wood-panelled Van, Go!

in the moment:
reading a book called 'dear theo'; it is the biography of Van Gogh, as laid out in a liquid series of letters that he wrote his brother, quite frequently. this cat can think, and express. well, obviously that latter....but he is also verbally profound and conceptually inspired. matches wonders how different the world would appear everyday, if we placed enough effort and focus into expressing ourselves through something as simple and deviously complex as the shapes and strings of our words. things would be quite different. he knows this much....people living on different regions of the globe have distinct thought processes to call all their own, and the dynamics there erupt out of the different lingual structures that they have been brought up with. russians legitimately think differently than americans, in many ways both subtly and celestially. have you ever studied a text in another language? with a teacher whom has read the verse or what have you, in the original form? the word on the street is that it is dazzlingly different, and that tremendous amounts of information in multiple contexts are lost to the translation process. when he studied faust, the professor would constantly be reminding the fuzzily-massed 9AM attention span before him that such and such passage appeared quite differently when he was reading it in german, and would (beneficially and frustratingly for us) be incisive as to how there was no proper translation in english for a certain or other german word. he would meander all over our adjectives, like leaping between stones on a path, never quite able to alight upon a solid footing and so maintaining the momentum of intellectual pursuit (much to his fancy). m gleamed the general impression that germans possess some concepts which he was not raised in attunement with; that certain states of mind slipped from his grasp, tantalizingly, like sand through the swift curve of an hourglass.

so how is it that we can come to expect a thought to arise in another person? 'knowing' a person is not possible in the complete sense, and yet we become put off when they rub us the wrong way. everyone has their own priorities....their own pursuits. it makes matches wonder a lot about what 'trust' is, about how it is something bigger than one's self. it expands the boundaries of the mind; it plays in spaces beyond the normal reach of the usual mental faculties. it is a bridge; a synchronization. it creates compassion and caring, understanding and freedom. trust, as a conductor of freedom, is a concept he will enjoy pondering...he can tell already. this idea of 'knowing' something about another person (or set of people) also makes mattress wonder about the possibility of a global political movement. how can there be unification if our fundamental drives and perceptions differ drastically enough to hinder communication? if our ideas of morality and freedom are different than one another? if (most importantly) our priorities, our designs for ourselves and our thoughts, our passions, our entire lives, are walled off from one another? it seems to him that the nations need to come to nothing more and certainly nothing less than an understanding, a mutual respect for the prospects of life and the infinite possibilities of the human mind in whatever quantity it chooses to be grouped within.

easily said, he knows.

m should have started writing earlier. now he must vamoose to take care of other things, leaving points unstated. expect a tomorrow, he supposes~

the beginning of 'carousel' by iron & wine just came on, and certainly it is reminiscent of pink floyd. 'night.

jot

haven't felt like writing lately; but a quick thought today:

- light diffused through leaves, emerald, making for an enchanting atmosphere below. forested, fortressed, and all its own.

- memories of sinking into sleep, with the door cracked and loved ones' nearby voices spilling into the room, gliding along with a sliver of light. family acoustics. the crackling of a fireplace. burning cozily like an ember under a warm sheet of ashes.

k.

blossom

http://takingsteps.blogspot.com/2008/04/getting-hands-dirty.html

apropos indeed. matches loves the internet, he loves humanity, for voicing such things. relevant. bright. full of fire and faith.

just ran. granted only a mile, probably nothing to those runners amongst you, but m is not the cardiovascular-exercise type, and he thinks that's an okay distance for the first time running purposefully since early high-school. funny how you feel, great, and energized, after such a thing. so much different from lifting weights, which makes one sore and sluggish for an hour or so afterwards. he used to get this sensation, this weightlessness, from swimming in california, but he is darkened and dampened (hah~) by the reality of not having a pool in oregon. le sigh.
perhaps he shall take up aikido after all.

he would love to sew his thoughts into the air, but he has been staring at this screen for 20 minutes and nothing has come out. a distracted lull; a dreamy haze. and oddly enough his actual dreams lately have stretched themselves into opposites - tantalizingly tranquil and radiant, beamingly happy. and sometimes rupturing, disjointed, dismal and downtrodden. he should have purchased a dream journal some time ago, but has put it off, and off again. how can one analyze a sensation, without a medium to record it, without some distance to look at it a bit more genuinely? it is so easy to become swathed in the wrappings of the moment. sheik in sandstorm, cuffing a cloak around a face to protect and observe.

feeling eccentric lately~

good day, sunshine

apparently m is dangerous, as dictated by a little girl who saw him traverse a river on a fallen log and declared "that wasn't very safe!" he smiled and told her that being safe wasn't always the most fun. now he is undecided as to whether or not he even wants that lesson to stick in her head as she grows up~ so impressionable, the little ones.

the weather is bright blue with a strong (read: apparent, every passing minute) chance of verywarm sunshine today, and it is so refreshing. how is it that seasons are just so long that one gets completely wrapped in them, yet in a short enough succession that the body remembers how they feel, spurring the mind to reminiscence? this world is put together very well, and so finely tuned as to bring back the flower shoots in every little grassy nook of the northwest. if you're a vegetarian because of the way that it makes you feel, then perhaps you should try smelling some fresh hyacinths in a sunbeam-sliced forest. it has precisely the same effect, without all the day-to-day hassle~
he is, undecided, on flower-picking.

the ahead weekend is a large question mark. it is very tempting for him to play the solitary role, and cloak himself from known eyes in the various recesses of tree-trunks and coffee shop booths. none have the same reddened and worn appeal of trident's. it would be good to cloister, to shutter oneself in the west wing of contemplation and meditation, and music, and midnight strolls around the many fountains of rome (er, portland). on the other hand, it is equally tempting to forget all about reflection, as it wearies him so in sometimes aimless repetition, and parade around the town with his eclectic friends and associates. he wants to sit around and play cranium over beers and smiles, and he could make you a list of the players he would choose to have there, but they are all removed in various degrees of distance from his current city. it is more unwieldy than one assumes, this separation of all familiar peoples after the nigh monastic clustering of souls in boulder fades into e-mails from everyone's different locales.

he will probably achieve a balance of these two possibilities; that seems the best route if memory serves him precisely. for whatever reason, a weekend feels longer and more saturated if you juggle 15 separate activities instead of say, 2. and sadly, saturating the weekends is an absolute necessity these days...if it slips away unnoticed, then another week of work without the threshing justification of a few fun days bears down upon one in a significantly more weighty fashion. we can't be having that; not on our dime.

in other news, matches just realized that he carries around a ridiculous amount of value on his person at any given time. his backpack currently contains this laptop, a $300 cell phone, a $300 ipod, $100 headphones, and a digital camera whose value is rapidly declining in proportion to the number of times it cheerfully decides that it will function properly, vs the number of times that it stubbornly is unresponsive to any stimulus one can impart upon it. still, that's something like $1500. plus any cash or cards. he doesn't think that the rest of his possessions, total, would amount to that much. so basically, eliminating the car from the equation, he is carrying around something like 60-70% of his net possession worth on his person, at any given time. here's to not getting mugged~

bleh, scribbling today was terribly absent of epiphanies. still notable, perhaps, so up it goes. perhaps the contemplative portion of the weekend will reap some ideas to put a spark in his eye*

parachutes

lots to think about. as if that is ever not the case....even so.

mattress was pondering on the streetcar just now (he is fond of pondering in motion) about the origins of the universe, and whether or not there were in fact some grand intelligent design to it all. he recalled the clockwork theory from his philosophy classes. do you know it? basically, it says that if all the gears and springs and cogs and such that compose the orchestration which we nowadays would call a pocketwatch (use, say, an ipod if you're too temporally-hindered to be able to visualize the archaic brasses and silver inlays of a pocketable timepiece) were to find themselves right next to each other, manufactured masterfully and without a trace of reckless abandon, but carelessly tossed into a pile and left there to rust until the end of time, there is no way that they would ever assemble themselves through merely the forces of nature into such a complex arrangement as they present in the polished and completed (ahm, ticking) form. it isn't possible for existence to be complex without a plan, a thought, a design behind it. m pawned this theory off as silly at the time, and perhaps it is....perhaps. but for whatever reason from his cramped seat on the streetcar, doomed to swallow the yammerings of some young female on the phone with her significant other (presumably) with no escape as his stop was still far, he remembered this one notion and it made a good deal of sense.

what's funny about faith, that most people would probably not admit, is that they would like to have it. hell, this is the sole reason that some people have it in the first place...but for others, this 'brain' gets in the way and for whatever reason, stops us from fully being able to acknowledge an unproven as a truth. matches would really like to have it; is that shameful for a philosopher to admit? perhaps thats a sign that he does have it, in some waxing or waning capacity, in some solid state whose only reason for not bursting into color is the alternative existence of an antipode.
ah dualities. you will be the death of us humans.

matches likes the word 'pithy', but he feels like there is some new negativity associated with the sound of it which perhaps should not be there. it isn't a beautiful word; it isn't a sonorous word. not by a long shot. which kind of aids the definition in a way. but still, he abstains from using it as it sounds vaguely insulting. don't you find? he would say 'sententious', but nobody would know what the hell he was trying to insinuate; he himself had to look it up (which was what started this). which is sort of counterintuitive to the definition. so out the door these words go, doomed to be scribbled into the lexicon of the archaic and unused within the next 100 years~

in this paroxysm of discombobulation, he wants to write something babblingly poetic, but fears that this post is doomed to fall to the pace which has already been set this evening. le sigh. it isn't very expressive of his real thoughts. which is not to say that it is false, but moreso that he is preoccupied and that his thoughts are adrift like blue balloons. which are, coincidentally, the hardest to differentiate from the sky. funny how that works, one image corkscrewing into another, both contributing and extracting like a bee farmer but without the protective screening. the bees, are they appreciative bees? do they give willingly, cordially, with a wink and a bzz? do they storm and ravage; a thunderous cloud of particulate matter behaving with the characteristic swooshes and splashes of solar-systematic movement? boomerang, a-rang, coming back just as fast as you happened to have thrown it. predictable, but not to an untrained eye; not to a first. can you muster the fluidity to give, like water, space as it is taken? displace and rearrange? change? slosh, unspilling, maintaining, a balanced mind balancing a body, balancing the world that pivots with its step? microns of subtle movement, alterations, snowballing straight out of any measurement systems into something entirely else. a flickering edge of feeling; a paper-thin space where one thing meets another. a shift; a friction. a warmth.

perhaps matches should retire from poetry. but he does enjoy it so, even if not so much for his own~

40% inspired by photograph

he will rebel against the harshness of the future, if the past will hold against the winds of change.
because it is a daunting concept he is wrestling with...that the past is a moment, and that it cannot be held to exist afterwards. he will cup his hands and carry what he can of it; he will scrawl a note on the back of his hand (so that it doesn't rub off) and enlist its assistance in those subtle equations which govern human memory and hourglass sands. he will embody his past, not run from it, not neglect its reflection. he will use it as a comforter, on top of his comforter, on chilly evenings. what else could thought be composed of?

time cannot govern the confines of truth, of hard things which refused to be washed away by eons of subtle rain. a true friendship weathers ages and ages passing, without a word of exchange or a glance to be caught. it's the nature of the thing, because it defines and tailors both ends, bends them towards one another even when circumstance does not. such is why matches has friends, good friends, that he can have not seen for any number of years but still, the thing will remain. the principle, the binding force, the understanding.

still, there is something to be said for the past, if the future cannot contain it, cannot embrace it simultaneous with whatever the present holds. if things cannot be precisely repeated, then they have unique properties, rarity, perceived value. they exist in juxtaposition to that which they are not, to wit: a lesser moment. they are, they are, and who is who to stop them. you? you have a thousand different selves that you could be, and choose at this moment which is what is here, now. brown cow? no, silly, but that was a fragment of past trickling in. it defines, it associates; it has burrowed and becomes like seeding plants, percolating with vitality through into new iterations, new echoes. good album name. good governor of action.

how tragic that the transposition of the past into the present, into future, can be robbed from us; hooded, blinded, dumbstruck! that a child could be taken from a family; that a wife could be erased from an unattainably-perfect coupling...o, caprices of the world. in garden state, they spoke of a family as being a collection of people who remembered the same imaginary place, the same 'home'. chilling concept, removed and distant. but for parents, how true that concept must ring for children spreading their wings~ one mustn't stifle, mustn't confine, and yet inevitably the unity of a family dissolves as they are eddied into different pools of life. they can still be in touch, still be familial, but the thing, the circumstance, the group in unison against outside infringement (not against, necessarily, but you catch the meaning), six heads in cordiality over a dinner table, over a board game, around a fireplace....that thing is gone. how meshed a parent must become in that blissfully nurturing environment, only to have it swept away inevitably and likely much sooner than one would welcome after a complacency nuzzles itself in.

and yet there are connections, pathways, harmonies. associations. there are things we possess that are steeled against change, and these make all the difference. the past is alive if it is chosen to be remembered, or if it is cared about enough to make choice into an abstraction, at best. we can define who we are; we do, and in doing so define who we become. "the choices i make now, will follow me through life" ~braille. but to remember is a certain carrying over; a breadbasket full of faded photographs. the difficulty comes in transitioning a remembrance into a continuation, an actuality; forging a connection on the current lines of transmission. and that, is a very important distinction, matches is finding.

today matters.

"and glow,
glow,
melt and flow,
eviscerate your fragile frame,
and spill it out in the ragged floor,
a thousand different versions of yourself,

and if the old gods still offend,
they got nothing left on which you depend,
so enlist every ounce
of your bright blood,
and off with their heads"
~ the shins - sleeping lessons