Remain

Equatorial Disdain

2009-12-22T23:21:00.000-08:00

The hillside lights up slowly, three blinking towers on the crest to make a crown. The sunlight dies, quickly, quickly now it dies. I wait patiently, day after day, for the full moon to come. Clouds skew my vision, take up all that open space and spit it right back at me.

You sons of bitches, you. You bloated equatorial currents of evaporated air billowing in from off of the Great Blue, shimmering deep and wide. I despise your condescending condensation, causing me to bend low muttering curses that sound like prayers.

This blue moon will drag me to it, right from 28 straight into 29.

This Ikea star hovers above me, throwing incandescent promises into the deepening night.

The Egg Before The Chicken

2009-12-20T18:07:00.000-08:00

It’s raining in Seattle again, and I don’t know what to do with my life. I’ve never really known and never understood those who seemed to decide their life path with such grace and ease.

Maybe if I lie on my bed long enough and stare at the ceiling hard enough it will come to me. I can memorize the ridges and bumps and holes and lumps that make up the drywall covering and perhaps all of those intricate mishaps will somehow coalesce into a life plan.

I'm almost 29 and find myself asking the same questions I did at 12.

Fuck searching for an answer, I'm hungry and feel like making an omelet.

And omelets, as we all know, make everything better.

Quiet In The Fall

2009-12-03T19:00:00.000-08:00

It's been a long month. I'm moving (again) and not feeling that great about it. In fact, I'm not feeling that great about much right now. A very low point indeed. I think I could use a little help from Superman. But since Superman is busy saving the rest of the world, this cry for help will have to suffice.

I asked you a question
I didn't need you to reply
Is it getting heavy?
And then realize
It's getting heavy
Well I thought it was already as heavy as can be.

Is it overwhelming
To use a crane to crush a fly?
It's a good time for Superman
To lift the sun into the sky
Cause it's getting heavy
Well I thought it was already as heavy as can be.

Tell everybody
Waiting for Superman
That they should try to
Hold on the best they can
He hasn't dropped them, forgot them or anything
It's just too heavy for Superman to lift.

~Waiting For A Superman (As covered by Iron and Wine)

Most Appropriate

2009-10-27T21:41:00.000-07:00

"The Grateful Dead played a lot of 'free', often spontaneous, concerts in the Haight-Ashbury years-though the term 'free' seems somehow inappropriate given the band's ethos and the general zeitgeist of the time and place.

This show is remembered most fondly of all, largely because it has become regarded as the band's goodbye to the Haight, and because, after the ravages of the summer of love, magic could still happen. The concert came about after a nasty dust-up between hippies and cops two weeks earlier. Hoping to ease the tensions, the city proclaimed a 'street festival' for March 3, with the streets of Haight closed to traffic. It was an opportunity the band wasn't about to pass up. Playing atop a flatbed truck with the power tapped from Strait Theatre, the boys kicked off with 'Viola Lee Blues' and as the first notes crackled, the people began to gather until the streets (and stoops, and roof tops) were packed."

~ A passage from the book Grateful Dead The Illustrated Trip

And now for the show: March 3, 1968.

From Where I Stand

2009-10-26T19:16:00.000-07:00

Just existing in America. Not going forward, not back, just standing still. Road blocks at every turn and there is no light at the end of this endless tunnel. Can someone please end this tunnel or do I have to do it myself? A generations worth of prose on the tongue but no ears to listen, no one willing too hear what we all know to be true but refuse to confront. We have forgotten how to hear the clarion call of LIFE. We accept cheap imitations, shadows of the original. Hopes deferred until WHAT!?? What are we deferring until? Until life hands you a golden goose egg, until the heavens open up and a deluge of dreams and wishes come true rain down upon your weary and waiting head?

WHAT???!!!

O.K., wait, I know what it is. I missed some critical speech the other 307 million of you tuned in to, right? It’s my fault, I know. I don’t have a television and I missed it. Would someone please tell me WHAT THE FUCK that message said? Must have been some powerful shit to put the whole 307 million of you in a deaf, dumb and blind stupor.

This life is killing me. This country is destroying my spirit. Wearing me down like a river over stone. I look into the eyes of Americans everyday and see a crushed people, a people enslaved to a system that cares nothing, NOTHING, for them nor their best interests.

America will not cease to exist by forces from without its borders, it will die a slow and sad death by what happens from within them. We’ve no need to fear those that hate us abroad as it is our own self-hatred that will eventually do us in.

I know no one, self included, wants to read this. No one wants to hear this. We want to believe that a country so many once immigrated to is still a great place to be born, a great place to live and a great place to be from. But from where I stand (and believe me, the ground I stand on is shaky at best) all I can see is what I have written above.

What about you? What do you see from where you’re standing? Or have you even stopped to think about what you are seeing all around you?

Dark Harbor

2009-10-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

I can hear it coming long before it reaches these shores. Blowing its mournful horn through the foggy recesses of my thoughts. This ship sails into the minds harbor and stays for quite some time, finding safe passage through the brighter moments only to put off mooring for exactly the right time and place.

The time and place is now. Where it goes when it’s not docked here I know not, I only know when it is coming (and rarely when it will be going). It brings with it a darkness I have come to recognize but will never grow fond of. There are lessons to be learned in this darkness, I just sometimes wish they could be learned in the light as well.

This gently rocking vessel drains me, exhausts me, destroys the me I like best in an attempt to keep things in balance. Yet it leaves me in tact just the same (but never the same as before it came). I do not think it will kill me, at least not by itself alone.

Fear and Self Loathing are its cargo, Doubt and Insecurity its freight. There will be beauty again; there will be laughter and song and dance in its proper turn. Now it is a different time, a turning of day to night. You cannot always live in the light, as the darkness helps to remind us of just how beautiful the light can be.

So now the time has come, to let the dark mantle descend.

Black and White

2009-10-11T21:54:00.000-07:00

I found it at a yard sale, maybe a month or so back, just sitting on a table with a bunch of other junk. It wasn’t in a frame, only glued to a piece of weather stained cardboard that was curling at the edges. This old black and white picture had seen better days and today was not one of them. It had water damage on the top half but not enough so as to ruin the photo entirely, just partly.

But all of this was not relevant information when it came to the point of purchase. I knew I would buy it, trading in one hard earned quarter to posses this small moment of local history preserved for the ages.

The photographer stands on a small hill overlooking the logging camp. From the hill you can see a team of six horses; black, white, then back to black again. Big, strong quarter horses. Horses bred for relieving these tree-laden hillsides of their heavy wooden burdens. The horses are harnessed to a wagon, which is attached to another wagon. The wagons are loaded with lumber cut into planks. A man sits atop the first wagon holding the reigns in his hands. He wears a cap and a winter coat. To his right is a wooden shed with a chimney pipe sticking out of its metal roof.

Behind the wagon he sits atop is an old Ford. Not a model T but something similar to it in style. The vehicle is the period marker. The Ford is not alone, though, as another rests on its four rubber tires not too far away. Behind the motorcars is a wall of cut and stacked planks, planks waiting to be loaded onto the two wagons with the six horses and the one driver. A large stand-alone chimney rises up from behind these planks, issuing forth a plume of white smoke that dissolves into the water stain at the top of the frame.

And where there are two cars there are also two men. The other man stands away from the wagon and away from the cars. He holds nothing in his hands and seems to be looking up at the cameraman wondering just what exactly he should be doing with the moment at hand. He is smaller in size than the man leading the team and wears a different kind of hat. It’s hard to tell but his skin seems to have a much darker complexion than that of his counterpart. I don’t know the logging history of the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900’s well enough to determine whether or not this man could be Native.

And then there’s the forest. Ah yes, the forest! The whole reason these men and horses and cars and smoke are all here. The trees are there, silently watching this whole scene unfold, quietly thankful that they are too small to be of any real worth.

Sometimes I bike around this old logging town, trying to imagine just what it might have looked like a century or so ago. I have found a few of the “old” trees left behind. The ones that for some reason were unmolested and allowed to continue their heavenward expansion. They are magnificent testaments to what once was. Within less than a half-mile of my house are two huge, red trunked wonders. In the Giant Sequoia family if I am correct. Sometimes I just stand beneath their bows and listen closely for the stories they are telling.

And listen you should, because they are telling stories like you’ve never heard. Stories different than the ones I know, different than the ones I can tell you here and now. Different in stature and height, stories with roots growing down into the earth, into the soil. Tales sent on the wind or the wing of a bird passing by.

Time may not be eternal, but the stories they tell me are.

A Season Ends

2009-09-21T20:59:00.000-07:00

You have to slow down to see it. Slow…way…down, down, down. Pull back on the brakes if you have to. That’s what I did.

I did and this is what I saw: streets aglow in the warm orange light of a fading summer sunset. The last sunset of the summer to be specific. And floating above those streets: various winged insects, dandelion blooms aimlessly (but full of purpose as well) searching for a new place to call home, spider webs catching the last rays of the season.

Tomorrow, with little pomp and circumstance, Fall will begin. My 28th Fall in this body to be exact. Apples will be pressed into cider, leaves will burst into flame, the nights will grow cooler and the days will call it quits sooner and sooner.

Fall comes and I feel ready. Ready for what I cannot say, but ready nonetheless. Change is in the air, and if you know what to look for you can see it coming long before it arrives.

Thoughts From The Subdued City

2009-09-06T12:45:00.000-07:00

On a day like this, how can you not write about the wind? Howling loudly through the cracks, careening wildly down brick alleyways, carrying along with it anything not bolted to the pavement.

I watch it tug at the green leaves. The green leaves not yet ready for the Fall. Ready or not, here it comes. Riding in over the Bay, like some derelict banshee out on parole, accruing violations and making enemies as it wreaks havoc on this quiet college town.

I'm in some ancient diner now. Well, ancient for this part of the world. The old Horseshoe Café has been doing what it does best since the late 1800’s. Food: meh; atmosphere: ok; waitress: friendly in that subdued Bellingham kind of way. A baited friendliness, one that comes across as being laboriously unsure of itself. A few college-aged students occupy booths. A Vietnam vet or two stare up with vacant and pleading eyes from cups of steaming coffee. How many years has it been since we bombed those villages? Obviously not long enough for these men.

But they had competition now, a fresh batch of disaffected and abandoned Vets were roaming these streets with their own tales of sorrow to be told. Like those that came before, they too were destined to become the abandoned nephews and nieces of their conniving Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam, that decrepit old bastard, still telling his same worn out lies to another generation of eager ears, pure hearts soon to be broken down by waylaid promises made that he never intended to keep.

This is where all the dreams of the great Western myth come to die. Some live longer then others but rest assured, they’re all on their deathbed. The fever grows as the heart slows its rhythm. Beads of sweat form on the brow as the eyes gloss over with that far away look. Looking toward a heaven they never found on earth, a paradise lost long before they were born.

But I suppose this is as good a place as any to watch a culture calcify, topple over and live vicariously only through the stories of a bygone era.

Last night I rode around this small town, letting my body absorb the cracks in the sidewalk, the gaps in the road beneath my tires. I found myself gazing in on darkened storefront windows, searching for god only knows what. I stopped in front of a café after hearing the bend of guitar strings float through the open doorway. Guitar strings being bent in such a way that you just had to call it the Blues.

Now, as Leadbelly so eloquently put it before his recording of “Good Morning Blues”, “never was a white man had the blues, ‘cause nothin’ to worry about.” I concur with his sentiments in the assumption that some well-heeled white man simply has no cultural context from which to truly sing the Blues. The Blues came out of slavery, oppression and the like. Something most white folks in the U.S. have never truly experienced.

So, to hear a middle class white man play the Blues is almost a bit too much for me. The whole scenario too rife with irony. But that is life in the good old U.S. of A. Ironic at best, something wholly unspeakable at worst.

Needless to say I stopped long enough to watch these two white boys play black tunes with all the heart and soul they could muster. I sat on my bike, propped up against a red brick wall. Black night without, warm incandescent glow within. A woman passed on my left, glancing over her shoulder long enough to meet my gaze before she dipped inside the café. I couldn’t read the gaze, I never can.

The night wore on and I coasted around town for another half hour before retiring to the house I share with three women. After a meal of red soup, white bread, and green salad it was upstairs to my small room with the well-trod wood floor.

Tacked up the curtain, turned on the fan, read a book written so well it broke my heart just to think it would soon be coming to an end, then shut off the light. It was time to dream of my own paradise that would never come to be.

The Long Weekend (Part One)

2009-08-31T18:38:00.000-07:00

I feel as though a small disclaimer must be passed on to those of you who follow this roller coaster ride of emotion I call my blog.

I'm insane, in the most sane way possible.

It would be in your best interest to take what is typed here with a rather large grain of salt. In fact, you might just wanna bring the whole damn shaker along before you read these musings. I write to help calm a dis-eased mind. When the soul is quiet, when the mind is at peace, you’ll see my public musings taper off, as they have for the last couple of weeks.

For the most part, I don’t feel compelled to write when all is well. When the sun is shining, the conversation flowing, the mind feeling healthy and the soul feeling fulfilled I simply don’t have as much need to process what I'm going through in writing.

I understand the inherent tragedy that this situation presents for you the reader. You often hear from me in the midst of the storm rather than when the sails are up and the boat is gliding effortlessly across the strait.

The last three weeks have been beautiful, marked with moments of sorrow of course but overall some of the most soul affirming I’ve had in a long while. Some very good old friends and a few new ones have helped to carry me along. This is the best kind of journey, the kind that gives you just what you need right when you are most in need of it.

The power of human connectivity to change a life should never be underestimated. Compassion, caring and understanding, you can never have too much of these although we often don’t get enough of them.

While I could carry on like this for sometime I think I’ll wrap this post up for now. It's late and...(I broke this post up into two parts after realizing that it was really long).

The Long Weekend (Part Two)

2009-08-31T18:29:00.000-07:00

I'm exhausted after another weekend spent in Canada with my Maple leaf loving friends. My buddy Steve and his bride Stephanie were married last night at one of the more appropriate places I’ve chanced to end up. A small farm about a mile from the U.S. border with a gorgeous glade of cedars and orchards and a truly old barn exuding so much authenticity that with the right kind of ears one could almost hear all the stories it held within it’s wood planked walls.

Oh, it was heaven.

After the realization of my close proximity to the U.S. border I thought it absolutely ridiculous to ride with my friends all the way back to Vancouver only to pay eighteen dollars to ride the Greyhound back to Bellingham. So, after much personal deliberation I decided to have said friends drop me at the border so that I could walk across and try my hand at hitching.

The crossing went smoothly (as good as any crossing can be when dealing with government agencies which force you to recognize the imaginary lines they’ve drawn up). I walked into Blaine and immediately began searching for a spot that looked good and felt right (in hitching I’ve learned that a good spot makes all the difference). After some wandering around I chanced to meet a woman walking her dogs beneath a bridge. I asked her if she was indeed from Blaine (lots of tourists around town this time of year). Yes, she was. She told me the where the bus stop was and then I asked if she knew of a good spot to hitch out from.

She pointed to the only highway ramp in town and said that she had often seen people standing there trying to hitch out. I thanked her and before I could move on she told me of how she had ran away from home when she was fourteen and hitched her way across America to Blaine. She told me of how she’d been here for thirty years and how back in the early 70’s she had helped smuggle draft dodgers across the border into Canada.

A person of conviction with the actions to back it up, now that’s my kind of woman.

I thanked her and took up a very short lived residence on the highway on ramp. A few cars went by and no takers. No worries, the sun was out with not a cloud in the sky, I had all the time in the world.

Then I saw him. He sat at the stoplight just before the onramp. His big white box truck said “Fountain Rental” on the side and I knew that the gods were smiling upon me. Today was my day. Fountain Rental is not a chain rental company. They only have one location that I know of and that location just happens to be located no more than a five minute walk from where I live.

John pulled up, opened the door and I climbed in, a broad smile spread clear across my sparsely bearded face. He asked where I was going. To exactly where you are going, John. Exactly.

So we rode down the highway exchanging stories about jobs in America and how much it had changed over the last forty years (John was in his late fifties, maybe early sixties). I asked him where exactly from back East he was from before he told me he was from back East. New York. The accent is unmistakable. I told him my family was from Long Island (and when you’re talking to a New Yorker it’s best to pronounce Long Island as one word, not two, dragging the ass end of the g right up against the I’s lonely left side. Longisland. One word, not two).

John spoke in that very direct Northeastern American way I have come to love and cherish. The Pacific Northwest is full of its jellyfish people with their jellyfish speech, no spine, no substance, no direction for the conversation to flow. Some of the most socially inept humans I’ve chanced to come upon exist in this part of the world. There’s good possibility for it being one of the main factors that will eventually lead to my packing up and moving away from this physically beautiful yet socially retarded part of the world.

So John dropped me at my place and rode off down the street toward the rental place. As I strolled up the front steps I was reminded of the fact that some of the best folks I’ve met in life are when I'm hitching.

It was a very good day.

Moving Inward

2009-08-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

There is a growing part of me that wishes someone could have told me that by twenty-eight I would be spent, hollow and bent low, low, low to the earth. How is it that I feel like an old man already? Creativity, gone. Curiosity, banished to some dark corner of my being. Some dark corner of the soul that I cannot find a light bright enough to illuminate.

I wept hard the other night. The small room I inhabit absorbed the sobs and threw them back at me, bringing me no solace, only a sad ringing in my ears.

A recent phone conversation with my beloved mother found me saying into the receiver, “if this country wanted to break me it has”. Here stands one broken citizen of the crumbling empire with nowhere to turn. You can leave this country one of three ways: by throwing large sums of money at whatever country you want to inhabit, holding a degree in something “in demand” (a lot of money is needed to obtain this education as well), or marriage.

What about the penniless wanderers? Is there a place for them? When my great grandfather came to America he held no degree, had little money and was not marrying anyone in this country (but would eventually do so). My, how the world has changed in less then a hundred years. For most of the world’s population they are effectively “trapped” in whatever shit hole they happen to be born into.

I’ll stop there. I’ll climb down off this horse and hitch it to the old worn out post for a while. I’ll give you the reader a break. I’ve been talking in circles, feeling very much like a caged animal. I did not ask to be born into this zoo and as a result have found myself feeling infinitely embittered by the cage that is the United States of America.

The utter lack of anyone to seriously converse with about my perspective of this country has been the final blow, the one that’s really taken the wind out of my sails. I wish, for my own sake, that I could say I had a group of others who felt the same way I did about this place, a group who saw the writing on the wall and were making serious plans to escape. For reasons beyond my understanding this is not the case. It’s as if the whole populace has been lulled into some sort of collective lie that “this is all there is”.

Sure life is kind of crappy here in the States, they say to themselves, but it’s much worse everywhere else. Right?

Wrong.

I am beyond appalled at the lack of any sincere foresight for the future of this country by my fellow countrypersons. I am broken and absolutely devastated by it. It makes me sick to the point that I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it.

How can I feel so alone in something that seems so apparent?

This has struck too close to the soul, too close to the core of my being, for me to speak on it much more. A silence will soon be necessary. I’ll plug away internally, finding strength from a place within I still have yet to tap in to. The Titanic is sinking and I am not going down with it.

I Was Lost...

2009-08-03T18:42:00.000-07:00

And now this book has found me. Ishmael is not only one of the most important books I've chanced to lay eyes upon but sums up (and confirms) much of what I've felt about the culture around me. Things I've intrinsically "known" since a very young age are in this book. Words I have not been able to express nor articulate are there as well.

Tears stung my eyes as I read the following excerpt. I could not nor have ever met anyone who has summed up the way I feel about humanity better then Daniel Quinn has in this small novel.

The following is an excerpt between the teacher and his pupil:

"So when the people of your culture concluded that there's something fundamentally wrong with humans, what evidence were they looking at?"

‘They were looking at the evidence of their own history.’

“Exactly. They were looking at a half of one percent of the evidence, taken from a single culture. Not a reasonable sample on which to base such a sweeping conclusion.”

‘No.’

“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”

Thoughts Of A Hypocrite

2009-07-31T18:45:00.000-07:00

I can’t help myself, I really can’t. My mind instinctively wanders to the more obvious questions of where all this, this, is leading to. What are we as a species doing with ourselves, with the planet we inhabit? What is the breaking point? When will we hit the Wall…the WALL??? My new job, the one that requires me to drive around all day consuming a very finite fossil fuel and helping to aid in the meltdown of that beautiful glacier sitting atop Mt. Baker, gives me much time for introspection.

Upon observing the daily goings on of the town I live in I have this reoccurring thought that I am witnessing the end of a culture…life as we know it in the first world (and in the United States in particular) is coming to an end of sorts. I'm not claiming nor subscribing to any fantastic “end of the world” scenarios, my ego is not large enough to allow for me to think that I can somehow predict the future.

And I know what you’re thinking. Every culture that came before us has, in one way or another, had some overarching “end of the world” myth. We are not alone in this thought.

The Wall I am thinking of isn’t in the form of a giant asteroid shattering the masses of land we exist on or anything like that. In fact, I think the planet will continue on without us the same way it always has.

Earth does not need us, it never has.

The Earth, and everything in it, is in fact not ours. If anything “belongs” to anything it would make more sense to say that we belong to the Earth, not the other way around.

For now, I am too exhausted to carry this thought any further. I’ll have to set it down here for now and pick it up later. If anyone reading this has anything they want to add by all means, add away.

Glitchin'

2009-07-06T11:26:00.000-07:00

Trash day is a strange thing, the trumpeting sounds of hydraulic brakes conjuring up memories of Jurassic Park dinos and childhood mornings spent in a last minute dash to get the garbage to the corner before the truck passed your driveway. Should have listened to your mother, should have taken it out the night before you lazy troglodyte.

I’ve moved, for the trillionth time, into a nice little house with three others. Relocating happens so often that I don’t give it much thought. My life is motion marked by brief periods of stillness. Three months here, six there. Collect some junk then two months later drop it all back off at the same Goodwill you acquired it from.

Goodwill: Life, Recycled.

This is the American Dream at its finest; a room full of someone else’s previously owned shit that you now call your own. Lifestyle, recycled.

It all comes down to one bag. One ugly grey and yellow backpack purchased from a rather large chain “outdoor” store. I really hate this fucking bag. But it’s been the one constant, consistent artifact in a life of ever changing street signs, city names and home addresses.

History between us be damned, I still hate this fucking bag.

And now for some random pictures.

There's a fungus amongus.

Bro looking tired and old in an Irish kitchen.

Midnights Descent

2009-06-20T21:25:00.000-07:00

It came to me two mornings ago, maybe it was three. To believe that the Sun would rise, that the earth would spin blindly upon it's side, took more faith than I could muster. I sat next to the window, peering out at the horizon where I supposed the orb would appear. Birds sang out, cars cut through the dusk, headlights ablaze illuminating an asphalt wasteland.

And I sat, watching, pensive, not quite persuaded that the light would come. Streetlights, with their sickly pale glow, flickered as if to announce the forthcoming arrival of what I could not yet see.

Oh sparkling horizon, do not tempt these wanting eyes. Either burst into flames or altogether disappear!

The Accidental, Existential Crisis

2009-06-14T14:30:00.000-07:00

Ok maybe it wasn’t an accident. Perhaps some deity, some movement of the cosmos, some alien race from a billion years back planned it all out and I'm just playing my part in the big puppet show called Existence starring humanity (well, at least we like to think we are the stars).

For me, it all happened very simply. I grew up as an introspective child with a love for (and deep appreciation of) the natural world around me. I spent my younger years camping, hiking, exploring and learning about the forests, hills, mountains and fields around me. I was a member of the Boy Scouts and had a subscription to Ranger Rick. I wanted to be a Forest Ranger when I “grew up”, when the time was right.

At 28, it appears the time still isn’t right.

By my early twenties I was in need of some serious direction. I lived in a small town with my parents and had the typical small town conundrum of “find something to do with your life before you “accidentally” get someone pregnant”. So, I applied at the local technical college and enrolled in the Photography department. It went well and I soon discovered a natural ability to turn the lens on subjects in a way that was not only interesting to me but apparently interesting to others as well.

I enjoyed photography.

Then came a very intense phase of Christianity. I was a freak, somewhat brainwashed and very into what I believed “god” was wanting me to do. This phase led me to become a missionary for some years. I lived in various parts of the world volunteering my energy to help humanity and teach others about the “god” I believed could change their life. In all of this religious fervor I never lost that introspective part of me, that part of me that still would wander into the woods, fields and mountains of whatever city, town or village I found myself in to ask the deeper questions of life and what my purpose in it was.

Fast forward. Fast forward past the collapse of my religious belief system (it happened slowly and consistently, like a mountain being eroded by wind and rain), past the spiritual crisis I suddenly found myself in, past years of lonely wandering (an ongoing part of the story) and deep disappointment of the world around me. Much of my disappointment stemmed from the fact that I grew up in a somewhat sheltered environment. I was taught many things about the world that held less and less water the further I journeyed out into the world. Expectations met reality and, well, reality won.

I don’t pick up the camera much these days. I'm just not that enamored by what I see around me. This is a sad realization to come too, especially for one who was once so enthralled by the world around him. Writing was once a safe place I could retreat to, a place I could write down all that was consuming me. Now writing seems more like an act of great mental duress then a calm harbor to shelter in. My thoughts come out sounding boring and redundant. I sometimes want to write but most often don’t due to the fact that I find myself unable to express what I need to say in any kind of creative or interesting way. Simply put, I don’t want to subject others to my drivel (and by writing this entry I am doing exactly that!).

I can almost visualize the kind of life I think I want (or more appropriately put, “the kind of fantasy I want to be living within”) but have no energy left to try and make it happen.

This is a severely tough spot to be along the river that is my life.

Biggie Fries

2009-06-02T17:58:00.000-07:00

"Most of them were from middle-class backgrounds, but not upper bourgeois, more petit bourgeois...homes with Culture but no money or money but no Culture."

~The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The last two months have found me slowly chipping away at this book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Not slowly because it’s boring, slowly because of my lack of discipline, my lack of “quiet time”, my lack of you fill in the blank.

If you haven’t read this book, perhaps you should. It’s really hard to say since I really don’t know who I am “speaking” to on this blog. Speaking at might be a more appropriate way of saying it. Speaking into the great cyber space void.

But here is this little book, a crazy piece of hippie memorabilia from the late 60’s. A loose chronicling of the early days of the acid movement, the be-here-now movement, the giant social upheaval that spawned from the psychedelic experience movement (a movement that still continues to this day).

The author, Tom Wolfe, takes the audience (which at the time of publishing was mostly a straight, middle class, “silent majority” readership) on a fantastic journey into the day-glo world of Ken Kesey and his band of merry pranksters. They paint a bus, take lots of acid, drive around America and basically help to ignite what eventually becomes the hippie movement.

So that’s the basic rundown. And throughout this strange tale of strange people doing strange things Wolfe asserts, or more likely stumbles upon, some very interesting observations about the American culture as a whole.

I opened this entry with a quote from a paragraph I read just today. Today being the second day of June in the year two thousand and nine. Today finding me in a country that has little culture to speak of, and what little culture there is isn’t even worth mentioning.

And this is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of my generation: we are inheriting from our parents generation not only an unheard of amount of debt (60 Trillion and counting!) but also a culture that has been so exploited, so wrung dry of any uniqueness, any semblance of authenticity that we literally find ourselves standing amongst the ruins (in our case they are sheet metal strip malls instead of the large stone Pyramids) of an utterly mind numbing landscape devoid of anything worthwhile.

We are the generation of no money and no culture. Welcome to the future, would you like biggie fries with that?

Funky Little Shack

2009-05-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

Alive

2009-05-16T09:25:00.000-07:00

I wanted sunlight in the kitchen,
but all I got was rain.
I wanted diffused bliss,
of the late afternoon variety.

The kind of light you find
at the higher regions
of this spinning globe
we call home.

Not blinding, not demanding
but encompassing and inviting.
The kind that welcomes you
into the room,
imploring you to see
what's been viewed before,
with eyes shot through with wonder.

I looked for sunlight in the kitchen,
but all I found was rain.

Respect

2009-05-14T15:13:00.000-07:00

I was o.k. with it at first, this turning tail and running back down the mountain from a rather large rattlesnake that blocked the trail. But then the cute college girls in the tie-dye t-shirts showed up in the parking lot. When I told them to watch out for the rattler about a mile up the trail they didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest. I tried to make them understand that she was big, aggressive and probably guarding a nearby nest. They thanked me for the information and headed off up the trail. Made me rethink my decision to traipse back down the trail.

But here’s the story. There’s not much to it but I’ll tell it to you anyway. It took me some time to find the trailhead. Many trails in the Southeastern U.S. are poorly marked. After three stops at local establishments I finally found the way up Mt. Yonah.

The ascent was nice, with boulders poking up from beneath the fallen foliage and undergrowth. Squirrels did their thing (you know, their “squeak, squeakum” thing) as I hiked past their nests. I found a small purple flower that gave off the most beautiful scent. The kind of scent that wasn’t overpowering, the kind of scent you had to lean in close to experience.

Then up, up, up the trail I climbed, past more purple flowers and a rather large Oak tree. And then, rather abruptly, it all came to a halt. I was just walking over a rock on the trail when my eyes registered a rather straight looking stick lying horizontally across the length of the rock. After another millisecond my brain registered what my eyes had just seen and I jumped back. She did the same, slithering her scaly body into a defensive coil.

Next came her unmistakable rattle and my unexpected adrenaline rush. I'm sure she was just as afraid as I was (if not more). I weighed my options. I could a) blaze my own trail around her, hiking through the abundant poison oak all around (after more research I learned that the plants I thought were poison oak were actually Virginia Creepers. An apparently common mistake.), b) jump off of the rock she was coiled at the base of and possibly risk her striking at me and not missing or c) simply turn around and head back down the mountain.

As you already know, I chose c. But not before I snapped a few shots of this venomous creature that had altered the direction of my day. Snakes have my utmost respect. I am no Steve Irwin (man I miss that guy).

Hope the ladies had a better go at reaching the top then I did.

By The Sound

2009-05-10T19:41:00.000-07:00

Maren being Maren.

Getting It

2009-05-09T09:13:00.000-07:00

"The Dead scene is "more inclusive than exclusive" and "has to do with integrity...the point is, we're not trying to be famous or rich, we're just trying to make music as well as we can, and get it out."

~Jerry Garcia

Spoken by a man who truly "got it".

Only The Next Exit

2009-05-03T20:18:00.000-07:00

The road is sometimes a hard black surface I meander down in the middle of a comfortable Georgia night after my truck, oh this truck, runs out of gas. This night patience is not worn thin. It's 2:30 a.m. and the road is quiet.

This is where i've been. On this lonely highway with the sound of crickets in my ear. Leaves, the verdant green of mid spring all around me, being lifted with a sigh by a slight breeze.

It's only a broke down old truck, it's only 2:30 in the morning, it's only 2 miles to the next gas station and I'm only trying to see the world with new eyes, to hear the sounds I normally speed by, to not grow too tired of life too soon.

Collected Perspective

2009-03-14T21:27:00.000-07:00

I feel like it needs a name, but what name to give it? How do you name something that is more a feeling or an inkling than a concrete piece of matter or evidence you can point to and say “ah, yes! I know exactly how to describe that thing. I know just the name it should go by.”

This sounds like gibberish, I know. Bear with me though; it’s been a few weeks since I’ve written anything. The “thing” I would like a name for, or if not a name than at least some insight into, is my near inability to see the forest for the trees. Move those damn trees, and then maybe I could see the forest beyond it. Oh wait, the trees are the forest you say? How can that be? It looked so different in my minds eye, in the recesses of my imagination, in the culturally ingrained perspective I project onto everything around me, including myself.

Idealism has always been with me, and I hope it will always be so. For the most part, idealism has been more than a welcome companion on this 28-year journey of my life. But that’s changed lately. I’ve found myself frustrated and demoralized with the clash of the idealistic world I’ve envisioned myself living in and the world that I actually wake up to every morning.

Expectations can really fuck everything up. I’ll give you an example. Let’s take poverty in the U.S. Now, being poor in America is obviously very different than being poor in a third world country. Even the poorest American has more readily available access to modern conveniences than a poor person in Africa or India. But, someone living in poverty in a third world country has something the poor of America know very little about: solidarity. Poverty in America is tough not only because of your limited means but also because you are poor in a country that expects much of its citizenry in the way of material wealth. The expectations for what is considered the American dream are much higher (and more unreasonable) than those for someone in a relatively impoverished country.

And this issue of expectations goes hand and hand with the idealism I am trying to find a happy medium within. I’ve always had my eye on next destination. The green grass withers away far to quick. The ability to be content with the space I currently inhabit, the town, city, state or country I happen to be living in at the moment has been held at arms length most of my life. A place to call home has always eluded me. I’ve moved often and loved less with each move.

If I know how to do one thing well it would have to be moving on. I’ve tried to turn my nomadic ways into some sort of story that others might envy me for, something for them to define me by (and something for me to be defined by). But unlike the nomads of the past I have no traveling nomad community to carry me along when I grow tired of journeying. I might meet another journeyer along the way, but those are too few and too far between to give the life sustaining community that humanity is meant to be a part of.

Expectations in themselves are not necessarily a hindrance. It’s when you’re expectations make it near impossible for you to enjoy and be grateful for the life you are living that they become poisonous. Unrealistic expectations have a way of destroying you slowly, from the inside out.

And now I stand at some sort of crossroads, at a point where I recognize the desperate need for deep community that has always resided within me. This time I’ve chosen to take the road that leads to the closest semblance of a home and community I’ve ever really know; that being my friends and family back in Georgia.

Yet this trip back to the South is not without great trepidation. For me the South holds my family and friends but not much else beyond that. I see the southern states of America as some sort of bastion of traditional American values. Traditional American values like thoughtless allegiance to some perverted version of a god that if it truly existed would scare the living shit out of me (and does scare the living shit out of the many who believe in it), blatant and outright racism toward anyone besides the white race and the small town, backstabbing gossip that demoralizes everyone who chooses to swim in it’s cold, muddy waters.

But perhaps the South isn’t really all that bad. I mean it’s just my perspective, right?

And that’s what this whole thing called life really boils down to; perspective, expectation and the idealism one chooses to deploy in an effort to create a world around him that currently does not exist.

Thoughts, anyone?