Stoking this Fire

I scroll up and down a message you sent to me, for the third time. An email. How ridiculous. Looking up and down, admiring the spaces in between your words, measuring this one and comparing it to the next, your phrases, like I'm somehow caressing your back and your body by perusing these typed words. Looking for a way to find something more in this. To maybe turn it sideways as if some extra words will be hidden in a corner, feeling a freckle on your already perfect body that I haven't felt before, skimming my body down yours like if we keep moving, we'll keep growing closer into each other- exploring more and more, little cracks in.

My general concept of life- my religion, so to speak- although it's almost an anti-religion- a belief in a super-natural as opposed to a supra-natural- is, simply, “water flows downhill”. The world is in a constant process of melting and flowing into the cracks, oozing slowly, sloughing off and falling away, moving beautifully around the obstacles, blessing everything it collides with and rolls lazily off of, with this relinquish. This melting matrimony, powerless but irrevocable, swept up to fall down and regrow, regenerate. But you, my love, without even trying, I'm swept up and off my little world. Yet more connected than ever. My relinquishing this time has floated me up, lifted me up. By no means of my own, beyond means of my own, I've broken laws and my stream flows uphill, encircling itself, each other for the first time, growing closer and closer, forming compounds that never were before. This makes so much sense, redefining physics my dear, I had no idea.

These rules don't apply and now, just glimpsing this precipice of godly resignation, this completed, fully fulfilled striving, a striving to get inside through you, to access something through you, with you- my rubbing, my wrestling, this gliding towards each other- to get inside, to join, to fit and consummate... something. This pulsating exploration, my loving you, feeling you, this blissful blissful struggle as you hold my hands behind my head to come into me, contorting to find a closer way to hold me- I'll give myself to you completely, my love. I trust you beyond everything. I trust some part of you that you probably don't even see. That speaks my language on such a level, it's nothing even visible, just a shuffling under my feet, rooting me stronger, a sweet little jostling, holding me closer.

Who knew, rocks, the rubbing of two rocks, of two separate elements, would make this fire and heat us both. To heat the space in between. That quivering space- that I peruse, shake and test, explore around. This space we can caress but not overcome- heats us- it feeds us, heats us both- palpating divine, my love. Stay with me. Please stay with me. Keep stoking this fire.
 

My baby my baby my honey baby
This hunger I have for you can't be alleviated
Even your touch, even your body beside mine
Even when we can get no closer possibly
I still want you with hunger that I can't express
can barely satisfy
These pangs I get
of all my latent desire building up from a day
from all my wanting, of looking, of hoping
and dreaming of you- of someone like you- of passion like this
crops up- my desire, that building latent desire
or a little flash. A flash of recognition. I remember the way you laugh
or a little slant of the head
it crops up and builds against a floodgate- to come crashing crashing down.
I want to rage with every muscle in my body
To dissimulate, pixelate, disassociate and reform inside of you-
surrounded by, mingling amongst you
To squeeze you so hard- as if maybe that will make you pop and scatter
like glitter into a billowing cloud that maybe I can crawl inside of
take those particles and spread them in my pores.
I want you my darling my darling my darling
I want you. I want to fight with you and scream and crash
and make love, laugh with you, watch you and hear you think,
watch you puzzle, I want to pixelate,
for our mutual vulnerability to deform us-
strip us down naked and I want then
I want then to make love to you.
To feel all of you inside of and surrounding me.
Your arms around my back, my neck, my head and yours,
my thighs, my throat your hair and your back
your back, I love your back- I love your arms. Your chest against mine.

And this want- this need- is transcendent of now and you there, me way over here.
We pop up together, arise out of, opt out of- together- time and spatial orientation, coordinates
for a moment, or longer- that spot free floating above the right side of your lip
and that birth mark buried in the hair of your head right before your ear
the left one, right there, your right, you're so right.
Those are the only coordinates I need right now and the space- that tiny glimpse of eternity- that neverless gasp, the gape, of your breath- between your breaths. The pit, the spot, the cradle of time- that tiny little pause- the death of it and my thousand little deaths- between your breaths and mine- is all the time I need. I need I need its all the orientation I need.
I long for. I long for you so long for you, my baby my darling, my sweet sweet sweet.

My temper- I temper myself. I must- this is, that is what we do- we temper ourselves- pick the mid-spot- that's how we survive- to temper ourselves because there's eternity at either end and we live in the middle. Life is right in the middle.
This life of you and me, our lives, our life- exists right in the middle- tempered, mortal maybe, although a glimpse here and there, right there I saw it- a glimpse above like a keyhole- a puncture in the night sky. That little impossible luminescent dot shimmering through- fools, it fools me. And gives me faith- for a moment- a moment of chance. A possibility to be fooled, to live like that, to live creating for myself- a world out of those shimmers, those luminescent dots- sacrilege to even describe them as dots, those little spots, the freckles all over your body.
I choose to live believing in this.

Butter

All of a sudden, something has switched, a light has flicked on- not changing anything in the room, just casting a different light on it all.

Something happened. There was no way I could have known but like an asteroid on path- no question as to its bull's-eye route, imperceptibly, we pummeled gently into each other's paths and came to a slow, gradual halt face to face. Like a boat docking, sliding right into place, unaware of its path until it arrived, like butter, he slipped into my open hands.

Serendipity- upon arrival- transposes into fate. And genetics, wrapping, spindeling around each other in a sudden vacuum, when tapped into just right, lines up to reveal something worth having faith in, this godly languish, this limp, strangely empowered resignation.

Like a page torn off and placed in a puddle, the space behind the words I read, is saturated and dappling with my lovely lovely.

He finds his way into most crowds and the transcient opalescence, my diaphanous darling, of an embellished imagination outshines these charcoal sketches of skin. Reality plus one- my favored picture.

My first new leave was a welcomed respite. The smell of his aftershave was replaced by the completely different but equally pleasant smell of fresh sheets in a guest bed and the warm dead weight of the house's dog nestled between my legs. I stretched myself out, immediately absorbing the role of companionship. The very short time I spent laying in bed before falling asleep was kept in the best possible company by and amongst myself as I realized, again and again, that I am my favorite companion. Reconnecting with that after recontextualizing for a brief bit amongst someone else- laying on my side talking to him as if I were saying all these things out loud for the first time. My own thoughts sounded new and revealing as I took them out for him to see. That familiarity and comfort that my relationship with myself is blanketed by, is removed as I open up my own coveted ecosystem to this new stimulus to see if something new can be introduced without disrupting the current homeostatic balance.

It's an interesting challenge, a dissonance between wanting the company of someone else without losing the company of myself. I don't know how to emphasize enough the companionship I have with myself, how completed I feel alone. Maintaining that with someone else- keeping both relationships intimate and strong without compromising or withholding from either- integration not replacement.

I've never allowed someone in, found someone so close to me, tapping into me just right- cleaving me open in a straight clean cut from the outside in. It was never a question. It was never a choice. Those two relationships have never come face to face before, that boundary line never blurred. But blindly, I've stumbled upon the one chemical that is able to softly, sweetly erode my marble walls, sloughing off effortlessly like shudden sheets of tissue paper. And now I stare at the ceiling, the room breathing with me, goading me on, thinking, "What have I done?"

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Treatment

Here's my idea for a new method of therapy. It's called the Self- Fulfilling Prophecy treatment. People, I don't know if this reflects intelligence or stupidity, believe what they hear. We believe something if it comes from an external source, whether that's a Time magazine, a Cosmopolitan, a politician or a friend. People are especially inclined to believe something if they've spent money to hear it, deeming their usage of money a worthwhile investment. Crafting a therapy treatment around this knowledge isn't cheating or corrupt, it's just playing into people's psyches, understanding how people work and using that knowledge to further the a) success of a business and b) the effectiveness of a therapy treatment. With no knowledge whatsoever of a person's future and having only the social skills to understand the client's situation and ability to read them well enough to know what it is they want to hear, you too can become a highly successful therapist and change many lives for the better.

Here is the story of the genesis of this brilliant idea:
My mom is an acupuncturist. She and her husband share a practice. He teaches at a nearby acupuncture school and has a highly successful practice. He is one of the bigger names in acupuncture, especially in teaching because he practices a form of acupuncture not widely taught or practiced and is, supposedly, a fabulous teacher. My mom has been in practice for five years, although she rounds up to eight, and although she is devoutly adored by her patients, has a humble practice and no other major source of income. Money, for whatever reason, has never been either of my parents' forte.

To maintain her license, my mom needs a certain amount of 'continuing education units' a year, usually obtained through seminars and lectures. Dr Tan, an eastern medicinal healing superstar, was teaching a weekend class on Chinese astrology and diagnosis in Portland, Oregon. My mom jumped on the opportunity to soak up info from the great Dr Tan and, knowing well my love for wandering around yet unexplored cities, invited me to come along.

After the first day, my mom was a bit disappointed with the seminar. She was stuck in a hotel conference room all day, instead of exploring a city that I assured her is fantastic, and she was straining to listen to an old burnt-out Chinese man fumbling through a topic which, for a good reason, had never been taught to a white audience before.

"The textbooks he gave us, so we could follow what he was saying, are in Korean! You know that sheet or characters I was supposed to be familiar with? Those characters are supposed to let us get the important information out of the textbooks but even if I WAS familiar with those characters, how am I supposed to pick those out in an entire book full of the tings, written backwards, in tiny print... and they all look the same!"

The next day was slightly more successful. Because on the second day, Dr Tan read the horoscopes, the in-depth life paths of some of the audience members. After scrawling down her birth day, birth time, birth place, moon sign, sun sign, social security number and mother's maiden name on a slip of paper, my mom got her horoscope read. Over dinner, she gave me a detailed recounting of her life according to Dr Tan, the man we had just seen come out of a restaurant, can and take out bag on one arm, blonde 25 year old assistant in heels on the other.

"He said something really interesting. He said, not knowing anything about me or what's going on right now, that I will not, in my life, be supported by my partner. I was thinking about it and that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just what's lined up for me."

I chimed in. "Thats a good point. Because on your own, that's when you do best- when you have the most drive and energy and when you take the best care of yourself."

"And right now, the last few years have been in the wood sign for me which means, well I don't know, I forget but the next few blocks of years of my life are metal metal metal metal. Which means, money."

"Is that metaphorical? Success, abundance or something or does it literally mean cash money cash?"

"Literally, it means cash."

Seeing as how my mom paid good money and traveled halfway across the country to soak up all the info that Dr Tan had to dish out, when he told her she was going to make a ton of money, my mom of course believed him. But this prophecy begs a few questions: how; where is it all going to come from? So, knowing her past and having been given her future, my mom's only job is to fill in the gaps, examine her life and ask herself, is the path that I'm on now going to be the one that will lead me to all this cash in my future? Put in this context, immediately became apparent that no, continuing along with the way things are, will not bring about the buckets of lollie promised to her. So it will have to come from somewhere else.

"Maybe this cancer clinic idea I had. Oh speaking of which, I should call Dr. Pujet back. Or maybe my anti-sugar book is going to lead me somewhere. I should get to work on that actually. Maybe I'll dedicate the two hours between my patients today to writing."

And just like that, my mom has begun to craft and shape the future that she knows will be hers. All of the things that my mom knows will come to her, she's now began to work on reigning in. And will it work? Of course.

People believe what they hear, whether it's the findings of a study reporting that people living in Boulder, Colorado represent the happiest and healthiest population of any American city ("Ha- that's so true," I thought after reading the headline. "I eat great, am totally happy and do tons of sports. As a matter of fact, I think I'll go for a run right now.") or a psychiatrist telling her patient that he is ADD and cannot function normally without being medicated. People are so impressionable that they'll do the work necessary to live up to the image they hold for themselves. Unfortunately, that image, for most people, is not very good.

Skipping on the Brink

Its a Sunday and in Boulder, in January, its supposed to snow, they say but its raining, at an angle from the mountains west where there are storms and freezing temps to the plains east where tornadoes come here and there but in between, the valley of Boulder is safe from, or deprived of, either and both. We ride bikes and rock climb, we ski and six year olds break piggy banks to send tooth-faerie dollars to Haiti, simply because we dont live in the real world. Graffiti is of love, hearts and beauty. Its warm and pleasant always and when its cold, its freezing, the mercury strains to compress, and coats are worn- North face if youre from California, fur if youre from New York, sandals if your from Texas. Nobody's a local. We've all come from somewhere else because no one can be born in Boulder, no one conceived and death is just a voluntary return. Im from California but dont consider myself human so I wear Monte Belle. My other coat doesnt have a name or a brand but its red and warm and it fits me the best that any misfit material can- covering a body that's naked and will rebel against any covering by changing size, shape and hue- Coats are worn, the body shivers but the cold isnt really felt even, it doesnt matter at all.

Did I mention? I've always lived in a valley- LA at first for several years, where so much goes on that really nothing happens and now in Boulder, where so much is happening that nothing really has to go on. We're all floating to and fro in the tidal waves we've made in the bathtub, without having moved at all. I started rock climbing a month or two ago and now Ill climb anything, I decided to start running and just because I decided, I can run as fast as I want for as long as I want and it all feels the same. Swimming, we're pushed forward and reach our destination much faster than expected, not even knowing we were in a stream, the current pushing us where ever we choose to go. Strokes cant keep up with our progress so why not just lay and float, I say, and the rain outside pours on.

It gets louder and louder within the walls of this cafe, until it becomes unbearable and then I realize its silent. The coffee grinder breaks the din, turns on and turns off and turns out I AM still here. Not only that but my legs are crossed, my back is bent, my hand moving. The coffee I finished half an hour ago was free and the pastry a dollar twenty-five. I paid for it but my wallet doesn't miss anything. I ate it but I can't feel it anywhere inside my body.

The man sitting in front of my table to the left is watching, complacently, a slideshow of cold cuts on his computer and is grooving to some unheard tune. I'm meeting people for dinner, as if they'll show. as if six o'clock is universal. as if someone else is living a life too, just like mine maybe but the hair that falls in front of their face when they stoop is blond, maybe, not brown like mine.

Is it possible or is this it? Is it just one streaming immortal, amorphous cloud thats there whether or not we divide it up, divvy it out and assign characteristics to this one versus that. Just for fun.

Im hungry now. (How did I know?) I've been eating less, not as hungry as often, and I feel like more liquid comes out than I put in. But running my hands down from my ribs and onto my hips, there is still and always will be a little hump built up on top of the base of my belly. A little hump of warmth that is stollen from my freezing fingers and hands, just sitting there waiting to protect the baby that isn't there and won't be for many years still. Knowing that I have no control, no matter how much or little I eat, of my sole purpose, manifested and clearly stated by my anatomy, shape and purport, calms my mind and upon racking my brain (given much more credence and attention than it deserves) for solutions of who to be, what to do and how to live, reassures me that, by breathing, blinking and bleeding, I'm doing exactly what I need to be doing and am fully fulfilling my potential.

In the cafe, a pot breaks, plates clatter, a kid jabbers in an unbelievably high-pitched loud voice. The usually impeccable bathroom looks like a crime scene. A boy walks in with a sword in sheath hanging through the loops in his backpack next to his nalgene water bottle and I think. Is it possible that today is the day of every exception?

My phone buzzes across the table with the name of the restaurant and, looking at the time, the amorphous cloud of shapes and colors falls to the ground, compartmentalizing, and the pieces are assigned the sounds that were already there but are now rationalized. I recognize the song in the room and the familiarity spreads down from my ears until my hair and hands come back into my field of view and I can feel every part of my body, aware of what shoes I'm wearing based on the height of the arch and the comfortable pressure on the slope of my foot top.

A chilly bike ride and a warm wonderful dinner awaits but I can't, just not quite yet, know how that will feel.

Too Much of a Good Thing/ The Evolution of Insecurities

Sorry about the slow lead in. Bear with me here..

Why does society cater to incompetence? Is that what a society is? A system of support in which the strong take care of the weak in order to maintain our race? Its worked so far at least- tremendously well. The smart, able people have engineered products to compensate for idiots’ incompetence, reducing their impact, allowing them to function independently by either trashing and over utilizing their resources or by buying into the bureaucracy that provides the shortcuts necessary to bring lofty goals and complicated procedures down to the level of incompetent, unthinking people who can only thrive within the confines of structure, games and rules. And then becoming slaves to it. It’s worked. Despite the fact that we, as a society, structure, race, and people, have more problems and diseases and unhappiness as ever, there are also more people than ever, our systems are bigger, bureaucracies are more impenetrable and were able to get more things done faster than ever. Ah, sweet success. But what was our goal to begin with in creating this maze for ourselves? Were short sighted, maybe that’s the problem, creating quick fix solutions to problems that we’ve created by our own immediacy and laziness and then, just after we become fully dependent on our new creation, we realize that our new crutch is unsustainable, running out and has terrible backlashes.

Although this is often the kind of things I think about periodically, in the shower, putting away laundry, spacing out, this specific little impassioned rant was triggered by helping Keith clean his apartment to show to a potential renter. Keith’s not the subject matter here, Johnny is- the roommate whom three people are relocating in order to avoid. Our disbelief at the level of Johnny’s dependence lead me to ask what makes people this way. So here’s my attempt at an explanation.

People started by gathering. In families, tribes, near rivers- for transport, water, crops, connectivity, trade, then cities formed and grew and grew. Sticking up for yourself, your family was no longer enough. Now it was a society, you had to be a valuable member of society while still looking out for yourself- this survival tactic now based not on the maintenance of a closely-knit community where people felt confident and solid in their role, enough to lose a need for self- preservation and work instead for the maintenance of a way and a people one strongly believed in preserving. A then small-scale system in which you and everyone were necessary and vital components. But now in a city, a system, a society, moving as a unit of its own, unreliant on personal impact (every vote counts but not because we respect your opinion but because 1+1+1=3, times a few hundred thousand adds up, it all adds up, to maybe one point, which can win or lose an election), moving on its own, bolstered by and built upon a foundation of insecurities, inferiority and a desire to keep up with an impossible ideal. Now we’re lacking the reliance on one another that previously made up a society. Charity, then, made sense. Empathy and support because everything that happened to an individual effected the community. Here, an individual is no longer important in the bigger picture, just a number to add up to make a whole, a fraction of the bigger picture instead of being a microcosm for it.

In the good ol’ days, if your grand father and your father were barbers, you would be a barber too. Now, one has to find his own meaning instead of being born into it. You have a world of possibilities in front of you, hundreds of potential careers, lifestyles, relationships and if you choose wrong, it all comes back to point its fingers at you. What is masked as control over oneself is presented with such daunting possibilities and implications that it has the opposite effect and in turn, disempowers the individual. And if one day, for some reason, you’re a little discontent, its no longer just a bad day in the midst of a good life. It’s the result of thousands of personal choices that now, you must look back on, doubt and wish had been made differently in order to spare yourself from this impermanent unhappiness. So egos are considered, tried and fail. Within the privacy of your own home, out on the streets, a huge world is not comprehensible for us so we fragment it, create classes, races, stereotypes, groups, political parties and above all, watch out for numero uno! A safety in numbers (the dependence and personal responsibility one takes in a small scale community) morphs into the bystander effect where now, we’ve become so removed, that big world out there, its no longer our creation or even our land to walk on. It has a life of its own and is no longer ours, that a girl yelling for help on a street corner in New York has nothing to do with us, its not our problem, its just another struggle far off along with the thousands of problems and suffering brought to our attention and pinned on our backs as vague nagging responsibility, by a global community but not actually experienced, seen first hand, lived and felt.

In order to preserve ourselves, engage in our surroundings, we create false worlds based on distractions and creations- things we can process and tackle. The drama in tonight’s episode of Desperate Housewives is more manageable, more tangible, closer to home, than the warring sects in the Middle East, the governmental corruption in Somalia and Kenya and what that corruption is driving people to do. So our efforts to engage in hum-drum routines and trivial pleasures is really just an effort to regain a control over ourselves and our own lives that was lost when our worlds went from tribal familiarity and familial values to large-scale worldly knowledge, expectations and involvement- a task much too daunting for our small simple bodies to take on.

We’re stretching ourselves in order to move further and further away from animalistic, bodily-dependent simplicity and further and further towards matters of the mind. If we disconnect from our bodies (what do you mean my mood is affected by the processed food-like substance I just ate for lunch? Im a lawyer, I make 200 grand a year, Im a self actualized human being!), distance ourselves from the mortal world around us, falling leaves and springing buds, life cycles, water cycles, mortality, change, death and evolution, than maybe- at least consciously- we’re able to detach ourselves from the impermanence which everyone fears. Why? I don’t know, maybe because its one more threat to our control. Control-that’s the one thing here that sets us apart from any other animal. A mind so abstract that its mere engagement contradicts every cyclic, mortal force that plays on our lives. Opposable thumbs my ass. If we couldn’t open jars, we’d find a way around it. A way to justify our inability with a desperate, quivering ego-based superiority.

The ingenious of us have found that the number one way to market products is to strip perspective buyers of their last thread of control, instill a feeling of incompleteness and lacking, making them dependent on an outside source to regain that thread. If you tell girls enough that theyre bad at sex, they’ll rake for solutions and find an impermanent solution in the false promises of a Cosmopolitan magazine. And for 6.99 a pop, that’s not a bad price for a quick fix high. If you convince a homeowner that her cleaning methods don’t protect properly against a certain strain of bacteria she cant pronounce, she’ll spend her money on products manufactured not to improve the quality of her life but to turn her into a consumer- buying a fix here and a fix there until the dopamine is expended, regulators forced open and the high becomes the norm and the lacking becomes the painful, sweaty trembling crash. Addicted, dependent on products that support the maker‘s similar struggle to keep up, prioritizing immediate personal gain over sustainable betterment.

Dependence on something means that without it, you’re lacking. When people are taught that they’re incomplete or not good enough as is, they lose the confidence in themselves necessary to think for themselves, follow not what is forced down their throats but instead what they independently believe in. The loss of control over oneself strips people of the power to think critically, question authority and say- this is how I want to see the world and this is what Im going to do to see that through. So little power is given, or taken, over ones own life that people try in vain to bolster their failing egos by abusing the few aspects of control that they still feel they have. Teens desperately do everything they can to rebel against parents and every force bigger than them- drug problems, self mutilation, eating disorders- some of the few things in life they feel are in their hands- so who could pass up the chance to exploit that rare power?

Johnny, as described by his former roommates, is a fuck-up. To the extent that his mom flew in from the east coast to come check up on him, you know, clean his sheets, buy him toilet paper. If his own mom doesn’t have the faith in his abilities to manage his own life, who will? And then it all became clear. Maybe if his mom hadn’t flown a few thousand miles to help him with his life, he may have understood, after perhaps finding himself in the bathroom with no toilet paper a few times, that his power over his life extends an ability to find people who are willing to take care of him. And maybe then he would scrape the leftover lasagna off of his plate before balancing it on the tower of his unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink. Maybe then he would have the self-esteem to redirect the energy and money currently spent on constantly revamping his wardrobe (to once more get that dying high of false confidence instilled upon consumers by marketers who don’t mind adding to the whirlpool of dependence and disempowerment to get a slice of their pie) to the promotion of something he genuinely believes in, something that brings actual, sustained, real happiness.

I might be completely wrong, totally missing the mark about all of this, but if its true- if this kind of pathetic dependent incompetence is in fact just the manifestation of a desperate confused desire for empowerment, its hard to look at Johnny and feel anything but pity. But I can also see how after a year of living with the guy, being constantly bombarded by his pleas for attention and approval, and scraping crusted-on oatmeal off of abandoned bowls, pity might morph into pure resentment.

walking home one night. sent to my email by text. I dont really know anything- these are just guesses in an attempt to understand what I do.

I can give myself completely because once I have, that's just a layer for me that Ive sloughed off and although aspects of that, what I just revealed that is, leave a residue on my skin, they dont necessarily still (or maybe no longer) define me. Or maybe its just that I dont let anything (nothing that can be put to words at least) define me.
Or maybe there is nothing that is me. Nothing to me. Im not even let in on that. Im an observer to myself as much as I am to the rest of the world.
Im always on the outside, a shell, so theres no core of me to give (nothing to compromise or maintain). If you pour out my contents, Ill find something new. That change, defines me. That constant reshaping, revising, evolving. Im a host to whatever I let fill me and Im not the same now as I was yesterday.