the letter A, as in abstraction

who knew that it would only take 20 minutes to walk to NW 21st, after so many months of taking the streetcar? faster? certainly. better for you? absolutely. more exhausting? admittedly yes. more scenic? depends on whether you prefer people or charmingly deserted alleyways. but a portland sunset is a fine time for strolling any day. even the rainy ones, if one gets into the proper state of mind beforehand.

the world is too complex. too? perhaps. it's nice to know how intricately the details spiral, considering how many people put their heart and soul (or perhaps just their 9-5 attention spans, but we know what goes on behind the scenes) into making something worthwhile of it. m has, without anticipation, ended up in two jobs since academics that helped in some capacity to reveal the detail, to unblanket the larger forms that most people don't give a second thought to. no, really...imagine that your couch has a blanket thrown over it, you know, to shield against the dust and sun and cat hairs and such. now whisk that blanket away, and lo! it was never a couch at all. it was a collection of smaller items; and oboe here, a mcdonald's plastic bambi toy there, an un-lidded tin of peaches over yonder (aqui, alli, alla); precise meetings of points, that give way to something larger than themselves individually. not to say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (wouldn't want to step on any traditionalist toes), but really what is value anyway. yes, that put you in your place, didn't it?

the point was reduced to absurdity on purpose, yes. more tangible that way, don't you think? what he really means, is really absorbed by, is all the ideas, the labor, the cooperation that goes into the production of realities in the world. engineering is a marvel, in any shade or color that you would choose to cast it in. every day, people see something and think to themselves, "now that, is neat". neat. what a horrible, candle-snuffing word; it completely robs the discovery of all intellectuality and reduces it to a bauble, a trifle, a pawn bowing to the power and complexity of the queen which rules it utterly and completely. and the mind does retain dominance, ultimately; let's not overstep ourselves here. the mind created and can destroy; the mind chooses its constructs and folds the world into whatever patterns and shapes it thinks commendable. but at a certain point, merely in an instance, even, one has to acknowledge and find a profound respect for these things, these objects, engineered commodities. one has to recognize the confluence of events and ideas and inspirations and drives which ultimately orchestrated these...things, into being. it was all human, all struggle, and it is commendable in that respect, interesting in another, and almost fearful in the way which the idea eventually took hold of its composers, trans-substantiated from a thought into a concept into a plan into a thing, and practically willed itself into the world.

it's amazing, really. and what's more, it is neat. but not in a dawdling, bashful, foot-shuffling way...in an empirical, investigative, and compelling way. it strikes one forcefully, the phenomenon of creation. it is an art, though perhaps more calculable, more formulaic in the long run than that more inspirational of imaginings. still, it has that same...liquidity to it. the modern world is steeped in design, in ideas manifest; the difference being that multiple people have had their hands dipped in this, um, pond. lost track of a metaphor halfway through, just then. what would normal commodities be like, if they were not governed by the rules of market and commerce; if they jutted up chaotically, plate tectonics, only meeting where they happened to run aground of one another? no, production process is more predictable than this....pragmatism wields its ugly hand time and time again, and we end up with square buildings. snooze.

real art, if he can be allowed to make the distinction, ascends to another tier in that it does not play well with others. real art is cloistered, secluded....there is no concurrent interplay of minds involved in the end results of one singular piece. the artist is unique in that he struggles with the thing in its entirety; he buries himself in it and does not delegate any task within it for reasons of economy or raw efficiency. a writer does not pen a chapter and then pass the baton to the next for supplement. the purpose is found in the meeting of the beginning and the end, all contained and bubbling within one cohesive (sometimes jagged) mind. the first stroke can be anything, it can be anywhere. the last stroke has to be exactly, precisely, as it is~

evening in brief

memorial day coming up. what to do with a substantial brick of time once one finally gets it off of work? three days is not substantial, he knows....but it is has more substance than most other opportunities at this point. perhaps california is on the horizon; it's only ten hours away. 8.5 by matches' driving standards. how good it would feel to go back and haunt those places which he experienced under a shadow, now that day has broken. those are the sorts of opportunities which are best not passed upon.

colorful lights and interesting fabrics at this coffee shop (about to transform into a venue for sam cooper's purposes) make m realize that he need to do something more creative with his room. it isn't a very good representation, at the moment, of a place where it would be supposed that a person such as he would occupy for an undeniable portion of time. he saw on the internet the other day a faux-skylight that lights up and has clouds floating to and fro beyond it, for those without the means for a legitimate skylight installation. he would probably make the purchase if it had nighttime settings, complete with constellations and embracing spiral arms. turns out he is quite picky about his purchases....well, about a lot of things in life really. but he has been trying to make up his mind about a pair of windchimes on the east side of portland for a good four months now.

if there are two colors that play unexpectedly well with one another, they are an aqueous blue-green and a frosted purple-maroon (only ten or twenty percent maroon). he is seeing this color splash more and more recently (even shockingly at an art museum or two), and it always catches him off guard with its refined yet vibrant appeal. a good pairing.

arg sam playing.

update two days later: what a curious coincidence that a band from boulder would be playing at the same place as samtron. well, not entirely unexpected, as sam is from boulder. still, an oddity that they would happen to be on tour. high-energy. and what fortunate occurrences came from the walk back home...events which would not have happened had he decided to saunter over to ground kontrol and play pinball with christopher, as was originally on the itinerary. the most compelling things can happen from meeting absolute strangers. stopping a basketball-turned-soccer-ball-by-faculty-of-overactive-slash-tipsy-imaginations from careening into the street and getting flattened by oncoming traffic. it really makes one take a step back and think.

phobias and photomographs

there are always, it seems, those ghosts of insecurity that steal over us. even in the midst of cheerful times, there will probably always be the occasional shiver of disquiet, of uncertainty, of helplessness. even as m sits in this quirky coffee shop for the first time (but likely not the last; cute barista), reading some van gogh, he is reminded by whatever signs and tables and pooches outside the window that his life has progressed to a remote location that is dissimilar to what he has engaged with for a very long time prior to this. the city doesn't feel so different from any other city (well, admittedly, a bit "portland" in its ways), but there are fragments of sensations that have morphed into something quite different than any colorado springtime. he is reminded of visiting his grandmother in denver, the big-big city of colorful colorado, and gazing off of her deck into the massed confusion of a metropolis. everything was shifted slightly to the left, or the right; nothing felt as it should. this skewed his perspective of denver into the negative for a long time, and only began to repair itself near the end of college when he gave it a fair shot.

now portland is 'local' for him, and moods have shifted....he cherishes the slightly-familiar over the extremely-unfamiliar, whereas in colo he was steeped in the all-too-familiar. something he has only done once or twice is now the safe play, the explored territory, even though he knows that there are layer upon layer of understandings that one goes through in exploring any one thing, place, or person. one um, noun.

what's funny is that he makes motions between two opposites in this respect....sometimes he feels that the concept is what is important....and if we're talking theory, the same ol' things are happening in portland as anywhere else (with perhaps a few *hem* unusual exceptions). he would call this the majority of the time, where he feels comfort, peace with the turnings and tides of human patterns. life and he have an inside joke, a shared understanding, and it is simple to exist in whichever way one wants to. other times, which flutter in and alight upon his shoulder from time to time, bring a mess more confusion and imbalance, constantly prodding his mind back into stasis from the step it had taken forward.

why is it sometimes difficult to progress from a thought, from a mindstate? it's simple to be on top of the world one day, and have the carpet ripped out from under you in the next. self-questioning, self-criticism, stepping in pace beside you and inquiring in terse and obnoxious terms what your plan is, or will be, or has been all along. is it too much to live a life without a unifying plan in each moment? is it a confidence, which quakes at first only in order to be forged stronger yet by bending it to your will, now, and then again, in true damascus form? ("why do we fall? so that we can learn to pick ourselves back up.") do we ever feel so justified in what we are doing, that this recedes in the wake of our conviction? perhaps that could be said to mirror the 'good times', but certainly those are not always strong enough to ward off another coming, another regress (which we may call it, even if in fact it is a signal of a deeper progression).

why is it that when we strip off a layer of ourselves, when we remember the past fully, passionately, everything seems unfamiliar again? does that mean that our new selves do not effectively incorporate our old selves? that somehow we cannot reconcile the two, into different scenarios than what they had originally existed in? if that's the case, then perhaps it would be a relief rather than a concern....it would mean that there is never a reason to get down on yourself for acting differently than you might have at a later or more experienced time...there would never be any logical way to connect the two notions of yourself within the realms of space and time~ we live the best that we can.

or perhaps we live, forgetfully.

juice box

how is it that every table at every coffee shop is always unbalanced? it's just a matter of adjusting the little knobs on the bottom of the floor piece. or inserting a select thickness of napkin-supports. now m has a sloshing green tea endangering his laptop (and lap) every time he lets up off the keyboard. tired of adjusting these things~ he needs to invent a cheap, perpetually-self-balancing table. phase 2: ? phase 3: profit.

everything that matches sees has the potential to become a life-changing painting. or story ("i twist up stories out of nothing.") it all washes away, down to the bare-bones framework; colors swirl in the sink basin until finally disappearing out of sight. do you think that your orange is the same as m's? he swizzles his own life's story-colors instinctively onto the wire, without even thinking about it. this naievete is why he will always be superior to a computer's cold calculations, its natural non-thought but yet its ever-vigilant...processing. mattress processes as well, but in a constant state of forgetfulness and flirtatiousness with his whirlwind sensory-surroundings, constantly imbuing himself in splatter-fractals inside and upon the sights and sounds, the memories and the re-analyzed memories and the noisy chaos in between the two.

every moment, if painted with a particular set and sunsetting-gradient of colors, if inked with the precise degree of abstraction that speaks just so to a certain person's own inner monologue, to their own aesthetic, with the correct shapes and printed movements, motions; every one has a drawing power, a spirit that can be found in it and if not captured, at least expressed. art can blow right through you like an icy mountain wind, mingling with the core and variably shutting down, numbing certain parts of you into absolute stunned silence, and illuminating, activating certain other dormant areas, stringing lights on to a map, brushing the metal side of the cavity in the old 'operation' game...a jolting bzzt that spirals consciousness, fresh breath, into new areas.

feelings. convoluted sometimes, but certainly indicators of your 'truth', your own self being located amidst world-wide waldo-madness. he knows them pretty well by now, knows where to juice the nourishing truth from the fruit; what is husk and what is energy, what is life~

will-o'-the-wisp

"one minute I held the key
next the walls were closed on me
and I discovered that my castles stand
upon pillars of salt, and pillars of sand"

matches is stewing in thoughts, confusing illusions, and listening to the new coldplay single, 'viva la vida'. it's a soothing balm.
ah well.
am disagreeing with language lately; not sure if it is just a problem with our english version or what. perhaps m got too steeped in it during college, but he has a thousand colloquial expressions that do not make enough sense for every thousand which do. take the word 'facetious'. most people don't know how to spell this word in the first place, and they think that it means someone is just intentionally being an ass. but its root is facet, as in a gemstone, another surface, a different angle; light refracting and illuminating new accents. he would use this word all the time if this held true to its fine points, but the word means just a bit of silliness, really. literally. what an utter waste of an extremely poetic and far-reaching word. now the metaphor of a facet is ruined, what with the word being locked into the lexicon for eternity. one can't just unword a word; there is no unwinding of history, no subtle snippets of extraction to tinker with the end results. maybe he should get over it and move on~

something stopped him short the other day; snagged his mind like a sweater on a stray nail. he can't remember specifically where it was, so forget about all the story backtrackery. basically, it was an older gentleman relating how he was aghast at the pace with which his life was pulsing by. this is a notion that comes from several separate sources, so there must be something to it. why is it that life seems to go by more quickly once one trickles out of adolescence? is it that the mind shifts like sediments, becoming more settled, eroding away the walls of our conscious differentiation of one moment from another? is it that days and weeks and months become more self-same (like one another) at a certain point in life? likely the point of career-pathing, which weighs a trigger heavily on matches' mind right now....maybe he should just bail right now and hop a ship to madagascar or spain, for as long as need be to establish his own initiatives. he would be remiss if he didn't mention how quickly the last seven months in oregon have been burning by. it isn't that he doesn't have an extreme density of new and wonderful experiences, or that he feels he should have capitalized on his time in some other way....it's just very hard to describe. he hopes that acceleration is not a principle which holds constant throughout life, and that it is more of a state-of-mind to be grappled with and conquered through mindfulness. which is a word he hears too little these days~

what other propulsions could exist? can it be associated with age, in that we sleep more and play less than we used to? this doesn't necessarily hold true, especially not in the present case. could it be, perhaps, that our responsibilities, that our concerns and worries, are so much more numerous and present themselves with so much more immediacy than ever before? he thinks he is on to something with that one. the savory times are those in which one is acting of their own free initiative; fusing their own individual thoughts and cares into the atmosphere around them. "growth of the soul, growth of the mind" ~twelve days. we're so often forced into positions of maintenance these days, just keeping up with all the regular bullshit to make sure that it doesn't outpace us, that we seldom have the opportunity or the energy to pursue ourselves or our dreams. who honestly has a job that isn't involved in maintenance of some nothing, some customer or financial portfolio or product or service? who actually burns away the darkness into unexplored territories with those useful eight-hour blocks of their day? even then, they would return home and have to clean the apartment and sift through the bills and separate the papers from the plastics. so much of it is halfway mind-numbing, which he thinks is the core of the problem. it is willful sedation, and this is one poignant cause of time-slippage, of wasted hours and unnoticed opportunities.

another sentence that he heard a few days ago struck him in a harmonious chord: "it's not often the things that we end up doing that we regret, it's the things that we don't end up doing." a butchering of the phrase certainly, but the idea comes through.
he agrees almost 100%. almost. call it 92. he does so enjoy attaching hard numbers to such things.

the fury within

sometimes a happiness steals over mattress, a frenzied flurry or curiosity, an ode to joy. everything is enhanced, brightened, colors tinted more deeply, movements quickened. this feels like the true state of things, this alacrity...it feels like m in his most genuine incarnation. the world is bubbling with movement, and one can twist it around one's fingers or thoughts like one of those ever-morphing frameworks of yarn that you sometimes see people playing at with their hands. tangible, accessible. happiness is perhaps not even the most apt word for it (but certainly it is a corollary result); something like wonderment might be more accurate. everything is its own pioneer, pirouetting uniquely and etching new patterns into the air with the frictions of movement. there are a few songs that capture this enchantment, dense works of chaos and sentiment. his most notable so far are 'tokyo', by the books, and the gradual crescendo of 'la noyee', by yann tiersen. the unspeakable poignancy of these songs tugs at something inside of him which grips it tightly; built steam screaming for ventilation.

in fact he is noticing an urgency in many respects and perspectives upon life, at least ones which he holds himself. he is starting to sculpt (non-visually, and without any tactile counterpart either....it could be said, imaginatively) out the shape of something inside of himself which seems to apply itself in multiple, if not all, venues of his life. it is a restless sensation, constantly fueling an initiative to drive deeper, to scrape out further towards any lights which may lie at the end of their respective tunnels. not in a negative way, though the metaphor might have seemed it at first. no, this is something like a fury, which, while writing, he realizes is a word with negative connotations....but strip the word of anger or vexation (well, maybe not all vexation) and you have a decent semblance of what he intends to mean by it. it is extremely elusive, and yet so apparent to him at all times...the phrase 'rainbow in the dark' comes to him, for whatever reason. he won't hash it out; sometimes one must trust whatever comes in a moment that progresses naturally from the last. he knows that this fury isn't specific to himself, and that all people likely have it in some capacity....some yearning beyond what is current or attained, some destination forever on the horizon. it formulates itself into passions, burning away the pages of a book or perhaps, blank notebook, like a flame. an uncompromising appetite. it beckons him to wander into untrailed areas off wilderness paths. it requires mobility of him, an itch sparking at the back of his mind that can be rubbed by relocating hither and thither, but never quite satiated (like one of those itches in the arch of the foot when one is wearing shoes, and has to wriggle endlessly in attempt to get a scratch on it). it alchemically mingles and fuses with all input, all output, asking him wordlessly to be better than he is, to achieve some beyond, some next level. it challenges, drives, buries the past in obscurity and the unearths the future in an apprehensive and sometimes false clarity, much like the sense of sight we are all so accustomed to.

it is frustrating at times, but mostly he envisions it as a positive thing. it churns often, altering the sense of what is important and what is trivial, constantly making him shift his footing to pivot in accordance with the new ground and maintain balance. it seems like a healthy thing, an intense thing; seems to lend some semblance of integrity and meaning to a somewhat undefined state of existence which we all share. the problem is, it is equally intense in its difficulty to focus. this is a life-energy we're talking about; it wants to dance footloose and bounce recklessly, unpredictable, all over the dimensions of possibility. and it always maintains a steel grip on him, dragging him along to whatever fields and corners it chooses to encounter. it is an energy with endless potential, but he is only starting to learn how to collect it (firefly in a glass jar. with a stick and a leaf to re-create the environment it is used to) and apply it towards the ends that he deems most important, most relevant to the person he is constantly in a state of becoming. it is closest to an emotion, and other emotions have empirically (but not from an unbiased perspective) been noted to send it scattering like an overexcited field of electrons. hard to keep the reigns on an emotion, he finds. even so, it holds the potential for anything you could possibly ask within it....it comes down to a matter of commanding it, which involves being true to one's self, defining one's self, and not falling to temptations and idleness along the way.

this fury is found inward, but is in a state of constant outward expression. and that is the relevance of the two songs listed at the beginning of this note...they find sympathy, or empathy, one of the two or perhaps two of the two, in the movement and bliss of existence. these songs express the joy of living; they are a natural accentuation of the rhythm of expression. they strip his observations of superfluities, and allow his mind to progress with the natural baroque pretense (or so he believes) of an underlying melody. they are part of his own melody; perhaps just a snippet or incomplete chalking of the equation, but help him to see things, to express himself, how he means to. basically, the place that they put him in....that place is his most organic, least-distilled character....the freedom and the joy of being, m.

isn't that interesting? he thinks so.