3am is ALWAYS the appropriate time to walk to 711 and buy cigarettes.

I had a truly fantastic day today. The sky was blue, the leaves were bright, orange, yellow, red. Slight breeze on the walk to work. I listened to all my favorite songs on the job. It was pay day.

Harmony had followed me once again.

Then I began to fall. My mind changed back on to the frequency of bad thoughts. I started looking up statistics. I saw stereotypes, articles on race wars, numbers on increasing infidelity. I have now the visions of being backed into the corner. A weak world has forced me into for a second believing that I should ignore openness and remain in one place, stick to the familiar, stop the beating of my adventurous heart. Maybe the good in people is not the same a whole world around. Maybe I should live in my neighborhood afraid to step foot out of county lines for fear of what monsters are made in factories with big bold letters that spell out foreign words.

There are soulless men that will be condescending towards me. foreigners that will ignore me. Everywhere else is a land of whores built and programmed to deceive. Or is it a lie to myself. Who am I to say that they are wrong and that they should desist.

I have spoken down to my wise and noble elders, I have ignored my fellow man, and I have cheated on women that looked much like you.

I should embrace a walk into the unknown and face whatever beast I confront because I can only see my reflection and if I die it may be by the teeth of an animal of my creation and ignorance.

I ask myself. Is there respect? Is there loyalty? Is there tolerance? Is there good? Is there love?

What am I thinking…I’ve been through the cold, I’ve been cheated on, I’ve been rejected. Why am I afraid of any of this.

Fuck it. 

Weird Behavior

I’ve been walking at night lately. Usually between 10pm and 3am. I enjoy the solitude.

My life structure has become strangely free-form and suspiciously simplistic. Its cool to have a break from 22 years of busyness.

Even more bizarre is the fact that I’m more productive than ever. I’ve been reading more now than in any year of school. I’ve grown more in 3 months than whole years at a time. I’ve got a clearer idea of where, what, and how I’m going to be in the future and am shaping myself daily. Saving money is much easier.

But the means of this growth come from such weird behavior.

Gifts in general

I have this funny habit when I get something new. If I either paid a lot of money for it, or it was costly for the person that bought it for me, or it was something I’ve been waiting for, or it is something I appreciate very much it gets a red carpet premier. I usually clean my room, designate a spot for it and/or wash my hands.

I BEG YOU!

Please dream. Large and righteous dreams and understand that by grace, knowledge of self, faith, and imagination you will be rewarded each blessed scene under harmony, wisdom, and well-being.

May you continue with strength under your own regal accord.

Very VERY nice! :]

4

It shall be that also another man may feel that he finds treasure by chance or prayer and that it may flee into death. That he may weep that she is gone and may weep harder that she is more with him though he may not see, hear, touch, smell, or taste her.

There is a woman that shall choose to feel the same.

Off-white

All of my garments are now marked with the black charcoal of deviance. No wash cloth or bleach can remove the stains. Have I erred from purity and tainted myself with dark unconsciousness?

My temple has saturated for too long in filthy waters and become drenched in morbid intent.

Not even fire can burn these unjust streaks without entire consumption. I must bare with learned pride that I still wear my lightest cloth in remembrance of my sullied past.

Though I know that with these stains I can never truly wear white again. 

Two things about me.

A star that shoots is remembered by the dynamic of its rise and fall but a star that shoots that flares and stops has left no trails or bursts of light when it begins and ends.

 

Thus with no gradient of birth and death it remains infinite.

 

AND

 

As a child I would have a reoccurring vision of an enormous crystalline chamber of ice that carried within it an unflinching eternal flame burning brightly with immeasurable heat. Yet somehow it never melted its casing.

Those that speak the loudest follow the man who raised his voice.

Mankind takes a vote on its destiny or evolution. Ironically it follows not leaders but its followers.

Are we speaking or screaming.

Living or surviving.

He who is or should be most dominant attracts, creates, inspires and radiates peace.

The Authentic Warrior

It should be that warriors cry. True war is not logistics and formation.

It should be that the men of war cry. That during battle they see it as it is through blurry vision. Because only through the focus of tears can they see solely the blurred colors of flesh, the crimson of blood, the hue of bone, and the soft colors of sacred places within the body exposed.

The heart wants what it wants

It does not want to go to Canada.

So these are the beautiful little things (Tell me something good, Paul…pt. 2)

I had always remember one time 4 years ago walking into Nordstrom with Derick and seeing a Piano player that had inspired me spiritually and musically. He said that he had been playing music since before I “was a twinkle in my parents eye”.

 

Those words had resonated for ever. The sheer romance. This old man played my favorite jazz standards.

Today Derick and I were across the street from Nordstrom and I brought up the idea to go for a walk (it was a grand day). We walked into the mall and walked around. We happened upon the same man playing piano.

Bleeding out our favorite songs while casually bringing us back to reality with the most casual questions in the process.

Beautiful “coincidence”.

Nevertheless, I’m still confronted with the dilemma of going to Canada or not…It just doesn’t feel right. I don’t have the burning desire to travel there anymore.

 

I will be given a deciding sign very soon.

Tell me something good, Paul…

You know your mom is cool when you can kick it in your room with a 40 of Old English and talk about true life with her while listening to Bonobo.

 

:],

Paul

Baptism by Fire

I now take myself to a plane of miracles of action and silence of speech.

A place of infinite music and depth of feeling. Feeling no hollow dimension I have been burned by fire and forced into pastures that bear no fatalist fruit.

I am being graced. My life is a blank sheet awaiting a pens touch this is masculinity and femininity. The papers reception to a pens dominance creates life and story.

I am 23. I am human. Today I begin to write.

My thoughts are quieted tonight

In my child’s cradle I will put the same ivory white moon shining through the same quiet sky falling to the dusty hush of a night cleansed by wind. Tucked around his blankets I’ll put shiny cars that by their roofs and windshields resound the light of the moon’s nourishing voice.

I think I’ve discovered something amazing…

{Music video partially related/unrelated.}

 

6 November, 2009

I saw Múm last night at the El Rey Theatre. They were fantastic but not as good as when they played the Orpheum. Afterwards I ate 1 and one-half hot dogs with the works. I talked to the bassist and the violinist about Iceland and music.

The bassist smoked me out with a joint and I got very high.

Not too bad. But it could be better. It will be better.

On my solemn day of birth…

I must say I love to reflect.

I had a quiet day. I woke up and had a bowl of cereal- we had no spoons so I used a fork.

I listened to music and meditated. The sun shined brightly as I hoped.

I had a beautifully nude dream the night before- It was full of love…

I walked to my place of work to pick up my pay check.

Then I walked to this coin-op laundry place near home to do a load of whites and my work shirt by the time I finished drying my clothes I was cutting it close to getting to work on time. (I love to do my laundry here…these places usually have big windows with glorious urban lighting).

I stopped by home to drop off damp socks, boxers, and undershirts. I took my work shirt and lost it along the walk to work.

It feels good to hurt. To have a human arm twisted by life but the fires fuming from chimneys, the breeze sifting through trees, and the light that cadences through winter windows onto countertops cannot understand my call for uncle. I feel strong and I feel alive to this pain. I can laugh harder and think more clearly. I can love more. I am less ashamed. I stand more proud.

I am 23 and feel no day older but more fitted under my own skin-fitted into the grey hairs in my beard.

I am growing immune to these hardships and will continue to see the shine in everyday should I be blessed with eyes that continue to feel the warmth granted to me in everyday life.

I love you.   

I make my own heroin

I find that when I am clawing marks on the sides of my neck my only refuge from the poisons of life are the very noises that I hum, pluck, and record. The sanctuary of a days’ work is what soothes burns and calms the growl that I keep from becoming a roar; preserving delicate glass from being shattered…stilling my breath, and slowing the blood flowing inside my veins.

28 October, 2009

I am living an erratic life. High ups and Low downs. It’s strangely serine at times. It makes for good music. It’s also good for self-construction and self-deprecation. In this strange polarity I find immense growth, true arrogance, and crushing humility, complete clarity, but also the seemingly endless rolling fog of illusion.

Many times I am empowered and many other times I am helpless.

A blue sky can change my life but the next days’ grey clouds can crush it.

So it follows that life is what you make it. What is it that determines the amount of control I have over my life, my body, my mind, my soul? I see that everyone that I come in contact with is a manifestation of myself. How can the previous statement be disproved? How is it right? What are the shapes and sizes of the gears and sprockets of life that lie behind the sheet of progressing images that life shows me?

If this sheet that is shown to me-is for me, than the gears controlling the pulleys that tug on the ropes that shift and shimmy the curtain must be mine too. Perhaps it is important that I scrape the rust off the metal pieces and replace rotten rope with strong fibrous material. I can not see behind the scenes without tearing at my curtain. And now I can express my point:

I recently went to San Francisco to visit friends but spent more time talking to myself. I ended up being very rough on my body pushing myself into a state of self-destruction. I did quite a bit of drugs, smoked some weed, drank a lot, and ate a lot. The night I was supposed to leave I missed my flight. I stayed up all night and left early next morning on a mild drunk and an upper high. On the way down I felt a deep blow of filth that had manifested in my life and it projected onto the walls outside and the piss-stained streets. The ugly abuse of life of the neighborhood in which I stayed.

It was before dawn when I had walked to the subway station. I saw two men near a car- one man was holding on to a large laundry basket. As I walked by, the man near the car said “10$”, just then I saw two legs sticking out of the cart. The man was fucking the women hidden in the laundry basket- in the most obnoxious way. I continued walking in disgust at the abuse of sex I had just seen. I sat down in the subway and focused on an image of a fallen soldier on a veterans help sign (a sign I had seen frequently on my stay in the city).

In the subway station below the rotten squalor above I began to silently weep. I looked up periodically and saw a grand relief sculpture of the face of God.

I wept for the scum that lived for fleeting pleasures that end in decay. The lost ones in the parks who escape reality, the Kings without Queens, and those who would die for love and never get it. I wept because they are me and I am they. Those that I speak to I try to lead and encourage but what force can I have when I had little control of myself. I wept on the train because I felt God (a symbol of the substance that is energy of existence) it is then that I came closer to myself. 

As a child is born he is born with the legs of a child. But a man becomes a man when he discovers that he has knees to fall on when he is humbled.

True Kings take a knee. True Kings walk among their men and never stand above them.

I know see a den of lions racing on top of each other roaring while they leave earth and filing into blue skies and entering the light of the sun.

On Hold

At times people forget to love themselves and I speak mostly of myself.

Man is built with knees to fall upon when he is humbled.

 

I have developed this mechanism to block the people I love from entering my thoughts when I am confronted with inner conflict. It keeps my from abusing my relationship with them.

It’s not negligence. I put people on hold and if they are patient enough I will never forget to pick up the phone when I am finished dealing with my problems head-on.

Hard

Right now I have a cold. A cold being a minor nuisance on top of a big pile of many things. In between the cracks of folded garments, hairpins, childhood toys, photographs, old scents, laughter, and fearful things there is a vivid glow of fortitude. I am happy to see that in a dark place I can see myself still shine.

Having been back from my trip I find a new facet to my character; one of valor and honesty. Upon my return I have encountered visions of grandeur coupled with unceasing hardship.

Of my trials, and hindrances there are a few I would not like to mention. Yet this entry is not designed to welcome sympathy so I may only disclose the few that should be most daunting.

-My father broke his leg- his best friend and his son moved in to help him, since then the house has smelled like nothing but weed and alcohol from morning through to night. Everyone pops painkillers. His friend and I had stayed up drinking and smoking weed and cigarettes until dawn a few times. Most of the time he ends up in sentimental tears about his sorrowed past or his many years in a penitentiary.

-I am the only working person at home.

-I have no car, yet my father firmly owns two.

-My friends are showing their true colors- which is a very good and a very bad thing, either way it’s a benefit to me.

-Two weeks after my return I received a stressed and teary call from my mother about how we needed to come up with $3,000+ within 24 hours before the house was to be foreclosed on (for the 4th-ish time in 5 years). It was resolved hours before the deadline.

-My mother has moved out. I gave my car to my mother.

I feel that I have become worthy of my own respects; one of the hardest things I have sought to do. What is important is that I am not sad, or angry (maybe a little annoyed at this cold), or depressed. At worst I am pensive. This is all helping me grow as an individual human being. I am jubilant and am in the process of creating a rich life’s work. I feel like I am in a big auditorium celebrating myself and the things I’ve gone through this past month, this past summer, this past spring, these long domestically-unsettled and volatile 5 years, this past decade, and prior. I have always been so hard on myself. Today I feel that I am in a big auditorium celebrating the pride I now hold to myself.

But there is no one when I walk to my car after work at night, or when I wake up, or to eat with, or to sleep with.

My friends are somewhere else, my mother is moved out, my father is with the woman that he cheated on my mother with, my father’s friend is drunk at a friends’ and his young vulnerable son is at school waiting to come home to a furious, self-centered father. That’s fine.

Tonight I feel like I hold an award with no one else to admire it.

Even after the proceedings I’d still like to return home and sit on a bed to feel a feminine touch. If above food, shelter, and clothing I’m graced by that luxury of something soft.

 

{Listen.}

The tip of the Iceberg (presently)…inquire within.

Visualizin’ the realism of life and actuality
Fuck who's the baddest a person's status depends on salary
And my mentality is, money orientated
I'm destined to live the dream for all my peeps who never made it
cause yeah, we were beginners in the hood as five percenters
But somethin’ must of got in us cause all of us turned to sinners
Now some, restin’ in peace and some are sittin in San Quentin
Others such as myself are tryin to carry on tradition
Keepin’ the schwepervesence street ghetto essence inside us
Cause it provides us with the proper insight to guide us
Even though, we know somehow we all gotta go
but as long as we leavin’ thievin’ we'll be leavin with some kind of dough
so, and to that day we expire and turn to vapors
me and my capers’ll be somewhere stackin’ plenty papers
Keepin’ it real, packin’ steel, gettin’ high
Cause life's a bitch and then you die.

Day 1

So this is the day I achieve a certain kind of pride for myself. Not that I had no self-worth prior…Today waking up after a late-night with my fathers best friend- I understand my father is finally humbled. I have been fiercely cold even at his lows but now I know the loyalty of men.

So this is the day I can shake my father’s hand.

This is the day I have pride in my whole name.

AHEM-! Gets your attention (hopefully).

So I talked to my Dad’s best friend drunk tonight. It made me realize many things…

 

I am dependent as a dependant to my parent(.)

 

[This is what “he” says about me…agree or disagree please.]…

 

Dead boy stares
Strange to meet you
Dead boy cares
So great to see you
Is it time to go
It's a place I know
I can't read your mind
I can't find the time
I can't feel the thrill
I don't have the will
Dead boy dares
Believe in you
Dead boy stares
Afraid that you will see him
Is it time to go
Is it a place I know
I can't read your mind
I can't find the time
I can't feel the thrill
I don't have the will
I love you
A metallic blue
I love you
Golden blue
I miss you
Shine all alone
I miss you
Don't know what to do
I don't glitter like the stars above
I don't glow like neon alone
Don't blush it's just the wind outside
Don't rush to be by my side

Danglish

Four men travel north to test their limits. Exhausted after countless days of tempestuous winds, braving the ice, and the cold temperaments of unwelcoming shut-ins that fix selves in make-shift homes in remote areas of a barren tundra, they have found sanctuary- but one especially more than the rest. they find their way to a settlement that seems fit to trust. Across the bay there is an island with only one house and within it a solitary woman.

She had offered him her home.

On this night they are grateful. It is on this night they sleep and at the dead of night under the steadiness of their breath you can hear the sound of four men thinking; all four of their freedom, then three of their luck, then two of their courage.

It is on this night after the others lost their will to reflect; under clumsy sleeping breaths and the sound of muffled wind, there is the unmistakable sound of consonance of one man still thinking.

A mind haunted by the time he was less free, and luck was not an essence necessary to survive, nor was courage ever used to fend away fiends. Away from his beloved winds, into the places in between bed sheets pure white and expansive as the tundra; in a room whose walls like these had reverberated the softly spoken mantras of lovers tangled together, speaking in two foreign tongues combined into one.

(Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. August 2009.)

Negative Thoughts

Like I’ve said before…

There are times where I am ecstatic and there are times when I am angry.

Right now I am furious for potentials. Potentials that are at this point simply figments of imagination or quite possibly true.

I am angry all over and it is a drug that is dirty but has no charm.

Let's hope for the best. At least at worst it is still a feeling that is fleeting.

Hmmm…

Life can be good,

and life can be sketchy…

 

I will make it good.

Animals with guitars

Tonight I am playing a show in LA with the wolf (a close friend of mine who considers himself to carry key traits of a lone wolf). I’m somewhat excited for the show- although it will be for the most part ambient AND improvised so although I leave room for unexpected great success I don’t imagine it being TOO breathtaking.

Oddly enough, I’ve been more concerned with the notion of considering oneself a certain animal based on personal characteristics.

 

I’ve been asking others what they consider me.

 

What do you think?

7 July 2009: I need to serenade myself

The past couple have days have been extremely stressful and mentally, emotionally draining. I dreamt of a hurricane destroying an out door school. In my dream who was I?

Definitely a potential victim.

What I believe this means is that my unstable mental/emotional side that has been inactive side for quite sometime has been dormant and emerged at random through frustrations in life.

In what avenue? self-destructive “partying”.

What I’ve been frustrated with? Finding an avenue of expression. Two days ago I found myself scribbling on a pad. The moment I found aesthetic in arbitrary circles, scratch marks, and lines I felt the desire to put it on canvas.

Have I been daunted by the idea that my relative purpose in life is to pursue a completely unpractical occupation? I think so.

My identity in comparison to most- is very difficult to sustain.

I feel like I’m not making enough (money) to support my expression. I used to draw. Then I stopped because I saw no room for success. I used to produce my own music- then I stopped because of creative blocks. I cannot continue without constant change or I become flighty-ironically so.

Conversely, if I do find a way to be making money to support my drive- will this socially acceptable job consume me and deter me from continuing on my righteous path?

I am taking next semester off. The time I spent abroad last time was so rich that it changed my way of thinking, it changed my soul, it changed my bare bones, it gave me a spine.

Today I was not depressed but I felt stagnant. At work I was washing one of the delivery cars while a Mexican man and woman were at the dumpster near-by looking through garbage for cardboard boxes.

He said, “My friend. How are you doing?”

“Not too bad, man. It’s not that hot, I love it.” I replied.

“Even if it was my friend, it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful day. That we are living. Some one dies everyday.”

I agreed softly. Just then water from the hose hit the floor and splashed my shoes.

I thought: FUCK- these are suede. I was about to trip out-

then I stopped and didn’t. I finished washing the car in peace.

He’ll never realize his impact.

I hope I am/will be as moving as he.

[step 1: Ingredient 1- Intensity/Adrenaline/Movement Source- being abroad

             Ingredient 2- Honesty

step 2: No more drugs or alcohol

step 3: Play more acoustic guitar]

I need to serenade myself.

Stop drinking

Today I am frustrated and very angry. I went to Chris’ school today then we had lunch, I haven’t been eating in peace this affects my stomach. Much like many of the days after smoking a heavy amount of marijuana- I was in a haze. I’ve been paying close attention to the human beings around me and how they and I, I and they, they and they, I and I, relate to each other. I became aware of symbolic speech, symbolic subjects, and reflected on a discussion Brian and I had last night while high.

The topic of identity:

Identity on a superficial level (however still especially important in modern times), is in the form of social standing. Degrees, diplomas, awards, records, credit scores, affiliations. Core identity I’ve come to understand (or what I seem to believe) is the response to aesthetic. An immediate response is linked to a forever developing core.

IE.

A younger man decides to walk through a forest at dawn, the mixture of jasmine and oak together create a very profound effect that relates to his upbringing in a small town having experienced moments of solitude at play during a quiet autumn days with very similar lush vegetation- that is commonly known as smell memory. The importance lies here. During those moments there was no declaration of the moments beauty- it was appreciated with out the notion of why it was beautiful. There were no reasons for liking it. A small child is not able to deem an afternoon “serene” nor is he able to appreciate his first love as “winsome”. He cares not and knows not of the elements of beauty. He can not relate his first experiences to anything else because he has no experience of anything else- therefore he defines what is beautiful to him.

What are the parameters used when buying, or wearing an article of clothing?

Considering that wearing clothing is a socially acceptable form of conduct, and that one is free to design oneself in a vast number of ways, it is reasonable that he/she chooses to dress in whichever manner. This is an enabler of individuality. There are two forms- fashion and style. Fashion is a fleeting aesthetic driven by mass social acceptance (even of the esoteric kind). Style is personified and driven by a persons reaction to certain articles of clothing purchased and worn that accumulate into a particular wardrobe as opposed to a genre of clothing that carries many articles of clothing synonymous to each other.

There are certain things that will never go out of style in the United States.

A baseball cap on a male, blue jeans, converse etc…

For reasons being that they bear an affinity to the American aesthetic (however, dying or stagnant it maybe considered). A baseball cap embodies the American spirit through a game forged in one of the richest points in US history. A game that symbolizes capitalism in its purest sense.

Why not beehives, bell-bottoms, and afros? Fashions.

And now the topic of Love in relation to identity.

Does a man really strive to figuratively “marry his mother”?

Are these buried aesthetics truly in control of what this person defines as his perfect mate?

What about the insecurities that may need to be justified when he “marries his mother”? How much trust is fine for someone? Why is less trust justified in one relationship and not another. It’s only logical that a human be granted x amount of space. What determines x?

There will always be someone more beautiful, more intelligent, and more compatible to you than the person you are with. This is truth- and since it is truth humans should always be fleeting- like fashion.

But unlike the newest fashions. There are the days that were painful and that you remember, and are solemn to the thought. Is it wrong to disregard such a painful memory? Depression is the sore fibers of strengthening muscles. Should I really throw my holeist shirt into the garbage? It was my favorite.

Where to now?

I’m starting to get heart palpitations right now. I think I’ve been drinking too much whiskey.

Today I woke up and took a shower, afterwards I got lunch with Chris. When I got back I lied down on my bed and took in the day with an open window and moving fan. It was in this natural meditation that old obscured memories were unearthed by daylight.

When I was younger I went with my father to Hollywood and saw a black woman dressed in bright colors, she carried a plastic bag on her head. I hadn’t been exposed to her culture yet; at that point she simply appeared outlandish. I was amazed by her balance and concluded that the process of carrying something on ones’ head was a nearly impossible task worthy of admiration.

Around the same time my mother took me to buy a Halloween costume in Hollywood with one of her friends. I remember the entire setting composed heavily of deteriorating concrete. A group of punks walked through the scene. One punk had an enormous mohawk that was bright green. I had never seen such a shape of head. To me, his head was a kind that carried no hair but a sharp metallic substance with protruding steel spikes. His was a type of head that was more so engineered by logical design than human conception.

To see the world as a child.

And I continued in my mind- driving with my grandmother, grandfather, mother, and father. Up the 10 freeway heading west to the place I was born. My father told me at a very young age that it was my freeway. And I continue to look outside towards the gigantic concrete pillars that angle other passes further into the sky. My eyes are half closed allowing the more important rays to sift in through my eyelids gently touching my retinas.

On this Friday, I find myself repeating in my mind:

I am 7…

I am 7…

I am 7…

I am 7…

I am 7…

I am 7…

I am 7…

I am 7…

I am 7…

I am 7…

Lakers’ Lemonade

Having strapped cameras to their chairs they roll and spin quietly in circles. It may be one of the rare times they hear added harmonies to the rhythms of their motorized chair; the gravel rolling under the wheels, bits of confetti quietly tearing away. They don’t mind the arid smell of dust on a surprisingly humid spring noon. The ecstasy of having a camera to record the motion around them. They are rare. After the cheering begins to settle and the masses begin to disperse they find themselves still haunting the groins of the venue long after the celebration dies; the cement temples that tie to the stadium where people park their cars, or the narrow streets nearby that still hold some looming spirit- you still see them spinning and recording simple joys. Spending a day with lemonade. Rolling, steering, and weaving in and out of the event but not the crowd.

Yup...

Right now:

"Eric's Trip" by Sonic Youth.

Enough said.

Why I love the Sun.

So I ate a brownie today. You know the kind-more green than brown. A good friend came over and we discussed our lives elaborately in terms of self-doubt, self-unawareness, numbness etc.  I gave him my experiences. At times I stayed quiet while he talked and reflected negatively upon myself. The sky was a painted limbo of doubt and security. Rain and shine.

 

I doubted when it was cloudy. When he left and I was alone I lied on my bed closed my eyes and heard the shapes of my music. The hue of my room tinted into a rich yellow from gray like somber eyelids raising to jubilance.

And so was I.

 

Over the past year I have realized through countless memories of drawing sun soaked pictures at young age; my heavy concern with lighting; my questioning the origin of my serenity, my affinity with the sun.

So I traveled towards it. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone and ushered my bike out of the backyard. The place I entered was a changed homeland. Rejuvenated and made fresh through doubt. The day had humbled and reassessed itself-

-the sky was clear like freshly cried eyes that allowed its beautiful essence to shine through.

I biked for a long while- weaving and combing through rediscovered streets. houses painted in calm comfortable colors, planters, palms, 2 car garages, yards with 3 second memories and vivid emotional attachments however subtle. Then I neared home- I rode through a full but static parking lot

The sky still beaming. I let go of the handle bars and closed my eyes. I became miles and miles above recognizable ground. The sun as my guide pulling me into an apex of warmth, happiness, bliss, contentment, self-love. I became winged by navigating blindly.

Refreshed like a day that doubts itself to strengthen the good that it sees with eyes cleared by tears.

I whistle A LOT.

What You Say Isn’t Good Enough

At times I can write a letter. Bone, skin, muscle, and ink- sweat and tears are optional. These times call for an absence of the modern toys that grow from my body as man made extensions. These are objects that produce a cold symphony of beeps and alerts which even if adjusted to emit soothing tones end up jarring in their incessant repetition. They are the growing pains of modern life. Though when they are gone they enable me to enjoy the moment.

Everything should be gone. I used to be more elusive.

I cannot write a letter right now. I can be honest with my voice but most are unaware of why I am so honest and so passionate about being. It only exposes my sensitivity; though without sensitivity there can be no true enjoyment of life, no knowledge, no courage; no pain, no tragedy, no stories to tell, no history to remember, no grand love to be admired. Without sensitivity to life there is futility.

I have strived for logic and realize that it will keep me content but never ecstatic. Reason (rather than logic) is more abstract. Only in an idea’s abstraction can it be considered human. A being who is reasoning with his life experience is fully aware. However, the application of systemized thought is brought about by societal teaching of proper human conduct, it creates a cage surrounding a growing, beating heart. Reasoning may be more fitting for a soul like me. I can find proper reasoning for the things I love and can explain my backwards priorities as well. Logic is a design for a societal being. Inspired by politics, science, and an importance of human physicality. 

Although considered synonymous, it should be seen that reason is man’s ability to form design, and logic as the cage drafted for mass production. Logic as tested processes are in themselves  human achievements, but like all other human achievements such as works of art, literature, scientific advancement, they should be continuously, organically tested and reinvented.

Maybe I ought to sleep more. I should delve into my subconscious to find deeper understanding. Perhaps the farther I plummet the more I will understand that forgetting is necessary for growth. Holding on to a past rich with good, bad, romance, misery, shame, arrogance is unnecessary because they are simply a collection of indistinguishably singular tiny moments sewn together in an intricate tapestry that has led my footing from birth to the isolated present-a present in which carries no physical remnants of a past or future. Perhaps I should omit the moments I was wronged, or accept them as they lie…in the past.

To live in the present I should ignore my past anguish and jubilance, I should not focus on the dreadful things the future may present. Having considered love in my past I realize its insignificance to me now. Yet as a human I strive out of desire to attain it once again. This simply means I have a desire to be satisfied or am content at the moment and aspire for some illogical purpose to be even more satisfied. If it simply finds its way into my life without any aspiration on my behalf then it can only bring compromise and complication. Is this necessary? No. Every moment is fleeting. Life is an immeasurable sum of fickle moments. Loyalty is unintelligent, marriage is death, Love is unnecessary.

Can I choose to live this way? Is this what I truly think? No. This is not my reasoning.

I can only write a letter when I live inside a moment and understand that I am a mentally stable being but a being that is aware that the way he thinks is not socially acceptable. It is then that I am able to be uninhibited in thought, it is THEN that I am most frighteningly honest and secure in my insecurity and it is then when you may know me.

It should be known that a person’s consistency of character is a form of death and an inhibitor to growth and honesty. It is a flaw in societal trend that a person should not be accepted as a paradox. Man as the most complex living organism should be simplified and made less intricate?

I must attain balance but find no in-between with a self of symphonic of beeps and emotional inhibition and passionate animal impulse and freedom of expression.

I can write a letter to you explaining loyalty, the ill-use of labels and over-categorized terms for human relations. I can explain to you the falsity of you calling me ‘friend’ though if you’d like I will explain to you the cracks you and I fall in between. There is no logic to put such concern into something like this- a matter that I should not be affected by but I have given you my reasoning.

In being so honest I can tell you the shocking truth of how fickle and loyal I can be, how hateful and loving, self-confident, self-deprecating, afraid, fearless, angry, or ecstatic I am.

I can love or I can not.

The truth: I hide the fact that if I have become acquainted with your character I love you. It can be within weeks, days, or hours.

Unfortunately, I have a grudge against socially acceptable laws of conduct that inhibit a human being from loving another human being before set schedules of time passed.

Fucking cowards.

I and I

I’m Practicing

I’m usually one of the lucky ones. I walk a tight rope above most adversity and when I fall it is so strange. Thankfully I can never land because there is no ground to fall on. Instead a sea of hands that belong to those of whom even if born without eyes could feel what wings I posses. Even those who are blind will show me what grandeur I hold and of what glory I am able of expressing. It is only when I close my eyes I doubt my will; I feel the sensation of my falling. My eyes must remain open and if I do fall I must never doubt that I many never land. That if I fall I can only fly.

FUCK the Marshall!

I've got a new pal to combine forces with in order to get this whole "music" thing on lock down.

"Validation"

Roger

I called a man at the top of the world who answered the phone and replied, “Roger”, every time. I’m sure he expected researches whenever it rang. When I visited him he was frosted in ice living in an a modest home with only a frame exposed to the world. As I walked through it I noticed sheets of ice filling the spaces in between 2x4s like spider webs. I asked him why he did not have walls and said that to live in the arctic you must sacrifice them. Once spring comes and the snow melts- the water pressure on the house could crush the walls. We stood outside and I asked the disheveled man what it was like to live in the solitary north. He made no attempt to shake off the frozen moisture on his hair. He pointed at a large structure in the distance- an enormous product of man. A project so grand yet so obscure it would only exist in the arctic. A spherical object with a rusty orange hue with cylindrical figures in between the sides and the front-curving up like small horns. Giant sheets of black  ran across the face which made it look like a helmet. Its purpose was unknown but the fact it still remains is a testament to the idea it withstands the arctic which makes it less of a structure but more so a mountain, summit, an apex of land forged by man. “I remember going in there, and putting on my old diving suit when the oil levels got high- I would swim around for a long time” Roger said. Solitary-an intrepid man. He told me of the hardships of living there and began discussing the exposure to the cold, waking up covered in jet fuel. pictures of his son moved.

The next was a small town filling with people escaping crashing economic lands- cramming into small apartments built for clean survival- built without any knowledge of intricacy or beauty beyond sterility. Tundra.

A hike learning from apes the grace of nonviolence.

“Dear Paul:

Thanks for expressing interest in the possibility of joining Frontiers Foundation-Operation Beaver and working as a volunteer in the north of Canada.  I would like to try and provide you with some information that might help you decide whether or not this is something that is right for you and if you want to follow up by making an application to join Frontiers Foundation.

Frontiers Foundation is a federally chartered non-profit charitable organization that has been actively working in Canada since 1968.  Our mandate is to provide international groups of volunteers to small, northern, usually Aboriginal, communities to assist on a variety of community development projects.  Over the years these projects have primarily involved our volunteers working on housing projects and other construction oriented activities.  Our volunteers would join with the community work force on the construction, repair, or renovations, of homes for low-income families.  However the past six years has seen a dramatic change in the focus of Frontiers Foundation and we now send the majority of our volunteers up to work in schools in the far north. 

The work done by our volunteers mainly involves assisting as tutors for students with learning or behavioral problems, helping as teacher's aides, and assisting in many different capacities.  Our volunteers have also supervised libraries within the schools, instructed on computers, helped with different subjects such as art, physical education, and music classes, and have assisted in many other ways as they have been needed.  We try to use the talents, experience, and interests, of our volunteers when we assign them to particular projects.

We ask that our volunteers commit to a minimum stay with Frontiers Foundation of ten months which is the full school year..  Since most of our projects start in late August or early September, this usually means that the volunteers commit to stay through to the end of June.  We require such a long commitment for several reasons.  First of all it is extremely expensive to send volunteers to the far north of Canada and we require that length of time to justify the costs involved.  It also takes the volunteers a great deal of time to get to know the students, the members of the community, and how things are done, or not done, in the north.  Previously we had asked for a minimum commitment of only five months and I found that the volunteers who left at that time were finally making a real contribution to the school and the community and then we were sending in new people.  The majority of our volunteers in previous years usually decided to stay for the full school year so hopefully this length of commitment will not be too difficult for you.

If you were to be accepted to volunteer with Frontiers Foundation, and if you are from outside of the country, you would be responsible for your own travel to and from Canada.  Frontiers Foundation will cover all of your travel within Canada to and from the project, your food and living expenses, insurance, and provide you with winter clothing that is adequate for the far north of Canada where temperatures regularly fall to forty below zero and colder in the winter.  We also provide a living allowance of $50.00 a week that can be used as spending money.  The end result is that joining Frontiers Foundation should not cost you anything other than what you might spend on souvenirs and extras.

There are several things that I want to stress very strongly.  The communities in which we work almost always suffer from a variety of very serious social problems with the worst of these being alcohol and drug abuse.  The alcoholism rate in some of the communities in which we work is as high as seventy percent of all adults in the community and this creates extremely serious problems for our volunteers.  The alcoholism also results in such things as child neglect, spousal abuse, and many other problems and this is something that our volunteers have to deal with every day on the projects. 

Our volunteers are usually asked to work with those students who are most in need of extra attention and these are the students with learning and behavioral problems.  Many of the students with whom we work suffer from a condition called Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) which occurs when the mother abuses alcohol when she is pregnant.  This results in the children having many difficulties with formal learning and this can cause a lot of anxiety and frustration that manifests itself in serious behavioral problems.  Working with these students is extremely challenging, demanding, and frustrating, but it can also result in tremendous satisfaction.  We send our volunteers to those communities where the need is the greatest and this also means where the challenges are the greatest.

Working in the far north of Canada also has other serious challenges.  The temperature will get to minus forty to minus fifty and this can be very difficult especially for those people not used to cold weather.  In the far north there can be twenty-four hours a day of darkness in the middle of winter and this is also very hard to adjust to for our volunteers.  You mind believes that since it is dark you should be tired even though it might be two in the afternoon and it can take quite a while to get used to this change.  Things are also done very differently in the north and you will find that it is incredibly hard to organize and get things done.  This is the nature of the north and it will not change.

We are looking for volunteers who are able to meet these challenges and to make a project successful under extremely difficult circumstances.  One person will see the challenges and give up as they are extremely difficult, while another person will see the problems as challenges and will thrive while overcoming those challenges.  If you were to be accepted to join Frontiers Foundation I can guarantee you that you will be tested regularly and we need people who will not get discouraged and who will work to overcome those tests.

We are looking for outgoing and extroverted people with a strong and genuine desire to meet new people, do new things, and to learn about a different culture and way of life.  The volunteers that frustrate me the most are those people that do the work in the schools and then return home to read, write, or watch television.  That is not why we send people on projects.  The people who do the best on our projects are those volunteers that are involved in every aspect of community life and are out doing something in the community in their spare time.  If there is something going on in the community we hope that our volunteers are involved.  If nothing is going on then our volunteers will get something going that will involve the community.  On many of our projects the volunteers have started sports programmes, different clubs in the school, drop-ins, and many other activities.  This is a unique opportunity for the right people and I hope that the people selected to join our programme are the kind of people that will make the most out of this tremendous situation.

We will next be accepting volunteers in April and May of 2009 to start on our projects in late August and early September of 2009.  If you wish to apply for one of these positions it would be best to submit your application by the end of May.  We will likely be choosing around thirty new volunteers at that time.  You can download the application and recommendation forms from our web site at www.frontiersfoundation.ca by clicking on the word "volunteer" in the orange stripe at the top of the page.  This will bring you to the necessary forms.

Thank you for your interest in Frontiers Foundation and I hope that we hear from you soon.

Don Irving”

The Process of Falling in Love and Living Happily Ever After- explained through music.

The Opium of Old Age

Inside a low-ceiling theatre, almost 20 children are on display. Each child enacts their own monologue and sing harmoniously in new language wherein the most delicate of human dynamics are protrusions of ineffable truths. All are in progress. One child silently celebrates the coarse sound of construction paper split by small dull scissors while another marvels at the discovery of a 4th layer of skin he found on his hand with the application of cool white potion used formerly as an adhesive. A broad window long into the room offers the set a backdrop of a vast green field with rolling knolls that lead into a lumbering horizon. The azure sky allows the sun to shine through-reflecting immensely on the clouds. The clouds themselves become suns without circumference; free of form. They beam white light- sparsely inhabiting the sky in horizontal streaks that navigate at slow speeds. This light obscures the shape of the child standing in front of the window-turning her into a frozen silhouette. She is humming. The well dressed audience in their twilight sit in the back of the room. Throughout the opus it is common that within such naive banter, words of stark wisdom can resound within the hearts of the audience. Gestant with feelings of empathic nostalgia and regret for a life of lessons unlearned, the Old produce silent tears and hold their applause as to not disrupt the performance.

An Alarm from an Emblem of my Peace

Lately,

In a dream…

The dimensions of my peace are not in metaphysical increments because they come in forms with distinct names. It may even be morbidly mundane to those that live in rotting urban centers. There is a stark project housing unit somewhere in the UK that can tell you my story. It’s shaped like an unclosed rectangle with the opening used as a courtyard facing a large body of water. Vegetation has dominated the side of the building. Flats have wide open windows. Some tenants have even taken it upon themselves –with the help of a negligent government to break through the walls for wider openings and make-shift balconies. They are people of color; hang-drying brilliant traditional garbs and modern clothing. Although they are underprivileged they remain content but never complacent. Lush with grime and rich with life this poor place I am in awe of. Suddenly they push back from their communal flat openings into their rooms. A spray of doves and seagulls cover the suns rays as they escape what I am confused by. I stand their possibly with someone else. I turn around to a hazy nothing. A large body of water probably stagnant with long-term metropolitan influence. The recoiled people tell me with their response. Slowly they emerge from their shambled flats. Still they focus on what made them afraid but now it is reverence they express; an admiration of what I can not yet see. This is self-unawareness. Beholding…

Lately,

During conscious life I’ve tried to pinpoint what self-unawareness is. I’ve come to use my dreams as maps for where I am in all facets of myself. I’m gaining insight. I enjoy encouraging myself. The feeling of the audience’ reverence reminds me of a photograph I took of myself that I entitled “Seeing God”. Though God or whatever my gaze is fixated on is not pictured, it is this that shows another vital affinity to my dream. It was taken in a grimy part of London. I used a steel scaffold to hold my camera- this photograph happened to captured a very pinnacle point in my life. At that point I excelled. This dream is probably a sign of strong growth.

By leaps and bounds.

Beholding…

A Train's Providence

I want nothing to do with trains except the tone they may emit during cool spring nights when its voice rolls through the trees and lands as soft wind against the skin. They exist only at a distance to haunt the mind with immediate desires to flee or pursue. Chasing tail ends of rolling northern lights abandoning a western town for someplace strange yet congruent having headed for the north promised by the song of a distant freight.

Fighting a Gorilla in a Phone Booth

Now here's the stage during late mornings and early open afternoons that I choose to pace about my house trying to reflect on things that I think I've done wrong. Usually It feels like a fog in my brain deceiving me with truth and falsehood. This fog is not something that I should fight but have every power to simply dismiss. It is only a matter of short time- that it falls and soaks the ground-eventually-ironically nourishing its surroundings.

Clouds at Night

A violet sky has produced a wispy lavender Phoenix that charges toward a star. Having scowered the expanse of existence for the one that shines as brilliantly the Phoenix' fears not that his steadfast eyes my wander-but his wings from fading from its reach.

AMEN

"United with his fellow men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, toward a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in hours of despair.  Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the caused; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed."

                
Taken from Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship"

My Radiant City

This dream I had was dark-this place I saw was dark. Though it did not lack beauty for it still retained its light and shine. For quite a while now I have been completely fascinated by urban planning and the idea that human beings use the elegant design of cities to cure the human condition.

Last night I dreamt that I was in a place with a Northern name. I sat on an empty beach with a friend- a glistening quiet metropolis-loud with piercing sterile white lights to our backs.

The sand was soft and slightly moist, although the grains were fine the shore was interrupted by large jagged boulders that went up to the waist of a human of average height. But this northern inhabitance was simply not an average place with lethargic terrain. Unearthed would be brilliant sediments in very strong colors: violet, golden yellow, radiant green, orange, ruby, aquamarine, pink...

They did not go without accompaniment since gazing towards the sea I would see a separate city created entirely for aesthetic. Built in honor of nebulas, stars and space stations glowing throughout a dark abyss-which was now a black ocean that in its ominous depth promised that there was no other land to touch. It longed for us- softly- lapping 10 meters from our bare feet. The city out there had a different type of edifice erected- a skyline composed of illuminations shaped in bulbs forged out of nothing tangible- frozen explosions, throbbing orbs, ad infinitum fireworks- constant happiness. they carried congruent if not exactly the same hues and shades as the chalky panel rocks glittering the sand field.

The administrators of the city- no matter how serious and logic-minded- pursued even more beauty for the citizen. Swelling harmonies in sporadic progression produced by the colors of the city were assembled in mid air and caressed all it could touch- the bass tones were not heard but felt nearly on the ground against the bottom of my feet or tenderly against the skin carried by the wind.

Behind the clouds shined grand flashes of white light that illuminated the back of clouds and intensified the spectrum of colorful shine that the vast city in front of me projected.