It was a late night and a friends and I were playing cards when it struck me. What struck me was the absolute meaningless nature of how important playing cards was at that very moment; I was overwhelmed by this, even possessed down to my very atoms, so it seemed, with that awareness. Dumbfounded looks welcomed me as I declared “what are we doing!” I acquiesced in the end and continued playing; looking back I wonder what this present would be like had I actually let everything continue to take hold, so to speak. What if I drove off into the night in search of what had just haunted me instead of brushing it off until now?

There is a terminal feeling about everything; every thing is slowing, shoulders forward, racing to its climax. While this is nothing new nor is it some stark philosophical statement but the demise and death of that which we call reality is true all the same. Without it, death, things would have no value. To be biblical for a sense, without the prospect of death of what use is a god or even a paradise akin to Heaven; at least the belief in those which I find myself having a very hard time coming to terms with. This touches, I believe, somehow with the listening to Kerouac’s novel. It seems to be the same stark reality that the Beats dealt with; the inevitability of the potential of all of their destruction by careless war and madness; maybe even consumerism.

What to do though? We all stop buying Coca-cola and how many people end up out of work, then homeless, finally dead on street corners? Overstating? I am not sure to tell the truth, where are they supposed to get new jobs? Or does something come in to fill the vacuum of no Coca-cola? If we are talking about a complete mental evolution away from soft drinks then Coca-cola would not be the only people out of work. Replace it with something else? Sports drinks? Juice? Water?

Maybe not, maybe it is all just a hopeless bit of paranoia; the structure is sound; yet some internal dialogue and unconscious admittance of being a shopaholic and some desire to remove myself from hollow purchasing to feel whole. If it is happening to me, what if it is happening to others? What if it happens to everyone and the above paranoia becomes true? Somewhere I tell myself to buy to help everyone else. The President tells us all to support the economy; they want to give us stimulus packages to buy things. A very root of all of this is the very nature of wanting to buy!

I feel lost in it all; little boat, vast ocean and countless storms and unknown serpents of the sea at all of the four winds.

The buying is just part of the bigger singularity though. Purpose seems important and the removal of inane beliefs that only make very thing worse. What is the cure? A Manifesto, a scary word; a manifesto that borrows from the Buddhist ideas of the lotus flower. Instead of delusion and such the murky waters are just that, murky water; all the crap and inane belief systems, the religious driven intolerances, the blind vapid greed of it all; all of those things making the water colored shit. Yet, the lotus flower breaking through it all and blooming, beauty and somehow ugliness too; how it itself ruins the murky water that must have its own inherent beauty when eyes are not blind to it.

I keep having a thought, a vision not like those of fanatics and the mad, a movie thought played over-and-over again in the mind. A soldier struck to the ground by the blast of a too close shell. Dazed and struck deaf he an finally look up and see the birds flying overhead, back and forth to a fragile nest that a mother bird tries to defend and keep safe with her chicks inside while the world around it burns. The fighting moves on and the soldier is left for dead and the nest survives. The soldier far from death or maybe dying, he doesn’t know if he is actually hit, sees the beauty of the bird and its wings, the construction of the nest, imagines the chicks chirping and what the sound of the mother bird must be while it sings someday elsewhere in time. That lotus in the murky water; that moment of clarity and reality and everything else just falling away the expectations the misery and the shit; that is where it all comes together.

This is where the healing begins, this is where the text stops and the calmness returns. This is where it is called therapeutic and ‘good to get it of the chest.”

In other worlds, I am afraid I should be more saddened by the fact that my creative endeavor that I have been working on on wordpress is not as popular as I had hoped. For the most part though I am okay with a website that barely gathers any traffic since I have only been at it since the end of November. My real fear is that the sudden panic of failure will eventually strike me and I won’t write anything else. So far so good though.

Also, not to make Penelope out to be a villain, it is hard to get in any real confessional soul searching life affirming stuff when a nine month old wants all your attention. Believe me, Penelope is pretty life affirming and rewarding, it is just there is more to my life than just that. For example I am going to later today write up a quick 1000 word short story and send it off to, I guess it is a contest of sorts; not sure if there is any prize actually involved, Poets & Writers to see if it can “win” the prompt contest. On a lot of levels I feel like a rusty wheel when it comes to this but recent writing is making me more confidant that it is worth a shot to get back into this “submitting” world. I have enough ideas so it is about time I start putting things down I guess; we will see how it goes.

One thing that does come to mind every December 10 is the fact that I share this day with two individuals that have had a great effect on my life even before I knew we shared a day. Emily Dickinson and Thomas Merton are the two sides of the coin in regards to this date. Emily and I share this date as a birthday, whereas Merton and I share less except that he died on this day. One birth and one death, a mutual life all summed up on one day. Both individuals had great respect for the concept of Solitude each in their own way; it is in this solitude that I reflect on my own years and years to come.

It is in this spirit that I dug through some boxes of books to find something I had written years ago.

1210

for Emily

How short the years

seem when counted by the seasons

a collection-short abundance-

of Spings and Falls

intermixed, entwined with 

numbered Summers and fleeting Winters

an amount considerably shorter

then the leaves that                    cling,

grow, and struggle to survive

upon nature’s storybooks

whose chapters are images

singular poetry of

rebirth through death

and in appearance-unquestioning-

of ways so old-firmament

ghost guardians that seem

to rule the realms of

Oberon and Titania

and transcend

the beginnings

and ends felt by mortal coils-

falling away-drifting downward

to soils of early thought

realizing that you and I have

more questions than all the pages

that rest upon the chilled grounds

at this

-a moment of season-

 Yet, I have failed. I have never saved the Princess at the beginning, in my world she has been Bowser’s bitch until she was saved in Mario 3 and that is a long dark time for her to be imprisoned, gawd only knows the sick and twisted things she has been forced to do… the Koopa Kids anyone???

 All is not lost, now with the power of the Wii I am traveling back in time and setting things right. No longer will the 8-bit world be under the tyranny of the Koopa King; except I suck at Super Mario Bros. I am getting better, I can now get to the 6th world but I die somewhere in there, either to a missed placed jump or a damned Hammer Bros. I am getting better though!

 Once a day now I throw on the old overalls and eat some magical mushrooms and throw myself into the wartorn Mushroom Kingdom; I am playing it straight through, no warp zones, so no saying that I half-assed it, I am squishing the Goombas and putting fear into the Koopa’s shelled hearts; the kingdom will be freed dammit!

 Until all are free; Toad and his bretheran and of course Princess; until all are free!

Originally this was posted on Myspace some months back but I enjoyed it so much I wanted to add it to this blog.

While I might not be writing my long suffering novel at least I am writing again and that gives me hope that one day I will turn to more serious writing, though never completely giving up on a true part of me.

I think one of the cutest things that Penelope does is to loose her pacifier from her jaws of doom and then stopping to look at it reaches her heart out to grasp it and then puts it back into her gapping maw. It’s precious and it beats the screaming, ha!

1. My favorite writing song played over and over and over and over again on continual repeat: “I’m in love with my car” by Queen [preferably the Live Killers version]

2. Sweat pants 

3. Refrigerated filtered tap water

4. Trusted Macintosh computer

5. Coffee

6. Notepads to scribble ideas down

7. Pencils, pens, crayons, markers, sharpened wooden sticks and other unnamed implements of destruction.

I am struck by the specters of memory recently. Strange blurry thoughts of the past have come in and out of my mind’s eye. The two most prevalent memories concern a friend who died more than a year ago and a girl I knew for about a week during a family trip to Walt Disney World. While more than a fifteen-year expanse of time separates the memories from each other, both are finding themselves intertwined.

At a very young age, the exact age I am not sure of, my family and I took one of many trips to Walt Disney World. We had a habit of staying in Frontier Land when it was still low-key and not “roughing it” for the upper-middle class. We stayed in trailers that looked like at anytime you could hook up a truck to and drive back into the 1950’s and travel the American highways and byways. This Disney visit found us the trailer neighbors of another family who brought their daughter to see Mickey and the Gang. Few details remain of this girl named Mackenzie; we had become fast friends from the moment we first met and she had brown hair and was missing her two front teeth; though this is mostly known due to a blurring photograph that my mom took of us in a playground version of a covered wagon. A memory that has no photographical evidence is of riding with her in the back of a golf cart that her father was driving and we rode past a man who caught, what I thought at the time, was the largest catfish ever to swim the waters of North America. After these to memories pass I remember nothing about this girl. Now and again I think about this “ghost” girl and what ever came of her; not out of some “lost love” sort of thought but just out of the strangeness that her memory has never left while other times in my childhood have most definitely disappeared. What ever came of her? Did she go on to college? Ever get married? Have children? Does she ever think about an odd boy that she cannot recall much else about other than a wisp of memory from a log ago trip to Disney? Is she happy? Is she still alive?

Phil Torres, on the other hand, is no longer alive in the sense that we as human beings believe it to be. He died but a few days before I got married in July of 2007. I had not come to know about his death until after I was married and a mutual friend of ours got in touch with me. Phil and I were also fast friends for a time when I lived in NJ and we both worked for Borders bookstores just outside of Princeton. We spent most of our time as closers and like all twenty-somethings we discussed endlessly the questions of life and what happiness really was and what it meant to be truly human beings. Sure, there’s a certain type of arrogance in those discussions now but that is because I am looking back on that time as a man in his young thirties. Regardless of the nature of the conversations we spent each evening after work circling the parking lot on foot wasting away hours; one full lap around the parking lot was exactly one mile. When we would get tired of this we would head to different all-night diner of choice and continue the discussions. Sometimes it was the other way around and we would eat and then go for the walk. As time naturally progressed further Phil quit Borders, or was forced out, which exactly it was, is a mystery to me. We tried to stay in touch but neither of us was very good at keeping up with E-mail or even letters. Eventually I moved away and saw Phil one last time on a trip back to NJ from Ohio one lonely summer week.

Now Phil is dead. The details of his death are as mysterious as much as they are uneventful. He stuck his head on the floor after he fainted and died. No more, no less; at least that is what I have always been told. Much like the girl Mackenzie, Phil resides somewhere in a part of me that yearns for a completion or an end. In Mackenzie’s case the end is to know what ever happened to her and in the case of Phil, death seems to simple of an “end” for him; Phil’s end is more a matter of coming to terms with his lack of being or getting around to getting back in touch again. Of the two individuals Mackenzie has haunted me longer but Phil’s specter has been more intense most due to the fact that there is no holding out hope for a phone call or a blog comment or even an E-mail reestablishing that lost connection. All that remains of Phil is quiet cool nights in parking lots when wind blows softly and the questions of life rise up in one’s mind.

Both of these moving pictures in my mind have come to a certain apex or critical mass as I read a translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus translated by C.F. MacIntyre. The final lines of the last piece in the second part reads as follows: “Though / earth itself forgot your very name, say unto the tranquil earth: I flow. / To the fleeting water speak: I am.” Also, as the lines of this blog’s name and subtitle come from a piece by Whitman on his thoughts of Lincoln’s death they too stand as markers to these two “ghosts” of thought, memory, wonderment, and even bewilderment that continue to walk with me, not so much as baggage but as a lantern pointing somewhere forward, somewhere in the vastness of the forever future, that holds where I fit in and, in some regards, where we all fit in.