force. Of course, when I am dead it will be too but so will everything. So will the tectonic shift and Seychelles and all the nations awaiting changing tides and high waters and fire and meteors or any such boy dream Romantic nonsense. Nevertheless.

So I speak in the quiet, calm and more than coincidental realization that the face plant of landing inanely in Philadelphia, in the heat and cold of transition, in the need for a break and time to make a better move and forceful plan to march on I find a tiny reason to post this and remember that in the quest for an honest life one makes horrible mistakes. That living is not hiding and wanting is not needing and helping is often the equivalent of shifting rather than changing any outcome. Still it is entirely the debt of stupid belief in something honest. So I must, at the very least, tell the truth on my way through. Honest report for whatever it's worth. Dear God, how stupid.

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!

Christmas day comma two thousand nine

Christmas was a beautiful day. Except when the girl was puking from food poisoning and when Z called and had me assist like a goon with the latest drama between the ex-wife and the boy and the ex-wife’s bo, Cletus. It started however in church and church was good. It was as usual filled with memories and the icons rested like heavy granite in a much heavier structure surrounded by the light hot weight of history. I thought of my grandfathers, both of them but each knowing more, watching and trying or watching and hoping across the river Styx, then across the clouds, faithful and full of love, full of peace. From this spot in history I wanted the night to extend on. The chorus sang and the bells rang. The people of the village were well dressed and white and well-to-do. I watched them, I watched the row of boys behind us and the woman with the long legs and black lace stockings and red silk smock. Above her the ceramic Stations of the Cross mounted on the one hundred fifty year old brick, women singing, men in robes raising hands above the Eucharist, the Christmas offerings, the first. From here there’s a beginning but I think two thoughts that contradict these desires. One, an ex-wife and a marriage on a mountain and a lost thought and a better time and two, a small church in a small town from a year ago after driving through deep snow, so absurd and so deep that I kept the car travelling fast enough to prevent it from stalling. I made it within 100 yards of my destination and called the girl where I lay, stuck along the road in a shit house car, red and stained and already gone because the worst of the worst place got the best of me and kept me low and the best of the worst place was actually not true. The season past, the summer came and God pulled me west by the ear to the land of answered prayers. So fucking answered that I could proclaim it as certainty. Direct action without lip service – the way I had demanded it so pompous. All this could happen in a blink and even the opposite travelling behind in an instant, an afterimage. So this is Christmas, I thought, so lucky and rich with love that I was alone by nightfall in a house that didn’t belong to me, in a space that I didn’t choose, in a time that I’d have been glad to escape, in love and safe, because I had wished for it and there it was - thankful, alive, angry, in love, in peace, in stupid honest report (dear god, oh boy), listening to the bells and holding the hand of the one certain one on Christmas day 2009.

my ass is so bony, it hurts to sit on wood

I got fucking visions, I know it sounds crazy but right here is where I'm going to make my stand. This is it. This is where I draw the line, Obadiah says catching me in the morning hours as I shuffle sleepy down the hall toward the porcelain shit machine.
I stop and stare, listen for a bit then say, well if we're on the subject I need some bars across these windows for security and, not for nothing, I don't want to smell the cigar smoke of my fucking neighbor either (as long as we're dropping F-bombs). He's a hell of a good guy btw (I say it like that B-T-W), but I just don't want to breath anything other than air, coffee or my own god damn farts. This last part I add for emphasis barely containing a grin.
Who Jerold? He's been smoking cigars fifteen years, I don't think I could stop that.
I nod but I see we're not connecting.
I'll get some wood for those windows and we'll fix you right up.
I don't think so, I want something worthwhile, I'll work it out.
I know I can come off as an asshole but.
You are an asshole I add abruptly, that's just the thing.
There are two kinds of people in this world, ones who draw the line and ones who just let it happen. This is where I draw the line, this is it, right here, he says speaking to the ghost of his dead father and the father before that.
Alright, I hear you, and to it I'll add this, it's not going to work. Not this way, not here. I'll watch you come around. I'll watch you work it out. But in case I'm wrong I'll buy the next round. Then I went to shit, which came out burning from the prior night's hot wings. Fuck.
I thought of Buttercup, poor girl, in this nightmare pile of bricks and broken things, fascist crazies, from the best of good places, for a night or two, playing along. The truth is, no one would play along if they had a choice. The truth is that this place is a monstrous end and a damn new beginning (god I pray). That said, I felt for Obadiah, felt on his side, to make a stand, etc. All that horse shit. I felt it was as good as any approach. Maybe it'll go. Maybe.

In the morning Emmy texts - I'm still praying.
Me too - I reply.
For what? I thought. For a strange thought thank God. For worse until it becomes clear.
What becomes clear?
Good point. It.
There is as much 'it' as there is a 'they' dear boy.
There is?
Ha ha, you know better.
I suppose I do. Even though, in the back of my mind, I know I don't.