Odds.

Watching a plane in the sky, there’s nothing more liberating. It flies off into the world, taking people to random places so they can travel, move, lay over, visit family, anything. These massive metal structures can fucking fly, and I’m sitting here feeling the impossible. As the bird gets smaller in the sky, there’s nothing to stop me watching it crash down, come hurtling out of the blue.

These visions are becoming more prominent. It’s not like the Final Destination bullshit where one kids sees his death and thus prevents everyone else around him from being killed by a pipe or a tanning bed. That’s stupid. I find my brain jumps to a special effects reel 90% of the time. Cars crash, people are hurt, buildings fall over, and bridges give out, boats sink, all in my mind. 

I live in a 24-story building about half way up. As my elevator climbs 11 stories to take me to the gym, I wonder when the day will come that the elevator wires will snap sending me, screaming, hurtling into the ground, through the lobby floor and into the parking garage. The odds of someone dying in an elevator accident is 1 in 10,440,000. Fucking splatter on the ground. Looking out the window on the 22^nd floor, I feel the building swaying in the wind, bending and bending until it snaps. I imagine clinging to the railings and window frames but eventually I have to let go. Fucking splatter on the ground. 

It’s not just airplanes and elevators, although those things are freaks of nature and gravity-defying beyond my physical comprehension. We shouldn't be able to defy gravity, but that’s another issue. It started in a car. It’s always worse in the car. The brakes lights, swerving, traffic, it has buried itself in my brain and I can’t get it out. Driving in the city is fine, lots of stops and controlled driving. The highway is a long, gray path to imminent death, I’m sure of it.

It’s funny how scary things aren't very scary in the day light It’s like the sun chases away the monsters. But in cars, it’s the opposite, day light allows people to see farther and take more risks. I find my palms wet in cars, sweaty from pressing them together between my legs. Sometimes I dig my nails into my hands to focus on something besides the life-shredding concrete outside.  I've mostly managed to keep my gasping under control, I guess it distracts him from the actual driving because he thinks something is wrong. But something is wrong, we’re going to crash and I can’t stop seeing it in my mind, playing it over and over in my mind. The odds of someone dying in a car accident are 1 in 73.89. It’s not splatter into the ground, it’s skin tearing, organ piercing, skidding, mangling, shredding into darkness.

I had a panic attached in the subway, that’s when I realized I may be developing an actual anxiety towards modes of transportation and heights. We were just sitting there, in the subway tunnel. I was engrossed in a book at the time so I didn’t notice just how long. I looked out the window, which exists in subways for an unknown reason to me, and all I could see was concrete walls. Dark walls, rough walls, no room to fit between the wall and the subway car, it was just inches from the window.  Then I noticed just how small the space was.

I imagined another subway train, like a long silver bullet, smashing into the back of us, sending our cars hurtling into the back of another train. The metals would collide, sending that unbearable metal crunching into my bones. In those tubes in the ground, there’s nowhere to go. How would I get out? I imagine scrambling over broken doors and people, pushing myself to find a way out, to live. 

As my breathes quicken and my heart races, the train starts moving. 

I’m okay. 

Frank O'Hara

I took a creative writing course when I was in college. For the second installment of the course, we spent a long time studying poetry. I found this piece I wrote hidden in old files as I was cleaning out my lap top. I read it a few times and really enjoyed it. I thought I would share.

It seems that I wrote this poem as a cover of a Frank O'Hara poem. Frank O'Hara was an American poet who died in the 1960's. He was a great writer.

Here is the original text:

Why I am not a Painter 

Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is 
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a 
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Here is my cover of a Frank O'Hara poem.

Why I am not a Painter.

Paint a poet.

Why? I think I would.

But I am not a painter.

Mike Goldberg, for instance,

Started a drop painting.

“Sit down and have a drink,” says he.

I drink. I look.

“You have sardines up in it.”

“Something needed it there.”

I go by the days.

I go buy the painting.

“Where’s the finished sardines?”

That’s just all left.

Mike says, “Too much letters.”

I am thinking of one day.

I write a color orange line.

Pretty soon it is about orange.

Whole lines, not pages.

There should be another page.

Not so much orange.

How terrible words of orange are.

Days go by, even life.

I am a real poem.

I haven’t finished.

I call twelve poems “Orange.”

And oranges one day in a gallery.

I see sardines called painting.

Interesting, eh? It seems like the assignment was to take out words or rearrange them. I think I may even like my version better!

Do you write poetry?

New Do.

I feel a blog change-up coming on. I want to revamp my look on here but I don't know what to do.

 

I think I'm slowly getting my blog groove back. I feel more urges to share things, which I haven't felt in a long, long time. I think because I'm involving myself in more things (reading more, taking online courses, doing more with people, enjoying work, etc) that I think I have more to share.

 

TED talks and coffee

I'm thinking about adding a few pages onto here, maybe a reading list and a recipe book, where I post my favorite recipes from this paleo life style change. I'd love to post some creative pieces but I have none at the moment. I need to do some creative writing.

 

Next week, I have the whole week off due to March Break. I think some creative summoning is in order. I'd love to get up early, go for a nice walk in the sunshine (crisp sunshine) then make some coffee and read or do some writing. I think I'll make sure at least one day I'll do that.

 

Do you have any suggestions for a new blog look?

Home.

Home. It’s where we are from. The place where we grew as people. Where we learn how to walk, talk, use a spoon, ride a bike. It’s where our families are, our childhood friends. We know the back roads, the short cuts, the best routes.

Then home grows too small. We can’t stretch our legs or run far enough away. Like Alice, we’re sticking out of every open window and pushing the roof off. Eventually, we push the familiar away, not wanting what we are used to.

We’ve spent the first 16, 17, 18 years trying to figure things out. Then we want new things to figure out, a new puzzle. If we push hard enough, we’ll break the plastic. We trip and fall into the unexplored. Diving into dark water only to find a shore on the other side. We become Lewis and Clark, exploring sites unseen.

But time passes. We get use to being away. We lose touch with who we were, where we were, who we knew. We transition, forming into a new mold, melting into the cracks. Starting a new life is easy. But making it stick is hard. Meeting new people, trying new things, going to new places, it’s easy until you have to find your way back. We become well traveled, more knowledgeable but with nobody to share with but our own minds. We try activities and foods that we would possibly never try at home. But the novelty wears off. We get updates from home, “____ is doing this,” “_____ is doing that,” and start to wonder, when will “here” become “home?”

When will the navigation turn off and the short cuts turn on?

When will the friends you try to make become the friends you’ve always had?

When does here become home?

Same Forever.

(Image: Glyn Lowe Photoworks)

I have this favorite moment of the day. Well, actually it'd be two favorite moments of the day. From my eleventh floor apartment window, we look out on a office building. It's about 5 floors taller then my window so it's literally all that can be seen. I don't mind, honestly, it provides this strange sort of privacy from the world. 

Each morning, as I am getting up much before the stroke of 6, I sit at the table or on the couch or perch on the bed and at exactly 6am, the lights come on. Floor by floor, flashing on. Like 16 or so floors of eyes, all waking up at the same time. The light is so bright, in it's collective glory, that it casts a fake sunlight into my apartment. That's when I know it's truly time to start my day.

Coincidentally, every night the lights must turn off, the eyes must close and the building must get it's rest. At 10 pm every night, the light will shut off. Floor by floor, row by row. The eyes close, signaling that it's time for bed. It's as though the world has turned off the sun, as the darkness ascends on my apartment without my neighboring false sun.   

Those are my favorite times in the day. There's something so...secure about knowing there will always come a 6 o'clock and a 10 o'clock. That there will always be a place in the world that there is a routine. That there is a place in the world that will be the same forever.  

The Girl Comes Out.

I've been wanting to get more in touch with my creative side. To dig my imagination out and use it again. I've started spending time working on creative pieces. This is a piece I wrote a few months ago. I've reworked it and gotten it to a good place. There are no pictures. I want those to be in your mind, to be what you imagine them to be.

We’re always running, her and I, through the woods and the mud. It always seems like eternity, taking the biggest steps possibly in those heavy boots. Mud, grass and hay encrusted on the edges. She wears the same white, cracked straw hat with the bow, clutches the same pink notebook with the ballet slipper on it. The pages are twice their size, swollen with water, the ink running into each other like trickling streams to a river. A copy of Moby Dick tucked into the folds of her long skirt. It’s how she always travels, her hat, her books, her skirt and her friends. I just tag along, trying to keep up.

Down in the trees, the world slips away. Looking up, the blue-gray Oregon sky peeks through leaves that are clumped together with mosses and dead sticks. Our boots sink farther into the muddy banks of the creek as she navigates the waters with her memory. Up the creek to the left, we’d have to wind our way over the tree roots, through the brambles, to the waterfall, where the waters are brown and dangerous. Wandering straight ahead, we would maneuver over the log bridge that was once a tree hanging its head over the creek. After climbing the embankment, we could turn and survey the land below, being able to see almost everything we have. Our last option is following the creek towards to bark boat.

Picking our way down a small but steep path would bring us to the biggest piece of tree bark, so large she swore to me it was once a pirate boat. The far edge is still outlined with a bit of tree hanging onto its ship, not wanting to give it away. Old bottles, tins and wilting flowers sporadically dot the small crevices and natural shelves on the boat. Its here she’ll sit and pull out her journal, probably to complete a work of fiction or an illustration.

Her hours are spent in this valley, in this cool, dark valley, where the world outside flies by. She spends her time with the friends she creates there; the fairies that live in the knots in the trees, the pixies that reside up the slope in the thick part of the forest, somewhere she cannot go alone. Winds move branches, giving the brush around her so much life.

After tying up some lose end in her novel, she ventures off into the water, not afraid of a few inches of brown muddy water when her rubber boots will save her! We pick our way up the creek, ducking under overlying tree branches and cobwebs. The air cools dramatically once we are crouched over the water. Small water bugs skim the surface of pools gathering in tree roots and embankments. She trails her hands through the water, searching for any small treasure, an old, broken bottle, or an old tin can. Anything she finds can spur another day of adventure.

As time passes and the shadows rearrange themselves on the creek floor, the light starts to fade. I find myself back at the top of the embankment, the waterfall, the boat, the fairies all in the forest below. She’s a few steps down the way, right hand on a moss-covered tree looking back up at me. Her white hat in her hand, she waves. She’s weaved a few pretty leaves into the bow on her hat, a few fall out as her hat slaps her legs. She turns and, in a few fluid motions, she’s back down in the trees, only her faint outline in the darkening night air is left.

 I feel my heart beating as I come back to life, glass of wine in my hand, panting dogs to my side, a family waiting for me to finish walking the dogs before dinner. I find myself staring into the woods, a part of my heart longing to throw it all away and run back to the world among the trees. I blink hard and take one last look for her. But she is gone now, maybe to resurface at another time. She waits for me, you know, deep in the hidden places of my mind. She’ll always be ready to take me on an adventure, to pull me out of life and back into my mind. It’s easy to lose myself for a while, to lose my childlike inspiration for life, but I know she’ll find me and bring it all flooding back.