Signs point to flux
The rise of short form aphorisms has blunted my resolve to blog, I conjecture. So close to bog. A cavernous awe that leaves me shaking my head at the blank screen and wondering what genuinely do I have to contribute to discourse. What discourse. Any. Discursive is what I do. I skirt off in other directions for want of a sticking place. But I've received signs and portents from the electronic ether nudging me in the direction of making some noise here, any noise. A message in a bloggle. So here, internet, do with me what you will.
If you've not heard the podcasts Here Be Monsters or the memory palace, go and listen and you might start to understand the world differently. Or realize how little you do understand. Understanding is overrated. What we need is more wonder! They're only two of many I love (I've become a podcast fiend), but they're most in my heart at this particular moment.
To wit, I've resolved to write more openly and share my thoughts, whether they're heard or not. So often my resolutions have dissolved as resolutions are wont to do, but I'm beginning to grasp how little I have to lose in breaking silence.
Life of late has been lonely and unwieldy, like standing in the middle of commuter train with no handhold, kind of like surfing, because you wound up in the middle of the car during rush hour, surrounded by strangers you don't want to touch. You get your sea legs eventually, but you don't really know why because you're still technically on land. You feel simultaneously accomplished and profoundly isolated.
M. is living on a rig in Oklahoma. Catching dirt, I joke. But it's geology-related and that's his love. It's just difficult when one love separates you from another. That's what decision means. From the Latin caedere (to cut). We made the decision to be mostly apart while he pursues this thing called a career. I've heard of this, but it's a bit foreign to me personally. Sometimes I do things that make money, so I can eat and pay those pesky bills. But typically I lament that time is wasted in those efforts. Doing time is an apt phrase. I don't do time, though. It does me. In midlife, I'm feeling cut (off) - all the many things I've struck from my life in favor of other things crowd up on me. A thousand little paper cuts. I'm damned by them because I can't move forward for all the thousand little what-ifs escaping from the cuts. I'm fascinated by them, though. I feel the dread of mortality, but not so much so that I am willing to get awkward, defy mores, that sort of thing. The thing a poet should live for - a true iconoclast, not beholden to cultural norms and social strictures! It seems like such a universal and unpoetic pickle, I can't tell you how embarrassed I am that I'm not writing something more unique. But isn't that just the thing - the key to injecting art with meaning is finding the confluence of the rivers universal and individual. Also, the key to empathy and thus to surviving other people without resorting to homicide. Whoever says poetry isn't useful or necessary hasn't really thought it through.
I saw some baffle-headed ducks at the pond near my half-empty townhouse the other day, but couldn't get close enough to tell which type they were exactly. And lots of northern shoveler ducks - more than the same time last year - which is a nice diversion from the usual hordes of mallards and geese. I call them my shoveler friends. They make these little hiccupy quacks and dabble in tandem, groups of them swim in circles, presumably to kick up the goodies more efficiently. If only poets could be more like dabbler ducks, I think, kicking up goodies for one another. A simple pond-crud based economy. And I enjoy birds infinitely more than people, but you probably could have guessed that.
The dog is begging for walkies. It's a good idea. Will report back.
.
If you've not heard the podcasts Here Be Monsters or the memory palace, go and listen and you might start to understand the world differently. Or realize how little you do understand. Understanding is overrated. What we need is more wonder! They're only two of many I love (I've become a podcast fiend), but they're most in my heart at this particular moment.
To wit, I've resolved to write more openly and share my thoughts, whether they're heard or not. So often my resolutions have dissolved as resolutions are wont to do, but I'm beginning to grasp how little I have to lose in breaking silence.
.
Life of late has been lonely and unwieldy, like standing in the middle of commuter train with no handhold, kind of like surfing, because you wound up in the middle of the car during rush hour, surrounded by strangers you don't want to touch. You get your sea legs eventually, but you don't really know why because you're still technically on land. You feel simultaneously accomplished and profoundly isolated.
M. is living on a rig in Oklahoma. Catching dirt, I joke. But it's geology-related and that's his love. It's just difficult when one love separates you from another. That's what decision means. From the Latin caedere (to cut). We made the decision to be mostly apart while he pursues this thing called a career. I've heard of this, but it's a bit foreign to me personally. Sometimes I do things that make money, so I can eat and pay those pesky bills. But typically I lament that time is wasted in those efforts. Doing time is an apt phrase. I don't do time, though. It does me. In midlife, I'm feeling cut (off) - all the many things I've struck from my life in favor of other things crowd up on me. A thousand little paper cuts. I'm damned by them because I can't move forward for all the thousand little what-ifs escaping from the cuts. I'm fascinated by them, though. I feel the dread of mortality, but not so much so that I am willing to get awkward, defy mores, that sort of thing. The thing a poet should live for - a true iconoclast, not beholden to cultural norms and social strictures! It seems like such a universal and unpoetic pickle, I can't tell you how embarrassed I am that I'm not writing something more unique. But isn't that just the thing - the key to injecting art with meaning is finding the confluence of the rivers universal and individual. Also, the key to empathy and thus to surviving other people without resorting to homicide. Whoever says poetry isn't useful or necessary hasn't really thought it through.
.
I saw some baffle-headed ducks at the pond near my half-empty townhouse the other day, but couldn't get close enough to tell which type they were exactly. And lots of northern shoveler ducks - more than the same time last year - which is a nice diversion from the usual hordes of mallards and geese. I call them my shoveler friends. They make these little hiccupy quacks and dabble in tandem, groups of them swim in circles, presumably to kick up the goodies more efficiently. If only poets could be more like dabbler ducks, I think, kicking up goodies for one another. A simple pond-crud based economy. And I enjoy birds infinitely more than people, but you probably could have guessed that.
The dog is begging for walkies. It's a good idea. Will report back.
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