The prairie
May 16th, 2008Muted browns and greens stretching on forever.
No ocean, no end to the prairie. Flat and stretching on until I can’t see anything else.
It’s like nothing else exists.
Day 1
May 16th, 2008Let’s start this post off with some unadulterated emotional lightening:
Fuck you Las Vegas, Nevada. Fuck you. I hate driving though you, you’re hot, you smell like sweaty crotch and your mother is ugly. Fuck you. Sink into the earth.
Alright, I’m glad we got that out of the way.
My drive started off quite well and continued that way for about 340 miles until, on the I-15 in Vegas with the Circus Circus Casino to my left and in 100 degree heat, my car just stopped moving. I quickly pulled over to the center median…and there I sat for the next 2 hours waiting for my tow truck to arrive.
I would like to summarize my whole experience of waiting on the side of the freeway in one phrase: (to quote my friend Tom) “It’s like getting a pink sock from a big black guy in prison”
On a positive note however I have now officially taken the piss on the median of a public highway in rush hour traffic. I thought I should at least have some type of positive from the event.
I’ll make the terribly long and expensive story short. I got to sweat my ass off in Vegas for about 30 hours…and no, nothing fun happened, it was mostly me sitting in the back of an auto repair shop. It sounds about as fun as it was.
After my car was repaired (the fuel pump just decided to quit) I was back on the road and determined to step out of the car at my buddies house in Colorado.
Happily, pedal to the floor, I left Vegas….13 hours of continuous driving later I arrived here, Colorado Springs, CO.
There is, of course, much more to write but not now. Now is time for Guitar Hero 3 and coke.
Yes.
Chilling.
Yes.
SUUUR PRIIIIISE
May 12th, 2008I just had a surprise party thrown FOR ME!!?!?!??!?! Can you believe it!!?? That was my first one ever and I’m just completely shocked; it feels wonderful.
I think that is one of the nicest things a group of people has ever done for me.
Wow.
I’ll write more later, now is bedtime….i just feel so damn loved.
*le sigh*
getting ready to go
May 8th, 2008The end is near!!!!!
My room is packed away and stored, clothes are separated into ‘take’ and ’stay’ piles, bills are paid, all engines are go for my trip to the Midwest.
I don’t know why but whenever I am home in Ventura my desire to write dwindles to almost nothing. Maybe it’s all to familiar and settled, nothing new and exciting to get my juices pumping…I dunno. Hopefully as I put rubber to road my little writer inside will perk up and start having something to say.
While I’m here I’m trying to be thankful and appreciate all the things I’m about to leave behind. My family and friends, all the wonderful music I’m surrounded by here, the beautiful sea breeze and salt air, my weather.
I know when I’m sweltering and sweating through my shirts in Iowa I’ll lament having left mother ocean behind, and when it’s dark and cold I’ll dream about the endless laughing that seems to birth itself whenever my sisters, mother, and I get together around a table.
It’s interesting to make the conscious choice to set these things aside. Place them down and behind, look ahead, and step confidently away. Maybe love ignores the time dimension and just exists. Whenever it’s in the head, whenever it’s experienced, it’s real, no matter if it’s memory or current action.
I can’t help but feel that although I’m going I’m not really leaving anything behind.
I’m existing instead in the middle of my youngest sisters laugh, firm, easy, and readily available; or maybe my middle sisters wit, sharp, piercing, and dipped in irony; or perhaps it’s my mother’s begrudging acceptance that our crass stories are funny, despite her best efforts she’s forced to smile and laugh at our efforts.
My family is timeless.
What is ahead though?
What is the corn holding for me?
What about the cows?
Dropped in the middle of someplace else… ‘I wonder if this is Beijing…let’s walk that way.’
Dusk
April 27th, 2008Clouds stretched purple off far in the distance.
Before them gray and hazy mountains.
I sometimes wish that they were mystery and their contents unknown. Their possibilities endless.
You could pack off and explore something completely new.
You could make your fortune
you could seek your death
you could find your life out there
lost underneath the purple skies.
Lilly.
April 23rd, 2008Her hand tumbled around the tip of my middle finger. Fat, plump little pythons circling as well they can the vast accumulation of my finger’s 29 years.
Even though she grows with each delicate breath I feel assured she will never close the grip. It’s false confidence, of course.
The world has sectioned us off; A few moments spliced off the time line and hidden in the cushions of a couch.
She sleeps. I stare. The great protector, guardian of cushion’s edge, none shall pass.
A million questions about life and living surge from her fingers to my brain. A million comments, the bullet points of my life, clogging my grey matter’s precious dendrites, scream forward. My life as I remember it accelerated to simple color streaking by.
Here though, in the slipstream of time, the whitewash and noise fades away. I, the great watcher, am lost in a commentary of life professed by a master of only 7 moons.
Unburdened. Defenseless.
I was supposed to be doing the protecting but it felt like the roles reversed, if only for a little while.
‘Slave, be aware that the Lord of all the East is here.
A flickering storm cloud shows his lightnings to you!
Your words are guesswork.
He speaks from experience.
There’s a huge difference.’
Rumi
Pizza and Beer Night
April 20th, 2008Every now and again my mother and I have a pizza and beer night.
Tonight it was Bottleworks pizza, and BSG on the T.V.
I brought home the beer and placed them on the counter.
For my mother Guinness Extra Stout, for me Bass Ale.
My mom stopped at the counters and looked at my Bass Ale and then, using polite verbiage and nice grammar basically called me a big pussy.
I laughed. It made me happy.
Huge Jhonson
March 21st, 2008So. I am a huge dick.
It’s been almost a solid month since I have written anything here, let alone anything of substance. My life has been in the process of change over the last few days. The musical ended, I turned in my notice to quit my job, I’m packing up my life preparing for my move to the Midwest, I realized I REALLY don’t have very much money at all, and, today, was the first day in I-don’t-know-how-long that I got to do next to nothing ‘workwise’ and just exist.
I work up, went to music theory, came home watched Juno (very good) and In the Name of the King (very bad), packed more of my room, worked out with Brian (beefcaaake) and then watched the debates (blah blah blah). Great day. I wish I could say that I feel in a content state but I do not. I DO feel relaxed, which is part of the way, but content still is elusive. There is just SO much to do and SO much to pay for and I have no idea how I’m going to get it done let alone pay for it to happen.
Keep pluggin on…ya ya, I know. We’ll see what comes.
This weekend should prove fun. Some friends in from out of town, blow off a little steam. I have to find away to silence the never ending commentary and critique about the coming storm that sometimes gets out of control in my head.
I don’t need to decide anything till after August (if I survive that long) so I will appease the voices till that time…then we can hold counsel and decide what to do. When we have the information..as it should be.
I need 6 more hours in a day, and 1 million dollars…that should shore everything up quite nicely. Pray that I have enough for gas to get me to Iowa!
Maybe I should start a fund.
“Help a poor, young(ish), artist make his way (halfway) across the United States…for the sake of artistic expression.”
How about it?? Any of you six figure types wanna help a brotha out!?
The vessel
March 16th, 2008I met a man who knew my family since 25 years before I was born.
He liked to tell stories, so he did, telling me quaint anecdotes of times past with my father, now dead, as the protagonist in the stories.
Then he told me he had something for me, something to give to my father, something to say to my father.
I did not know this man, to MY memory I had never met him although I assume knowing my family as he did he saw me often over the years. He stepped to me and gave me a huge, tight hug. He kept this hug, genuine and deep, as he started talking to my father in first person as if he was standing there in front of him or, more accurately, as if he was hugging my father.
I was surprised by what I did and what I felt. What I did was nothing, I hugged him back. What I felt was normal completely un-phased by this unusual act. Even when he started to cry as he spoke to my dead dad I did not feel weird or uncomfortable in the least.
I felt like this was my place, my role. The last male of my line I am the descendant of all that came before me. To speak to them was to speak to me, to speak through me, honestly and openly.
I felt, strange as it may sound, that my father ‘heard’ him somehow. That by his supplication to my ancestors and using me as a physical focus for his message it ‘worked’ or something. I was in my body but apart from it, compartmentalized so that the intention of his communication could go ‘through’ to wherever something like that goes.
I had the same feeling of normal you would have if someone behind you, trying to shout to the crowd down below, asked you to hold the megaphone high in the air as he spoke through the hand held microphone. You’re not talking, you’re just standing there holding this thing in the air…ho-hum, ‘don’t look at me, I’m not talkin, pay attention to that guy’.
It was strange, comforting, and normal.
He stopped his talk, said thank you and we parted to go about our business. We turned and walked off on our separate paths like what had just happened was as casual as a meaningless smile cast toward a stranger who’s going nowhere in particular.
My mind tells me to say that it was like a fired clay cup, perfect with its fingerprints and imperfections…
I’m not sure exactly what that means.