this thing here

I brought the dog to the park where she frolicked in the crisp air of winter. It was cold and she loved it cold. So did I actually, as long as it was winter I preferred it to the heat. At the park there were other dogs, and ducks on the icy creek waters, and a light fluffy mist from the lake effect settling on the branches, creating an other worldly sharpness to the scene. Then the clouds got thin but not enough to break in the mid morning sun when Faf and I headed to up the mountain trail. It is more of a wooded hill really not a mountain, but I think of the relative distance and the relief I feel when inside of them, surrounded of them. Years go by in either direction and I breath deep of the steep climb and relief of escape. When the snow makes a dust and stays lite and airy, the gray wash seeps the range and a sharp, utterly pristine air projects from each surface. Every dribbled line of bark and amber fall grass on each short ascent and rise sings like the summer. Silent and certain - as beautiful as youth.
Babe had some advice for me. "You're all surface" she said, "you've stopped getting deep into it." She wants the dirt I thought. I've got dirt but I imagine to protect Buttercup I'd stop talking because she's dying. I could make mistakes and those are easier to take if everyone lives and moves on and can assume their own responsibility though that is not what is happening here. I'm afraid to write because I feel the need for permission. I want a mentor or God or others to tell me with clarity and pure definitive certainty to speak my thoughts or not in this way. Silence, then Babe adds her two cents - she says tell it and don't hold back. I can't think of anything but Buttercup with the cancer eating her up and how I leave and how many of my friends fall away and are actually not friends. Big deal. Every time I think about telling you the story now my heart beats slower and time gets shaken up. The story is halted by the march of time and the fear that I am over the edge and a dirty lone wolf-type creature. This is how it gets written down only. What I have found is not something altruistic or profound but instead my fear is confirmed and love and cowardice. I had wished for something more, I think, analyzing and wasting time. At the same time that something more is delivered - Love in an abundant rush. Then the voice shatters and comes to present in tiny shock waves like broken glass or crystal or even something more, reverberating in the present state and I follow the ripples forward, mostly. This means I think, fairly soon, I'll be living forward. On listening, I hear the present. Stay tuned I tell myself. Stay tuned I tell you.

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.