Sunglasses

I am in a state of continual bafflement about the necessary evolutionary idiocy of human pair bonding and the delicate Newtonian curved functions of women's asses. Are these two things related? Will you make a point, ever, that is not wallowing in the obscene, the erotic? We know the answers to these questions already but as I sit here in the cafe, the wonderment about the initial mysteries is profound indeed. Despite the amount of awe these constructs procure, I've come to no real conclusions about anything deeper than a base, root code, instinct for the propagation of species. Worn ground, endlessly tracked, sure, but wonderful all the same. 

More and more, I truly believe in the audacious luck my life is perpetually becoming. I went to the store today and dropped a bill on booze and sundries. Seven dollars for a pint of vegan, keto friendly, coffee creamer. Thirty five for beer and wine. Four for a package of hair ties (I low-balled these.) Twelve for shit paper. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The day prior we went sledding with friends in the neighborhood. We've been feasting for days, eating like madmen barons with heaped plates of meat and cheese, bread and olives, pastries and chocolates, stood by with whole gallons of beer and liters of wine. I remember, once, seeing my old man at the kitchen table, head in hands studying a checkbook that lacked the funds he needed in order to make the monthly note on the trailer where we lived. I don't remember his face, but the scene of him staring at the wanting ledger maintains, a theme of woe, a great unavoidable burden.

As the year climbs back into lightness, I had the phenomenal luck to be party to many rituals - all of them profound. We visited the river with offerings for the birds and the moose and we hailed the river roundabout, supplicating for a blessing of another agreed upon year of togetherness. We effused goodness and warmth and, later, for our ministrations we were gifted with an earthquake, a sure sign that the animism in Nature had heard our prayers. Later still, the entire family gathered in a log communal house bedecked with fake boughs and colorful ribbons. We sang hymns and celebrated the miraculous act of conception and birth, lighting candles and hearing all the old stories. An 8 months ripe mother played a flute and a young, attractive couple dueted blissfully while a communal fire was raised and another, younger and more attractive couple ushered around bits of the flame for our candles. A brief flicker of light in the dark, an exhortation to go forth and be fruitful, a petition for tribal unity. It was the most human thing to have struck me in some time and I left elated, exuberant, cursing God in the parking lot for the beheld miracle.

 Christmas day came. I spent the day ice-breaking through reality, trying to get a handle on its faults, the rips in the fabric. It was a useless pursuit, but worthwhile nonetheless, like most things. The Packers had won the day prior and I was happy, sotted, twisted, alive as we sat around with family (man-woman-child-grandparents). As much as I wish I could, I can never forget the news clip of a Palestinian father and son murdered by Israeli snipers in the early, heady days of the first intifadah. (You've talked about that before, broken record.) I wonder what happened to the rest of that family, now, twenty years on from that afternoon. 

I'm Risking It Always

I started a new job, likely the cause of my most recent and critical terror. It's an endeavor to support homeless queer and trans young folks who haven't been presented with the most welcoming environments in their limited experiences. My colleagues at the new joint are all the worst hope junkies, furiously railing against systems and bureaucracies and the general funk of the world and the furtive realization that nothing matters except this singular instance of passing, tick, tick, tick, of the neverending present. Who knows what I'm talking about? I sure don't, but better yet, who knows what lies I will profess next?

I've been doing a multi-dimensional comparative reading of various texts - tomes on magic, religion, and the various and nigh identical communal fantasies that arise whenever more than two or three are presently gathered together, naturalistic poems concerning the majesty of the insect world, the capitalist necessity of the witch hunt and the vast legislation against the common individual, essays on poetry and translation, short stories, and a thoroughly racist account of the Killbucks' missionary vision among the Yup'ik peoples in the late 19th century, among other things. Just now, I had the thought that I felt very much like the ewer from Aesop, the one in which the raven drops stones to raise the water level so that it might drink from the vessel. I don't know what I'm talking about.

Throughout my adult life I've been stricken with nightmares, needing to be shaken awake from a moaning keen by my bedmates, whoever they might be, to stop the reel playing in my brain. The other night I had a dream of the agglomeration of the most beautiful and innocent and wonderful young girl with whom I'd had a conversation. The talk was light, airy, full of magic. We sat on a bunk bed and talked, she in a nice blue dress with crisp linen mille feuille. In the dream's logic, I had to recurrently leave the little girl in the bedroom where we were speaking, and was forced to pass by the child's corpse being stuck to a wooden peg, like a coat, on a closet door that stood outside the room. I screamed and cried, looking at her little shoes. Dangling on the peg. Her living face so resplendent in memory and not reality. I don't know what that says.

The solsticetide festival season is upon us and the cafe throngs with holiday liveried folk and well wishing and parades. Dax Riggs mellowly croons "I'll see you all in Hell or New Orleans" of that titular track from his eponymous record and I get the feel that he'd definitely vibe with that notion here in Palmer as folk shepherd reindeer through the town commons and a cobalt blue tractor hayrides bundled children along the town's streets as the tatted barista dressed as a lithe Ms. Claus delivers trays of steaming sandwiches to tables brimming with old women and their grandchildren. Does that follow? (It does not.) I sometimes wonder what it is I'm trying to say.

I can go with the flow. 

Hey, Hey!

Here's a collection of depressing things I've found on a recent trip to Bishop's Attic, and maybe some commentary. 

When you witness heartbreak in the real world, what does that look like for you? Has the child died? Is this Raymond Carver? Is this Hemingway? The child has died, regardless, in theory or experiment, for this item has made its way to this image. What is the baby's name? Who did she look like? What is her (possibly inextant) arc? There are billions of heartbreaks flowering all around us.

Absolute insanity in any direction, a blanket of non-stop wondrous living, pushing into the right void of nothingness existence in a moment that cannot be replicated. And the sound, sound, sound of it hammering, concordant, disconcordant, at times harmony, at others noise. There is a portion of us that pushes against the false reality and gives the briefest moments of smeared clarity that also cannot be fully resolved. Look at this little girl's face. Feel every instant of her being. Joy.

This life, my life, has been a spectacular spiraling about things that keep surprising me. As if I'm some idiot continually reminded of the shit that's happening outside my window. It's as if you live in a haunted house but become acquaintanced to the ghosts. You get to know shaky drawer Beth who rattles the silverware, Moany Pete who can't shut up about his heartbreak, Cold Area Maver who you just put on a blanket and sit with.

50 years only to end up in a thrift store. Who would buy this? Who could drink from such goblets? Me. Imagine sucking down the lifeforce of 50 years of co-being. Imitative magic in the extreme. Parrot the thing you wish to happen. I left the set on the shelf as a faded ghoul in the rear of the thrift store hacked and hacked at some catarrh. Later, I would go to the bar.

Uly and I engaged in the old, the ancient, the creation of magic amulets and medallions, the genesis of coins, of numismatics, of record keeping, of bureaucracy, of grain, of slaves, of property. He's a quick study, the lad, and he knows things writ deep in the nature of his soul. These things we inhered with special portent, in the hopes that they might see the sun through to another passing, another moment, another everything.

Don't be so hard on yourself.

 

Howl.

Evidence of a kill, possibly by an American Kestrel. 

Not from Ginsburg, but from Alexandra Savior, who I've recently discovered in my ever expanding circle of shit that I'm into. I've been listening to a lot of Indie/Folk lady singers belting out their heartbreaks and melancholic misadventures with their wavering throats in tones like pink lemonade to steal a lyric from another of Ms. Savior's jams. Who knows whence came this re-education, but as I was saying to my special lady earlier, I should have known something was in the works as I had been the alone twink 17 year old boy with tears in his eyes who embarrassedly and with much self-consciousness crooned along, badly, word for word, with Sarah McLachlan's "Adia".

See the swag, the drip, the absolute candy paint bling recently copped from Faerie magazine's merch portal. You can find them under the "Witchy" tab on their site which hails to contain "all things witchy!" This also says something about the current rabbit trail from which I send out these inconsistent updates. I remember, it being the apropos time of year upcoming, how much my mother detested the thought of witchcraft and the unbearable stench of anything pagan let alone Satanist. When we were kids we never dressed up for All Hallows, even going so far as to turn off home lights and ignore the knocks of the bravest trick or treaters to haul up onto a darkened trailer porch in rural Mississippi for treats for the fear on my mother's part that even a dalliance, a bit of fun, an opening to evil could lead to a slippery slope of idolatry and sin, the loss of our collective and delicate souls to the foul machinery of the Devil's workshop. That probably says something about me too, but I'm ill-equipped to say what as I'm all I've got to analyze the situation.

A rare internet sighting of a Dighiera in the wild, seen socializing with wise folk.

I turned 40 recently. I certainly wouldn't proselytize the greatness of simply existing in the world for its own sake, by any means, but this past birthday was the easiest one yet. I spent my celebration day alone, twisted, wandering around town, completely adrift, my special lady having abandoned me for her summer hiatus in the lower 48. I ended up at the bar, natch, and can't remember much about the particulars of it - what I ate, drank, heard. It was, as many current days have become, a seemingly endless cinemascope of a man performing bizarre Skinnerian behavioral loops. Hypotheses: Given "a", subject will wake, look at a screen, rise, dress, walk to a cafe, drink coffee, write, walk to a bar, read Virginia Woolf. Given "b", subject will wake, look at a screen, rise, dress, drive to an office, look at a screen, drive home, drink. Put that on repeat and the edges start to blur. It's reasonable to accept that some of the details are lost but that, on balance, I feel the days are "good". Likely, disaster is just around the bend.

There's snow in the Talkeetnas, the Chugach. COVID numbers are through the state's roof but, as the barista implicitly informed me recently, the pandemic was, in fact, over. I agreed. So do the hoi polloi of the cafe, me one of their ilk, sitting around in the public spaces of others, wantonly breathing particulate clouds around us, perforating each other's bubbles. I had a cousin die of the disease recently. She worked in the hospitality industry, restaurants specifically, in the deepest south you can probably go in this country. Thinking about her situation - an intubation, sedation, improving function, being woken up, trying to learn how to eat again, then a rapid decline into eventual death, is all abstract, like some kind of impressionist view of how shitty it is to die choking on your own fluids. Yet here we are, all doing our thing. You can't think about it too much.

Cafe Mind, Mind Cafe

Today I arose at a hefty 10 AM after lying in bed for more than an hour, staring out the window, at the screen, scrolling the tubes, watching the spectacle. After waking, I finished the cherry cider leftover from the night before, a nice, 6 oz. lift to what had all the trappings of a perfect Sunday morning, minus the availability of the Eucharist (my own fault, really). Instead of the liturgy, I repaired to the cafe, my seeming church, its congregants my brothers in faith, these days. There are all manner of folk here and only the old men come in, much like myself, for their soups and coffees alone. There is a boy who resembles the fat kid from Stranger Things on an awkward and seeming first date with a young lady. They make small talk and fumble with their cups. There are families, whole scores of people, with babies and children eating tiny portions of grilled cheeses. Old ladies consort in the corner. People stab plastic straws into disposable cups with a prurient urgency. Lana Del Rey is fucking slaying me and I'm close to sobs. Holy God, send a little help to your scribe down here.

Yesterday I was in the cafe solely for reading. I had been writing a truly insane piece of journalism that will never see publication (but that's okay) but put the juice on hold for the day in order to scratch around through a collection of thoughts from various authors. Continuing my education, as it were, refreshing the knowledge I'd forgotten. I stopped after each section in each book to "rest my eyes" as my mother would implore me if I video gamed too long. The cafe was a bustling oasis of warmth and I had just finished a story by Laura Van Den Berg (Volcano House) where the protagonist's twin sister fell victim to a mass shooting. I began to dwell on the absurdity of this, the logistics, the tactics, the possibilities of a man (white, mid-twenties) prepping in the nearby bathroom to gun us all to hell (the delicate click of rounds into magazines). I arose to investigate, found no shooter. Pro-gun Trump guy was in the cafe and I considered the lack of public violence in my town. How would one go about such an endeavor? Remember basic Marine training. Begin planning. Arrange recon. Make recon. Complete plan. The thing I can't remember unless I google (Its acronym's placeholder being an I). Supervise. What was I doing if not making said reconnaissance? I studied the layout of the cafe, the patrons, the curiosity of mass shootings happening in mostly open venues like supermarkets and malls. Here, we were/are target dense, few exits, choke points for bodies, literal fish in a barrel. Why hadn't the imagined guy from the bathroom come in blasting? Which corner would he take first? What child could I steamroll to escape? The thought of a hand grenade rattling around in the small nook. A possible incendiary device, maybe more. The pop pop pop of 556 rounds into puffy coats and bodies. The baristas flooding out through the kitchen in back. Maybe a surprise? Maybe Pro-gun Trump guy engages the target with a concealed pistol? Maybe an "allahu akbar" prior to a clean and final light? Rest your eyes, Benjamin. 

I go back to work tomorrow. Not excited about that one. I suppose its necessary as I've worn out my welcome at home and everyone needs a break. This "vacation" of mine has been, like all things, a mental odyssey. Another family through the door, vacantly looking around before selecting a table. A child in bib snow pants (mauve?) runs about smiling like everything, the world, life, is okay. The beauty of the young is so grand, in that they are ignorant of all the ways the earth will destroy them. Yesterday (Friday?) I watched a short-eared owl coast above the Matanuska river before plunging, presumably for prey, into the reverse slope of a nearby rise in elevation. Everyone is speaking wordlessly, replaced by the music making a circuit of my ears which in turn is equally as meaningless/ful. Ah, fuck it.

I suspect I should get in this balloon and motor.

Mind Cafe, Cafe Mind

In the dark (brilliant, dazzling) temple of the cafe where there sits a family of seemingly Nordic stock enjoying the hard-earned labors of the man and woman (man sits with his hood raised) among the children dressed as ragged scamps (one, a boy possibly, doffing a red and feathered felt fedora prior to repast). They are curious. Recently I read the story of a prehistoric mass grave unearthed and examined in Europe somewhere (the Baltic states? the Balkans?).  A collection of skeletons unceremoniously dumped in a pile in a shallow grave all of which bore the evidence of disastrous head trauma, aged 2 to old, and only a few of which were related genetically. The scientists speculated as to what had happened, what led these bound victims to their brainings, but if you pay attention to this family over here, you already know. A massive, ugly truth from the deep unrecorded.

A barista delivering a meal passed within arms length. I chuckled about that. Last night A and I finished a movie, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, which is, as far as I could ascertain, largely themed around the armature narrative of the unknowable other. (Jesus, will you ever shut up about that?) It was good, infuriatingly so, the way decent works of Art are supposed to elicit outrage. Of course I wanted to argue with A about it but she would have none. There is an ancient man, a gnome by rights, who frequents the cafe in the same way as I. The baristas know him, his usual, and I even saw one of the prettier ones, one who works here no longer, hug him once. He sits and watches and I rarely see him speak. Is he a widower? He is always solo, save for that legendary scene where, over bibles and notebooks, the blonde woman a quarter his seeming age asked for a hug and received one (avuncular, well-meaning, rightly-intentioned, no hint of filth). Fuck I hope she's doing well, wherever she is.

The other day at work, I consoled (one wishes), a young lady from the village about a recent test result that had not gone in the intended direction. She was upset (it seemed) at not having performed on a metric that others had impressed upon her as important. She'd called to see if it were appropriate to visit my office at the oddness of the hour and I said yes, natch. She asked on the test results' seeming import and I explained that, while I understood her concern, to not bother with feeling shame, or bad, or negative as the test was an absolute falsehood. I tried to inform her of testing's inherent bias and of things cultural and societal that had conspired such that she'd never reach the hoped for goal and as such pining about missing the mark was a waste of energy. Can you imagine the roles reversed? Can you imagine yourself hunting seals and being graded on your performance adversely and then feeling poorly because strangers might be disappointed at your failure? Absurd. Insane. Possibly unethical. Definitely wrong. She left after a quick chat and her eyes smiled but I don't know if it was genuine as she was wearing a mask for the duration of our visit. Bizarre. Wonderful. I cried after, about the futility, the hopelessness, the implicit consent with all the things that conspired to make her feel bad that her score decreased. 

White guy in dreads across the cafe, near where the paleolithic massacre victims had sit. I've been flogging the beast of race in these posts lately, mostly thoughts about whiteness. I don't know what I'm saying and I have no agenda. I don't even have a cogent position as you have seen. It's like hearing an idiot's blather. Yet it won't leave my mind unless the trepanning here. Earlier today I learned that Trump was set to launch his own social media platform. Other things I learned from the news recently was that a man killed a six year old girl, shot twice in the chest after spilling some water. Some guy killed a bunch of Atlantan Asian people the other day. The same student I spoke to about her test results had previously taught me the Yup'ik word for caribou. I described my life to Nick and Dan as a "series of potions" and I think that's pretty accurate for us all. When challenged about the grandiosity of a woman's armpit aroma this morning, I maintained that it was definitely top ten in odors. (You're making up that part.) A young blonde woman is eating a pumpkin roll in front of me. I mean, if you can't see the species connections here, I'm not sure I can paint a clearer picture. 

Balance, Balance, Balance

The cafe is a vast and sobering place. Lunch press is upon the baristas caroming behind the counter to espresso, pasta, soup, chatter, receipt tape, orders up, mania broadcast from every cornice. There are folks here, all white, hugging and laughing and, before I juiced into the prog jazz station recommended for me by an A.I., conversing about the economy and recovery and COVID related things. Across from me at the shared long table, is a man whose laptop declaims loudly his a: being a gun owner and b: that he is stolidly pro-Trump. The women, one of them is probably Eowyn Ivey, all wearing the uniform of the white: yoga pants/leggings, puffy Northface coats, children in tow. Earlier, in the library, there was a woman, in the uniform of the day, with four children, only one of which was school age whose youngest daughter supplicated, pulling at mom's coat pocket flap with a keening "unnhhh, unnhh" for a full three minutes before her mother dismissed her with, "One minute, honey." I was in line behind her and imagined all the implications of the scene before me, all 4 billion years of it, the absurd machinery. Who are these people? Why can't they get out of my head? Why can't I get out of my own?

Later, I went to the grocery store and spoke only in memes, aloud, to the patrons attempting to shop alongside me. I spent 80 USD to purchase items to make po'boys. I laughed in the check out line as I relayed this amount to Uly. When he didn't appreciate the hypocrisy, I enjoined him to chuckle, in the vein of Foghorn Leghorn, as "It's a joke son, you're supposed to laugh." I have the feeling that I'm going to be the old man in the home who speaks in crude and unrecognizable snippets of a lifetime of exposure to a culture that refuses right understanding and all cogent analysis. (Can you imagine explaining your daily life to an extra-terrestrial?) I imagine the long suffering CNAs doomed to cater to my needs as eye-rolling goddesses. How can one study a thing without the trappings of its infection? Maybe that's where the writing comes in, a kind of barely-maintaining-sanity-life preserver, a consciousness Mae West inflatable. Maybe the point is to become so cryptic and esoteric that one eschews ciphering, to write oneself into a nice solipsistic dreamscape from which awakening is unable and undesired? 

The older I get, the more I seemingly understand, as much as anyone understands anything, the flow of the jazz tunes that the machines suggested I hear. I've been in the nerve for a while now, long enough feel profoundly revolutionized yet not long enough to begin to question my initial assumptions, a dangerous juncture. I might say any number of asinine things at any second, outing myself as a fraud, a neophyte, an idiot. I wonder if the Trump sticker guy has these thoughts. Maybe I should ask him over a heteronormative and totally not homosex beer that I know, at least for myself, is going to happen later? We could talk shop, discuss the nation, engage my fellow patriot. The fictions we collectively suckle are delightful indeed. Wait, hold up, I just glanced over at my man's next to me (not the Trump dude) screen and found he was reading the story of Jesus's encounter with the famed (infamous?) tax collector sitting in a sycamore. I'm surrounded. I'm terrified. I'm in love. Man, is this track screaming. I need to displace, to reload.

The new pos is engaged with an enemy in the form of a white man, bearded, 30s, wearing a hoodie, who is roundly expounding about the military-industrial complex to a table of similarly raced folks, both apparent men and women. Oh, he's going hard at it, talking, talking, talking, declarative in extremis (What is it, exactly, that I think I'm fucking doing right now?). A woman at the hand-gesturing instructor stretched her back, twisting against the chair in left and right arcs and revealed she had, no doubt during the course of this very morning's shower, shaved her armpits bare. The light fixture over the table's head has one blown fluorescent bulb, the kind that, when introduced a while ago would destroy the incandescent bulb market and was seen, by some, as anathema to lighted structures. The walls of the cafe are decked in new watercolors and ink at obscene prices. I am beset by words, by lies, and the more I see them, the more I hate lies, as Captain Willard would say.

I was recently taken with the fantasy of using Uncle Joe's stimmy money to partake in a Greyhound bus tour of the Michigan wilds. Jesus Christ guys, I just took out my earbuds to go get a birch beer with ice and heard mil-ind complex guy say "For a minute there I thought you said 'game theory' and I was all 'eeeeeee' because it seems complex but it's really based on simple principles." (Legit LOLs here in the cafe as I type.) Anyway, I wanted peruse the highways, in Poe Ballantine fashion, of the upper Midwest, logging country as I understand it according to Papa Hem, and meet a kindly old man named Bert who would teach me to hunt and fish the land in a way my father never did. We would wear mackinaw coats and hunting caps with ear flaps and stroll the wood with our shotguns, looking for pheasants. Bert would be the kind of person who had never heard the construct "cancel culture". He would be solidly anti-hippie, but would, for reasons unknown to himself, take a liking to my long hair and ratty beard. He would have vague libertarian notions of national governance. Evenings, we'd sit by his cabin's glass-doored woodstove and stare into the fire without words, sharing warm whiskies, before a shuffle off to sleep. A completely absurd scene, surreal really, one that lives in my mind, like this cafe, like the baristas, like the Trump guy, like Zaccheus, like the military industrial complex, like this music, like everything else.

Jesus, these are words. 

Magic, Magic, Magic

Earlier today, the barista stopped me before I ordered and said "Don't take this the wrong way, but I was watching a documentary about a cult and you look like you belong to it. Hold on, let me show you." Then she proceeded to scroll her phone's images to display a shot of a  group of African men in orange jumpers, much like the thermal garment I wore. We then had a good laugh, mine altered, hers seemingly genuine. It's not the first time these young women have said something about the meat face and aura I project. Previously, I'd been informed that, from among the patronage, the group of early and mid-20s caffeine dealers (all white, many Christian) had decided that I was the one most likely to be/become a serial killer. It's nice to be seen, by anyone, much less a troop of attractive, young and unattainable folk even if it is not in the kindest light.

Speaking of the cafe, I took it on myself to visit for a prolonged stay, the first time since COVID numbers in the valley took a significant leap back in October of last year. The place is every bit as mysterious, as casually strange as it has been with only the sporadic mask sighting, a kind of looking glass back into pre-COVID days when people had the sheer temerity to gather indoors in large numbers of souls not in their circle in order to breathe on each other. A woman passed so close I could smell her perfume, and I had the insight that it was a divine thing, the smelling of people not your own and likely, I imagine at least for myself, to go away for the most part on a large scale just because COVID. Speaking of, numbers are down, statewide, from their obscene peaks around solstice-tide and so I sit in this magical spaceship cabin with my fellow passengers - to be awed by their separateness. If only there were some way to reach them, to communicate an experience, yet not one is reading a book. A bizarre let down from the species.

At work lately, students have been returning in fits and starts - subject to the whims of a fanatical bureaucracy and the order by fiat mentality of all the most oppressing machines. That I'm a tool of institutional racism is a fact that never fails to present itself. The Department of Labor needs civilized, meek, conflict-resolutionized, and anger-managed facile drones for the work force. At work the mechanism seeks to take the Native out of the Native; the sufficiently un-white, un-western must be whitened and westernized, else they will be unable to get and maintain a job "outside of the village". This and sentiments like these ring from the dorm mezzanines and the classroom walls, the institutional hallways and in the communal dining hall. My role in the beast is finely tuned, one for which a body must have the thinnest veneer of empathy to execute, and must be an organism attuned to the jazz sax wailings of a student's potential employment in Q4 lest the company performance rating take a hit, and one where a person must bow to the bottom line of and apparent student success, but who must also must carry around with them the family mysteries of hundreds of individuals, all piping similar melodies of the cruelties that brought them to us. What a world.

The equinox is trending and it shows - water in the streets, slush in the gutter, the scrubby cottonwoods on the walk downtown birthing just beginning to green nodes of leaves, vast labile moods from despair to euphoria. I haven't written anything coherent in months, almost a year. I've tried to corner ideas, snare them, but all of the things I write sound banal, corrupt, greedy, and, worst of all, repetitive. Topics abound that I wish to broach but the words look like idiots on the page, myself the idiot king puppeteer. A sentence appears yet one does not follow. The thought of submitting a story to a magazine sits obscenely gesturing at passersby. The prospect that graduate debt was a waste in both time and energy, at least in terms of creative ability and proliferation, looms.

  Ah, time for the bar and pint rim paredolia after some prolonged absence.

If Only

Today was an exercise, as all true days are. Get up, get nourished, ingest potions, armor up and get out the door, get experience, try to swagger through the buffs and debuffs of your most recently saved campaign. I'd the day off from work due it being the new year and the morning was a divinity of light and sun and the cat on the windowsill and a card that Ulybear and I made for his godmother, T, in thanks that she sent us a greeting and update on the necessary beauties of her own compartmentalized being. Once accomplished, I sat on the sofa and watched the mountain grow and mutate in the cresting sun. A went to the store and I put on music and slow swayed around my living room ingesting all of the beauty-terror of the day and my being in it. That has nothing to do with the Scoob here in his Christmas regalia but there he sits like some obese and profane satrap lavished by concubines and born along the yuletide snow drifts in an immense palimpsest born aloft on the shoulders of slaves of many races. It, the photo, is simply another mote in the ever growing gyre of absurdities in which we, all of us, swim.

Christmas happened, is happening, depending who you ask and we had the day ensconced in the living room, unwrapping gifts from locales near and far, myself with the added task of police calling the yard of waste generated by unboxing and unwrapping. Even with recycling, you fail to not make a substantive amount of trash but we persist in these rituals as they are older than memory can recall, developed at a time before which writing could chronicle. The weather is cold, it is dark, the spring may not come, I've been stuck in this motherfucking cave for a moon and unless we, as a tribe, make some diversion and spread goodwill then I swear I'm going to jab this antler tipped spear into someone, anyone, maybe even myself. My mind is prone to flights of idiocy, true, but I spend a fair amount of time trying to grind out what appears to be an inherent meaning between myself, the past, ancestors, my children, the stupidly unknowable future. Here is one of the nuggets, a high resolution raven blasted onto a canvas, courtesy of my two oldest. It attains primacy on the cave wall here, with others of its ilk, an important addition to the miracle of birds. Future archaeologists will ponder the meaning of this room of the cave. Did we venerate the birds because we believed them to be deities that would ensure the sun's return? What other evidence in the surrounding sediment layers support this hypothesis? 

My special lady got me a horse for Christmas. It's beautiful. I love it. The plan is to take it to work and elevate it for all to see who should come visit my work cave. I've become obsessed by horses, have been for some time now. Just the other day, I sent a text to one of my dearest friends, J, who is herself a horse person, that read "I petted horses yesterday. That was god." The occasion to send such a text was Uly, myself, and A going to a horse farm event for Halloween and I remember the exact horse - a buckskin quarter horse whose name escapes this faulty tub of neurochemicals - and I looked into her eyes, into that strange ungulate space, back down into the history of it, of us conjoined together, our species as rivals, then theirs as food, then their impressment into the service of humans, now, largely, their role as pets and recreation. As I looked into this creature, and into myself, I was stricken by the remembered line from Blood Meridian "and everywhere... horses lay screaming" as the most horrific in a passage rife with violence, human massacre, scalping, evisceration, and unconsented and sometimes necrophilic sodomy.

We went to the arboretum today and I stood in a snowglobe of crystalline shards and columnar light fracturing with the mountains hoving up like sea beasts on the horizon and the diamond particulate fluttering through the air in the cold and the vast mystery of the trees and the unquestioned existence of sprites in the wood albeit in diminished magic due to the nature of their institutionalization and the vermiculite tracings of voles in the snow exposed by wind and melt and the vast clear overhead bell of sky and the pop of snow underfoot. Perfection, save the absence of the two oldest due to positive COVID tests and exposure on their end. What a world.