It was warm yesterday. I was glad to spend the morning with my good friends on a light-hearted ride, lots of laughter, sunshine, and finally a long visit on a deck. I wasn't able to see the rest of the day because afternoon time was so dazing that I walked in my sleep throughout it. I found a spell of energy much later and went out with my girlfriends. I wore a gray hat, the kind that looks like it's from the 1940's period, something a woman would wear to the train station when she's saying goodbye to someone special. This morning is flirting with spring but, there's a crispness in the air. There aren't quite blossoms all over the place yet. Still dry and damp at the same time, the trees are not yet warm and decorated, no signs of new growth, just yet.

I closed my eyes and the burnt orange splotches bloomed themselves into poppies. Poppies behind my eyes - can't ask for much more on a gray morning.

Maybe i'll get work done on the bike today. Right now I feel like the air has been punched out of my stomach. Maybe I'll even go to yoga tonight. Hopefully. Unlikely. I can hope, though, can't I? Losing hope is an unpleasant idea.



Tell me, from where you're sitting now, when you look out of your window, what do you see? I see a gray wall of cinderblocks, from the top of the ledge to the bottom of the blinds.

This is the stuff of dreams and crazy camera angles. The haze of tiny soft circles obscuring my vision, for a fraction of a moment I am in an entirely different place. I am four, eating the snow off of the branches of pine trees. I am five, playing piano upside down into a tape recorder. I am eight, riding my uncle's old road bike far away from grandma's house. I am eleven, in a nest of blankets on my day bed.

Something very tiny snaps within me, and I am perfectly, completely, happy - for only just a second. Then the water ripples away and I am left alone. During my bath, I shift in my tub and petals fall from the top water spout. I brush my hand over my hair and feel soft water dripping down my cheeks. It could be collections of steam, it could be sweat, it could be tears. Involuntary souvenirs, clinging to me, dripping down me, displaying my momentary need.

The Brain in Love and Lust

The Brain in Love and Lust

Pusher be the test and I beat to the rest
In my head, in my head now
Slow candle burning with your flame on high and now I'm dry land so
Play it, play it, player play
The sound of escape now honey
Take it take it
Say it lover, say it lover right
It's all the thicker, the light hearted taker
So take it, so take it, so take it

Dream is in this heart
Season in these years
Death is in this heart

So what so what
So fine so fine
So what so what
Be mine be mine

Burn it to the ground
With the planks all around
On the top
On the top right?
Flowers in this dream of easy thinkers
Fell out of love, out of love now
It's all the faker, the light hearted taker
So take it, so take it, so take it

I'm looking for something breathtaking, and though I'm finding images no words are pouring out of them. So i guess this is the end, for now.

Write something for me, will you? Haiku, limerick, prose, whatever. Maybe this will be an inspiration.


Photos: zeitgeist studios

Chapter 7 continued...

I looked at him secretly from under a fall of hair.

He was lying on his back, his hands under his head, staring at the ceiling. The starched white sleeves of his shirt, rolled up to the elbows, glimmered eerily in the half dark and his tan skin seemed almost black. I thought he must be the most beautiful man I'd ever seen.

I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with.

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.

The same thing happened over and over:
I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.

That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitment and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Plath, S. (1971). The Bell Jar. New York: HarpersCollins Publishers Inc.

Not caring about anything. I hate it when I get this way. Anxiousness wrapping around me like a mummy. I'm turning to stone. At least if I were an oyster, I could create something iridescent and luminescent and beautiful like a pearl.

When I feel this way I wonder if I'm perpetually afraid and only at peace momentarily - or if my inner most self is like a long row of sadness where happiness passes through in cracks, like a long, lonely sidewalk. I hate getting annoyed about things and then I have so much difficulty letting them go.

Just calm down, breathe deeply, pretend I'm having a good time...but that doesn't work so well for me. I can't fake it.

In my heart I'm naturally happy, but when the blues hit the ground shakes. I lock up because I know my foundation is being rattled and tested and the ground below me is turning into water and everything is going wash out like dark storm. Never mind.

I need sleep. I need to drink water, ride my bike, take a hot bath, and figure out what home really is.

Hawk

Sew the seeds
Of everything to be
Safe in sleep
I winter in my dreams

Speak your words
Defined by grief for me
Out of reach
Some things just can not be

From chapter 7 of 'The Bell Jar'

I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

My list grew longer.

I was a terrible dancer. I couldn't carry a tune, I had no sense of balance, and when we had to walk down a narrow board with our hands out and a book on our heads in gym class I always fell over. I couldn't ride a horse or ski, the two things I wanted to do most, because they cost too much money. I couldn't speak German or read Hebrew or write Chinese.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brillant professor, and other fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of of other lovers with queer names and off beat professions, and other fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I coudln't quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant loosing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Plath, S. (1971). The Bell Jar. New York: HarpersCollins Publishers Inc.


"New Discovery" By Alex De Spain

by kozyndan http://www.kozyndan.com/

Frost // Soft Attacks

I watched the winter today.. slanted rips and tufts in the air, a shattering and crunching of feet marching over frozen land. The sky the color of milk mixed with dirty water. Harsh and silvergrey. The sun scarcely shone from the edges of the clouds, Through the bent trails of water on the car windshield. Dim shadows flanking luminous reflections, crawling across the backs of my hands as I watch the edge of the hood onto the road in wonder. Handcolor, whitegold and peach. My scars are shiny, pink, faint, white, and dull. I have 3 easily visible scars. They drove me to a hotel. My nails reflect the bed light, making them seem more awake than I am. My fingernails made up of a million hairs, pearls at the top, and light pink at the bottom. How many things have I touched with these hands? How many things have I made? how many more will they make?

My motion for magic is always to make the same loose fist and then uncurl all of the fingers kind of open outward movement, like a little puff of smoke expanding, then you expect something to appear in my palm. To make the motion would be to say swooossshhh! - but I can't write it because it's a whisper. It's the onomatapoetic sound of a tiny magic thing happening, I'm doing it now, something tiny and magic is happening right now.

The sky at dusk was bluegrey. It reminded me of the color of the skin under someone's eyes who wore too much makeup and partied too long last night.

Semafora, Triangle Folds

Sometimes we sink, sometimes we float, and sometimes we fly. Today I'm submerged, but tomorrow, I'll shake the wet frost off my wings and race the frozen clouds. Tonight, I'm listening to Legowelt and hanging vintage garments in one lofty closet. Is this all it is to be a girl in the city? Only for now.

He Would Have Laughed

Only bored as I get older
Find the ways to...
Cult of time

Only bored as I get older
Find new ways to spend my time

I'm a gold digging man
Find my money, find my land
I'm a gold digging man
I won't rest 'til I buy your land

Sweetness comes suffering
In sweetness comes suffering
I won't rest till I can't breathe
I can't breathe with you looking at me

I get bored as I get older
Can you help me figure this out?

Come on, dream on:

"I lived on a table - I don't know where to go. I know my friends would. . . I know where my friends are now. I lived on a farm, yeah. I never lived on a farm. Where did my friends go? Where did my friends go?"

What do you do when you're sleeping?
Where did you go when you said:
"I don't need nobody on my bond"
Where do your friends go?
Where do they see you?
What did you want to be?

- Deerhunter, Halcyon Digest 2010

I'm off to a peculiar start. It's like there's something wrong and I can't put my finger on what it is exactly. It seems like I'm searching for something but I don't know what I'm looking for. I'm forgetting something important and everyone know's what it is, except I do not. I'm lost today, maybe I dove too deep in all the writing yesterday. Today I feel like I need to surge to the surface for a blast of life-giving, forgiving air.

Moments like this, I wish for a full time job so that I could punch-in to work. Forget about my personal thoughts for 8 hours, switch into work-mode, and just let my 'self' rest. Maybe this week with Kacey here, I've been digging up too many buried confessions about my weaknesses. I feel exposed.

I'm taking a break from Facebook, I need respite. I wish it weren't a finger's touch away. Too much social networking makes me feel like I've put myself on an operating table and everyone's looking at my insides and I can't do anything about it because I'm sedated and drifting to and from reality.

I like this blog because, let's be real, no one reads it! Well, maybe 2 friends and they are like family. I can vent here and say whatever I want and get it off my chest and it remains unknown. Plus I don't know where my written journal is hiding today, so, here I am.


Rest circular thoughts,
rest...

This morning I awoke wanting to write again while the house is still sleeping. I awoke wanting to do a whole lot; thirsty for knowledge, hungry for activity.

Crazy connect-the-dots inside my brain today. Synapses zapping metaphors around these deep fissures.

My thoughts, zooming around like a fleet of small birds, blackspotting the sky. Droplets of memories and bits of information clinging to a hundred tangled mindwebs, occasionally coalescing, slipping down my spinal cord like a long icicle. Shiver.

Can you know me? Look into my eyes. Can you see the gold flecks shyly floating in there? Can you see the iris of rust acquiescing to the sea on an overcast day? Can you look through my pupils and tell that I'm not from here? Not from anywhere?

Wading up to my knees in a flooded street. Transparent windstorm. Starry glazed streetlights in the reflection of a storefront, dusty raisin sky like a smoothly rounded rootbeer waterglass.

Waking up in the middle of the night with heavy choking fear like swallowed cotton and humidity in a small dark corner of a bedroom. Fear of what? Today, tomorrow? Nothing. So I slumber into the bathroom and look at myself into the silver mirror. I look surprised.

Ok, maybe that's out of my system now. I don't know, it all definitely helps.



"I had that dream again
I'm exploring my (own) home: I happen across a door: that leads me to a room I've never seen."

- Photo by Brandon Boyd
From White Fluffy Clouds

I love what light in the sky can do in different situations. Moonlight on white clouds against black sky. Sunlight from one side of the atmosphere against bold clouds, it makes the sky taller. Eerie quiet light blinking during a lightening storm, electrons balancing and unbalancing, like a flashing strobe, a thousand snapping photographs. Rays of sun through smoke, like the edge of a beachfront. Bright, bright.


Photo by John Trujillo

- Brandon Boyd
White Fluffy Clouds

Love&Life,Life&Love

- Brandon Boyd
White Fluffy Clouds

Carla Swart

The beautiful, brilliant, heart of a pure champion. You will always be remembered.

Trish Keenan

Brilliant poet and musician. I will always hold Trish's music and close to my heart. All the good ones go too soon. It's as though they see too much, know too much. They're a catalyst of life.



I am grey, still on the page
Oh colour me in
Just an outline, sketchy but fine
Oh colour me in

If green is chasing the hills over miles
If blue is pursuing the sky
If the red of your heart doesn't mind
Where to begin to colour me in

Something new and nothing to do
I'm just the idea
I must be real cause somehow I feel
That I'm just the idea

Let's share the blue of the towering sky
The green of the hills that run by
Leave the red of your heart to decide
If you cannot choose which colour to use

I'll always wait, it's never too late
To colour me in
To colour me in

Today or next year
I'll always be near
if you want to colour me in

Kevin Cyr featured on zeitgeistudios.com

I can relate to this after living out of the back of my Subaru station wagon all summer while traveling to bike races. This, to me, seems like luxury. In 2011, I'm going "big"...

Architect Selgas Cano featured on zeitgeistudios.com

I would work in an office like this one in Spain...

Tiny PBS Documentary on the Tiny House Movement

I've been writing longhand in my journal and it feels so good to flow into true penmanship again. It's a little more visceral than typing up a blog. Reading my journal from 1999 made me want to try physically writing again. I converted a few of those entries from 1999 into this blog last month but decided to save that entry as a draft. Basically that period of my youth is uncomfortably strange and unusual to me now. Despite its tumult, the diary documenting that time period was really quite beautiful. If only for the depiction it provided. Things I had completely forgotten, and it took me right there, to that very moment reliving it, or watching it from a distance. That's the beauty of an actual diary. I think the direction of thought is better documented that way, at least for myself and for the time being. Maybe it's because I know it's completely private. The act of writing, when we don't have to feel guarded in any way and the words become more effortless. They are complete thoughts, uninterrupted by judgement. Maybe I'll submit some entries from my current written journal into this blog. As for tonight, I'm once again super late in going to bed. I have a job interview tomorrow and I need to get some sleep, but I'm nervous, well just a little. On the other hand there's something that cycling has taught me... I know I can step up to the occasion when the pressure is on. It's interesting how riding a bicycle can be applied to life in so many little ways.

Here's an old Squarepusher track. I used to love when Dave played this one. We all lived on St. Paul Avenue in uptown Dallas and listened to great music, and created all kinds of art. I was a bike messenger then and life was different. I remember I would come home for lunch just to watch The Kids In The Hall with Matt. It wasn't long until I fell in love with the idea of bike racing. Anyway, this is odd and quarky track and for the most part unknown, but I love it.

Yokoo: Words to live by

"Weathered Stone" by Aphex Twin, I listened to it over and over on the Greyhound bus when I moved to Texas. I looked out the window all the way from Chicago. I remember I wore tan corduroys and a black top. There was a lot of gold september sunshine. I had an empty stomach for days and days and had just turned 19. Such a dream ago. Right now I'm up late listening and baking a cassoulet. I'm in love with the entire Selected Ambient Works Vol. II album.
Also the track "Rhubarb" , "Metal Grating", and "Corrugated Tubing" are all just as intense.

Lying there in a tall painted room, hot like baking cookies in August.
So still that I've forgotten what quiet feels like.
So still that my body is no longer an instrument of touch, but instead a conduit, a translation of cadence and whirl into tactile output.
So still that my chest falls open like a sleeping child's fingers, uncurling.
My heart is beating like a couple's joined hands swinging as they walk down the street.
The bicycles going around the track so fast they catch my breath.
I'm so happy I could die.
A bell rings and the dark gold sound is like sunlight in the leaves and it ripples through my body like a stone thrown into a pond. I'm simultaneously all consciousness, released from the shackles of the body, and all physical, sense and perception washing up my spine like a bucket of bloodwarm white chocolate.

Hands off the bars of my bike and it's twilight. The stoplights are like stars, if stars were made of cherries, yelling "go!" into my eyes.
Tan wind on my skin like pond water.
Around and in and out of well-banked curves I'm wheeling, twisting, a sparrow at a dance party.


I wish I could cast a spell. "Watch this," I'd whisper as I ride up the bank into the low, late, yellow moon.

Feel the slow soft love of being alive with me, like falling asleep while I watch you, smiling.

ראש השנה

L'shannah Tovah!

Today I wanted to stay in and write. I wanted to find a used slide projector and make a show on our wall of other people's vacations. Today I wanted to document it all; the taste of anise, the sounds of stepping on leaves, the sound of the hub on my favorite wheels, the way light creates stars in the creases of a strawberry candy wrapper, the ribbons of a balloon wrapped around an antenna, the shush and rattle of the wind in the trees, the sounds of bicycles as they travel in packs, the way expensive shoes sound on the pavement, stepping the time away moment by moment, the way our sight wraps itself around each object, softly and carefully, like a cotton towel after a cool swim.


This life is an engagement ring, it's the touch of your lips against a warm forehead.

This is it,

a heart beating.

Still the body resting into a blue corner, pressing a toe against the crack in the wooden floor.

Ink dots dripping onto fresh paper like pores of skin. Listen, it crackles as it spreads.


The ceiling is above and the floor is below and the walls are four sides of boundary, it's a space.

What will you fill it with?

Two minutes or twenty thousand miles?

A fragrance of pears?

The nape of a neck?

Gauntlet Hair

GAUNTLET HAIR - I WAS THINKING from ( . )( . ) on Vimeo.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

I don't know why but when I return home from long races I sometimes tend to feel blue. When I drove into Texas a few hours ago, I felt the heat change against the windows and the Texas sun set in. I started to unload the car and felt all woozy and dizzy inside. I felt worried, worried in so many ways... Worried about the bad dreams I had last night, worried that maybe I said or did something wrong, worried that I could have offended others. Worried about so many things all at the same time. Maybe I'm just tired or overstimulated because I have nothing to feel sad about today. I set my goals and I completed them, I'm home. Why is that not enough? The aftermath of weeks of hard racing enumerate themselves through ecstatic highs, elation of good results, interviews and celebrations. Why is it met with the contrasting lows? is it the natural balance of life? All of it makes for ups-and-downs that tend to follow a long batch of intense efforts as we strive so passionately for achievement. Maybe as highly competitive individuals we push ourselves so gruelingly to surpass our boundries that it depletes our stores of serotonin; the very shred of our comfort. It does stand to reason. After a great bunch of races, why on earth would anyone feel depressed?
Maybe the sum total of racing is greater than its parts on the course, or where ever it is that achievement is sought. It goes on and on after the finish. The journey doesn't end there, it's only just begun.

Tired, glazed eyes separate me from everything. Odd camera effects pushing everything into the distance & feelings of disconnect.
Flyaway

pink pink pink pink pink

I wrote a long entry, but then I erased it to feel the power of making something irrevocably disappear.

Last night I dreamed of kissing.

I'm reading Henry Miller again.

I am lonely.

Sun-thick & Lolling

Strange how summer happens so fast. The air is gray and sharp one day, sun-thick and lolling the next. The flowers are each events. They're drops of food-coloring, twisting knots in the crevices between cool rocks. Throughout the seasons the temperature doesn't actually change. In the wintertime there are blankets and warmers and overheated restaurants. In the summer its shaved ice and bare feet, skirts and lying in the shade. Sometimes I slip into an apartment building's swimming pool late at night to swim. I submerge myself quietly in its corners. Nobody ever notices.