1/19/09: The past being curiously relevant...

You do not conquer things. Not possible. You may get to know something for a while, spend your time with it, keep it near you until you think you recognize it. But when it's gone, it becomes someone else's thing to change. And it leaves you behind. Whatever you knew about it--all of it will change. Be them relationships, or simply those facts told to you in a classroom. The closest you get to keeping something static and close by is through the change you yourself embody by having known it. The only thing you get to keep--how much it has conquered you.

For my part, I appreciate being changed by things. This change attests to the effect of this thing upon me. It speaks strictly of its importance to my life, and I feel i can gauge my progress somehow in this way, by evidence of the things i have both lost and have become.

The point of my entire delusion of existence is again unclear, evading me. I feel myself as a vague presence in the world. When I sit still, I feel my loose clothes flutter around me, moved by an air or another human being. When i move, I sense the world around me moving too, sometimes with me, and yet sometimes against. I feel a certain agitation has been abating for quite some time, so that I'm no longer moved to make arbitrary adjustments in a violent right of way; a screaming light winning out behind my eyes, now no longer overpowers the glow of either night or day.

I find myself taking ridiculous risks. Feeling uneasy about them, as uncomfortable as a freezing stone wall--lost from sunlight and pummeled eternally now by icy waves. Still, i choose to step into their uncertainty with enough regularity to worry the people around me. Or rather, the ones that seem to love me. These risks are small but many. Taking them feels wrong and natural, and so far I'd say they've yet to get the better of me.

I'm always spilling things on myself, so I suppose I still presume the existence of 'self', 'things' (outside of the presumed 'self'), and the possibility even of all my fuck-ups. I still like to close my eyes tightly and intentionally focus on the blindness, to the soundtrack of the world unabated/unrelaxed/not on pause. I still want things that I do not really want at all, as though bodily desires, or even those of the soul, operate on a separate sphere than the faithful demands of myself named 'self'. But to derive a point from any of this? To find a center? Summarize my sum of all desires into a project worth a lifetime? I don't possess this degree of ingenuity! I don't even know where to begin...

Listen: Rock-climbing, and the way my forearms look afterward. Barefoot feelings in the instance of carpet, versus the shock of concrete. Eyes that look my way or away from me, with specificity. Eyes that peek, and glance, and give and plan and take apart or put back together again. Hands that hug strongly, seen pressing solid against an envied back. The name of those hands; being blank but not empty, you're sure. Making lists--how we're doing--and how doing so fills your mouth full with the words your hand is writing. Thoughts of "travel", false as that cornered plant, but places other than your own made so vibrant in your memories, so much more real sometimes than here, or there. But you hope not--you even fear it. And how by now, your frantic handwriting shows it all....

How shut down you manage to feel sometimes, even by the absence of a blank page, or the present imminence of a blanker stare. How utterly entranced and loving you become by the music making your day come alive. How crazy you really, really are. To fall head over heels for a well-built chair, means that eye contact with said chair must needs become forbidden. And so the concept of "forbidden", too, is real, and taken seriously.

How you subscribe to such ideas (with profound loyalty). You vest in them, bet your life sometimes, unwittingly. And still you stay reluctant to admit your life to be something possible to wager on, likely to be bartered at all. Ah, the things we think we believe!, and more particularly do not--how they have nothing to do with the things we're acting upon. Everyday! Accidentally, almost, and letting the wind decide. We fancy ourselves to be free, after all, and freely led. And frank with life, but even so, riddled with these moments of anti-life.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (8/28/09)

...

Iron bar skims softly down my bare foot. Skin keeps imprint of its presence one moment at a time. Sesame seeds dot barren along the fake stained burgundy of table-top red. False plant in the corner, too scarred to turn back now.

(Oh, god, this is hard! How I wish I knew where I was going with any of this... But a story takes so much more of myself away with it then maybe I have to spare.)

Shit, man! My life has just taken a nice complete U-turn--

So Jesus Christ. Seriously. And here I am sitting in a Motel 6 in Salem, MA, wondering where the last two months went, and how the hell I managed to get here without really recording a mere minute of the endless time it took. Tomorrow I officially move into my new surrogate home in the Bronx, and I'm feeling rather out of body about the whole-crazy-hidden Truth of it all. And what else? The Law School of it. And the Absent Family Life of it. And the Abandoned Lover of it. And yes, the godforsaken invisible circus where the time already is counting down to the countdown--since really nothing has yet begun.

In the mean time (always), the Road Trippin' it from the West Coast to the East Coast and then some has seen its share of good and lesser wakeful days. Cuz shit, see where the game of association shall take us?: Taos and Dixon and Prescott and pool and The Rio (un)Grande and not NiagaraFallsGrandCanyonRockyMountains and Louisiana banjos and Wagon Wheel and hot springs and Colorado Springs and BIG CITIES and Syracuse and small cities and Omaha and carcarcar with dogdogdog and Sierra and meeting-the-mother-for-the-first-time and not Boston and gas stations and their coffee but not their food and 'jesuschristo we're tired!'s and feeling like you could go all fucking night long and the somehow stopping anyways...

And anyway, it could've gone on much longer, and in fact actually did. But as for my memory, only the bits and pieces of it serve as balm to the massive black absences of the rest, and I'm not sure if that's good enough yet. But hey, i haven't an alternative either. So that yes, in-the-mean-time i suppose I'll just have to allow in the content of all of it, even before I've earned the wisdom which bespeaks of its form with any sense of clarity. Until then, I guess I'd better go get whatever-it-is i can get, eh?

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (8/19/09!)