The strongest drug that exists for a person is another human being.

When you try not to love someone, though your irises are fixed glassily as distant mist forests, you still curl into the crushed coastal waves of their skin, as if their body's hollows magnetically draw you in and their every breath fits your broken breathing---then you know you love them like crazy, like you can't resist the chemistry that is him. 

Like, 

like, 

like you can't choose who you love, it just happens and despite all attempts to harden and contain, you soften in their bed: pliable, cuddly, sweet, infantile, sick. So sick that you need rehab to stop the fix. So sick that you must melt your own skin to stop it from soaking up that touch with such tingling euphoria.

A Post-Modernism Post

“Perhaps the crescendo of this gloom came only a decade and a half ago when anthropologist Marc Augé made his dismal conclusion about the nature of human interaction in physical space in his Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Augé suggests that our sense of place, as old as humanity, is coming to an end. Building on Marcel Mauss’s idea of place as a “culture localized in time and space,” Augé distinguishes places—locations in which individuals with distinct identities form human relationships that in turn accrete, creating the sediments of history—from non-places—spaces of transition absent of identity, human relationships, or the traces of history. Augé’s non-places are in-between spaces…” (Varnelis 18)

Varnelis’ use of the word gloom foreshadows humanity’s seemingly inevitable decline. Post-modern literature is thick with the robotic suburb battlefields and global decay found in Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story The People of Sand and Slag. Additionally, Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep projects the lost capacity for emotive response in humans common throughout post-modernity. Yet authors wage hypothetical wars in recognizable, semi-measurable spaces. These senses of “place, as old as humanity, [are] coming to an end.” The emergence of a new dimension, entirely hand-crafted is as invisible as imagination without key components such as viable power-sources, network connections and accessible databases. This intangibly populated model fits Varnelis' paradoxical frame described as “spaces of transition absent of identity, human relationships, or the traces of history.” Non-spaces exist with relevance because we (mortal gods) assign importance to them. The world wide web spread like a plague, statistically congruent with rising instances of obesity and ADHD. How does an army of 7.5 billion not-so-strong fight this invisible foe? Post-modernists predict mass extinction of humanity as we know it, and I predict the next world war will take place in a non-space inhabiting every home, market and government agency. The rise of the Internet marks the fall of geographic divides; countries formerly claiming terrain will fight to control a virtual realm instead. Gloomy is just one way to describe a robotic age—whether referring to technological animism or sub-human humans. However, if Varnelis’ non-spaces truly are in the state of in-between, the future’s pivot could shift any direction like a Deleuzian Rhizome. Humanity's survival is both determined and patterned after the collective force effectively connecting the past with the future.

No-Shave-November Should Be Forever

I love the rough hair on men's bristly faces

In class I daydream---imagining the flat-handed stretch of my palm

Pressed against the brittle-soft-whisker-grains of a stranger's cheek

I close my eyes to the perceived stinging intimacy 

There in the stubble: the breathing regions---textures of closeness

These men, animals really, with beards 

Covering their soft spaces

I'd place curiously-thirstily-exploring fingers upon their jowls

Masks of keratin cloaked with coarse winter growth

I find myself seeking that melting fusion where I'm singed 

In traces of masculine unshaven skin

Comparing Notes

I Want

To Master

The Unmasterable

You Can

Build a Bridge

Walls, Dams, Roads

I Can't

Measure Them

With Rulers and Marks

But You

Can't Break Apart

A Poem or Make it Work

This Science

Is Messy, Glittering

The Way a Crushed Heart

Drips When

A Doctor of Something

Somewhere Can't Fix it Me

Tricky Little Tuesday in an Insanity Vent

Today I want to smash the sky into metal. Dripping pearl mercury in rivulets of gray. It's a gray day with gray eyes and gray skies. Violence is the answer. We have to find the sun.

I focused on my phone and found synthetic lights only. Superficial icons in iconic flares of symbolic representation. I saw social media squares with authenticity suspiciously absent in there. Only images and avadentities with flat faces were seen, the fabricated size of compact digitized screens. Since when is a square ever normal in nature?

Changing keys. The writers and inspiration of my being dazzle my mind with this nebulous starry-eyed wisdom supplied. Satirical words pop in sizzling skillets of resistance---unrest and political quests steaming in prose. My friends blog, my dog blogs---I don't have a dog, but if I did, her paws would leave ink-trails instead of mud. In an industrial age, the universe is fully mapped. Is silence the only space left to fill?

It's all been done. Some things are cooked overdone and many things need subtle raw undone-ing. The polluted sky rots minds into mechanic fusions with computerized life programs left as solutions. My life is not a program. There is no foreword, no organized, formatted table of contents. No rave reviews mark my papery back with cries of genius or thumbs pointing any which-way-direction from notarized critics, dead or undead.

Instead, I attend university to unlearn all I've ever heard about the everyday human condition. I deprive myself of sleep, then eat too many plates of weird concoctions I call nachos when I can't cope with a single new idea injection, like analytical botox, into my unscholarly psyche. Sequestered and robotic, I plug into classes and textbooks with my Ucard only, our flat and compact replacement-identities. I can't remember what yoga was like. That's where I breathed real gasping breaths, deep and cleansing. Suffocation is painful and real.

Now what, metal gods? Now that we've killed all life forces, the taxiing taxation of taxes and human taxidermy leaves emptiness and shell hazards for attorneys and parking enforcement to pick up on their daily endeavors. I bleed in mercury too, but a smashed eternal sky won't crumple into me seamlessly because the trappings of responsibility have too firmly a fixed grasp with their intangible devices.

What's left? Nothing I guess. Except maybe music and memories and sunsets and dreams.

I cannot, simply cannot continue at the pace of expectation and remain exceptionally sane.
We have to find the sun.

Words, they breathe.

"What else is a vision or fact of time and the peoples it bears issuing from the mouth of the cosmos, from the round mouth of eternity, in a wide and parti-colored utterance. In the complex weave of this utterance like fabric, in its infinite domestic interstices, the centuries and continents and classes dwell. Each people knows only its own squares in the weave, its wars and instruments and arts, and also the starry sky."
-Annie Dillard

"At night when everyone is silent and everything is still,  I lie in the darkness of my windowless room, the place where they exile me from the community of their heart, and search the unknowing blackness to see if I can find my way home. I tell myself stories, write poems, record my dreams. In my journal I write---I belong to this place of words. This is my way home. This dark, bone black inner cave where I am making a world for myself."
-bell hooks

"The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles---preferably of his own making---in order to triumph. A hero without a flaw is of no interest to an audience or to the universe..."
-Garth Stein

"You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within; 

And to the leading Love-throb in the Heart

Thro' all my Being, thro' my pulses beat;

You lie in all my many Thoughts, like Light" ...

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are.. than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise." 
-Henry David Thoreau

“The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me.” 
-Emily Dickinson

"Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;--when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without."
-Erich Maria Remarque

"We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything--death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth."
-Elie Wiesel

"Within each of us there is a silence -A silence as vast as the universe.We are afraid of it...and we long for it."
 -Ernest Hemingway

"Within each of us there is a silence - 

A silence as vast as the universe. 

We are afraid of it...and we long for it." 

-Gunilla Norris

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!” 

-Shel Silverstein

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”

-Pablo Neruda

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” 

-Plato

“I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart) I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) I want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which

grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)”

-E.E. Cummings

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.” 

-Pablo Neruda

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
-Albert Einstein

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”

-J.R.R. Tolkien

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
-Marilyn Monroe

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
-Maya Angelou

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
-Mahatma Gandhi

"The enlightened man is the greatest stranger in the world; he does not seem to belong to anybody. No organization confines him, no community, no society, no nation."
-Osho


"As humans, we crave wilderness and open spaces. We regularly seek out aspen groves, desert oases, ocean shores, mountain lakes. But we can’t be camped by a turquoise lagoon forever. At some point, we pick up our feet and trudge back to our lives, hoping to keep those times of nature and calm with us."
-Celeste Keele

"Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?"
-Annie Dillard

Ahhhh, a reprieve from insanity!

I feel so optimistic and light that I don't want anything to disrupt my June zen. Today I ran a couple of miles through the city streets and absolutely absorbed everything around me. So many houses and yards to observe. I literally stopped to smell the masses and masses of roses. It was a sensory explosion.

Perhaps I'm still reeling from my Wednesday concert. It was a first in a very, very long time and it was very, very needed. I saw Danger at the Urban Lounge. Dance floors are such a separate world where one is able to immerse fully into shared feeling and experience. Everyone moves and sways with the beat while closing their eyes to the intangible pulse. I talk a lot about pulses and drums when I write; it's probably because they're such real reverberations. Sometimes they're the only thing that reminds us we're alive.

Whatever the case may be, I feel like everything is ok. I bought this new combination of vitamins and it's ridiculous----ly good. It consists of some B's, some D's and some good ol' fashioned St. John's Wort. I kid you not, I feel a lot of the perks of Adderall without the crazy high (which I love, truly, madly, deeply, but sometimes prefer not to be buzzing all day every day).

But nobody can argue that when life is good, life is GOOD. Sometimes I think about people I've crossed who've turned into jerks, but it takes about 5 seconds to remind myself that I actually need FEWER jerks in my life. More nice people, please. And more guinea pigs. And bunnies named "Puppy." And best friends in the feline form. I love my little animals, oh so much!

Anyway, Topie is wrapping up her year of Kindergarten and as she participates in field days and fun runs, I tell her to live it up, because those 6-year-old memories last a lifetime and you can never do it again. For the most part, I think she listens. She comes home radiating with sunshine and babbles incessantly about her day. Her energy is amusingly exhausting. I want to tell her to sprint a few laps and not come back until she's tired. My friend Rueben used to throw tennis balls up the side of a steep mountain for his Labrador to chase so she'd be mellow at home. I wonder if that works for children...

I have to work in a few minutes after this nice long refreshing day of "me" time, but I'm looking forward to several hours of friendly banter and the happy faces of my coworkers. It's so nice to have a job in such a positive environment. It rubs off on me, for sure.

So as I wrap up this little Saturday blip, I just want to say that life is good. I'm looking forward to a weekend of fun and laughter. Because laughter is always always always the best medicine.