Strawberry Swing

The shadows on the streets thin with the autumn. I never realized I noticed this before, but all summer we drive through solid, black shadows and in autumn, it flickers and sparkles through the windshield. And later, in winter, when we need every blessed photon more and more, the trees sit kindly unobtrusive, bare. They have not a single thought about us; these are only incidental benefits; they made us as much as we made them.

I stood by the river under a tree with thin leaves--are there willows that don't weep? These looked like willow leaves, but I am a novice at naming trees. The sound of them falling through the branches, ticking and gently rasping against each other, the bark, and those yet to fall, took me back to her suddenly. The river, filthy with pride, took the leaves. A light wind started it again and again.

Fall begins today. I found out I can still feel that way.

Taps

I found a delete key in a crack in the earth. When depressed, it clicked against the nothingness between stars. I tapped at it like a parakeet at the mirror. I waited for my latest blog to fizzle and blink away. Half-expected a different diagnosis, a different new hire, the Mary Celeste of my heart to re-appear. For a year (it seemed) I pecked that button. Waiting for failed jokes to recoil in my mouth, for Galveston reconstituted like resurrection fern. All the hurtful things I said replaced by harmless air. I beat the button like I had a bid, like I had the question to their answer. Nothing buzzed with the sound of edits. The fissure's floor filled up with dust. Then I remembered the crucial discerning difference between the backspace key and that which I pushed now. The backspace rolls up the world behind it. Delete keys only kill ahead.

Meditating On The Catwalk

I understand, now, why some adults fall to searching desperately for inner peace. The quietness—the focused stillness—that existed in me when I was a child, an adolescent, a twenty-one-year-old… the capacity to experience that kind of inner calm seems to be losing… losing against the adult world of existential assumptions, societal concerns, the identity of being an American in Indiana who works in an office and pays his taxes (hold the Mr. Anderson jokes, please). But what are these things, really? When did I start caring—am I caring, or just going through the motions because that's "how it goes"?

Although I still reflect, it seems so much harder to attain a clear view. I've grown more and more complicated within, full of new worries about people and things, more fear of losing them than I ever had before; more apt to suppress my impulses and tell myself it's nothing, really, I'm as free as I ever was. I've grown… riddled. So much is taken for granted in the name of this rat race. Existence itself is taken for granted, as if we’re all just so very certain what the world is that we have the time to complain about poor service at the drive-thru.

There is a difference between questioning and wondering at. I question a lot of things--but the sense of wonder is tougher to summon back, and it's an important sense, make no mistake. There is a feeling I have of flagging wisdom; that I’ve gained experience and intelligence, at the cost of my appreciation. Mastering the mundane details while the big, ethereal picture fades away. Anyone who knows me is aware that I’m not very religious, but I have always borne a species of faith in the souls of living things—and my soul feels more vague today than it once did, in part because the route back to its origins is less clear. Maybe it’s time to get into that box of mementos in the basement again...

There was a morning, in November of 1997. The love of my life was away at school; I was alone, recently reborn--having been hollowed out by a potent crash course in philosophy the spring previous. All my ideas about the world were shaky at best; I didn't trust what I thought I knew. I was attending IUSB, taking my first college courses (I remember the first class, the first day, the first thing we were assigned to read: the epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the first great tale humanity ever wrote down). And on this particular early morning I was making the drive to class, listening to Dave Matthews Band's Live at Red Rocks, which had just been released a couple weeks ago. And the first light snow of the new winter was starting to drift down as I rode to class.

The city is so gray at that time of year, but it's not yet the tired, wearying gray that comes later in the season. It's that pre-Christmas gray, where the cold air still feels like a refreshing contrast to the seasons just passed. It's a virginal chill that only emphasizes the warmth of the living body, the shell of heat you make inside a heavy coat that has slept for the last seven months. The traffic signals stand out so brightly, red and green, and the weightless white flakes look lost and countable, drifting as they are with plenty of air between them, falling any which way but straight down. #36 came on as I was nearing the school, and I ended up sitting in the parking lot a little longer than I would have otherwise, listening. Hani, Hani... come and dance with me...

That morning, it felt like I'd settled gently down into a perfect, lonely sort of heaven. In my Rilkean solitude I felt such immense peace inside. A few years later, someone managed to capture the moment perfectly in a song lyric:

My car became the church
and I the worshipper of silence there.
In a moment peace rolled over me
and the one who was beating my heart appeared.

- Ed Kowalczyk

O Fiona, Where Art Thou?

This will have to tide me over, I guess.

Listen

the song

moving cells in a drop of blood
bodies made of, caked with mud
voices lowing across the plains
wind in hair and water in veins
all these elements speak the same
tomorrow we may find our names

spinning webs in a shaking tree
sunlight flees from a mountain’s lee
axioms set with ink and lead
carving marble to raise our dead
sketching out where the last stars went
clasping hands for the prayers not sent

turning leaves with a hint of snow
wondering how the end will go
tiny creatures beneath our skins
writing laws to invent our sins
we consume what we need to live
comet tails must the sun forgive

falling red frozen mercury
pale white fish with no eyes to see
crystal virus in a velvet lung
passing biases to our young
churning butter in an ancient barn
surely God can do no harm

bent umbrellas in torrential rain
stabbing children to numb their pain
mantis colored to match her land
canyons patterned in flesh of hand
if our math fails on blackboard slates
find the words to deny all fates

Ranting Again

You know what, screw this country. Our political system is not just broken, it's become a perversion of something that was actually once workable, maybe even admirable. Even when the two parties aim for "bipartisanship" it's only to make their own parties look better. I think it's possible--possible--that Barack Obama actually cares where the country is headed, but just knowing that there's even a chance he could lose the race over some one-off sound-byte at the last moment--just knowing such a thing is possible in this country--sucks all the "hope" right out of me. We're maimed, wracked with self-serving political in-fighting, and the media only fuels that fire by emblazoning every ridiculous "did not!" "did too!" argument across the internet, in the headlines, or on a scrawl at the bottom of the television screen. The people who report it, and the politicians who originate it, act as though these trivialities actually matter; and so, consequently, the idiot masses who believe that if "everyone's saying it, it must be true" (these are the same masses who can't discern an obviously Photoshop-ed image in an email forward, and thus send it onto all their friends accompanied by messages of amazement and awe, or vague outrage) let the tit-for-tat muckraking sway them, at which point, sick though it may be, the bullshit becomes validated, in that it actually effects people's choices. Then, seeing that a result has been got, the politicians and media push even more of this refuse down the pipe, and the whole cycle just reinforces itself.

I just... don't want to care anymore. I'm really starting to be convinced that we're getting sick beyond repair here, that the good eggs are doomed to be subsumed in a sea of busted rotten ones. I kinda want to move. But damn it, I love my corn fields, my raucous crows, and my oak trees... I love the top floor of the Schurz library, and hearing the symphony play at the Morris once in a blue moon, and driving up to New Buffalo in the summer to get a cheeseburger at Redamak's. There was a time when I "followed politics", when I kept myself abreast of world news and events. Now? About the only news source that doesn't disturb me is NPR. It feels like there's a glimmer of sanity there, at least. And there are a couple decent writers for Newsweek that I don't mind reading. But every time I go to check my email, and Yahoo! pops up their inane version of a headline, I cringe. Because I know some people click that link and think they're going to learn something from it. And by some, I mean... lots.

Maybe I'm simply having a bad night. Yes, that's the ticket. That will get me through until morning. And maybe when I wake up tomorrow, something meaningful will meet me. I think it might. I hope so.