Changing, Recreation, Decisions.

Over the course of a great many sessions, seasons, etc., I have come to understand my insanity and its varying degrees of total and complete madness.  They happen a lot.  I can't help but change.  I can't help but reflect.  Hey!  Maybe there's not as much stitched together as I imagine.  There's a lot of cover in the jungles of my mind, and I wonder who I let live after the last Tour, whether they spawned children in my absence and are now stalking the bushes for a scent of my conscious mind, to subdue it and replace its reign with a figurehead of their own creation.  It's not like any of us are granted a can of napalm in this regard...unless, of course, we use aluminum based anti-antiperspirant.

Because it's time to re-create, which means calling back to old tricks while looking to new models.  I hope I have the right models, and a tether back home.  A tether back home.  A refrain has the power to call back an old emotion in a prior movement, congealing the repetition with a strange force.  Gagaism, Vorticist theory.  Yes.  Something about my current project and reading is calling back to T.S. Eliot.  Landscape a canyon but remove the river, and you have Mars, impotent, violently removed of life, immortal as stone.  For this is about solidification.

And validation.  Am I making the right me?  Hard decisions, no perfect solutions but the ones we dream, but those dreams cannot survive without reality, so in their inherent limitations, falsehoods, exaggerations and multiple permutations, they become flawed.  But every decision is flawed, so keep dreaming, you know, because no one is better suited to judge you than those selves you can't get over, and that can't help but not get over you.

A thought, a poetic thought, "Orquesta de La Calle"

Three fourteen second breaths, 42 seconds of eyes closed re-positioning of the self, and everything is clear and vivid and worthwhile to describe, to imbibe.

***

Drinking in, the world fills us,
Vessels for input.
Expressing out, we churn the world
Machines for output.

Suspicion is an ugly word for curiosity
The yin of it.

To reencounter the self.
The constant process of forgetting
That is necessary to grow
Adapt to new potentiality.

***

"Orquesta de La Calle"

It is not that when I reenter the strength of my mind
That I am remembering.
I am emerging new
And the old synpases are a road
Now well trod
Beaten
And its lines become the steps in an ever more intricate dance
Worn and worn through boredom
Mastered in the wandering when I grew disgruntled
From the lack of shelter
But eventually,
I breathe deep
Forty-two seconds
Three breaths in
Three breaths out
And I can dance in the rain
Dance where I had tripped
Quothe with his family dead and his head filled with trauma
He learned to play with five strings
And so I strum with my toes
My own discontentment.
Occassionally, some road is newly paved
But it is rare these days.
My road is gray.  Or it is rock.  Or pounded to dirt.
On the gray I stomp and batter a drum of my feet
On the rock I slide as a clashing cymbol crosses the wavelengths of rattling
On the dirt I somersault,
Catch myself on my hands,
By the end my entire body has found a special place or five to leave its imprint.
These are the pathways most worn,
Form the instrumentals where I am free to spread the best of myself
The greatest opf my potential
In bewteen the balance acts of wearing the rock
And the pavement
They are small patches of dirt
But more have been patched
I have earned these puddles of mental dexterity,
And when I can find a grip on them
My road
My dance
Thrives.
Empowered to trample the less worn ground more
Slide and trample
March,
Percuss the uneven levels
Percuss them until one day, perhaps,
It can, someday all be dirt
And I can dance for eternity to my own beat
The beat of my heart the beat of the world
But that is madness or immortality,
Impossible.
So I dance for its own sake,
Revel when I find moments of brilliance
And take the rest as a challenge
And in the pounding of my steps
With space for breath
I try to make as even and controlled an orchestra
Of the beaten road
Actualized in the dashes, spins, crashes.

Progress of the Naked Men's Softball Team

So...

When at first we began, all of us were rusty.  Super rusty, in fact: everybody needed a couple of practices to remember how to throw the ball without throwing their arm out.  Grounders were predestined to go between our legs, fly balls to fly over our heads or fall harmlessly to the ground in front of us.

But no more.  The men's team is now a well-oiled machine of interchangeable parts, rocking eight cylinders of Psylon kicking ass.  We got more gold gloves on our team than a Greg Maddux trophy case.  We got more solid bats than Dracula's Haven, and more arms than Vishnu in Destroyer God mode.

We're as broken as Umezawa's Jitte.

I hope the girls are ready, because from our side of the field?  Damn it feels good to be a Gangsta'.

If you want to see the premiere of the Premier Naked Softball Team in history, the Great Unveiling occurs Friday January 21st, at 2PM, at the Softball field at 10th and Q st.  As I have said countless times before, this game will hopefully lead to two things:

1. A Naked Coffee co-ed Softball team, for this Spring
2. Respect.

And as AJ used to tell me, "It all comes down to respect."

Friday, we're coming to take what's ours.

Buh-lee' dat.

Chillin' wit the fam

So spent a good amount of time this Christmas season working, so I'm taking tonight to hang with my brother Al and his wife Calli for the first time in two years.  Doesn't feel like it's been that long, but life's some shit sometimes.  Like I told Al, "Life goes by when you're having fun...not seeing you probably has something to do with it."

Like old times, instantly.

More writing tomorrow.

The Redemption of Today - A Poem

The sky came down and the Earth went falling
Down the abyss where cyclopses, walled in
Escaped with the darkest of souls in the depths of The Pit
Wound round the nine circles to battle mankind with
All of the hatred we had spouted, they had been saving
Winding our anger, a line for their angling
We were caught in the hook and the whole of us dangling
They pointed and laughed and in the great mangling
A bright young face stood and said with a scream,
Life doesn't just end with the death of a dream.

One day ends in horror, another in lies
And we just look up, shake it off, sigh,
Maybe this will be the sunrise where our nightmare sets
Where we are left alone to set right what's left.
But the days cascade and build from the next
And when we sweep aside life, our energy's spent
Avoiding the world we were once meant to conquer
We drudge to close doors and forget that what's offered
Is the promise inside of each of our striving
The guide of our minds is our soul that's deriving
The traumas and costs of our times into feeling
And how minds harness the meaning determines their ceilings.

Life doesn't just end with the death of a dream
There's more to a stitch than a rip in the seam
Backtrack and attach a new yarn to old thread
You'll never find a truth in a world of dead ends
When your ends are covered in the truth of the promise
That all of us are capable of pulling from in us
Our pasts into present, filtered by drive,
The wisdom we gather when we are alive
When we fall, and we rise, then we set like the sun,
We may hide from our gifts, but the light is still on.

Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse

Aligning in the air
Two circles
Crisp
Dark
Significance is supposed to hang
On the celestial bodies
At this moment of their dance.
They pull the tides
They light the sky
But that isn't enough
For those waiting for a harbinger
Or a boon
When our world blooms with life
With water, and with air
Everyday,
In a universe of dead rock, superhot hydrogen,
An unfathomable lack of density, the void of space, dark matter,
We dream for what?
What more can we dream for?
A lottery's lottery's lottery
Couldn't make the Earth.

The vanity of Man.
We would beg the sky to fall
So the world would own up to our call,
Bring order to our chaos,
End us.

Ch-Ch-Cha-Chaaaaanges.

Hey gang,

So, some of you kids know that I've started at the Roasting Plant, bagging coffee, selling coffee, not cutting my hair in far too long, etc.

Well, there's a couple of big changes that have occurred in the last three days.

I have officially resigned from Greenteagraffiti.com, the Asian Pop Culture site I started working on a year and half ago with my buddies AJ, Jonas, and others, and left on great terms, so that I can continue to pursue my writing endeavors while working my butt off in coffee.

Secondly, I will be joining the management staff at Naked Coffee.  I'll continue roasting coffee and slinging joe, and I'll function as a "flex position" duty manager, essentially going between coffeehouses and committing various admin tasks on a routine, scheduled, disparate basis.  I also get to talk in Manager meetings and do what I do best: say things that I know are absolute genius and full of import.  Basically, because I won't be running a coffeehouse/restaurant, I get to treat manager meetings like a focused blog, bringing up ideas that I think are neat-o without the responsibility of implementing them.  NOTE: That was a joke.  NOTE ON THE NOTE: Mostly.

I think both changes improve the quality of life for all parties involved: the website deserves an Editor in Chief who can be as dedicated as possible, Naked management seems pretty excited about having me aboard, and I'm going to learn...well, a lot.  I think.  I don't know.  I think listening.  I'll be a better listener for sure.  Or Kaylee and Inga will stab me.  Necessity breeds obedience.  I think that's how the saying goes.

So yeah, I'm gonna be writing, working a crap ton, making some money, and hopefully, hosting game nights on a regular basis.

To all you guys who haven't been seeing me, I've been super busy, but I'm thinking of all you guys!  More transition is gonna happen these next four months, as responsibilities increase and writing output continues to grow, and I continue working on my physical capability, but it's all building for the better.

See ya on the Internets, kiddos!