slivers and silence

goddammit.

thus far, my day has been one of absolute frustration. i have spilled my hot tea on my lap, somehow lodged a sliver underneath my fingernail that i cannot remove, and hit a brick wall with recording. with bloodied finger throbbing, i stumble into the living room with high hopes, but find only silence. i of course have no idea why, but i cannot get any sound to come from the microphone. in theory, this idea of borrowing equipment from ron is wonderful, but in practice it has been a void. a giant field of nothing. why is it that i could get sound a few days past, and not today? and how do i get the train of my day back on its tracks, fucked up finger and all? perhaps i should go throw eggs at all of the shoppers. maybe i could compel one of them to buy me some recording equipment that i can understand {sort of}. alas, today is buy nothing day. does cheeseboard pizza to lift my spirits count?

i would go to new hampshire

I am currently sitting at the pub across the street from my house. I had intended to stay here for another hour or so writing, but they just turned off the Tom Waits and turned on the television.

It is amazing how much I fucking despise television.

If I hadn’t just bought another glass of wine, I would be on my way home. I could of course go into a long discussion of the reasons why I so dislike television, but frankly it bores me. {The discussion that is} Television itself makes me cringe. My skin crawls and twists, and I begin to feel a sense of hopelessness and unbridled tension. I’ve pondered that this may be due to the fact that I watched it only when I was sick as a child {which was terribly often} and therefore I associate this predictable blue box with illness. But it goes quite a bit beyond than that. It is quite frankly sad to watch the people in here rise from their seats and gather in the room where the box is on. Jesus. Point and case being, that it has stripped me of the rush of creativity I was feeling, and replaced it with angst. I imagine it does the same for most people, only they aren’t quite as aware of the dying off. So I divert my attention to the fireplace at my side. I recall so well the fires around the holidays at my parent’s house. Lying about on the floor with dogs and tea and a sea of blankets. And so today I drove Kristina to the airport. I envy that she gets to fly somewhere for the holidays. As romantically absurd as it is, I wish I could fly off somewhere and see a different piece of the world for a few days. She wore sandals and was brimming with the excitement of a young child. Perhaps I would go New Hampshire or Connecticut. Missouri. Maine.

crashed full of deer

saturday night i drove to Santa Rosa to spend the evening with Mike. veggie burritos, and hot apple cider, and the writing of letters, and ping pong, and cold, cold air. we slept outside in his orchard and the temperatures dropped into the twenties, a relatively uncommon thing for Sonoma County. and at long last, after years of cold nights in a north face bag, my new marmot sack kept me cozy and warm all night. as mike lay down the hill shivering and bundled in layers, i lay bare chested with socks off staring at the frigid sky. i found myself somewhat amazed that this light peice of nylon and down feathers could keep me so terribly warm when the air was so relentless. sometimes, the view that technology affords us is priceless. falling asleep beneath the blanket of stars, and waking to the sun breaking over the hills to the east in a field crashed full of deer. the dying off of youth and the onset of winter. she labors in with her icy hands, and lays them upon my neck. my warm, warm neck.

wordless

some days, i feel wordless.
limited by language.
tied shut.

and the light.

today, Jeff Buckley would have been thirty seven years old. i feel quiet, and the light shines on.

"the only way to really make it~ anywhere ~ is to put every bit of your being into the thing that only you can provide. the only angle is the art that you choose, that only you can provide. and to do that, you have to be quiet for a long time and find out what you bring forth. you have to know what's in youself~ all of your eccentricities, all your banalities, the full flavor of your woe and your joy. what does it look like? what makes it different from everybody else's? it's totally subjective. you're just given the task of bringing it up."

~ Jeff Buckley

now the stag

"Now the stag becomes part of the earth.
lifts and holds the tree of winter,
its pure unfoliated branched-out play.
the peacefullness of its head
stops just short of breaking into leaves."

~Rilke

with nothing to do but notice

"the trees are all stripped bare along the frontage. inert wind machines rise at acre intervals above the orchard files, a long time from blowing smudge. with the season spun down quiet, and spraying stopped, insects have hatched thick. they swarm close in the last bars of daylight, back-lit between west-trending rows. i can hear bats snatch them. the light tick of each kill a sound you wouldn't register unless you knew what it told of. unless you'd sat out nights with nothing to do but notice." ~Benjamin Jahn

the box and the list and...

enter mike schwartz and gray skies. perhaps the rains will return this weekend, thusly adding fire to my longing to sit and read and read and read. today the squirrels were out en masse on my run. tucking away their nuts for the winter, lunging beneath the arms of giant trees. oh how enormous these bodies must seem to them, at yet small at the same time for they have understood them better than we. they live within the souls of these gentle beasts, and wouldn't dream of tearing them from the earth.

last week, i sent the aforementioned and wigged mike, a list of my ten favorite books. i'm not sure i like or even believe in the concept of 'ten favorite anything' so rather than think about it, i just punched out the first ten that have stuck indelibly in my memory. in no specific order:

one hundred years of solitude, gabriel garcia marquez
love in the time of cholera, gabriel garcia marquez
jitterbug perfume, tom robbins
crime and punishment, fyodor dostoevsky
east of eden, john steinbeck
the poisonwood bible, barbara kingsolver
the road home, jim harrison
the magus, john fowles
the god of small things, arundhati roy
for whom the bell tolls, ernest hemingway

can i list more? the almost top ten? tomorrow's top ten? what the hell does 'top ten' mean anyway? do you have a list of ten? i laugh at the human tendency to rate everything. place things in boxes. scrunch them down to fit. life isn't like that, for tomorrow it could all change. the box and the list and the thoughts therein.

our flacid chief

this morning i read an interview with Tim Burton and was struck by the quiet connection that i instantly felt with his words. there is something so timeless about his view of the world with its hinges slightly crooked and ajar. his dark and haunted people are infused with such fragility and light, that it calls forth the thin fabric of our own lives. i think of Jeff Buckley and his light, as i spend the week attempting to make sense of his songs for our upcoming show on monday. his presence still so amazingly enormous. what admiration i have for the radiance that came from his soul. and what an example of the thin tightrope upon which we all walk. Tom Robbins writes that it is the immeasurable thinness of this rope that gives life its snap and fizz. what would it be after all, if we knew where it was going?

so this morning i sit watching the birds arrive and leave from the tree outside my window. they don't like to be watched, so i must be clandestine in my voyeurism and divert my gaze. they never stay for long, but their speaking and the translucent rising and falling of their wings brings me such joy. i wonder if they have thoughts of me in here, and the movement of my arms. not likely. today i will be a bird. perhaps i will fly and deliver one of these to our flacid chief. and the world spins. sometimes, i think i can feel it moving.

at last it pours

Thursday night I drove to Mill Valley and watched the white invertebrate lights of cars, snaking up the hill. It was quiet in the light mist, with the bridge rising out of the still water. A giant. I love the way the rainwater falls in through the cracks above like dust, and litters the cars headed west on the lower deck. I was tired, as I stayed up well past my normal hour of sleep these days, but then wine with old friends is so often the best medicine on earth, much like the rain; inherently nostalgic. And at last, at last it pours. Today I ran in the hills just before the rain began its crashing. Now the cars drift beneath my window making their ocean sounds, and the rooftop dances. Sitting on my couch, space heater at foot, tea in hand, warming my fingers for guitar. Some moments, are so wondrously crafted.

And I giggle at the photo. The new deal in my car, is that all passengers riding in the front seat, must wear the wig, and then i snap away. And oh, how the memories flood, as I've had this wig for more than fifteen years. Beware dear passenger, beware.

discovering ice

yesterday, i read an article about Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the New York Times Magazine. before reading the article, i sat with tea at my kitchen table in the morning, staring at the rather stoic photo of him that accompanies the piece. i found myself having difficulty associating the photo of this human with his art. it wasn't him necessarily, but rather the concept, or reality if you will, that any human was capable of creating something so circular and eternal and breathtakingly spectacular, as one hundred years of solitude. i feel as though i could read that book every year of my life until the curtain at long last falls, and i would never truly unveil all of the magic and mystery and purpose that lies therein.

i recall well, living in a slanted room in a bad neighborhood of New York, where i had tacked a small newspaper clipping of Pablo Picasso to my wall. at some point i awoke one morning, and sat looking at this photo completely bewildered; the scope of his genius unimaginable. i rose, removed the clipping from my wall, and left the tilting room behind in searh of humans. i needed to see people out there walking around aimlessly, going from place to place, drinking coffee. i needed to see the steam from their breath to remember that we are all here, taking oxygen in and out. i couldn't quite wrap myself around the degree to which human existence can be limitless; that in our art we can fly.

and yesterday was much the same. i sat in my kitchen in silence, watching birds drift back and forth between the trees, and the squirrels running nuts. i stood, put my shoes on my feet, and went out into the world. cars and wind and children in the street playing imaginary games. thoughts of children long ago, discovering ice for the first time. a gypsy with a magic carpet, and a soul full of infinity. a book that has in so many ways, changed literature forever.

sometimes, certain people are eternal before they even arrive.

christian and the sea

christian was just published in an online journal.
there, that should suffice for the day.