So, All Saints Suffer?

And now, a little Halloween story...

We were the first folks in the county to get a Ford, and I’ll tell you, we were off to California. For a people emerged from the bleakness of a coal-mine into the bleakness of a Midwestern winter, to roll up shirt-sleeves on Christmas is quite the heralding image. We found our home and a parish. The new jobs were simple, but easy enough. Yes, a job each, since we thought ourselves modern. I’d not been in the Great War. She’d not had to see me go. Things were quiet enough and our world was small. We didn’t own a radio. We only got a newspaper on Sundays. A whole city began to grow around us, as others came to roll their sleeves on Christmas too. But we paid that little mind.

That day had been dark, like clouds rolling through a diamond sky. But with the dark came a hiss. Almost a hum, and with it a living roil of swarming life. The black cloud of what would prove a pestilence lifted over our city, and then dropped from the air like a balloon had burst, and lay like dust on every surface. This fine, alien dust that choked your throat and ringed your nostrils. The streets sat quiet for days as people swept and mopped with rags across their nose and mouth. And then the bleeding began.

The yellowed sheets were threadbare and loosely knit. This gauzy lens through which we saw the cathedral ceilings was lifted above our heads as soon as we arrived. No waiting for death to pull the shroud across our faces. That time weeks ago. The glossy, red stains would wick through them rapidly, like a nation fleeing toward the coasts. They all but dripped at the corners as though taps had been installed and opened wide. If the shift nurses forgot to roll you every few hours, or if things advanced considerably, you’d be wrapped in a gestalt of your own lifeblood in just a few seconds. Weighted and suffocated in a glistening, crimson death shroud. In 1918, you could drown from the inside on your own fluids, if the fever didn’t cook your mind first. But now...well, not so much the opposite as a new the-same.

The Repetitive Price of Purgation

Okay, okay, I feel guilty about yesterday's vacuous (if not unpleasant) photo-entry. Here's a little content for balance' sake.

I wrote this sitting outside the cafe one afternoon, using my phone and publishing immediately to Twitter. Micro-micro-fiction, I suppose. I was reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing" at the time and borrowed a bit of the premise for the story from a passage in that.

a note: each sentence had to be 140 characters or less, as is Twitter's custom.

-The Cost of Things: a story (inspired by McCarthys "The Crossing")

-A man dreamt each night, less and less, of the casual beauty and her smile since losing sight at twenty-eight.

-He would feel sometimes, wandering here and there, at stranger's faces, but never pictured any but hers.

-Now old and beset only with his cane, the clothes about him and sturdy boots that cradled ancient feet, he ceased to dream at all.

-Wrecked between world and reveries, sleep having lost its lure, he called upon a man of tonics and oils.

-A tonic prescribed, promising to restore dreams and their contents, cost the same as sturdy boots, not more.

-Unshod and set in thoroughfares' dust, his mind's eyes saw what carried further than feet.
And carried thus, more and more, till no more sleeping could be had. (The End)

Out of Excuses

Remember when I actually wrote things here?

In the mean time...

...an exercise in admiration.


Oh, chill, it's just nipples.

Remembering The Revenant's Role

The dreams are always the same. The dreams are never the same. Or rather, the elements never coalesce in quite the same way twice, though there is repetition to the themes. Oh, I do wish there was some way to be clearer about all of this, but you know dreams. They are so set in their peculiar ways, and they make their own kind of sense. They have that dream-logic. You see people and they don’t look like themselves, though their identity is certain. You flash from place to place, though they might be in wholly different parts of the country. The world.

I’m beginning to suspect she doesn’t have dreams. I know, I know, everyone has dreams. And yes, its common to, having no practice in recollecting them, awake with no memory of those dreams everyone has. It isn’t her not remembering that I take as evidence, but the sort of sleeping she does. The sleep of the dead, you might say. Or the innocent, though that seems increasingly unlikely. Like a horizontal yogi, she selects some lithe position and holds it till morning. Then she’ll stretch like a cat; claws out and back arched, purring a little.

Then, 5 days out of seven, we fuck.

But that’s not the point.

In the dreams (my dreams, that is) the world is itself, only darker. And every entity presses, first, from the velvety panel of a night-time universe, then bursts into color. Into the color one can almost hear with the remarkably common synesthesia of dreams. Its nature, mostly, but sometimes buildings. Everything oddly proportioned. Not that I can see myself, but I’m present as my 13 year old self. Pre-adolescent and awkward and so aware that nothing about me is unchanging or ready yet for the world. And all the women I’ve loved begin to lurk into a clearing, only they are fawns. I mean, it’s them. We both know I know it’s them. But they are delicate, feminine deer. White tails and brown noses and dark eyes, with Bambi lashes.

It’s often now that I’ll notice there are birds singing with that spring-time urgency. Sirens, in both senses.

They stroll with varying steadiness and poise into the clearing and fold their spindly legs beneath their musky torsos. They first kneel, then lay about me in a circle, nibbling grass but mostly staring with those eyes, like ink-dipped marbles.

Then the silence is appearant, and the dead bodies of sparrows and robins rain down out of the card-paper-cut-out trees. Or, sometimes, from the pop-up-book power lines.

And that’s when I wake up. Wake up and see her sleeping still, in both senses.

Complacency's Placeholding Platitudes

I was going to try to come up with a clever introduction to these photos and their links, but really, I just like cool clothes, for men or women. So, here are some rather classy, herringbone gray galoshes that would look just smashing with this asymmetrical wool jacket. Also, if anyone has that model’s number, facebook me, k?

I need to put together my Halloween costume this weekend, and that means shopping, which might mean I shop for … ahem… more than just my Halloween costume.

I need more closet space.

And a haircut.

This is getting a little random...

The Parents were in town this weekend. I wish I had been a more exciting host, but mostly we hung out w/ my friends and walked about. So, I did what I normally do. We did manage to go apple picking and, while I abandoned them to go to lectures on Gadamer, they took a tour of the North End. So, not a total bust.

As a result of apple picking, I have just oodles of apple-based baked goods in my apt presently and there are only going to be more. You should come over and have some so I don’t turn into a big, apple-smelling fatty.

I’ve got a nice queue of photos all ready to write about, just have to get a spare moment to do it. So, you’ve got that to look forward too. I’m sure you’re waiting with bated breath.

Yes, that's how you spell "bated" in that usage. Bill Bryson says so.

Fall's Fortunate Foretelling

I sit here staring at a sun flower that grins a rich yellow from above my laptop screen, perched as it is in a narrow necked, fat bottomed bottle atop my desk. It's been a week or more since as kind a friend as I know in Boston bought it for a me still sick and behind and despairing. Its only curling a bit about the petals, but otherwise looking chipper and cheerful as any displaced plant ought in early October. And I admit, I find myself relating.

I would welcome a little escape, I admit. Just a little one. I read about these tear-drop trailers and thought of the desert in the Fall and longed to climb rocks, hike about, eat hearty, hot foods in the twilight. Just be present in the stuff of stuff. Be far from books and bars and burdens.

mewithoutYou has been helping me remember the meaning of the stuff of Stuff. Sleeping At Last too.

"a fumbling reply, an awkward rigid laugh
I'm carried helpless by my floating basket raft
your flavor in my mind swings back and forth between
sweeter than any wine and as bitter as mustard greens
light and dark as honeydew and pumpernickel bread
the trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead"

(Side note: my external hard drive with all my music: clicking. I think its gonna fail. Fuck.)

"We'll lift up the ground to see
The system of roots beneath.
Gears turn, endlessly,
To bring the world back to life
Like clockwork, when it dies.

The cadence of beating hearts,
The click of its moving parts
Grows louder and louder
From this restless earth...

Future gardens wait patiently below
somehow we smell them
blossom through the snow."

The nesting instinct is a fine thing and well enough. I don't think it a pure vanity to desire one's life is full of beauty, natural or creative. But its to be shared. This place would be a fine setting for a life-together-ed. Otherwise its all just a museum to lifeless artifice. Artifactualities.

Well, tomorrow is just the sort of day from which I need to retreat. Too full, too busy, too much. I'll face it all the better with a full night's sleep and further blogging serves that purpose not at all.

A little more Sleeping At Last before I'm sleeping, at last.

"We'll pray for heaven's floor to break
Pour the brightest white on blackest space
Come bleeding gloriously through
the clouds

and the blue

Forcing one place from two.
Killing formulaic views.

Only loves proves to be the Truth."

Stereophonic Phrenetics; A Stunning Stasis

The money saved on rent, on rolling her own cigarettes, on plastic-bottled liquor all went to clothes. To stylish, outlandish, belle-of-the-ball clothes. Dresses with petticoats. Jackets of varying lengths. And shoes. Dear god, those stacks of shoes. Some weeks it would all hang pristine in the hallway closet, between the galley kitchen and the sliding-glass-door-ed living room. Other times, strewn in piles of tulle and silk and wool, like some giant textile-digesting animal had been left alone in the place for a week and never walked. All of the clothes that never saw the air beyond her dry-walled world. Out there, black slacks and a green apron did the job. Sometimes that hoody from an old boyfriend that smelled like any brand of cigarettes but hers and which I fucking hated.

She never dressed up for me. Or anyone, as best I could tell.

She didn’t even own a TV and I’d never seen her cook. Grinning plastic bags declaring their thanks would leer up from the trash. Stacked forts defended the refrigerator’s interior with Styrofoam walls. I was never not surprised to discover it was day or night at the front door. If you asked me how we passed the time, I couldn’t answer. Only that we did and in whirling, haphazard stretches.

One assumes someone else has wondered that if there’s a difference between boredom and love, its not one easily pegged.