Jof

Hello darlings,

I really meant to be more communicative in online affairs upon return to the states. I thought, hey, not much to do in cute ol' york, pa, so of course ...

Didn't work out so well. So, just a few quick notes.

I have my old cell phone number until July 1, when I must again release the phone for communal usage.

The father is returning; they didn't get the project extension: however, the technical backstop position in DC might still be available, otherwise they are going to try their best to send him to kosovo, vietnam, or iraq. Oh, I think there was something in Pakistan as well. I of course would love that, because I want to see my darling Anisa, but I think the parents aren't really into any of those options. So, unless he's staying in the states to work and gets a company cell, I'll be unreachable until returning to rome.

Next: again regarding cell phones, I will have the same cell number when I return to rome, though I don't know if any of you had that except anke who is never online, and i would post it if i knew what it was.

EDIT: Rome cell: +39 3357641503

And zagg, darling, honey, baby? Text me, if you still have my old number or I'll text you if i can find yours because the whole e-mail thing just doesn't thrill me recently and I feel like quite the horrid twin/wife/seat partner on the bus ride to hell.

EDIT: Current cell: 717 578 3591

In general news, I got a job, helping out a friend who is HR director for a local factory, Worthington Steelpac. Also, since i've been home I've been regularly attending Unitarian Universalist services and Shoe, honey? Remember how I said Unitarians are cute? I totally stand by that proclamation. They had "Imagine" as the postlude music last week, and this sunday I went with the brother's girlfriend to the Women's Spirit Circle solstice ritual and I think all of it is just absolutely adorable. Damn hippies! ;-)

It's fucking hot and humid as hell. And i've got too much family around. Makes me nervous.

Woke up today to dark windy shivering rain. Not the kind of rain that tapers off to a mild day, but the curl up on the couch with a book and a cup of soup listening to the radio kind of rainy day. Where the windows are streaked with rain and the cars hiss as they drive by and in your head you think you hear the blues indistinctly lolling.

So that is a comfort, to wrap around yourself. Makes me not even care that I have three exams today because it just calms me into a certain state of mind. That, or the fact that I couldn't sleep last night is making me rather docile.

Parents will arrive tomorrow, and I really need to start moving very soon. On Wednesday night leave Rome, stay at hotel near both airport and beach, and on Thursday morning fly to DC. Have I mentioned how shocked and excited I am that I have a direct flight? Honestly, I can't remember ever doing that. It seems so wrong, so ... simple.

In other news, Berlin had its traditional May Day rioting and politicians seem to be debating all over the damn place. Eh.

I don't know why.

I keep hoping he'll get shot in the face - excuse me, peppered - but i suppose we must appreciate the simple pleasures: Cheney Facing Widespread Opposition at BYU Commencement Address Not that it in any way interferes with his evil.

So, 2 weeks until I leave for the states for the summer. And there are things in the states I want to do. I just don't understand why I have to be there until September. (Work, earn money). I found a place to live next semester, near the tram line. The people seem pretty excellent. I can start moving whenever.

God, I'm starting to get nervous at the thought of being in the states so long.

And if there was any doubt that I am simply a bad person, the fact that I am sick of hearing about a tiny polar bear cub is the clincher.

Update: Go watch: Buying the War (Bill Moyers). Definitely worth it. Thanks, voxsjournal for the information.

Do we all just become a collection of anecdotes?
Patched together with darling idiosyncrasies?
Do we assemble our pasts to create a face?
Are we more than that at all?
It can’t be erased.
What’s done is done –
And what’s us is either
A shoddy collection
Of cracked seashells from
When we couldn’t hear the ocean
Or too scary to ever own up to –
The ferocity of now being the same as death. ( Read more... )

But in the end the mountains remain in the ocean and there is no such end perceived, end is illusion, it cannot be obtained. We’d never know it if we saw it, never have the chance to greet it like an old friend and smile into the face of absurdity.

What do I know except that I feel hazy? A cloud swims around me, I am the cloud itself, my thoughts are drops of rain, untraceable, pummeling toward a solid steady earth so far away and tiny. Thoughts colliding with the miniscule specks of light and life that blur together for me so ethereal.
Solid objects in the sun, which is more real? The cold feel of clay or the music of a silent still day. Can you dance about a mountain? Can you sculpt a poem?

the thoughts of no-thought idle compounding fear upon beauty with the sharpness of a winter moon, winter when everything bites and cracks and lines become clear against the black bleak singing stillness, against the death and spirits and no-time times passing in linear fashion unlike summer that hops and twirls and leaps around, a mess of time never passing quite in line. The sprites of summer are far less imaginative, just pops of quirks and lazy mischief. Fear upon beauty, beauty upon sadness, cracks lined with hope. There is no isolated good, and beauty is far from perfection. Beauty in no-thought no-time fashion flying arcing in swings of thought-motion. What makes sense is the motion, the feel of the motion as it dances, like the motion of sunshine, the motion of winter. And this is not the detail of the here and now, the charming tic, the shadow the leaf, this is the everything in beauty altogether no-time flying. And the cut, the gasp, of pain within beauty itself inseparable from sadness from fear from hope. The image, the idea of a winter moon’s knife is more wintery than the trudging days and boots covered in gray slush the pain of red cheeks rushing inside. When it’s happening. To think of it is winter, to be there in that moment it is simply life ignored 99% as usual, the moment, the now that is so unnoticeable.

Solidity is a rarity.

There is nothing absurd about floating aimlessly when rooted to the ground. All is in perception and perception is like ocean. Can never quite find the bottom anyway. Perception and assumption, which will win?

Bosh. Irrelevant. Floating and swimming and flying and drowning are. No-thought rules the space of time and time is anything but linear. So it goes. Where is the kernel of beauty truth understanding and all the other myths that are as hard to find as the ground itself? The words are just motion anyway. Just a dance. Not even that. A dumb-show. ((Send in the clowns)).

It’s not only plot that is missing from life, not only vibrancy. It’s true that the colours aren’t like those in the movies. That the movements are as graceful (nor slapstick funny). In life we can’t edit out the boring parts. We’ve become impatient. We expect meaning out of each moment, meaning coming from some source other than ourselves, from some great scriptwriter who would never leave us sitting around bored for more than the few seconds it took to convince us we were bored. It is impossible for every moment to make sense, it’s even rare for one or two moments to make sense and they’ll always be the ones to confuse you later anyway. Reality is sneaky as hell.

At times it becomes like absolute death of everything outside thought. Frozen solid. The world outside and body itself. And this all powerful no-thought is nothing but motion, constant, bouncing against the absoluteness of the solid wall of death in everything that is supposed to exist. And inside is raw energy, pulling in what it can through the wall. Colours and sounds and memories, because memories are in the distance, away from the churning. But these are only words thrown together for the purpose of sound, not quite melody, but some sort of chaotic primitive rhythm to the bouncings of the mind. Connect the dots in maddeningly inadequate trails of words and sounds.

And what of these mountains in the ocean? And the oceans and the mountain we know are the same, the same in the end which is impossible itself because impossible to perceive. Is it in fact those irrelevant differences that matter? (But not in the end, not in the end).

Sudden silences, no-thought returns, whether good or bad. It’s neither one nor the other, it’s the quality of the static that determines the impact of no-thought on capacity to live and breathe. Moments full of negativity from no-thought static, other times it’s perfectly okay. And when the static pulls you down, when the no-thought stills all hopes and actions, filling everything with nervous buzzing, breath comes sharply and life not at all.

There is stillness and there is chaos, and yet they are not far apart to
the mind.

Ahem.

I'm doing the ever required friends-list purge, to remove those that either don't update, or that I've rarely replied to and have rarely replied to me, etc. Standard thing. If you'd like to remain on my friends list, post a comment here. Just cleaning things up a bit.

"If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don't speak often) please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want - good or bad - BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you."

somehow we always want somone to save
us from the mess of ourselves
from the swirling coil of unattainable
mind. ridiculous quandry pretending
to be forever decently dressed
adequately assessed in faux harmony.

singing to the night in reckless harmony
and in the end with nothing of us to save
we prance about, delicately satin dressed
and as they come ahorde we breach ourselves
the gleaming night is of apes pretending
to love, keeping the gleam unattainable

and yet in this night unattainable
the seeping vision of whorish harmony
begs to be a dream pretending
to be nightmare, in order to save
shredded decencies, or else ourselves
from despair as normalcy dressed.

and as we so appropriately dressed
we sink into the hope of unnattainable
passions of movies, unlike ourselves
who reek of mediocre harmony.
left with nothing of the spark to save
we stagger, drunken, to love pretending.

Love as night, as day, as life pretending.
and when you are for sex so dressed
that you couldnt breathe yourself to save
everything right in death, unnattainable
fortune down your spine gasps harmony
in ecstatic renewal of ourselves,

and we breathe, again, within ourselves
no more sex-induced pretending
we begin to seek, begin to know a harmony
as we are for life triumphant dressed
we know ourselves as the unnattainable
the naturally concrete, nothing to save.

pretending to be as stars so dressed
to become ourselves unnattainable
and yet in harmony, nothing to save.

gate gate paragate.

everything is valid.
every truth, every lie.