Letters to the French

Inversion

2012-02-01T16:36:00.000-06:00

Amidst all the busy, a day of hooky I gifted myself. From responsibility I for one day fled; luxuriant with quiet and rest it was. Oh, to remember: miles will come, once last week's soreness fades; for just one day, students' problems need not also be mine; momentarily I can put aside the likelihood of our program this year failing. Failing is for me nothing new, of course - this is what education and non-profits do best, after all - but somehow this place feels more necessary that most of the others. We're addressing a need otherwise not discussed. Or so I tell myself, running late in a sleepless night - such is the shortcoming of memory, such is the spectre of the seemingly-near future.

About those miles: tucked in among the other runs have we found these twice weekly four a.m. jaunts. At such an hour, the night is still dark, morning still a thought long yet from the horizon. In the cold, our legs turn over under the stars and in the heavy silence there is not much else - and that is altogether perfect. Winter's comforting, these miles, and the ice familiar, the apathy shown our ankles somehow a tenderness against the day yet hours ahead. I think what I love most about these mornings is how easily I in them forget the task ahead, the task of each day trying to build velcro brains where previously there'd been only loss. I think she loves these mornings best because it's when we're most alike while also most different - but then if I've learned anything at all, it's that I know her least where I think I'm uncovering the most.

Most evenings I now expect texts from students, asking for help; some evenings I also get full papers, some so rough as to defy description as drafts. A finalized essay due the next day, most often, and this one, this most recent plea for editing help? There was laughing, definitely, and maybe a bit of exasperated crying, and in hindsight, I might have - probably should have - reported her to CPS. But she loves her kid and understands classical conditioning, that much was clear, and so what if she can't write? Maybe sometimes love and effort ought to be enough. That's all she has to give, really, all any of them have to give, it seems - love and effort and doubts and fears. I try altogether too hard not to think about how many of them are about to fail out of college, and fail at that equally as often. I hope to forget that any one of their shortcomings could be the failure that kills our program's funding, leaves us short of the conditions of our grant. Cynicism comes easy, and hope with great difficulty, when numbers seem to count for more than lives - but I'm running more, and on steadily more treacherous trails, so I suppose there's at least that.

Still, I can't help but fear. For the program, sure, but especially for so many of the students. Also, there's this: fear of the dark, fear of my imagination, fear of the unknown, fear of success. The other night, running back down a dark canyon after nabbing a few peaks (sunset and early dusk, snow and ice and slush and so much vertical, the fatigue delicious), I mistook the grumbling of an empty stomach for a cougar's low growl. If I could say misidentifying hunger as fear was something new... but, well. We both know better, don't we?

I've a question from months ago on my mind, it this whole while waiting, even as I perpetually ignored it. What fears drive and shape you?, he so earnestly asked, and my immediate answer then - only everything - seemed both too glib and simple (even if true) to offer as a response. Which, I suppose, is really only another way of saying I still haven't found the answer he - or maybe, for that matter, I - desire.

So I run, as the stars shine and the cold breeze blows and the mornings and evenings and miles keep piling up. We're halfway through another quarter, and the successes and failures tally on their respective ledgers. We're making a difference, or maybe we're not, but either way, tomorrow it'll be as if today never happened. Which, I suppose, is rather nice - even as it's another thing to fear.

Newest Year, Oldest Line

2011-12-31T15:10:00.003-06:00

So it is. Thinking to the future, I remember the past: words, come slippery. Words, come elusive. Words, come unbidden - I dare you. The big build-up to the smashing crescendo, the huge reveal! No. That's not the way most of these words pitter-patter through my head, onto the quietly judging, waiting page. Instead, the let-down of a phrase that'll never fall into place quite right, all edges when what I've need of is instead a smooth smile. So. This thing?

This thing's a silver-sheened salmon, radiant pink, spawning all matter of uncertainties, as full with questions as these things forever are. There's also the matter of what's comfortable - isn't that this? - and what's right, what's seemly and timely, too. Ah, but questions: how they're multiplying forever upon our tongues (swallow that whiskey quick, slug away that troublesome tickle!), in wait lying. In wait.

Years ago, actually, did I first find peace in shadows, questions, doubts; not yet has that changed, not yet has the uncertainty become unwelcome. Besides, I found the right whiskey'll silence any tickle, profane as those twitches may at times be. Theology of the damned, and I'm all the more grateful for it. Sinner. For the aches ibuprofen'll not reach, for the holes I've no way of plugging - there's liquor, miles, words, or the hope of, anyways. Or so I'll dream?

A week I've in Stumptown been this particular trip, or not quite - but seeming forever longer, maybe, given the rain - and oh, oh the rain, how it fell and fell and fell. Stereotypes, sure, but having had sunshine and wonder as often as not on these previous visits, how doleful I'll find myself this time through. How I'll ache for the light, a physical need no less than that of these miles. So, the weather - the oldest, most familiar of our tired Midwestern conversations - the weather: the mist's a waterfall upon the miles, and likewise the fog a window to my soul (What do you see there, through the steamed pane?); this sloppy soup of trails in which I find myself slip-slopping, stumbling back in time-lapsed thought, the disarray with which I'm sliding by these seemingly prehistoric ferns - all the better does it mirror my mind, these befores and afters and, of course, the what next?s.

I've a head full with altogether too much thinking, it's true. This is not a new development.

Water images dominate the week's words. This is, of course, the most transitional of the holidays, perhaps all the more so this year: slip-sliding am I through limb-split cascading showers; thick drops fall heavy, and the sky all the while holds sodden and grey. In these miles I've a particular gravity, that of paper dissolving in a tray. This is Portland, this is Forest Park - mud-slicked leaves and sliding, sliding; wet and wet and wet and miserable, miserable are the miles; I'm the whole week through cold and cold and cold. But: miles will come, days will pass, and with them this mood'll turn over, as forever it's wont to do. Even if unseen, I know the the sun rises, sets; likewise, the moon'll find his cycles, even if we've no sight by which to see it in this week's particular ever-present grey. Reach we toward the new year, unseeing that which'll lie ahead; maybe it's the weather, but this year the coming midnight feels particularly like falling back, into the past. Then again, perhaps I'm just forever prematurely nostalgic, inclined towards catalogue before even there's an event to remember. Who am I to say?

About those miles. "It's inspiring," she says, "knowing you don't want to run, and do anyways," and well, if it's true that hardly have I for a step this week cared, well. You know how it is, was, always will be. Miles of trials and trials of miles and some truths will forever hold their weight; to say anything more would, well, miss the point. We are the product of the steps we take, most simply. More and more - with each of the passing miles, as I find my fitness once more, perhaps - do I remember this simplest of truths.

It's only two days away - no, tomorrow, now - that an old home becomes a new home becomes a shared home, and that's certainly one way to begin a new year, all of it done before even as I'm doing it again for the first time. If I focus, there's still this truth: I haven't words for stories that aren't mine, and this story is probably less mine even than most I hope to tell. Tried I her larynx on - strapped those chords between my own, perhaps you see it? - but I found myself boxing frustrations instead, another voice hardly befitting my own. We all do this on occasion, it's true - forget who we are, try to be another, at least in tone and spirit. Such are the follies of our perpetual youths, our hopes, insecurities, doubts, wondering alike. I don't know how else to say it, except to return to water: these fingers are not my own, are not the sea, are not the sky. These fingers are the in-between. These fingers are... floating?

Yes, floating. Just at the surface.

Peace and Love!

2011-12-12T01:25:00.001-06:00

What days wrought with change have we so recently known! There are the travels, sure, but more so do we futures in each slow day craft; note the shadows of the past in each step forward through the present. Miles of grace I find in these foothill trails, especially blessed as they most often are - either bright with sunshine or thinly radiant by the power of a quietly observing moon. Just as freely did I bathe this past weekend in fog, but still: contentment by such definition boils down to miles and miles, near-constant movement. Between places, between thoughts, between lives: always, I'm realizing, there's movement.

I'd stolen for myself another day away from work - not much care have I for the collection of wages, it'd seem, but such is the life I'll hope always to choose, poor in finance so as to be rich in spirit - and so I'd these hours passed, one bus to another, one state for another. I spent the miles reading, and remembering, and more specifically remembering the things for which I've not yet much hope of finding the right words.

This particular story I've years and years mostly side-stepped - and continue to do so, really, but for it told now through his father's eyes. And the road mirrors some of these thoughts: It's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world comes to mind, and climbing over Stevens so little can I see the snow gleaming across the dark, but that white which I witness is a beautifully stark thing indeed. Struck dumb am I - and not least by this irrational desire to make for Proud Mary and I a winter ride of the pass, to soak in the cold and sometimes savage mountain splendor. Mulling the notion over, I find in it a tribute to like-minded spirits, particularly bathing as I am in the memory of this adventurer soul that in the past'd showed me a life more fully lived. Mindfulness he mirrored, sure, but more so even this: an active participation in all things. Ah, but how I've veiled myself from some memories!

Likewise, realizations had many times before and consequently forgotten. Such as this: I forget much and remember less. I think about time, and how it wanders from us, and through Gold Bar I chew the gristle of the thought over. Jot I phrases in corners, knowing all the while how I'll later forget to seek the slim sentences back out - but still I note them, and when another like-minded night comes in which to lay awake and waiting, well then perhaps I'll find them. I know this, too - that when such a night arrives and the sleep won't come, well then the words will pour right out. Disfigured, sure, but still holding some semblance, and like in a dream I'll ink them fast, skipping spelling punctuation grammar - because the process of the thoughts will forever carry more weight than their delivery to a faceless document later. It may even be that come morning, I'll have cleared it all, find myself with only another blank page. Of course, then again, perhaps I won't.

But I'm straying again. In any case: I've been sleeping strangely; there are too many stories of which to speak, but I've at best only the opportunity to give them each a few token foggy phrases. Croak out a few tattered bits I will, sure, but then what narrative might I realistically expect to offer when I've but a few windows between times myself?

Wandering still, losing focus. The bus is still rolling, of course - now I find we've paused in Monroe. I remember much here, more than I should for perhaps only a half-dozen visits. But such is the nature of fatigue, maybe. I remember the gas station once raided for directions (though to quite where I can no longer say, I can speak decidedly of the way the air that night tasted - almost burnt, as if summer'd over-warmed, and was now cooling into the disrepair of fall); I remember the Safeway we'd stopped beside - though for what? Neither do I recall that, though only six weeks past; instead what I remember is the way my tired feet stubbed themselves against the shiny cream floor, the way the blisters pinched on the ends of two toes, the way my left hip locked up after an hour in the car, the small bruise carried tenderly by my right heel. This is what I remember - the experience, rather than the pertinent details.

And all of this dwelling in past and place transports me; back in thought I find myself at a memory from long ago - a rival high school's meet (the Monroe Cheesemakers), spring in southern Wisconsin, age fifteen or sixteen. I've on my mind their red red track, this race I'd bombed (the 1200 of a d-med, and oh lord the pressure I used to manufacture for myself!), a troubled foster brother and the ensuing police report. But nor, I realize, is that quite my story to tell, not really, and besides, there are so many other times and places in which to lose myself from there. Amusing I find it, how easily these memories shift, all this loose scree in our unsecured psyche. Eventually I'll circle back in thought to the things I'd rather not think about, but then, who are we to try and control the tides? Feels like floating on a sea of pebbles, mostly, without ever having learned to swim.

I'd the thought to move on, I did, the thought to run into another book and lose myself in pleasant fluff, some summer reading. But instead I chose to stay, to follow this train of thought, to savor the depths of these things I'd forgotten. Just as I've each of these past summers appreciated more the quiet nights for all the miles of hard riding, so too did I luxuriate in the high places both beside me and in the annals of memory in appreciation of both their beauty and their cost. I treasured the sated white of steep Cascadian slopes and the glowing ember memories of all these places loved before, just as I was sure he'd have loved this night. And what fun he'd've poked - how dimly this thick wet resembles the powder of his beloved Snowbird!, he'd have laughed. To hear him tell it, he was but an amateur, but there are those that do nothing half-hearted, and Jon was certainly of such a number. Even if he'd certainly have been cautious as he first learned the lay of the slopes, I'm equally certain he'd have found the blacks in short order. Such was his way.

And I'd wish of whiskey then, thinking this through, wish of whiskey to see the fire in my chest swallowed up by a fire in my throat, to see this particular inferno at least temporarily swallowed by the more subdued warmth of the quietly drunk. I did no such thing, though. Instead I held the ember of memory and thought in tired hands and behind heavy eyes, and remembered that this is living, that there is no light without the dark, that to hide from it is to lessen whatever hard truths might come from it. Of course, sometimes losing is simply losing - but I didn't want to think about that. So I stole his father's words, words that were not my own, and made of them my velvet coat. I dreamed of a freshly flowered meadow surrounded by snowy ridges, that fierce ankle-biting terrain, and though in the cold night no spring came warming, it was good. Fatigue stole the hours, a deep fatigue of the spirit, and I locked myself in the past, where losses and regrets I treasured even as I bathed all the while in the well of the future; I was glad of the Kodachrome thoughts, and treasured the hurt. I may be a sick, sick man.

Still, I know this: even if I've no particular reason to believe the future to be especially different than the past, I know it for certain to be wholly unknown, and unknown I'll not make into unwelcome. I'll refuse not to forget at least some slight modicum of caution as forging on ahead, and it warms me to think of how he'd've advocated the same. There are some truths I hope not to forget.

And traveling, it's - as is often the case - the same long roads I travel in return as in departing, though my reading's changed. Now it's a work of the gods I read, pondering omniscience and omnipotence and the need for narrative deities. And I cannot help but tangentially think of the kindnesses these past years have shown me, kindnesses that have like invisible hands conspired to thrust me forth so, as if colluding before for the possibility of today. I spend the miles in fond thought: of Jon and these many loved high places; of a family formerly unknown, yet accepted all the more quickly on account of it; of strangers that have time and time again in their hearts and homes taken me in, full with the sort of hospitality first learned in Midwestern youth.

And this after a weekend spent walking damp streets and remembering a first visit, now two and a half long years - a lifetime! - past. Beverage flowed easily as freely that week as this past weekend, but how different the tone, the objective - from forgetting to remembering, from running away to holding my stride. And I remembered connections, to place, sure, Portland having become something of a home away from home, but more so to people. So fine are the graces of mutual admiration, respect, trust! Times have for several of these treasured few so changed - the finding and choosing of so many respective poverties comes first to mind - and yet I think each of us affected would say our lives are the richer for it.

I think in particular of one fine friend: he's in love, of course, and among many other rich traits - his humility, kindness, compassion and humor first spring to mind - is all the more enviable for it, they each a gentle spirit made more full by the company of the other. If I can't say so definitively where I am as he might, I can for certain still say this: I'm by no means ungrateful or unhappy. Life's all manner of privilege and grace, for which I daily hope a greater cognizance.

And of nothing, perhaps, can I be more certain than this: we've each, this company I keep, a tremendous quantity - and better yet, quality - of love surrounding us. We've a sacristy here - Seven Day Recreationalists, each communing in spirit with this earth together! - among our number of blessings, and trails abound for our holies of holies, but more so even we've the simpler things, like goodness of heart and the joy of full spirits. Words are a special treasure, sure, and ought be shared wisely and kindly, but more so even is the company a gift, this communion of friends and family.

So I've hope yet of finding for myself a more potent and pleasant memory, of upgrading this steel sieve, hope that I'll less often forget the simpler lessons living might daily offer - even as I'm all too well aware of how memory's in the past failed me. There's altogether too much love between friends, particularly this fine season. Or, more simply: be well, stranger friends, be well.

As Jon would've said, Peace and Love! There are worse things that being a dirty hippie.

Catch The Fall

2011-12-04T22:43:00.000-06:00

'Tis an unseasonably warm December day, and from brunch we've to coffee shop / bakery gone, words and grammar and sumbissions and student help ahead. She's working through a student essay - how easily I've pawned off that particular work! - and I've these words to compile, student texts to answer. Logarithmic transformations are hard, if you didn't know, and how they'll struggle, but the rewards I think are greater when they'll come at such a cost. Stickier the glue may be, the more valiant the effort made. Perhaps?

There's this table beside us as we work, two young women studying their chemistry and psychology, and I'm near enough certain I've seen them before, at the college. More certain am I, though, that they've some of these pieces still incorrect; I overhear them work through valence shells and wavelengths (350-800 nanometers? Is that violet to red?), a tangent to string theory besides, and so tempted am I to interrupt their errors, correct them, set their study straight. Finals are coming, don't you know - one more week of classes, then the tests - and stress levels build, build, build. I'm tempted to place bets on which students are most likely to meltdown, but am trying to be a better man than that.

Maybe I'll drink before work instead. (Joke, guys. I promise. Maybe.)

*******

Training's begun in earnest again, these miles climbing and piling, nine atop seven atop twelve. Seems the twelve-hour attempt Halloween weekend's proven enough to put my ass in gear once more, and I've these goals - 50k's in the spring! I'll be competitive again! (Maybe?) - and long runs will each weekend, when I've both time and light, abound. Each weekend, it seems, I'll find ways to punish myself further and farther and faster. Now, a full month back in, the fatigue's a baseline rather than anomaly, the cloak I find myself most comfortable. Mornings are better when it's a fall from bed, rather than grace, and in this aches I find I like myself best.

Anyways: it's miles of trials, trials of miles, I tell myself, miles of trials, trials of miles.

*******

The holidays've fallen upon us in earnest now, this the season of Halloween - birthday - Turkeyday - birthday - Giftmas - birthday - birthday. One year fades, and another on the horizon looms. I've this Christmas trip planned, another potential trip just after. A family I'll meet, a brother I'll hope to catch. Most often, it seems, I continue to miss.

Or: some things are as much literal as metaphorical, and it seems this'll be the time of year I've the hardest time telling the difference. What was, may be... or it may be no longer. Neti, neti, I think, and wonder at the rituals, rites and phrases we each find comfort in. Words, I think - and how they may be both empty and full.

*******

Anyways, we've all some catching up to do, probably.

Shadow Puppets

2011-11-28T23:58:00.003-06:00

She's her melancholy. I've not my words. And there's a ghost come calling from the dark.

*******

I'd a wholly unreasonable pledge made, true - but still I've every intent of keeping it. We'd these drinks down, of course, more than several, maybe - but still, the drinking doesn't matter. I'd promised them I'd apply for an MFA program, a program in particular, a program across the pond. I'd no good reason to make such a pledge, in truth, no good reason except perhaps their words and the bolstering booze flowing so freely and this pride I'd been trying on as if it were a second skin I'd someday wear. Here a clarification may be in order: this isn't a cry - oh, praise me, praise me! soothe this ego! - but a matter of observation instead. It's not that I haven't communion here, in words; it's not that I haven't desire of words that are mine alone, my blood in typeface; it's not that I haven't a yearning for greater skills than these meager tools I call my own. Rather, there's this: I haven't the confidence and less so the skills. Instead, I've these exercises I've begun, carved out for myself - and these exercises alone. Daily I say I'll write - and near-daily I do. Several submissions I say I'll each month compile - and thus far, I have. Even if for each success there's a dozen failings, this routine I'll still call success.

Except.... except most often, it feels as if I'm trying to sculpt without touching the clay. Except most often it feels as if I'm trying to skip stones across a river run dry. Except most often it feels as if I've forgotten, as metaphors go, how to throw at all. Still, I'm trying... and maybe somehow that'll be enough?

*******

Other worlds I lose myself in too: I've been running more again, and all the more aware I am that I've not so many years left on these joints, their aches perpetually and infinitely spilling forth. On account of these aches I'll train all the harder, trying to squeeze more out of the years I do have; I'll reach for the slights that spurred me on in years before, press on for the motivations I'd in these past few years allowed myself to forget. If I'm to ever realize whatever potential may or may not in these legs rest, I've a limited window, it's true. Of such truths I'm all too aware - and for it all the harder will I run.

*******

'You're a better writer than I am,' she says. 'I'm not shitting you rainbows. You are.' So she says, earnest and plain-speaking, but other truths I've argued and will continue to argue: most of those who'll call themselves writers oughtn't, haven't any notion the gravity of such a name. And this is what I think of as I watch her parse phrases. She's writing the jumbled thoughts before the jump, of the long descent - to madness, to redemption, to death - and as she writes her face draws taunt with the sort of thoughts that precede tears, so personally does she take the story as she crafts it. And yet, this is what I think of: I think of what happens when a volcano meets a tornado and I think of what happens when circumstances meet a dreamscape context, all of it blurred by the moment and yet equally detached from past and present. A river of time washes over all of it, and for all practical purposes, words are useless. So too, maybe, are senses. I don't know what to think and I don't know what to say and I don't speak because I haven't a thought to give voice. Maybe I've been running too much - or maybe I've still too many to go, having not yet found my enough.

*******

So I've finished this second round of drink, realizing that if I'm drinking more often it may yet be I'm drinking less. Perhaps this is moderation - what a foreign word! - or perhaps it's becoming habit. So many things, I think, half-drunk and happily aloof, are more a matter of perspective than definition; this, I think, is probably one of them. Likewise, she's a knack for running down - long limbs leaping miles forward ahead and down with each and every stride - and I for the climbs. Another thing I'm realizing: the way we'll tread this earth's as much a matter of genes as anything, maybe.

*******

Or: I'm once more writing more and saying less, probably. Alas, I don't know how else to translate these living beating breathing jumbled days. In other words, your guess is as good as mine.

Tomorrow

2011-11-17T22:38:00.001-06:00

Oh, today. I'd left the house and found the streets sheet ice, but running late, attempted to ride anyways. Three times in two blocks gravity won, hard; after returning my bike to the garage, I slipped and slid my walk into work. At work my coffee exploded as I microwaved it, the take-out cup disintegrating and coffee splatter everywhere. I'd a bit of a hangover from whiskey the night previous, and hadn't yet gotten to my then cold breakfast - but still, it was funny. Ridiculous is usually funny.

And the rest of the day came crashing in.

First we'd a less than stable student burst in, sobbing - one of the students with whom we've made the most progress, perhaps. Her words ran reckless and wild, near incoherent: her car was wrecked; the cops said it was her fault; it wasn't, she knew it wasn't; she'd been concussed and nervous and just agreeing to what they said; now her car was totaled and her day was ruined and the cops'd said it was her fault; how was she going to see her kid (who stays with grandma, thirty miles away, during the week) on the weekends if she didn't have her car? Slowly we calmed her, got a clean and clear statement written, tried to make arrangements for her. I'm a bit afraid we may have lost her for the quarter, though, just the same - and this after we'd in three weeks time fought her grades back from F's to B's and C's. There was hope, and now there's so much less.

From this we fell into the student who'd the night previous sent texts threatening suicide, and seemed well on her way to a full-fledged breakdown today. She shows all the classic signs of abuse, of course - and we've our suspicions she's still abused - but has social anxieties such that any help we've been able to find her has been too foreign to her for her to accept it. We've long ago run out of ideas, and hugs or an open ear are such small tools against such a heavy weight. I'm afraid for the futures it seems she's increasingly charting out.

And then we'd these two papers returned, both F's, both papers the English tutor and I had each labored over with their respective authors. Oh, but the grading! Sentences were marked fragments. Points mysteriously disappeared from totals. The one paper 'hadn't been turned in,' said the prof... until the student found it, graded, on the top of her pile. The list of nonsense went on, and on, and on, forty-five minutes easy... but then, this prof has been a nightmare since the quarter began. Of course the prof is tenured - in one of her classes, three of twenty-five are passing; in the other, nine of twenty-five. We arrange a meeting with the department head, will see what recourse's available. Progress seems a dim light on the horizon, but at least there's some hope here.

And then a text from the high school: the school was in lockdown; a body'd been pulled from the pool, unresponsive. Not many know much, and I know less - only that he was a freshman, and couldn't be revived. I'd worked briefly with his brother. It was a rough day for a great many students.

A long day it was, the sort of day that feels as if I were still teaching in St Paul. I forget how hard that year was, sometimes, forget until a day like today shocks me back into memory. And yet? I miss that green-tiled office building school, those survivor students. I miss our dysfunctional and broken community, our collection of perpetual fuck-ups and disasters and a million daily dramas.

It was a long day for a great many people today, and my day was so much better than so many others' - spilling a bike on ice isn't such a big deal; losing a brother, or reason to live, or access to your daughter all are.

I've my whiskey here, and maybe you've yours there. Here's to remembering the charities of yesterday and the hopes of tomorrow, and forgetting an awful lot of today. Tomorrow'll be better. Mostly, it has to be.

Braggadocio

2011-11-07T21:58:00.000-06:00

The days in which I'll use this space to brag of misadventures and misplaced bravado have passed, or so I'll hope, anyways. Though, if I'm honest, that may at least in part be the result of these past few weeks, which have given rise to far more self-deprecation than any auditioned false modesties; may it yet happen that I actually learn humility. I'll not count on it, of course - but maybe there's a chance.

Seems likewise that I've these chances at grasping health, but keep passing them up in favor of fatigue, anxieties and stressors their own dirty laundries with a knack for piling high. I've been especially poor at saying no this fall, even compared to autumns of the past, is what I'm saying. There's a bit of fomo, as he'd say, hoping everyone would like him better with his phrases less square¹, sure, but just as likely some of this is the result of unreasonable hopes: that I'll rise insatiable again; that I'll prove myself invincible once more; that this skeleton's above and beyond the capacity for rust. It's not so, of course; these bones, I'm hearing, are well past the age at which such dreams are any longer seemly - but still, I wonder.

So I hoard the little victories, try hard to make them sound larger. I pretend to be more than I'm not. And I keep right forward, filling all the rabbit holes in this garden with the procrastination I keep shoveling on. Someday, maybe, it'll all make sense - but damn well you ought to know I won't wait around for the day it does. Instead: another run, another drink, another excuse probably too. I'll figure it out tomorrow, maybe. Or, more likely, I won't.

-------
1. We didn't.

Fragments

2011-10-06T01:06:00.004-05:00

Today's a good day / to flex the muscles of the weary...

Wednesday:
I've memories like trains, sometimes about trains, another day running on to night. This current memory triggered by a text: 'you don't remember me, maybe, but we met on a train last August... here's that bakery's address.' She was wrong - I do remember her, we shared whiskey and good venison sausage and talked about speaking German in Montana - but I don't as much care about that. I wonder if she still lives in the cold by the border, but it's the thought of this bakery I'd forgotten which excites me. It's fall, I can't help but slide across times before and yet to come.

Tuesday:
My americano tastes burnt, grounds thick like a charred skin that wouldn't dare think of dissolving. I'm trying not to think of all this tired. He texts: another long morning, limbs acting on impulse, auto-pilot. Thoughts are delayed, sky is gray-brite, prose lacking. Muse on repeat, and I hope you're well... I suspect we've each fallen into our own respective wells, more likely; these stories are completely different - and just the same altogether too alike.

Monday:
These mornings come early, hard-edged like summer heat lightning. May be I've run only three hours before, but that too was another life, now nearly forgotten; students text me, and the sky's still purple-gray, and that's exciting and that's okay and that's terrifying - some need more help than I've time to give. I've slept for hours; I've seemingly not slept; another long week's begun. I'm reading these words and writing those, there's math and smiles and frustration written across all of it. I'm surviving this Monday, just surviving.

Wednesday:
A sweet ride to work it is, wheels spinning across the drip-drop and splish-splash, and slip-sliding streams sent cascading in waves by the cars that plow through them, a smaller - but similar - shower spraying from my fenders. I am cold, beyond damp, and joyous just the same. Fingers numbed, I ride through white-gray clouds swathing the still purpled streets; shredded cotton balls of wet, they soften and obscure the way even just ahead. This is a palatial water-world fairytale, and in it I have no work day ahead, only play.
Like all good dreams, the illusion does not last.

Tuesday:
I've legs in want of fire, a hellish day of nowhere meetings and wholly lost students to put miles behind; a quick hour I can perhaps squeeze into the fading day before I've next an appointment, and so it is that I've flats on my feet, a whispering wind for my breath, these slopes falling away from the trail that clings only by the narrowest margins against gravity. I've up and up and then another route up to try, the sky sliding from purple-orange to purple-gray, and then this pounding flying whirling dervish descent. Three times in the space of a mile I nearly bowl a walker over... I'm careening too rapidly down to have seen them before I'm upon them. I fly, a ghost against the fading sky. Silent as a deer, bounding as a hare. I hear nothing, I hear everything. I am the whispering grasses, I am gravity, I am a pebble loosed to roll the pitch. And then I've overdone it completely, these last few miles liquid fire and starry eyes and I am a god. Still, maybe more so for the suffering, I am a god. For the moment, for the night, I am a god - and all is well, quite well. Forty miles and two days and all is so unbelievably right. just... right.

Monday:
They'll throw it up, and I'll do my damnedest to run it down. They'll throw it up, and I'll do my damnedest to run it down. They'll throw it up, and I'll do my damnedest to run it down. Then someone will cut, hard, while I'm covering - and I won't have a chance, these short arms and slower reflexes useless. I'll watch that disc sail right on by. Point, other team. Agility, quickness, me? Not so much. Still, I've missed this game. Damn, I've missed it.
Not just for the drinking after.

Wednesday:
My bag's dead. The last functional zipper functional no more. All the miles this bag's seen, more miles perhaps than all previous bags combined: that first Portland trip, that big day to the coast and back; shenanigans; three bike summers, strapped atop the trailer - the food bag, usually; so much grocery-getting; so many days of school. It hadn't a name, but felt like it should have. Was family, as gear goes. It wouldn't have felt wrong, I don't think, if I'd cried - though I didn't. I'm not sure what it says, this realization that I may have been more attached to this bag than I am most people. If Proud Mary ever dies I'll have myself an emotional crisis.

Tuesday:
A gorgeous sky surrounds me - Twin Peaks veiled, air crisp with a tangy hint of potential rain. Students keep calling my name excitedly in the halls of the high school - I'd no idea I'd become so popular. Maybe they just miss my help; I'm at the college more now, and here less. Inside myself, reflecting, overthinking - it's the promise of trails this evening, later, eventually, that's calling me most. This thing akin a primal urge, some last vestige of an earlier before. I'm exhausted, would be hungover probably were it not for that sixteen-miler that just whittled away the dark. It's only Tuesday. I need to run, need it badly.

Monday:
The second week of classes at the college begins. This is the first week it's mandatory for enrollment in the program that these students come see me. Two hours a week, we're requiring, despite that adding up to a total three times what I'm approved to work, at least twice what I would want to work - though even those hours wouldn't be near enough for some of them. They need so much help. There'll be juggling, always, and this being education, I'm fairly certain the balance'll often as not find a way to come short. I tell myself it's early, they've another ten weeks to drop off this quarter, to fall behind - but still, I see our numbers and I'm hopeful. It's Monday, and I'm hopeful.

Wednesday:
Another morning. Heel's bloody, a scrap of skin just flapping off my Achilles, a stray dog lagging at each stride. I overdid it, again. Still, the day's burn is the quietly satisfying sort, a fatigue that lingers - a cup of tea, or the smell of woodsmoke. I'm closer to the me I remember from falls of yore, here in this fatigue. Students keep me busy, and I nest in the fatigue and burrow in their questions and in the trust we're already finding. Simple problems stand in for their much larger ones, but they trust me, and I'm honored, and hope to hell not to let them down. I've made it my nest, this place and this fatigue and these problems. This is simple, the ways we make it so, and this is satiating. Above all, this is good. So very good.

a miracle's a miracle / even when it's ordinary...

No Gang Signs At The Dinner Table

2011-09-20T02:34:00.002-05:00

Drunk and sloppy, I've whiskey on my breath and brain. Morning after I'll find my head throbbing (older and less pliable I am, so clearly am I reminded); as ecstatic as the late night (or, more accurately, early morning) run may have been, this hangover'll be part of the penance I'll pay. So these steaming mugs of coffee I gulp down, savoring the caffeinated elixir; from miles I've come, and in the shadow of memory it's miles of before to which I return. So begins another day, another piece in another weekend's puzzle.

We've these trailer rides, the littlest and I, and he's forever trying to scream over the wind we're creating; his laughter drifts a current across the cool afternoon. We've been mistaken, it appears - he doesn't have a soccer game, as we'd thought - so we make the most of our trip, sitting beside the river, watching a gull peck at a suckerfish as we skip stones. Early afternoon slides into mid- afternoon, and we're both restless as I pedal home. A box of peaches and a bag of pears lay across his lap, and then we're back at the house; peach cobblers bake as I prep salads and food enough for several days ahead. I've a couple beers as I work, college football in the background; he plays with friends, laughing and screaming as they're wont to do. For a few hours, all is the model of normalcy and right.

I've this next day a Sunday funday adventure planned, a nearly-forgotten adventure from the past hoping to bleed into the present. An acquaintance from a story before has made plans to run the Enchantments loop, asks me to join; I've of course agreed, this sort of punishment being my idea of pleasure, but as the weather turns even uglier than we might have imagined - freeze-thaw cycles up high, cold rain and hard wind - we both bail. Having each run the loop before, we've found the granite slabs treacherous enough on tired legs, even before rain-slicked or icy. So it is, that he just drives by and I resign myself to other, closer adventures. I set my alarm early just the same - then sleep right through all the buzzing. Sometimes, it turns out, fatigue wins.

So I eased into the day slow before finally finding myself amid these beautifully painful repeaters on a favorite foothill summit instead. From the run I dozed the afternoon away with football and beer; evening found me once more in this strange position of responsibility - goading children toward the homework they'd all weekend put off, chastising them for all they've left undone, attempting to reconcile these minor sibling squabbles. I'm not the parenting sort, it's true.

Still, the days go on, one into another, and we've none killed another, running as we each are from one distraction into another slip-sliding tangent. I'm forever finding I've taken the wrong angle, perhaps, and though I'd no real reason to expect it'd be different here, I somehow did. I forget these scales of time, perhaps: when a day at school is as the littlest says, 'forever,' then of course two weeks is beyond the pale of imagination. They're tired, is what I'm saying, and hardly can I blame them.

Of course, nor will I admit just how much coffee I'm drinking these days.

Shortchanging

2011-09-15T01:48:00.002-05:00

Seems I've these past few weeks traded in the steady murmur of words won in living, of play in the woods and under the sun, for that language of busy jumble and noisemaker cacophony. From quiet miles ridden and run I've stumbled into loosely scheduled chaos: all these meetings and the school year finally roaring to life; job offers bleeding into each other, none of them quite what they seem; these children with all their busy and busy. Two weeks their folks are off, and if I'd this strange (and foolish!) notion that my presence'd make their absence less a void, it seems I'd that concept rather backwards, and have been corrected accordingly.

Teens both, the older two are if not wholly independent than at least practiced in maintaining such illusions. Their schedules are so full sleep's for each of them at least half mirage, though hardly will either at this late stage fess up their full deprivation. Sleep, she says, half-facetious, half-serious. Hah! I'll get that when I'm dead. He's not so different either, not in bed at least some of these late hours because I don't want to and I'm awake... duh. In their defense, they've each an awful lot of homework, but still: I'm best with young adults, even ones I like as much as these two, when giving them back. I've far more skill teaching tidbits in the field, or kneeling beside a desk.

The youngest, though: the other night he and I lost an entire quarter of a game neither of us saw, waiting as we were in that indomitable line. Friends we were with; sometimes they watched the game, but mostly they talked. He'd make a great dad, you know, one told the other. Of course, she'd no idea how terrible a job I suspect I'm doing, unable even of pretending to fill in most of these days. Nor that I've no desire any of my own, even if I won't begrudge others their progeny; I fuck up enough things as is and have no need to raise yet more monsters. A related thought: 'families are important,' I remember telling another friend, 'and probably best a time zone or two away;' she'd of course this idea that she'd with children manufacture herself friends. We've all our own peculiar misunderstandings of how the world ought work, I suppose.

Not much has changed in the few days since that game. Perhaps fewer eyes watch so intently as they did that night - so many people at the game that night knew he was not my own, knew him or knew me but rarely both - but still this remains a small town, in which I am most decidedly an outsider. The past week even more littered with tests than usual, I'm sure to have the bulk of them failed. Of course, it may well be they're tests I've - before these three, anyways - little to no interest in passing, but still. As in most things, I can't help but suspect I'm at my best when expectations are least. And each day I'm more accustomed to this sense I'm ill-prepared for whatever it is I'm doing. A realization accompanies this thought: life may well have her own current, and if so, who am I to try leaping against such gravity? If that sounds like apathy, perhaps it is. I don't care much for definitions, anyways.

Caretaking, though. I've this night given myself a breather - words and whiskey - but it'll likely (hopefully?) be the only night so. Were this a highlights package, I'd have for you a bulleted list of not enoughs and accusing shortcomings. Day one and the littlest got sick at school; by the time I got there, school was letting out. Days two and three I lost in a blur of battles over electronics and attention spans, privileges revoked that I might even just for a moment have him listen, in this lost hope that he might concede that yes, he knew what was expected of him even if I wasn't his parents. Day four brought shattered goggle lenses, the little bits of glass because they sparkle like diamonds and he needed money. For what, he wouldn't say.

From there I'd say the ship's righting itself some now, but I think we're just sliding from starboard to port, day seven having brought fresh fun in the form of disciplinary referral. I'd love to say I've some unwavering egotism that'll allow me claim that whatever scars this experience is leaving on his psyche will be small, but I can't. All these ways I'm finding myself freshly tested, perpetually unlocking new places inside myself in which to hide, new rooms in which to quietly vent until it'll later blow over on a run or a ride, and when she says you're so patient with him, I've no good reaction but a laugh. One afternoon he tells me a half-dozen times how his teacher calls him 'the distractable' with a certain undercurrent of pride in the statement. None of us bother disagreeing, each too tired.

In other words? Poor kids.

Close And Far

2011-09-04T02:05:00.001-05:00

There be dragons here, or so we joke the map ought to say, that these places might be reserved for us - and for those of whom we approve - alone. We've so many joys here: these high alpine lakes, the water cold and crystalline, blues and greens, still and rippled; these granite spires and slopes and slabs breathtaking beneath cloud or sun; this approximation of solitude, our campsite that'll let us forget, momentarily, that we are not the only people to witness such magnificence; the contrasts of cold lake water and bright high sun and grimy skin made fresh; the brilliant warmths of everclear and 'just add hot water' meals, and laughter, especially laughter. We've three brilliant days here, days of simplicity, of tired feet and aching joints and brilliant vistas. In some small moments - the small moments before we remember the rest of our lives, everything else we've connected ourselves to, ties strung from the other people we also are - in such small moments, these three days are exactly enough.

Truth: the world'd be a better place had more people such experiences, at least some way of touching 'wilderness' and 'nature,' of this I'm sure, but damn if I haven't the hardest time wanting to share such spaces, as if the temple were so easily polluted, as if the holy was something the improperly initiated might rub right off. Someday I'll learn to share what wasn't mine to claim, will realize first that this wasn't my trip; it was his, it was hers, it was ours. Someday I'll learn to share what wasn't mine to claim.

But forget the pronouns. For a few short days, these beauties - peaks! and lakes! and big wide skies! - were our own. More accurately: we were theirs, subject to the whims of weather and a world that'll so easily dwarf us. I may forever be better at running (away?) than at setting (still?), but these few days? For a few days I'd just enough setting, just enough relaxing, just enough simply being. Reaffirmed, though, is this: I'm still better at hearing than listening, better at listening than conversing. As puzzle pieces go, I'm still most comfortable in the border.

I've not told much in the way of a story here, I realize. But then, that's not who I am, being not clever enough for the one-liners, nor particular witty; I'm just trying to sense of what I've been, where I am, try not to think about where I'm going. I feel like I'm the same person I was at twenty-seven, she says, and it makes perfect sense even as I wonder. Seems to me transformation's both a blessing and a curse, that change's the constant I prefer most. Embrace the lyrical, a voice from the past advises.

I think it might just be that there are dragons everywhere.

Holy Now

2011-08-28T19:04:00.003-05:00

Absent any other structure or routine, I'm as likely as not to implode in some sort of ritual way, as likely as not to delve deep into the darker corners of these miles of trials and trials of miles. I've been trying to be reasonable - more so this year than last, anyways - trying to bring these miles back around slowly, but of course it'll not surprise you that reason's another one of those moderated things I've only mixed success with. 'God, do you ever stop talking about your legs?' seemed to be the refrain last year, and may it well be that we'll reach again that impasse this year, but well: I am who I am, we are who each are. And I quite simply run too much, except when I don't run enough, and so it is that the answer's perhaps most truthfully, no, I don't, these legs being the purest physical extension of who I am. I run, and I ride, and this is both play and vocation.

My most recent undoing'd been months in coming, truthfully. Sure, there'd this summer been plenty of unmitigated excess, but I'd not these particular miles, hadn't known these mountains in near enough a year. A return - to the Enchantments! - was more than overdue. To these lakes, these granite spires, this wide open beauty - a return was necessary, like a home it called, in my blood I felt it stirring, just as that run around Lake Alturas had beckoned weeks ago. It's in the steady simplicity of these miles - thin air, open skies, cold water and the magnificent peaks for company - that I am most alive, most untethered, most at peace, most complete. There is in these miles only one foot before the other, only these breaths running from uneven and ragged into the even exertion of someone working efficiently and in tandem with the earth beneath. There is only rock and water and dirt and sky, only the elements and the simplicity of the purest, most natural of motions.

I've difficulty in such a home as this remembering that this human body is frail, is weak, knows more limitations than not. I've difficulty here, surrounded by such wonder, remembering that I cannot fly, that I cannot run forever, that I cannot make the days stretch into each other infinitely, difficulty remembering that this play - despite the freedom I feel while at it - is not self-sustaining. I've such difficulty remembering even my most basic needs - food, water, rest - when the experience itself is so untethered, so outside myself, on a scale of much larger consciousness than this small body.

So it was, then, that all this play found itself winding towards familiar refrains. So it was that I found myself reduced to an old man stiffly hobble-running down the trail, these legs only barely clearing the bulk of the rocks that littered the trail, so battered was I after twelve hours of play. So it was that that upon returning to the trailhead lot the only reasonable response was a hobo nap, fourteen hours of hard-fought play behind me - though as quickly as I fell asleep was I awakened by this spasming leg. So it was that I found myself hours later awakened by a grocery store employee where I'd against their building fallen asleep; it was eleven, store close, and I couldn't keep sleeping there. So it was that I'd on the tired ride home seriously considered a night in an orchard, might well have slept in one, were they not all being irrigated.

It's no wonder, then, that even four days after all this play I'm still paying penance. But, given where I was: how could I not be distracted, how could I not play? How could I see those great granite blocks and not go bouldering up and over them? How could I see those long loose scree slopes and not want to scramble up them, come sliding back down, repeat repeat? How could I see those towering ridgelines and not want to go up, up, up, or see that massive pitch and the cliff faces dropping from its point and not want to run to the high vantage, not want to watch the world fall away beside me and before me? How could I not see all these tremendous lakes and not want to feel the cold saturate the bone, the chill transporting me to another world? How could I pass those ~~salmonberries~~ thimbleberries and not gorge myself? To have denied these urges would have been to somehow forsake the immediacy and beauty of living, to have not pursued such a life might have been an advisable exercise in moderation - a bit of wisdom, even - but that's not the life I want, is not the life I choose.

I could not be happier to hurt as I do. This, I know, is the way life ought to burn and throb, the way our days ought thrum and hum with the turbulence of doing, being, living. This is the sacristy of aches, beauty in the body's breakdown, and I've my Church of Seven Day Recreationalists, poetry in motion and a hymn for the heavens in each high point found around me, each of those mountains below and before and beside me warranting special praise. Life is beautiful, life is in the living and all these aches, and these blisters I'm still now draining delight me. I've in these days doors to other, better worlds. And those doors? 'Twas my legs that opened them each.

Letters

2011-08-23T19:12:00.001-05:00

I'd left this space, in the hopes of finding again myself, I think. There are all these names and labels and titles I've in various times and various places gone by, but a name's just a name and never the thing itself. I'd left this space thinking that this space was itself space, that it was somehow the thing I'd found myself lacking; I'd once believed that in this space the words were freedoms in and of themselves, absent whatever meaning others might choose to attach to them, and I'd left when I found it to not be so. I'd left this space because you'd the audacity to here read my words. It was if I'd believed this burrow really was just that, a hidden nook; when I found it otherwise so, I left.

Of course that isn't to say I stopped writing, though I at times liked to tell myself I had, mostly anyways. Maybe I was writing less... except, of course, for when I wasn't. Perhaps it's so that after the first month or so the only real change was that I wasn't letting any of those words slide here, into this particular place. I wrote elsewhere, about the bike summer and to my brother and toyed even a bit with Tumblr. This space, though, I left blank - as if doing so would make the things circling in my head, these paragraphs of phrases jumbled and cluttered, stop still. A fool's notion it clearly was, but then a fool I often am. It fit, in a way.

At any rate, it was this summer sometime I'd the realization that if I'd truly meant to leave this particular space, these letters, I'd have taken it from public sight. I'd've locked it behind doors, privatized it, as I have so many homes before. But I did not. Not in February, when I declared my intention of leaving, nor in any of the months since, and so perhaps it's so that I'm not quite done with this space. This isn't to say I won't still likely write in my other spaces - I almost certainly will. Nor is it to say I'll write here more regularly, for I don't with any certainty know that I will. No, this is only to say that I may return, that this absence was a fool's errand, that this correspondence - with you, French or otherwise - isn't something I've quite the desire to sever entirely, least not as of yet.

I've missed this burrow, as it happens. Perhaps I've even missed you.

Storyteller I'm Not

2011-02-14T07:28:00.000-06:00

1. We find our humanity in stories, you say. Perhaps this is so, or perhaps we turn to stories to forget our own humanity. We're all looking for escape, from something and to something, aren't we? A burrow to hide in, or to disappear altogether - yes, I think that's so. Even when all else fails - or especially when all else fails? - stories'll do. Magic! Yes, stories well told are certainly that.

2. To sleep I stumble, a glassy fugue in which I bury the undoing, the stuttering of poor choices along that forward tumbling line, time. Only fourteen or fifteen hours after evening's close (near-dawn stumbling past dusk) do I find myself catching the bitter dregs of a hangover. A slow & unkind death the living, beating days sometimes are. And other times rushing forward, past present future as likely moments springing forth as falling back.

3. The night before, this symphony unleashed: my computer died; half my only warm gloves tumbled away, lost; Proud Mary and I garnered ourselves a speeding ticket. Something else too, probably - though now, weeks after, who'm I to remember? A warm wind that night blew, hard, quite feeling like Spring; I slept uneasily. I'd not been drinking. Not a drop, but these weeks that's noteworthy only on account of the wholly unmoderated exceptions. I'm running more, yes, and how easily one sin'll trade itself in for another.

4. Aberrations aside, I've a good, oft-fulfilling life seemingly begun here, finally growing up and all that. [My] undoing is not one of place... I've excitement enough to embrace the reason of this place, the home I'm slowly making it. So I wrote; I think it was mostly true. And perhaps still is. And maybe, I think, will continue to be, the constancy of change notwithstanding.

5. I'm reading more, all my own words having vanished - damn you computer!; thank you, computer! - and with them, most the desire to make more. So I'm reading more and writing less, and some days (most?) I think it's for the better. And? If I run just a little more (a century each week perchance sufficing where eighty will not), maybe I'll cease thinking altogether.

6. I sleep disturbed these nights, an oily sheen across the slip-sliding dreams... I find it both fitting and unbecoming the moon's watch, the swirling fog of these sometimes icy dawns. I'm running too much for not feeling nearly fit, the winter weight that won't bend to training weight, nevermind the ten more to racing form, but at least fatigue'll blur the margins nicely. Stories? This is the most common tale I have. It may be all I have.

7. Or: I'm not sure I've many more - if any - letters forthcoming, if there'll be stories yet shared. More accurately: I doubt it. We've each our burrow, and this no longer feels like mine. I secretly wish for the Universe to erase me, you'd said, and though I'll disagree myself, I'll not prefer the quiet places any less. It's been a good run here, these past years, and besides - at any rate, so it goes.

Maybe (Not)

2011-01-16T23:33:00.003-06:00

You should have made me a drunkard
Should have made me a liar
Made me a preacher
With a head full of fire

I'm not much for midnight running, he tells me. Neither am I, I protest, before that very night a liar makes me, and that with a backpack of beverage. Well: it's the dark and shadowed and lonely quiet in which I feel most at home, perhaps. I mean, more at home than just the ever stretching truths. At the shop, talking of running, going on nine (?) years one way and fourteen (!) another. As usual, the constant change. At what derivative am I placated? I don't think there's a math for this.

I'll be home
When hair has fallen out
We'll be home
When it reaches the ground
We'll be home

One of these nights, she says, before I resign myself to these demons... The rest left unsaid, only hinted at, better for both of us that way. Some of us like our demons just fine, I remember, I say. Just fine. For better and for worse. She knows it's true, of course, knows the misadventure plenty well; she finds her solace in sleep and I find mine in miles and the night continues, unmoved. Isn't that always the story? And what care has the night, indifferent, always?

I know nothing was planned, you just can’t help yourself
Some people are so easily shuffled and dealt...
Yeah all I know is all I know is all I know
I’m writing this to you in reverse

To the river I went then, sleep not coming, bottle in hand and the silent, slick night for company. Cloaked in the mist, the lights of the city across bounced unevenly, furtively across the black sheen; I'd my harmonica and these legs and I walked and ran and played and drank, the night swallowing it all, forgetting as quick as it came. A Saturday night, sure, but the town quiet as ghosts, and the rain coming in steady waves. If I was cold and wet, no matter. I'd the fog of my breath and the slushy stillness, and that was enough.

We use up people, use up time
Use up places, we say goodbye
Searching for the crowded hour

We're starting a band. Probably. Maybe. I'm building up a fixed-gear / single-speed flip-flop. Probably. Maybe. I'm finding direction, not moving on again come the end of another school year. Probably. Maybe. Someday it'll all be enough. Probably. Maybe.

Snowscape

2011-01-14T01:41:00.000-06:00

A week it'd been, a week since last I'd run and cantered and trotted and made the world my own. Sick I'd been, and this absence in my life well on on it's way to becoming another, more intimate sickness, and so it was that I'd abandoned caution and my plans for Proud Mary and so laced and taken off. To the peak I know best I'd intended to go, but well. Ever distracted I am, and so it was that snowshoe trails beckoned, and up the icy slopes I clambered, breath ragged and vision spotty and this heat of the effort such that not long was it before I'd stripped to shorts, a t-shirt. The snowshoe trails begat deer trails begat open white; the sky faded from white-grey to pink to purple, yet upwards I ran. It'd rained in the days before, and so I noted the sloughing slopes (avalanche risk, i thought, distractedly, momentarily; I'd a run to consider, and that alone) even as I continued slicing my shins on the crust with every stride I slammed through. Steadily I climbed, and as the purple gave way to blue-ish black I'd another peak beneath me. Temperatures having plummeted with the runaway sun, I redressed hurriedly; with stiff fingers I headlamped myself and began the descent.

Of course it'd minimal batteries, of course it died. So, then. Through the tarry night I stumbled forth, guided only by my memory - this mental map of the side canyons through which I'd hope of descending - and the flickering fireflies of the river valley behind. Down I clambered, steadily slipping and sliding and crashing, deer trails as best I could estimate, that frozen creek through which I crashed, that stinking (dog?) turd in which I'd placed a (thankfully gloved) palm. And I sat and nearly cried and instead howled at the absent moon and remembered similarly foolish misadventures of years previous; only then did I hear the owl's call slicing the black. "Who-who-who-cooks-for-you?," I called back, remembering those southern Minnesota nights and our calls across the bluff and prairie. Again, he called, and I called, and we shared the night; once more all was well. I found my way, and all was well.

Morning found me all too easily, wide-eyed four-thirty unblinkingly awake. So again, I laced up; again, I ran; again, I remembered the wee hour morning miles of years before. Two hours I added to the week's tally, and if I'd fatigue before, well. I'd forgotten the liveliness of such a hunger, the vibrancy of such a fatigue, how everything's heightened - an awareness second only to that of the runs themselves. This, I think, this is life! This is living! So through the fatigue, the strange fog overlayed on the increased awareness, through it I push. Good god, how on game I am with my students, how light bulbs flicker and minds leap forward. This is the best side of teaching, yes, the very best, and life is good, life is very good.

So, I'll think, some easy miles are in store, maybe a gentle half-hour to work out the kinks and re-hash the day and wind down, except how good my legs'll feel after the first fifteen or twenty minutes, and so again I'll climb and descend and repeat the process, another three hours and near-enough another peak. The last hour I'll remember both most and least, re-discover what it is that both draws and repulses most on these ventures, the peculiar places my mind will find in which to hide and scream and dance and buckle, repeatedly, as if once more in the latter stages of an ultra. I'm a stumbling drunk and my legs are shattered sinew and the snow's falling now as icy bullets, even as the fluff already down blows in billowing drifts, the mountains white skirts all aflutter, dancing in the deepening night. Terrifying and addictive the breakdown is; I've yet to meet a drug that comes near comparison, and ne'er do I hope to, for such a toxin'll be my end. The world's my plaything, and the middle these adventures'll have me as likely invincible as thrashed, such do the miles vacillate in their treatment of me, and so too will the buzz ebb and flow. Ten hours all told I ran in the span of thirty, and well: what else would I expect? Truth: I'd no expectation at all, so long such a run had been; four months it'd been since last I'd run more than two hours.

Other nights, then, the nights I won't run straight into the black: I slept strangely, a disquieted twisting in the night, and out of my uneven slumbers I fell from a tangle of sheets to the floor below, these limbs distressed even by the thought of mobility. Fire ran through me as I rediscovered the many places bruised, battered, broken, remembered anew the bloody and chafed and undone. It'd snowed the whole night through, the hours giving way to fat flakes and the soft pre-dawn glow of fresh powder. The walk in to school, normally a fifteen or twenty minute refresher, was a fifty minute slog; I couldn't have been happier for the cold, the clear crystalline scent of morning. I watched, and I watched: plows and commuters in their metal boxes slip-sliding, clouds dancing across the rocks on slopes above, the soft black fading to a deep blue and then to purple as the sky itself awoke. All of it, all of it was very good.

I'm not sure I know the difference anymore, I told her, middle as I was all these miles, I recognize the cliffs, but not whether I'm nearing a climb to the heavens or an abrupt descent. True it is, that if anything I've grown worse at interpreting some of these signs. Still: equally true it is that I'm yet learning how to sometimes sit on the edge and watch the world wander below, quietly survey the black Columbia snake through the twinkling firefly lives these other nights. And that? That's probably best of all.

Ghost Of A Shark

2011-01-09T05:39:00.000-06:00

I'm gonna leave any minute
See the skyline disappear

"I don't see you as the loner you paint yourself to be," someone told me once, and I've been thinking that through these past weeks, as the year's turned over; on long runs and rides, then in the hours spent weakly sleeping - I've been pondering, as if naming the act with such a verb would lend it more gravity. It's true, I suppose, she's right at least in part: these small spaces there are, moments in which I miss the heaviness of words that are filled less with air and more with sentiment, community, connection. I'm an adrenaline junkie, sure, but it may be more honest to simply say I'm an addict for all that which is felt as much as seen or heard or read. I remember, in a slim moment's pause - the space just so in waking from a dream, not quite sleeping neither quite awake - I remember a conversation had once about swapping skins. As if we were each ugly Christmas sweaters, all the more easily to try the other on - it seems a lifetime ago. But then, it was: a lifetime ago, and that season's well past, besides. The wise men long ago moved on.

Head out of the city
Burn my clothes, bury my fears

Oh, you will never know I was here

So, the New Year: full with sloth and slumber I rang it. The entirety that first day and a half I spent prone - laying, sitting, still, reconstructing, re-remembering. Thankful I was for the shop-closed holiday, how full the weeks'd been, thankful I was for the rest. And then two, three more days full I rested, these hours lost to the lung-racking crud, the illness of every winter before come 'round once again. But in the small pocket pauses I wrote and I read and I slept and slept and slept, then re-read and re-wrote, and by god, what crap it all was! From this tube of thoughts I strung long sticky strings of words, and I squeezed - oh, I did, I did! - but what came came only tired and forced, sad and silent. What came came in a dough more akin a sickly paste, and from it I knew nothing would ever rise and form into being. And so I left it, as the words had left me.

Tell me now, is there difference
Between a shark and a ghost of a shark

I tried to remember what it was like when writing was simply something I did on occasion, a release valve as I felt so inclined, not something I much - if at all - thought about. Something you told me once, still lingering in that space between dreaming and waking: "We're writers... we live in our heads." And our heads live in the words we give others, perhaps; we are our words, and our words are who we are. But, also: I'd never considered myself a writer until you, among others, told me I was.

All I have are secrets and memories of the dark
Rip away the skin, burn my heart

So, words. This friend'd just had a mini-stroke, her blood pressure too high and the stress of her baby too much, and I sat with her and listened to her stories, knowing she was scared and needed a friendly ear, even as I struggled to stifle the yawns, sleep beckoning. I could not have cared much less, actually. "I cringe at people's idiosyncrasies," I remember you saying, "not [having] the patience to parse them... I'm a big, ugly monster." We're not so different, perhaps. Alas? So of course it was only the night after, up far far too late - sure I'd been drinking, but early in the night, at the shop, as it were - and here I am chatting, chatting, about exactly nothing with another friend as friends are wont to do; it's late for me and well into morning for her, and well, the contrast. There's a lesson here, I'm sure, of some sort or another, but damn if I won't learn it. Or not care to look for it. There are worse things than being an asshole.

I'm gonna leave any minute
Another skyline disappears

And as night turned towards morning, and morning towards day, and dreaming towards waking, I wondered if writing was ever a plaything for you as once it was for me, or if you'd always been the serious sort. I suspect the latter, it's true - but then, having also just written it, I know the words themselves'll hardly make it so. Words are, for all their might, still words. And you're right, of course - we live in our heads. Perhaps altogether far too much. Here comes another year.

Sunlight in the mirror
Blinding me all these years...

Oh am I coming back
I'll never leave

Hole New Year

2011-01-01T21:47:00.003-06:00

It's sixteen miles
To the promised land
And I promise you, I'm doing the best I can

A year ago I wrote I've hoarded change these years and openly I admit that if much has changed since, in the space of the year between, much more has not. Always I've life firmly ensconced in the moment, and though I'll try not to force it - especially with this tendency I've towards one eye forward and one eye back, an eye to wherever time's current'll drift next and an eye lingering on whatever memory the hours have pooled and paused in - well. With such tendencies, perhaps it's better that I force the present, moderation being that thing I know so poorly. If I've a knack for collecting memories and experiences, so too have I knack for forgetting, and fitting it seems how well this past week and the week ahead follow the pattern these past years: one night last week spent in a snow cave, one night this next week likewise will I slumber, frigid as it may be; one night this past week have I forgotten, or will, or... well. You know how I am, how blank some the nights may be.

Now don't fool yourself
Into thinking you're more than a man
Because you'll probably end up dead

And so the days run into the nights and the nights into the days, but all of it full with the living. "You look frostbit," he says, and it may be I somewhat am; he himself is be-glittered and be-glammed, and this it seems, is the world I'm making for myself now, in these moments. We each take our delight in mementos, little gifts of the time just before, and he and I are no exception: he steals memories of his last show, as if the adrenaline of then might power him through the drudge of now; I hold tight yet to the chill of these winter runs and rides and the most recent night spent out, knowing full well how the love of such moments warms these tired bones. Tingly stiff limbs, red red nose and cheeks remind me how I've stolen from the stars what was not mine, drank it in and stored it away where whiskey coursed only moments before and perhaps still courses. These tingly stiff digits remind me of the night I stole away to sleep near enough the summit to imagine myself atop the earth, among this company of stars and only more stars. These still cold fingers and toes still hear only the breeze rustling through bare aspens and snowy-shouldered conifers, punctuated only by the occasional thump of a clump slopping off a overweighted limb. Other, more constant mementos likewise tie me to the ever-living present: the tightness of re-remembering miles laying a cable through my hamstrings; the fatigue that lays heavily at the back of eyelids; the ice that clings to my eyelashes and beard, seeming remnants of those Wisconsin and Iowa and Minnesota winters; the soreness that lingers in my fingers, shoulders, back from all this ski tuning. Most present, perhaps, of all is the hunger I'm retracing in the small spaces behind and beneath these bones, want being the most definitive of these memory trinkets I'm apparently collecting.

I visit these
Mountains with frequency
And I stand here with my arms up

Where there'll be want, so too will there be satisfaction. And it's finally in this past week I've a run in which my body remembered that yes, I am, a runner; this - runner! - is who I most am. It was the first such floating freedom in three months at least, and by god, the joy of such affirmation, how I savored it! I'd already an hour in that morning, and if my ankles were less than thrilled with the endeavor, no matter. Another two hours plus, near enough three, I ran; I drank in the stars and the stars drank in me, and there was only the clear cold beauty of a twelve degree night, only the stark distance that lay between me and the twinkling firefly nights below, our worlds altogether separate even under the same starry heaven. If not quite sliding once more into the insatiable of miles before, at least I was rediscovering hunger's fire; if not chancing upon light and spry, at least I found myself reacquainting with strong and steady. So I climbed on on an all too common empty stomach (eating taking time I'd not yet this day had), remembered what it was to be full and whole with the joy of these miles, to be a simple animal, part a world so unencumbered: of the world below I'd no need, and it'd no need of me. All was silent, save my slight breath and the regularly pattering footfall, and it was good. It was very good.

And some days they last longer than others...
I promise you I'm doing the best I can

So the year near enough closed as it began, this second-to-last night swallowed in the peace of the night miles. The spaces between were littered with reminders of the abuses this tired body's seen, and not just in how much slower I am in rising most mornings. If changes and uncertainties had years now been the norm, I'd taken comfort in familiar brokenness, though in no year had it yet been quite so pronounced. Tallying the miles now, I've hope some trends - from 5294 (2008) to 3107 (2009) to 2212 (2010) - will yet reverse. The year past saw me race drunk only once (and that on skis!), and that the same number as injured competitions; perhaps, the lean figures suggest, I'll learn moderation yet, in some form or another. Of course, numbers and odds in mind, I wouldn't much count on it. This body'll heal as it does; I've ever a knack for finding the whole most in the broken; I'll do as I do, which is to say: of course I'll push on through. As always it is, I'll find that piece of the night to steal away, drink in the stars, and sleep in the snow; the year ahead, I suspect, will be just enough of what came before and just enough of what's never been. That's not too much to ask, is it? No, I don't think so.

Editorial

2010-12-26T22:09:00.000-06:00

This Christmas I found myself stumbling into and through, wobbly -headed and -wheeled, loosely -footed and -hearted, full with altogether too many memories and recollections, a head fully in need of some purging, or, at the least, re-sorting. So I ran in the cold clear night, and remembered as I ran; beside the cold, cold Columbia I stopped with my harmonica, key of A, stopped and played and drank in the night even as the night drank in me. For those few moments, these thoughts I'd followed, had following me, were less a collection of ghosts at the edges of days and more a set of words I'd scripted for myself in the tired near-morning. Altogether too much writing and not near enough sleeping I've been doing, I told myself, and I ran some more, had myself another drink, and then set to edit this recollection, too - the whole while remembering that fiction need not make it any less true. All these memories I've perpetually in revision, anyways, and I've come to accept that hindsight's only different from the present in the tenses we choose, really.

Likewise these mornings have found me in spirits still lubricated, and if given enough chance hardly morning any longer - but still, these adventures awaiting, I'll rouse myself to the open road and miles of riding and running ahead. It may well be that you've each your nine lives, long-limbed feline that you are, but I've only one, and only so many hours in it, so I'll delight in having the world and the cold and the fingers of fog that drift off the veiled ridgelines; I'll find myself held in the damp embrace, and I'll soak it in, even as the chill becomes my marrow. I'm alive as only the road and trail will allow. Even as my feet grow unsettingly cold, even as my hips and back, no longer so conditioned, make their complaints all too well known - even as my body'll revolt, as more often each day it does - even so, I'll not wish for it any different. There's drunken memories and sleepless nights, or there's wonder and the hard sleep of a body fully fatigued, and I've hope yet of more often choosing the latter. A century plus of riding and four hours of running in a weekend's not a bad start, I'll hope.

Succession

2010-12-16T23:51:00.004-06:00

Can you hear the road from this place?
Can you hear footsteps, voices?

Playing chess against myself in the dark, these words into sentences'll fly. I've Barrie on the mind, this so-called fiction at the fray less divided than melded, really. Circumstances there'll always be, you know, contextual analysis and deciphering to be done between the commas, but I must admit I've not the codes to crack this most recent offering. We thrive on the mysteries, yes, but isn't most of life so constituted?

Glue the community together, we were hammering it

There's what I want immediately and the things I have wanted my whole life, she tells me. Clear enough it is to me then - as if I might have somehow forgotten? - that I've no longer any idea of want but in the context of immediacy, that this, the full-blooded embrace of the present tense, is my favored intimacy. For the future I've no patience, seeing in it only an abstraction of the present; I'm adrift, and do not care; there's only the moment, yes, and the moment is the future and the moment is the past, and entirely short-sighted it may be... well, maybe that's the whole point, besides. I've an appreciation best for the horizons I'll explore yet this day, you know.

I was walking for weeks before I fell in

These moments, these wintry wind-swept horizons. Replacing the passive of so many weeks just before with the active of the immediately present, I'm trading the sleeplessness of tossing, turning for the sleeplessness of doing, this busily awake mind. Too many things I'll think of, really, and too few miles and a few too many pounds I'll carry beneath me. Into the darkest hours of the night I run, and when that'll not suffice these tired legs, I ride on towards morning. This fire no longer burns as once it did, but nonetheless, climbing away from lights first beside me and then only below, through the fire of these legs I enter this kingdom of night and shadow, the quiet peace of such pre-dawn hours. Flickering fireflies, the miniature world from which I've come sleepily twinkles, and I've this wide expanse of black, the dark silence of so many trees and all that's swallowed by the snow - I've all of it to myself and myself alone. I prefer this quite whole-heartedly, I must admit, cold as I know the descent'll be.

Fall down, find god just to lose it again

But, the descent. From every rocket's apex comes the flaming fall, and so too must I descend. Cold blue's begun lapping at the edges of the black, and soon enough it'll transition from opaque to the slowly translucent light of morning; though I'd the desire to watch the transformation from up here, it's no matter, for work beckons, and as is I may yet be late. So down I scream, laughing wildly in the dark with the giddy glee of this unknown edge, even as the moments in which I feel my tires sliding out on the ice terrify me. Thirty miles an hour easy, if not much faster in the stretches of road I remember well, and I've only memories, shadows, and this cold slim light for guides. The edge I carve could be sharper, true, but for the morning, this'll be plenty enough to feel the sleepless stupor shrink back behind, made so terribly small by the sensation of living so freely and fully living.

To fill a thousand black balloons with air

I'll fly easily enough, it's true, and pity those'll who forget how in childhood they remembered the air beneath them. Afloat, yes. What you never understood is that I screamed only in searching again for myself. And after all of it? I wonder at just what it is I've found.

I've fallen in the forest, did you hear me?...

Blue Light

2010-12-15T05:40:00.000-06:00

What could I ever run to?

Fatigue welds itself to these weary bones, equal parts ingratiating and satisfying; I've no mask for the sparks that'll fly across my ankle each of these tired nights I find myself running through, but neither would I prefer one, finding kinship with the fire that flares across the joint. I've no satisfaction quite that of a body dissatisfied, beauty in the breakdown, don't you know? And a student inquires, isn't philosophy just asking 'why?' over and over again? I've myself no particular reason for disagreement.

If that's way it is
Then that's the way it is

I'm on a tear; I'm screaming through the atmosphere; as he put it, Prometheseus' fingers. I'm better at this than you and you're better at that than I, but really, do either of us particularly care? Moderations ne'er been my game, any more than overindulgence yours, all protests aside. I prefer the mistakes, maybe, accidents both happy and less so.

You are the bluest light

Education's your future, the speaker tells them. And just as much your past, I nearly interject, before refraining myself. An astronaut could have seen the hunger in my eyes from space, comes the message across the night, a strange night here in the land of snow and ghosts. Yes, I think, that's it precisely. But is this night really so much stranger than most?

You'll find it hiding in shadows

You'll find it hiding in cupboards
It will walk you home safe every night
It will help you remember

So stumbling into the night I drunkenly lurched, these steps slow in regaining their fluidity, and I once more a hatchling first learning to fly. So long it'd been, but that's hardly to say I'd forgotten the practice; beside the river I found myself (and I can hear them even now, saying there's snow on the ground, don't you know?), beside the river I was and so inspired by rum and foolish notions held once before and still not yet quite forgotten, I swam. I swam and I froze and I froze and I swam, through winter nights, past the cold blue mornings of winter slow in waking I carved for myself once more this space, this notion of solitude and solidarity alike in legs turned over. All these months slipping away, and so it was again and again and again. Again and again and again the legs turning over, as if to go until all'd be well once more or the legs'll go no more, and who'm I to say the two are any different? Through another night I sloshed and slipped and slid and strode, and if it proved no more than warm-up and cool-down, an hour or just less each side of an hour of sprinting after spinning orbs, mad-dash wipeouts across the hardwood floor, well. I've this oft-remembered and equally cursed idea that sleep's a thing we need only if we allow ourselves to think it so. Or, more accurately: I haven't crashed this time, yet. As always, if my body'll complain (it will), I'll not hear it (willful ignorance); I've only ears for what I'll care in that moment to hear, and you know this too all too well.

And you didn't even notice
When the sky turned blue

Or, if you'll allow that the difference between physical fatigue and that of the spirit is far greater than any exchange of modifiers, it's damn nice to replacing the latter with the former. Subtraction by addition's not quite the same as addition by subtraction, but I've a certain satisfaction in them both; I'm embracing the former, remembering the latter. Again and again and again...

Wintersongs

2010-12-08T01:52:00.000-06:00

Don't know time
Got no mind for the line in my life
No time to think, time for sleep now
Time to sink way into the blue deep...
Slowly, slowly I am drifting

A haunting edge hangs on such days, the fog that'll cloud and yet clarify; I've been working enough these past few weeks that burred edges on an oversharp ski, not yet tempered by any such diamond stone's the image that comes to mind. but, images... these eyes remember trips to the optometrist, cloudy lens against which i've my eyes pressed. One or two, three or four, the ever-present uncertainty as to which'll leave the letters least clouded. For inevitably that was the question I asked myself, seeking discernment not of greatest clarity but of least blemishing. So, too, it seems it is in these wintersong days. I've the equivalent of slicks on the bike - fatties, sure, a 38 and a 35, but at this point so worn as to be slicks nonetheless, as if my refusal to believe their shortcomings will make it less so. Winter's here. Of course, I'll slide right on through, regardless preparations, attempts at the application of brakes. Fatigue's a cloud that lingers through the caffeinated days, oscillating regularly as they do; spiking and crashing as it does, tangent's always been my trig function of choice. As to which parts are metaphor and which parts literal? I'm no longer quite sure even myself.

I wonder why we are the way we are
And why we only love each other from afar...
You spend your whole life waiting, but you don't know what for... still you want more

I'm just a spirit trying to be human
But I'm thinking, this is how we are fading, this is how we are fading
Time, time... you're afraid you might get left behind

The days themselves, then. Mornings roll through each other just as these tires slide and slosh, these temperatures most often neither quite liquid nor ice. Fog begets fog, slush begets slush, fatigue begets fatigue. White-grey clouds the morning, mid-day, and afternoon skies most often now; winter mornings unchanged become winter days become winter afternoons, and at the purpling at each day's edge'll do no more than tint the day's normalcy and rote with a touch of the surreal. These rides and the occasional mistaken idea of a run blur the distinctions between familiar and foreign, and so too can I remember and revisit a world of ghosts and myths and the air bent by both fire and ice. If the day'll tip towards center, who am I to say it'll stay so balanced? I've no way of knowing. There's a heaviness to the clouds and a lightness to the ceiling, the way these city lights find themselves both in water and sky, light being just the thing that'll bounce and bleed and give the whole of it a slightly ethereal glow 'round the fingertips, especially in whichever dark corners may call to me most.

Feeling on the verge of some great truth, where I'm finally in my place
But I'm fumbling still for proof and it's cluttering my space
Casting shadows on my face
...While my mind is on the moon

... I am only passing through
I dream these days about the sea, I always wake up feeling blue, wishing I could dream of you
So if I stumble... will you wait for me?

To winter songs I've once more returned (Jose Gonzalez, Nick Drake, Alexi Murdoch especially); I've rewatched August Rush and Finding Neverland and Away We Go and these other films of like-minded wintery nostalgia more times than I care to admit. I've these comfortable and familiar rooms in which to hide, friendly memories of snowflake-fogged days that've come before. The antsy-ness'll come full bore yet, I know, and it'll be Into the Wild then; I've no trust of 127 Hours or 180 Degrees South yet. You'd understand, I think, as he, across the static, did, if you knew me better. Some symbols are heavy, you know, and this winter coat's weight enough.

When do we really get to go home...
First you most go walking on your own...
Maybe then we already are home...

Two days I've off at Christmas. Two days and this realization that home's most the open nowhere road of mountain woods and solitude, two days I have, and with them, the strange hope of spending it out, exploring, woods and snow and I, all of it alone most together. A winter wonderland, mine, and more so, I belonging to it, if it'll dare claim me. This resounding silence, of course, is that of my fool-hearted and fool-headed ways, but who am I to deny the allure of the promise of cold and snowflakes and the woodland moon, all the sure and motionless silence, save slip-sliding tires and powder on skis and breath that'll come in puffs and clouds. I'll own the fool that ever I have been, am, will be. You were moving too...

Sunshine

2010-12-06T02:35:00.001-06:00

We salute at the threshold of the North Sea in my mind
And a nod to the boredom that drove me here to face the tide and swim

My fingers ache from all this tuning, and I've her words on my mind. Are you a climber, she asks, head cocked slyly - a quiet memory I've of someone just before. Just so, and oh so well the tights'll frame those legs; she gives her number, though I know I won't call it even before I see the ring. So it goes; we've all our familiar, comfortable habits keeping check. I've music on my mind, of trailers and films and conversations I'd do better to forget, but especially I've the music of solitude, of riding across the plains and wide mountain vistas and through the untouched powder, I've that music especially ringing between my ears, and with it this ache for the lonely explorer moon, full with itself and the night sky and the sun we cannot see. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, but I cannot quite find it, and that seems equally as fitting. It's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world, this memory texted me once, but I slept right through it, and that seems somehow just as perfect.

There are storytellers, I remember a teacher telling us once, there are people who make stories happen, and there are people who wait for stories to happen to them. I don't care which of the first two you are, she said, as long as your eyes are open and you don't become the third. A rough remembrance sure, as these memories go, but we'd just read Death of a Salesman, and well. Sometimes I wonder, especially as these days dawdle by, their fullness notwithstanding - or perhaps it's in part on account of that fullness that it'll stretch so? Or, as I saw elsewhere: There are interesting people and people who do interesting things. They are often not the same. And some people? Some people are neither. James Thurber: "All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why." I've answers for one of three, maybe. On a good day?

So I'm straddling intersections again, of time (here and now, before, after), of place, strata, station, expectation. I'll tune skis and build bikes for the haves, listen to (some of) their ideas of hardship, in the same day I'm wishing a better life for the have-nots, hoping to someday see them in another world, orchard-callused hands becoming those of college graduates. One cool night, this winter parade followed by the symphony, it'll be no surprise - though still a letdown - when I see plenty of the former world and none of the latter. I'm overwhelmed by these busy days, I'd say, but that'd be mostly a lie, actually. Disappointed? Yes, I suppose I am, at least with some things. But that's more often the case than not, isn't it?

Fortunate I am for such a simple reminder at such a perfect moment, a small line back to the good. Life is hard. Gorgeous, generous, and good most of the time. But hard. Even in the moments that spell near disasters this is true, I remember, perhaps especially then. The life is in the living. It's in flying across the open streaks of pavement, the sun having just in the last few days melted away so much of the white. It's in flying across the smooth fast black even as this damn truck'll dart across the intersection, never bothering to see me, of course; it's in slamming on the brakes even as I know I've such limited room to swerve, it's in the knowledge that skidding into the snow beside me at this speed'll be near enough slamming into an icy wall. So I'll slide, sideways, and bounce off the side of the truck, staying upright-ish somehow even as the truck carries on, even as I'm cussing up a storm and so too's the driver. No matter the stop sign he'd blown; of course he will not, does not stop. And if my fingers were still shaking a bit hours later waxing and scraping and buffing skis, it's as much the adrenaline as the laughter. These are sad sad cities we're living in, maybe, sad sad lives we're leading, maybe, but all the more glad for the living I am on account of it. All the more glad for the living, yes.

Sunshine, sunshine, it's fine
I feel it in my skin, warming up my mind,
Sometimes you gotta give in to win,
I love the days when it shines, whoa let it shine

Meridians

2010-12-01T04:25:00.000-06:00

The silence that breeds so under the guise of busy - and true enough it is, these hours so filled - has come thick again, fog across the miles. So it is that we're speaking only under the terms of tragedy, those measured in feet and inches and much less too. So it is we've retreated again, as always we do, to our respective burrows; so it is we've found our quiet, lonely corners. So it is that I've solace in thin fingers wisping across the slate-grey western sky, comfort in blankets of white and the thick aroma of wet sagebrush. You've solace in the memory recent visits, and, well. So it is.

I've not any good idea what I'd tell you, though, even if we weren't so perpetually at unconnected intersections, were we not so spectacularly adept at missing each other. I've no idea what I'd say were we, in fact, any good at this corresponding business; I've been writing more again, but that isn't to say I've words. Also, though: I know the words themselves are hardly important. It's the act, even in missing each other. And: we are one and the same at least as often as we are strangers. Again, so it is.

I've not stories to offer, really, so similar are the bulk of these days. Not monotonous, per se, but perhaps monochromatic: all this white that'll fall and slowly fade to grey, the sky that'll occasion towards brilliant-white but is more often the season's slate, dampened by the softened light of forgotten memories. The stories lost behind such wispy fingers are their own ever-changing poetry, and'll so clearly trump any I might offer that I know better than to try. Or these stories of students? They've different sources, sure, but they're still the same troubles, and you know them as well as I. Not that we won't still find the empathy - this is who we are, isn't it? - but good god, how tiring the sadness, all these lost bunnies haphazardly hoping to find their way across the white and just as often sliding towards grey. And how often we've nothing more to offer than crossed fingers and a prayer half-heartedly made to deities we've no faith in. Or I've no faith in, at least. But for every three steps back, there's three, or on a good day, three-and-a-half made forward. That's something, I suppose, and I suspect you'd say the same.

Brevity's a thing I'm learning, perhaps - recalling two recent emails, loaded as they could be, though neither more than perhaps two hundred words - but with you, that's never been my calling. Nor has it been yours. Rambling, yes. Thank you, we will. One and the same at least as often as strangers, yes.

And in these tired afternoons, swapping stories of misdeeds in the shop, it's been our shared undoings and foibles I've remembered most fondly. Perhaps this'll be the year to renew the mile repeats, albeit from afar? We've both been so responsible as of late, and I fear it; I'd hate to think we're capable of taking ourselves seriously, or worse yet, that we actually have been.

Even if you've found the wanderlust more recently, even so - we've always a need of more, haven't we? Only two months it's been since my last 'venture, that of four-hundred miles and a weekend and sleeping oh so gladly in the rain. The antsiness, how it grows (a rash!), the wanderlust building. Soon enough I imagine it'll be an all-night something or other, despite how this tiredness just hangs. We're all seeking out most that which'll have us feeling most alive, I think. I'd share it all with you, you know, if ever you'd come to the mountains, least 'til we drove each other mad. Not, given our respective histories, that that'd take much, but still. Sliding into memories of summers past: Crazy? I was crazy once. They locked me in a padded room... I can't help but imagine summers yet to come; Proud Mary anxiously awaits.

Changing tacks: near a week I took and wrote myself nothing. I'm back in the thickest bits now, and knowing how these things are, already find myself bracing for the insomnia. Still, moderation? Moderation can fuck itself. At least one of us ought still embrace the fire, right? Besides, I hear when all else fails, there's always rum. Cuba? Alright!

Packed Light

2010-11-29T23:51:00.000-06:00

When morning comes, I find myself perpetually tired; come night, I'm wide awake. I'd blame the red bulls, but really, it's hardly as if they're that effective, and I've not had any today, besides. So, mornings: I've these eyes dry and tired and heavy-lidded, and a head thick and slow, thankful these questions rarely require altogether too much thought, and I've sandpaper grit beside my eyes to scratch at, besides. All of which is to say I'm all the more thankful for these snow-scraped streets, how they've reached that perfect balance of packed ice and slippery slush. So it is that I'll race and slide and somehow these back streets will be mine and mine alone, the city blanketed by thin white foggy fingers, the snow that'll eat up and any all sound but the thick silence of winter. Foothills behind and beside me have disappeared but for the thinnest fingers that stretch through the mist, and once again, I'm thankful I've not my camera with me, knowing well the injustices images do such magic.

Rides like this, the day previous' two throbbing miles run - these are the things that'll have me feeling alive, make me feel my breathe and remember my pulse. Yoga it is not, but the satisfaction's the same as I'd remembered from those days. Satisfaction, contentment, yes.

So easily these past years have I catered to the dissatisfaction, the quiet empty. So easily I've allowed myself to crave the space of other places and so sought it out. So it is now, that fall rites find themselves this year in winter; still they remain the same: simultaneously I'm found out by communities that'll draw me in even as I resist. Better have I become in lingering further in the quiet margins, perhaps, less prone to seeking out the trouble that once found me so easily. Which isn't to say I might not yet find myself yet another nomad's home come next fall, tradition being what it is, or that I've gotten any better with my time - I haven't, and ever I'll wish I hadn't when I have it, and that I had it when I haven't - but, well. Naming a thing - just as refusing to name a thing - does not make it any less that thing.

And this novel? I'll hardly claim to still be making progress, not as I was, anyways, plateaued as I temporarily seem to be at only three-fifths the intended total. I know where I'll take it next, though, I think - and these days are a little less unsettling than they were. Even a couple hundred words a day is something.

Like I said, I'm tired. But that's not an unwelcome thing, necessarily, you know?

Moonlit

2010-11-22T03:45:00.000-06:00

Not sleeping, or sleeping in stops and starts, or sleeping in such a way as to never quite wake between the dreaming. The night'll stretch on or disappear before it ever came, all depending on the vantage; this I know all too well. And I've this antsiness, this need to move, this need for silence and solitude and the only interruptions that of my breath and fatigue. I've this dream that if I move just so it'll be alright, it'll be better; pick the night, pick the dream. As I imagine it, a cheat code: left right left right down down up up. Time'll bend with the right code, I'm sure of it.

I just haven't found those codes yet, so if you have them: please share.

It's late and I'd fallen asleep early, conked hard and fell fast into the black, only to find the night interrupted and awake and wide, wide, this dream of healthy and active. So it's late and it's dark and it's cold, but the flakes are falling just so and I've this uneasiness lingering so, like crumbling rust on the edge of the night. That trail I've missed so? It's only closed by the light in which I'd be seen.

So awake, I laced up and strode out, ran for the second time in months, and this was the first run for certain more than a quarter-mile. I felt old and I felt weak and I felt throbbingly alive in the discomfort and I felt lost - but it was the lost I went for. It was the lost that'd inspired the run. Because this - running! - is precisely the sort of lost in which I remember best how to find.

I can't - or, more accurately, won't - make myself feel guilty about how little progress I've been making on the novel. I can feel guilty about how little sleep I'm getting.

I can. But I won't. There's living to be done in these spaces between the days. Living, lots of living. Especially in the weariness. Maybe mostly.

Spaces

2010-11-21T09:04:00.000-06:00

Opening day of deer hunting season in Wisconsin is a day of sitting, of braving the cold in your tree stand, and keeping eyes for those deer who've foolishly not yet realized the season's opened. The game's never so easy as opening day; if you've a good spot, you sit and wait and then you shoot. Something like half of all the tags filled are done so in the opening weekend.

There aren't words for some sorts of things, aren't words beyond perhaps a quiet fuck. But even that seems, well, inappropriate, because lives are forever changed by some moments, and not necessarily for the better. Lives are sometimes suddenly made worse, or if not worse at least much harder. It seems if tragedy isn't the right word, then well, I'm not sure I want to know what is. And I certainly don't know the word for what comes next, the act of moving on, of forgetting the 'what if's and the 'how come's, the act of learning how to live again and with what's available.

But, opening day. Opening day's a day full of sitting, sitting and waiting. My father was doing neither; instead, he was walking. And he was listening. And that sound he heard, started to brush off, then decided to investigate? That sound was his oldest, his first son.

As he reminded me, his voice tired and worn and thin and small on the phone, as thick with fatigue and worry as ever I've heard it, this makes three years in a row something's gone wrong. Unspoken, though, was - at least for me - the realization that his list of disasters was only partially, woefully incomplete; we're really working on at least five years of continued losses and setbacks: his mother-in-law five years ago; one of my best friends four years ago (and the body found a year later); his mom and brother-in-law two years ago; the stillbirth and his son-in-law's brain cancer last year; my brother's childhood friend earlier this year. These besides the collected anxieties that come with living, the sicknesses and injuries and doctors' offices, the sort where if all goes well, then we'll all issue a collective thank god! and promptly forget 'til it comes around next. To sum: practice with heartache and heartbreak doesn't make either of them any easier.

This most recent news is of course a bit of both, the heartache and the thank god! each. Eighteen feet is a long way to fall, but modern medicine is also an incredible thing: Jason's not dead; though his spinal cord was severed, it appears he'll have use of his arms, neck, and head. And he'd in recent years grown into precisely the sort of man who'll do more in a wheelchair than most could dream of on two good legs, all in all a damn good man. It'll not surprise me if he's far quicker in adjusting to this new life than the rest of us. Still, any good vibrations sent his way can't hurt, right?

Fighting The Good Fight

2010-11-20T02:25:00.005-06:00

So you can make another claim, well go ahead and make it

I'm sliding. These days come slippery like the algal remnants in the long ago drained canal, sliding as they do between wakefulness and dreams; often as not I catch an edge only in the hazy spaces between. Nights, how they slide to mornings, often as not waking with my face on the keyboard, a page of z's and k's and l's. I'll rise early with hopes of notching another thousand words on this belt of my undoing, only to fall back asleep and so miss breakfast, nearly late of work. Four of every five nights'll now so pass, and how clearly I've made my remedy clear. Caffeinate, caffeinate, caffeinate. Fingers shake as eyelids droop, but. Wasn't beer made for steadying nerves?

As you lie before me now, like a shadow...
Never thought I could find you so hollow, laying into me

You wrote of numbing fatigue, and, remembering some of our earlier conversations, how you poked at me when I was too tired, I'll admit to finding some small pleasure in seeing you so defeated; I wear spite altogether too easily, it's true, but you said I didn't understand, said I wrote too infrequently. Well. You know now how easily I'll grab even a small slight for these bonfires. Such is life, and life is pain, princess. Though, one concession I'll make: you never had the advantage of such insomnia.

Can we show a little discipline... loose lips sink ships

A clinic they'd been running upstairs; I'd gone in on a day off again, such had been our load, then stuck around. It being after-hours, we sat and drank and shot the shit, as such things go, compared our battered hands and talked of running and riding and more foolhardy ventures. More sure signs, though, abound, such as how little use I'd of handlebars the ride home, corners and climbs and gravel no matter. I sat, then, and started to write, and I'd courage in my veins, nearly enough to call. It shouldn't come as any surprise, I suppose, that we'd a reprimand waiting this morning regarding our collective consumption. And I remember asking once, a cryptic conversation in the wee hours of the morning: what's the difference again between sinking and sunk?

Can you see in the dark, can you see the look on your face

Another night from the shop, and the flakes are falling now fat and thick, and I've, as usual, altogether too many thoughts and too many aches. This temptation I'd gone and gave in to the night previous, gone and run, battered as I was. A quarter-mile, maybe a half if I'll exaggerate. But if it'd been less than pleasant, nor was it quite the nasty bitch I'd well expected, and so the night awake I was, giddy with this love that grown faint in my veins. He sends a text, several, actually: hot ass girls... you need to be here! But as you noted once before, I'm more comfortable now with memories and nights left quiet than the sweaty drama itself; in the morning I'll slip and slide, these tires tracking through the sloppy white, a full day of work ahead, and that trace'll be company enough. That'll be just enough.

We expected something, something better than before, we expected something more

Another conversation I've on my mind, and sure beverage'd a role to play then, too, but still, it remains true: we all have different expectations of ourselves than we do of others. I'll bury the past to resurrect the ghosts, and somehow the biggest surprise to me these tired days is that I'm "only" eight or ten thousand words behind. Each day, I think, this is more true, as if the whole venture were no more than a testament I've more desire in that which'll punish and test than that which'll come along pleasantly. I'll embrace the fire ever more for all the preaching of patience and ice; some blazes haven't much need of stoking. You might well have known you didn't have to walk away. I've always had the war.

Tomorrow, Maybe

2010-11-13T04:07:00.001-06:00

So much better you'd been, it seemed. So much better I'd been, it seemed. We've these exercises at restraint and moderation and the model lives they've all ever dreamed for us. Practical citizens, responsible adults. The things I've never been, except in these occasional plays, the one-act dramas; you were better at theater, you know, even when I took the credit. I suspect we've both tired the audiences before they've even quite sat, on more than one occasion, but. No matter.

Barely I'd been drinking, barely I'd been playing with this pendulum and the weight I'd in past times let swing and sway so freely. I'd not let it roam so, scattering all these balls from the hands that held them juggling, had done no such thing, least not recently. Seems, strangely enough, I'd even made some uneven peace with the not running & barely biking business, though the acquisition of this particular slovenliness still seems foreign to me.

But, well. There's always this, you know. The swimming away from land and out to sea, the slow slip back into that which fits most familiar, that which even in its discomfort is comforting. perhaps as a result of its discomfort. We did grow up good Lutherans, you know. There's always the night to slip on, the night of lonely moon and warming drink and the ride or run forever unlit, the night of the fatigues near enough forgotten in the chase... there's the routine to slip back towards, as you well know, even if we'd mostly forgotten, always the histories that'll circle back around, of choices made even as they're forgotten even as the last time 'round's only just then remembered.

Time and regret are forever living in the same familiar pools, aren't they?

So it goes, you and I and all these 'we's' changing forever more only to mostly stay the same. Re-reading these essays and correspondences that have sprung from the same dark corners, and how much the language we've shared! By god, remembering the days when I was so vain as to think I knew something more than the realization I knew nothing. I don't think you ever quite shared that particular illusion, though that isn't to say you were at peace with it. Anyways - I still know nothing; we still know nothing. I think we've both gotten better at accepting it. Maybe?

So we're sublimating our personalized antidotes to loneliness as this essay I'd meant to share with you says, and we're searching for a sign that we're doing it right as the lyrics go, and really: we're tired, tired, tired, and altogether completely out of answers, again. We're tired and it's too much work and too much thought and too much, too much. There's sleep and there's drink and there's easy apathy, even if it's less easy to actually forget. There's always another day, though. Tomorrow, maybe. Next week. Next month.

Today, though? There's just not enough time or patience or energy or words. Today's never enough. As you said, it's nothing more than nothing. Except, of course, when we're both wrong.

That'll be tomorrow, maybe.

Amen

2010-11-09T23:54:00.000-06:00

Amen

I rode home hard as I might last night, feeling hemmed in perhaps by all this (relative) restraint I've been somehow exercising, and if this damaged hip were screaming already by the middle the first three-block climb, screaming forward as I was to race the night and the lights – tight as they are, that cars'll often enough not make them all on the climb – if were screaming as always she did before the big breakdown, the left always collapsing 'fore the right, you know, well no matter. It'd been too long, I decided early – several weeks, in fact, since I'd last embraced the forsaken feelings of pushing, pushing, pushing and the burn that'll swallow and make everything whole even as it'll flame with the effort. Into the highest gearings I shifted as the climb became more gradual, this mile-ish stretch of dark, dark night (even at 6:30) and so little traffic that I'd the road to myself, chewing up the center of it like a lunchroom fruit-by-the-foot, rolling it all beneath me and behind me. So it was that edges grew fuzzy – a difficult thing to do in the dark, indeed! – but I'd long before slipped from cussing at the effort, the foolishness, into silence, this breath altogether too ragged now for even the thought of expletives. Mind blank and the road before likewise empty, I pressed on as most I love, proceeding entirely by muscle memory, the knowledge that even in such dark, I knew this road well, knew its curbs contours and where trash bags may or may not be lying in dark wait.

It was delicious and it was dumb and I'd forgotten how damn fantastic it felt to be so damn alive.

There's a ring around the moon

Pleasure is pain and pain is pleasure, I told her, part tongue-in-cheek, but mostly on account of this foot still a little swollen to fit there. Still, the truth is. My gypsy heart was in flames, what with these traveling, itchy feet. Quite literally, too: the metatarsals so delicious in how they'll itch and I, perpetually forgetting, scratch them until the nerves once more awake to the blessed fire that comes flooding back; it'll be a while before I'm running again, I know this, yet this foot throbbing anew after each scratch is still something to savor, a reminder of how long trail miles'll break them down, swell them up like fish. I'm realizing altogether too easily how low this pain tolerance's stooped, but for the trade-off of expressing it a bit better.

I'm gonna fly all night down

So once home from this ride I fell myself right off the bike, less fatigued than straight-out jello-limbed. How delicious it was! Even as the last red bull bubbled dangerously in my sternum, even as the sky continued to spin and I'd trouble keeping a breath, what a thing of dazed beauty. So I set Proud Mary beside the garage and unevenly wobbled, hoping that such a thing'd make gravity return and the world settle, but I'd bile for a reward instead. And I thought of the littlest, how he's so unevenly been sick these past few days, but in truth, if I'm sick, it's more a matter this spinning head than any sort of bug.

I'm gonna fly down that road until I get where I'm going

Sick such that I'd savor the fire of this block-headed ride only naturally continuing to grow the evening through, hip and quad and the tightness full in my hamstring too; it'll be no surprise when the ache'll have me awake well into the night. But, what? I've no cares greater the moment, so short-sighted am I, and by god, I'd do it again and again and again. Of course, I've these plans already for a long ride next time my schedule'll allow it, cooler temperatures and these falling flakes be damned. Such is the use of tape and wrap and ibuprofen, being only so many days that'll allow themselves filled with the living, and fill them I certainly hope to. There's always rum or whiskey or words, besides, and if another vantage's necessary? Well, I did gain myself 2400 words last night on account of being so awake, and if the following day's often as not a four red bull dance with the weary, well. Everything's its cost; these legs go on.

And the silvery moon so fine

I'm savoring these days, and if anything I'm delighting in more than these many aches (weather changing'll not help either, you know), if there's anything I'll hold more than the aches and bruises and the weary, it's the things I associate: memories and nostalgia and the theft of memories; the smell of smoke and sweat and pines at night, the sounds of this guitar and click-clacking keys and who cooks for you ringing in the night. I'm stealing all the ways I've admired most in you and in others, minus the ones I can't be bothered with, of course. Words are words are words, but they're not all created equal, and I'd rather these to my others; I'd rather yours to mine; I'd rather none to those of most.

And the air tastes like wine

But a bookend, every tale in greater need even of conclusion than introduction (isn't that what separates fiction from fact, besides?). I'd rode to work this morning, fingers chilled as only a descent at twenty-eight degrees and lightly gloved would allow, and I'd rode stiff, feeling last night's choices and this morning's weather; it was riding home, this return from an emotional disaster of a day at school, I'd the fullest appreciation of precisely why, regardless the weather, I'd prefer to ride or run. Sky was brilliant as only a winter sky can be at dusk, the lights of the city reflected in this intimately close ceiling of clouds; slipping and sliding and laughing my way through the slushy mess of gravel and a carpet of autumn's most brilliant yellows and reds, I savored the snow on these eastern-most flanks, graded as it was from a soft shadow to a much thicker and more meaningful white on the upper slopes. The few peaks I could see were only barely visible, as if tip-toe distended to peer a white face above their respective rims of clouds. A hankering I'd had strong for this camera I so rarely remember, but even as I rode, I realized I was glad I hadn't it with me; trying to capture such a moment would've only taken away from the moment, the unthinking simplicity and beauty of it, the cleanest escape I might have ever hoped from the day.

And the road slips and slides...

Shadowdancing

2010-11-07T02:48:00.000-06:00

Having so regularly underperformed at playing nice, choosing passion over reason as once she'd less gently put it, perhaps it understandably came that I simply chose not to play. If I'd not the graces for so many social cues, not the patience to play even by the rules which I did know, not the discipline to refrain nor moderate - if I'd not the knack for such norms, then I'd instead make my own. It's this that I think of, sitting here before another blank email I've far less the trust nor courage than the words to send. Which is, of course, still the equivalent of saying nothing, but there's this: most of us wish solitude most when we're with others, but I wish of others most when I'm cold and could use some extra warmth. It could well be easier to just eat more, I realize.

Don't, don't leave yourself alone for too many days...
Sooner than you know you're gonna start slipping

So this other would-be mountain man and I, hearing of the movie they'd made about Aron Ralston, speak of lost spaces and the realizations that such openness and aloneness might sometimes push the spirit towards. Having just again revisited Alexander Supertramp myself, it's of course already on the mind, but still. You know, on those long adventures of yours..., he starts, middle o' nowheres at the conversational fork. And perhaps I've misread him, and its not intended as a kindly and gentle reproach, the sort only the best of teachers can offer, but well. We all read the lines different, you know, and you know better than most perhaps just how poor in fact I sometimes am at finding the fine print hidden between them. Not the patience to be bothered, as it were, I suspect.

So I think I can solve my problems by myself...
But then I go again, wishing never solved a problem

Not as if what he points isn't true, for it is; a bit of an isolationist these past few months I've been, as if the touring, once begun, never quite quit. And if I'm naturally a recluse, this has only been more true each successive year, as if I'd a web I've been slowly undoing, one golden corn silk drawn back each pull. Deliberate but quick I've been, as if to limit the damages of any more hands come swiping through, sweeping up what I'd thought rightfully my own. Likely a girl, as most these stories go. So it goes, the tale's not new.

You're sharp alright... but no one's asking to leave it alone, leave it alone
Can we?

But. Some of these are strands not so completely severed as to be beyond repair, and so I'll crawl out along these strings of letters, see to what states I may yet mail them off. To the French, alas, no, but many others, yes. This mountain man revolutionary friend - an original, I swear it - had tried calling several times in the early fall; I'd returned one, but admittedly been less than present at the time. A truth I'll swear upon, though: brothers are not so easily lost to time and space, and he'd been on the mind especially much these past few days, thoughts lost as they were in the dreams of trees, and so it was that correspondence began anew. As with the best friends, we picked up just where we'd left off. Threads we'd left and now returned to, conversations of plants and what'll make a community of love, of how knowledge and wonder both fulfill each other and play the spoil-sports. Only natural I've the urge to crack the same joke I'd cracked then, when it first came up, even if he'd never quite realized how mostly serious I was: no wonder I find so much mystery in the world, relying more on senses than sense as I may be wont to do.

The time that we wasted and the place where we fall
Will we wake in the morning and know what it was for?

These words aren't making it to the fifty thousand. But these are the words I know how to share. Or, put another way: I'm sorry. Care to be one of those friends that remembers better where we left off than why we did so? Like she said, I'm a mess. Like I said, I'm sorry.

Marking Lines

2010-11-03T23:48:00.001-06:00

I'm working on drawing a straight line
And I'll draw until I get one right
It's bold and dark girl, can't you see
I done drawn a line between you and me

Drawing lines any sort of straight's always been a difficulty, and narratives haven't ever been an exception; I remember how frustrated you were with me when I spoke of time in puddles, a mess of memories scatter-plotted with no discernible order. It'll come as no surprise then, of course, that this fiction business is such a struggle (aren't most things, though?). I'm writing my ass off and still it feels as if I'm falling behind. I've events, scenes, bits of dialogue, these characters in my dreams, but the forks that'll connect them I've less than no idea of. As to the tale I might yet choose, might yet find a way of connecting? I've no idea, accustomed as I am to simply falling in and falling down and falling apart. Builders and destroyers, you'd said, and well. I like fire.

I had a hole in the middle where the lightning went through it
Told my friends not to worry
I had a hole in the middle someone's sideshow wouldn't do it
I told my friends not to worry

And if I've learned all too little, at least I've perhaps learned this. There are always scenes. There are always characters. But there are only themes and arcs and climaxes and conclusions where we choose to contrive them, and these strange, sad characters, little as I know them, seem deserving of better, least in any form I'd be able to offer. Or maybe I'd rather run than stay still and slowly construct. But again, isn't that also the norm, the pattern?

It wasn't me, I didn't dig this ditch
I was walking for weeks before I fell in

So I've some of the usuals on repeat; Sad Songs and Alexi Murdoch and Into The Wild yesterday, High Violet and Midnight Organ Fight, Neon Bible and Winter of Mixed Drinks today. My wrists are sore from these crutches and the chafed spots along my ribs are slowly 'coming calloused; besides this idea I've my fingers should be worn from writing, were they not already calloused. I raced ideas across the page on my break, then raced a student in the hall yesterday; he hopping and I crutching, we both got a reminder proper hallway etiquette. Forever behind on the words, forever seven; both are no less true than seemingly always they've been.

The rest of me is a version of man, built to collapse into crumbs
And if I hadn't come down to the coast to disappear
I may have died in a land-slide of the rocks, the hopes and fears

The leaves outside are brilliant, even as the snow's occasionally flying on the ridges up above, and I've all these mountain runs I'd not a chance at before fall began sliding towards winter and postholing. No wonder then I'm only half-attendant, day-dreaming of ventures for healthier times, when one of my students tells me her mom's age, not so much older than my own, and she a senior in high school. A co-worker and I just look at each other, force ourselves later to laugh at the absurdities of it all. I'll of course never be old enough not to be a child, you know, much less raise them; a memory skipping back, spiraling out in one of these puddles, and I remember back when we were all drunk, celebrating our freedoms, and a toast'd been made: to raisin,' a verb better suited shenanigans than progeny. Laughter's a common response to uncomfortable truths, you know.

Yes I'm listening I'm listening
I can tell that you are serious
You're looking for that hurt look around my mouth

Another stone skipped across pools in time, remembering toasts. You'd asked for a happy story, and I'd asked for time to think. That night, I think it was, I drunkenly wrote a reply. One time I drank... then a growler, then a fifth... and I danced and I was ahppy a dnlife was good. Even now, I'm more impressed with the spelling than anything. There's no time like the present for the fuck-ups of the past, memory being the wormhole it is, which is only to say this: I've never been any good at coloring between the lines, much less reading them. Do the happy portraits come without the re-imaging, without the technicolor nostalgia? I know best the wistful and best-forgotten; they're most often a mix of greys and pastels and rusted autumn earth tones.

This is a story and you are not in it
Flocks of pages torn out ...
Here's your shovel, there's the ground

As it were, this isn't a good story, not much better than terrible, truth be told, but equally true - it could be worse. Puddles I keep splashing about each time I sit to write, but still, the words I've wrestled forth. One of these times, I wonder if I won't just fall in and disappear, swimming right on through the earth's molten core, there purified and memory wiped, until I pop 'right through, a new mind in China. That'd be a fresh start, maybe. (And likely a better tale.)

Inaction

2010-10-30T09:46:00.001-05:00

We're not much on speaking terms - not really, besides the occasional drunk text or email I'll send your way - but if we were, I wonder if you'd not be privately gloating, given how it is that my body's finally forced me not to just to slow, but to halt; mobility's, for the moment, damn near nonexistent, and if already I wasn't running, hadn't been in well over a month, well now it appears I'll not much be riding either.

Call on the fates, this'll take a second
While I fall on my face...
And we can talk all we want but all I can say is that I'm sorry...
But I'm never gonna do it again

I've no real confidence in other means of escape - I've not much for drinking these days (relatively, anyways), no way of running, nor of riding - but I've my suspicions I'll find another. These words, though? They're not that.

Where The Light Gets In

2010-10-28T07:10:00.001-05:00

A heaviness I'll find lingering, all these words I've found standing in for peepholes into other lives, and how I try them on. Sighs I'll not hear, but nonetheless feel; it not being in my nature to let go except where I shouldn't, these hurts I'll of course cling to, and they to me - most of all in the places I'd most easily flood with music and liquor and exertion. Opining it best if I choose the latter (is this growing up?), I'll waste sleepless hours in music and motion pictures, but for remembering then that though solitaire's a game most play until they win, I've a tendency to play 'til I lose. Only logical, then, that these stop-gaps won't suffice; only logical, then, that I'll still find the bottle and the bike, the wee hours of the night and the shenanigans of chasing amnesia. And so it was, the night no longer young, that off I ventured, these words in need of sinking, and from their weight it seemed most natural to climb, up, up and away.

I could go on, telling the tale as it were, but here the story's the same as near always, of a fatigue that'll build up as best I need it, 'til the weight of this weariness outdoes the weight of the other, and there the scales tip. So satisfied, I'll only then find sleep. Or, in this particular case, the hours for such having expired, instead I'll shower and head off to work, another productive robot in a robot world.

Put another way: I don't wish I'd that which'd alleviate, that'd make the living any less brilliant or memories any less hard (that's what she said), and so I'll not say anything at all, knowing altogether too damn well that the sea in which we're swimming is the sky and the sky's already said it all. Mattresses of clouds marking the dawn, memories drift across rifts in time; I've no longer much a care for the direction of these currents, no love for any particular course. So: you wouldn't happen to know how to get to the beach, would you? I think I'd like to laze in the sun for a while.

End of the Road

2010-10-25T23:28:00.003-05:00

On bended knee is no way to be free
Lifting up an empty cup I ask silently
That all my destinations will accept the one that's me
So I can breathe

Seems snow's seen fit to dust herself off and let her dandruffy hair on down, and so it is that ridgelines are whited, and momentary are the views I'll catch through the shadowy fingers of clouds so easily there drifting. The sky's a sea of mysteries, and the Enchantments - literal and figurative, here in this place - will only in small moments let loose little glimpses of her white flanks, akin to a thigh hinted at, temptress and tease as they are on an afternoon as this.

Circles they grow and they swallow people whole
Half their lives they say goodnight to wives they'll never know
Got a mind full of questions and a teacher in my soul
So it goes...

So it goes. Of course, I've my own fight here, beyond that of always wanting to see more, beyond that of always wanting somewhere else. I've my own fight, straining this tired bike up the dusty fire road, grinding through the low gears. Wait, he says, you rode up there loaded? Idiot!. I don't bother to correct him, Proud Mary accustomed as she is to doubters. And so it is that I strained and strained, pulling up and up and hard enough my front tire found itself every so often skipping. But, then, efficiency's no concern of mine, a rule I know but don't much want. I've my own fight here, the world spinning with fatigue and effort and mountain-loving lust, and good god, sometimes I hate how easily I'll hurl as much as I love the hurt as much as I hate it dried to my face. This fight, though, is so much simpler than any fight I've had with you, so I'll embrace this one in trying to forget that one. Running's what I do, you know. Especially, it seems, when I can't.

Don't come closer or I'll have to go
Holding me like gravity are places that pull
If ever there was someone to keep me at home
It would be you...

The sun's seeping through the sky like outstretched fingers, and the wind's a cruel mistress whipping across these far eastern flanks of the Cascades. The Columbia's a fat wonder down below, a thick snake still digesting the spring and summer melt even as she prepares for the feast of another season. A sprawling mess as I left her, the city's since shrunk to a still dwindling collection of twinkling reflections, diamonds alight with the mirrors of a million different suns, this great wonder played out across the gentler slopes nearer the river.

Everyone I come across in cages they bought
They think of me and my wandering
But I'm never what they thought
Got my indignation but I'm pure in all my thoughts
I'm alive...

Hardly pure, am I, but still I can't help but drink it all in, forget everything else. After the aches of these past weeks' (relative) inactivity, the tightness each morning brought my backs, hips, neck, this sort of earned displeasure's such a welcome change. These are the aches of play I'm accumulating, here and now, and if it's not the sort of weary sinew I yearn for most - oh, to run to a peak! - it'll come closer than most of what I've been finding for substitutes. Oh, how I'll try and savor it, the discomfort of the riding and the parched cracking at the back of my throat, the way the world spins. I'll take photograph after photograph, hoping that in memory it'll somehow suffice, this way the sun and sky are caressing the land clearly an act of love.

Wind in my hair, I feel part of everywhere
Underneath my being is a road that disappeared
Late at night I hear the trees
They're singing with the dead overhead...

The world is in me, but I've these troubles being in it; I've still that little bump, the one that'll move where it shouldn't and always tender to the touch, the littlest bit of my densest self that's not meant to be adjusted so, this clearly fucked toe. Still, I want nothing more than to run, the delights of singletrack up and up and into the heavens on just two legs and a tank full of will. With ski season approaching, I wonder if telemarking might likewise be compromised, and over a month now it's been, longest I've gone without running in oh, fully half my life.

Leave it to me as I find a way to be
Consider me a satellite for ever orbiting
I knew all the rules but the rules did not know me
Guaranteed...

But: as these things go, I'm alright. Proud Mary's taking care of me, best she can anyways. The sky's been doing alright by me, lonely moon and lovers' sun, and if the mountains won't be run, perhaps they'll still be ridden, even as the snow line starts to drop. And that, it seems, may just have to be enough.

Slickrock

2010-10-23T04:40:00.000-05:00

So it is that, ever insatiable, the want festers. Less of companionship, preferring as I do my solo ways, but instead of correspondence and dialogue and parried give-and-take. Especially with you, the art you'd made of it. We'd most often leave points of contention in polite disagreement, but just often enough they'd burst into inexplicable venom, a spontaneous combustion of words lost forever to any sort of shared logic. Fire and ice, but never complacency, it's true.

I've no knack for this sort of thing aloud, our exchanges, and you wryly noted it so once - you speak so differently than you write - far more accustomed as I am to tripping over my tongue than any sort of eloquence. But that's only deepened my love for the written word, the way it transforms and bends perceptions and truths. Or, in your case, sometimes did; I've such an affection for nostalgia, I admit, and nowhere more so than where, for simplicty's sake, I'd rather forget.

As it always is: I've spent enough time in silence again for silence to be most often my queries' reply. Those bridges not yet burned strain under the weight of such vanishing; those burnt smolder, and in softer places flake and ash and drift into non-existence. But that's a metaphor I'm fairly certain you're sick of, aren't you?

I remember this idea we'd had of sliding under another's skin, and I realize I've no idea what to say to you anymore, only that I want to hear your thoughts. This is the beauty of slipping into another's world of words, it's true - the small conduit into this bit of you, a glimpse inside the person, flawed and tragic and whole and real. I'm fully of the mind that not loving someone's near enough impossible when you've the idea you've spent enough time inside their most honest words, inside their head, even if that love may be edged with all sorts of other things too, bladed with hate and disgust and envy and pity, as it may be. Another truth I've come to: I'm likely far more a junk show than most, but that'll hardly mean you're any less; these words we share, or more accurately, perhaps, the silences, ought to be evidence enough.

The simplest of lines a friend wrote earlier: "The thing about loving someone for their words is that with enough hard drive space you can just keep on loving. Forever." Yes, precisely. The danger and the wonder, and under such scrutiny of course it had to fall apart, crumble into the void in white-hot ash. The best of words, you know, are - and especially from the mouths of fools as we - somehow ineffable. Contradictions, all of this, clearly. And so it was that monuments of dialogue full with the things we could not say began to naturally tower over everything else; chapter upon chapter, climb as I might, that became a tower I'd no hope of reaching, worn as the walls were with re-reading. A sign, perhaps, that I still can't say it plainly, but here another try by means of tangents: though such fevered discourse was hardly a first, this familiarity with the words themselves was. You discounted it, perhaps, but I could not, and that too, I think was typical of us each. As is the fact that you'll ignore that this is about you, while someone else may well make the mistake of thinking it's for them.

Similar enough: telling myself this should matter less does not make it so. So, tell me again, why'd we retreat to silence?

Lost in Translation

2010-10-21T02:36:00.003-05:00

I've seen fire and I've seen rain

I've these words, idle collections of nothings and somethings, all of them saying little. Of course, knowing no better I'll toss them to the wind just the same, as if blowing there in the breeze they'd somehow find quality in addition to quantity. As noted, voices change, from atop clouds (or close as I'll let fly these days, each morning bringing a body that'll feel it deeper) to the moderated mediocrity of the median that separates mutant and norm. I'm sleeping more, you know, twelve hours and ten and maybe ten again, whatever time'll allow me, successive days failing to wake in time to see them all off. Good I've a lesser schedule this week, but still - hungry I am for more sleep yet, feeling the fatigue of this long slide; this desire of drink a secondary sign, as if the words weren't enough. Strange it'll seem to not find myself editing or protecting, but then. Fuck it, you know? I've no more reason to be guarded than open, so might as well find a coin and flip it; when the view's more often of the past than the future, there's not much reason to hide, what's done simply so, and weight resting only on the moment and my eyes with it.

I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end

Metaphors I recall, of these hours with talking, talking, and far more said not in words than in them. Of fogs and buoys and swimming until there's no more land, of seas and sandbags and islands adrift. Of humpbacked whales, and long deep breathes. Of course, running. Falling. Gravity, things sinking. We've our codes, always. My younger other - for we are of the same clay, senor, so many of these ways we've sought to distinguish ourselves, as ever, later bringing us closer - he'll speak of the mind, ever over-cluttered or distressingly empty, and I'll immediately think of these days at the shop when I'll find both equally true. All the symbols we've shared, and I'm unsure which I'd choose now. Perhaps the island? So it is this evening I'll find myself a heart racing from too many energy drinks (four, alas, substituting for a lunch I never paused to take, forgetting myself in the busy, busy), and it seems certain enough I'm either trying to do too much (an idea I hate to consider) or remembering how to move quickly altogether not quickly enough (altogether more likely). Wide awake I am this moment, sure, but even so, in waves I'll have fatigue a wall over these eyelids; I've a beer and some rum in me, thick with the hope of quieting this fidgety, finicky mind, but. How unpredictable that experiment always is!

I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend

And I wait. Ghosts I've heard in the disquiet night, but well, phantoms lack substance, and so cannot be trusted. Which isn't to say I, ever the fool, won't try, for if I wouldn't allow the effort, then how would this be the mess I've come to expect? And, as for symbols, I've found my choice for the moment: ? For certainty, there's always another day.

But I always thought that I'd see you again

Ledgers

2010-10-17T22:33:00.001-05:00

We'll both forget the breeze, most of the time

Trouble came. Or, more accurately, I went and found you out, then dove recklessly in as if a mountain lake in August and I'd need of the chill against a hot summer run. A warm summer day it was then, too, hot and humid like I remembered of those years against the Atlantic long ago; sweat ran in rivers and heat radiated from the pavement and your body; the city smelled as only cities can. You held me against you and we awkwardly re-acquainted, you babbling nervously. Then, guard down, I left the precipice on which I'd been so delicately balancing, leapt on down and in, and swim swim swim I did. At least until the cold took my breath away and left me gasping, paralysed. Still. I can't regret it, only what came of it.

You and I so alike and yet so strangely different, and it shouldn't have come as a surprise, fire and fire making only smoke, but still, somehow, caught up in the swimming as I was, somehow it still came unseen. Climbing forward is ever the goal, but unless the mountain's literal, I've such an easier time rolling back, it seems. I won't fuck us over, I remember - oh, how sure I was! - but November hadn't a chance.

I'll get hammered, forget that you exist...

So it is. The night lingers on, liquid dinner in progress and I'm sitting restless even after all the others have called the night right off. Try as I might, despite the night's chill, the urge to ride won't be resisted. Into the silent dark I climb, into the invisible sky, the moon passive but watching. By god, the magic of these veins! Prometheus' fire in these fennel stalk legs, lighting again and again these sparks of vibrancy and life; Thor's hammer in every stroke down and up, and these pedals to which I'm clipped rivers of gold raining down, the road marked as only my own. Climbing to the clouded heavens, I've the darkest ridgelines to myself, the night now closer dawn than the long forgotten still sober dusk. This snaking arrow of a ride so tipped, I pause and survey my dominion: stars above and stars below, lives in myth imagined above, stranger lives imagined below. Cities below me sleep, and, in the thin black ribbon I cannot see but know is there, the river twists all the way on through.

Tired, I turn to go. At thirty-five or so, a reckless bat descending, I've this dinner to spill across the road and it's altogether far too perfect, heaven spinning and earth spinning and fatigue crashing down like a wall; oblivion and I are one, as we so easily fit. Ever on the margin of what is right and what is okay and what is acceptable (fuck all that!, I remember blurting, before I remembered better), yes, and so it is that I'll stoop beside the road where a little trickle'll cross below and scooping the water I'll feel but not see, I rinse the cold away with more cold. If I'm awake and belligerent, all the more am I alive for it, I think - and in such simple moments, what else could there be?

I have a new vigor... but still my body aches

Strange to me the questions these past few days have brought, from the most unusual of sources, all answers pointing back at the spaces I've filled with ghosts, as if phantoms could replace the missing. Harrowing loneliness?, she asks. No. Much more it's a weight, less than steady but still consistent, always there if I've need of something to push back against, even on the days when there's not much life for pushing. Tired is tired, as it goes, and tired is numb. Numb is good, especially compared to the fire ever consuming.

Changes, always. Fifteen months I spent learning slow, re-learning how to breathe, how to sometimes pause. Go-go-go as I always was, it became a foreign and forgotten thing by the end of all this riding. We're in it for the long haul, Proud Mary and I, don't you know? Of course it's now that I've of that lost haste, that I'm stepping back to drudge up the buried ghosts and calling upon those present in shadows, looking for that push I'd begun to stray from. Still I can't move quickly enough after that practiced deliberation, but I'm relearning the intentions of Busy well enough. Busy wears her smile with far more cunning than grace, but it's certainly alluring enough. I couldn't help but closer.

So it is I find myself writing on my lunch break taken at four on a Saturday, storing strings of thoughts, lines tucked away for later on my phone. Of course it's thoughts of long texts we shared I'm thinking the whole way through, and so it often enough is, that even in trying to run away, into memories and ghosts I stumble instead. Perhaps I'll someday embrace it for what it is. Until then, though, even if I've not running, I've plenty of riding in me: twice last night, and a longer ride this afternoon, easily a century of climbing and descending between them. Tired is her own trophy; there's always at least that one win. The other games? For now, I'm ignoring them.

Turpentine

2010-10-14T02:46:00.000-05:00

These silences, still. All's quiet on the western front, I wrote a friend, and at least as far as I can see – we are each our own earth, right? – that's true. I'm as absent-minded as ever I've been, I suppose, the way I've been forgetting and forgetting, though if ever I've been more in space, likely enough I'd not remember it, I think. Amidst so much fall, it's hard to think of much else, isn't it?

There's a tangible sadness to those few words used to express a connection... and the unreliability it can represent.

Seems the busier I am, the more aware I am the few small spaces, the gaps that'll whisper at winds left behind, the wall I've not yet chinked even as winter's coming; mornings'll tell me fall's well into the air and I've sight of my breath more hours each week. Students are stressing especially this week, all wanting me for math help, what with these tests before parent-teacher conferences and by god, how are they still doing so poorly, that teacher's sooo unfair, and they just don't teach right, and this is so dumb anyways... Distractions are good: math is dangerous, maybe, depending on what equations you'll choose to focus on, but a lack in empathy or understanding far more a problem. I remember that which keeps me grounded, even as I remember the tug of balloon strings and wonder at the color of the late-morning sky and the tenor of your voice.

I disappear. I find distance. I am not an easy person to be with.

I'm withdrawing, maybe. Fewer the emails I keep up on any longer, fewer yet the friends I'll still much speak with. Rationalizing: I move too much; I know how time and space wear us each down; how rare it is the friendship that'll survive more than a few such transitions. Fewer by far are the miles I'm running – three and a half weeks now it's been, yet the toe remains nonplussed, the sort of finicky that in anything else I'd have sworn off long ago. Remembering years past, I'm realizing just how much more easily I show signs of wear these days; I've yet to find any sort of comfortable peace in this. Already too much of me will crack and grind and moan and pop altogether far too frequently and easily. Maybe I'm forgetting this body I used to know, shedding a skin before I'll set in search another - hasn't that always been my past, anyways?

You're not the only one missing friends tonight, friend. Blame it on a lonely moon?

Fitting it seems that relearning anew and discovering fresh seems a necessary part these weeks as well, negotiating as I must some semblance of balance these jobs, all the unfamiliar. Only one season of telemarking behind me, and yet, now tuning skis and answering questions as if I actually knew, somehow magically an expert, I'm sure my inexperience shows. My body feels the new strains – building things a forgotten art, my hands are beat up and sore; likewise, the weight of things carried awkwardly remains the day after – even as it misses some the old ones. I'm riding less (working in a bike shop, this is not lost on me), and running none. More than a decade's passed since I last broke from running so long, and I feel the absence in strange ways, a ghost behind the lens of morning, in the taste of lunch, the fatigue of evening, even in the simplest acts of doing.

We've no need of hate, she said, when there's so much to love. And I just laughed and laughed, because people are stupid and she had a tendency to forget that.

Some acts are as much a definition, an identity, a proper noun, as they are a verb. Running, yes. I run is as simple a sentence as I am, simple as I breathe or I think. I wonder sometimes at how I might be rewriting this particular narrative, this long respite more and more becoming a fill-in-the-blank vocabulary at which I might stare absently than any sort of plot for which I've even an inkling of an outline. I've no satisfaction akin that of running to the tops of mountains, you know. Even if I knew the declination of these weeks, I've no means of taking a bearing or setting course.

I'm a kettle, dear, always just removed from the stove upon which I'd simmered...

But maybe you knew all of this, at least in the superficial way you've always heard me, even if you'll grumble about my fixation with miles and mountains. I imagine you'd tell me now how little you care; you've precisely that need to feel in control. So be it, I suppose. My mountains are better, anyways, and so's the beer. There's a solvent for everything, I'm sure of it, and it may be I'll yet find mine.

Yesteryear Come Simply

2010-10-07T22:30:00.000-05:00

Always I've had this knack for looking more behind than ahead, as if yesterday'd more relevance than tomorrow, but still it seems to me that some miles - no matter how traveled - bridge time and space as only the doing can. Save one short weekend a summer ago, years it'd been since last we'd gathered, and yet how little - despite how much - we've changed. Despite the many pieces new and different, the puzzles we've each shifted and sorted through, these amalgamations of experiences we've each come to call our own - despite all this, we've still our same cores, essences, even spirit animals, I imagine, should such tokens suffice. How little the years apart have changed us, for even in relatively aging, we've the same immaturity; even in wizening (again, relatively), we've this easy laughter' even in memories of tragedy and shared sorrow, we've this joy in the foolish and simple.

We had each other, the sound in sun and shade, and if I'd met their city differently, perhaps I'd not have cared for it. But with these two and the most pleasant of years on our minds, I'd not the chance to imagine Seattle any lovelier. Kindred souls, yes, and if there'd been a year apart for each day of the week, well. how little time might sometimes matter!

Of course, as with any trip, there'd be confusion and miscues, and if the departure was nearly marred, well then. Some things are not so easily soiled. Having ridden west, I'd not anticipated likewise riding the return east, but Amtrak pulled a Greyhound and forced my hand, so I played the cards dealt. Tired ass and grumpy legs, but if I'd myself a weary mind & body & soul, I'd just as easily those same freedoms I ever long for. Fatigue's the key that'll free the gate, and so it was I found myself as tired as I'd remembered from nights of long ago, the all night rides and runs of yesteryear, and thus relearned what it was to come alive, to make the stars my own. I danced in the eerie glow of the foggy climb, shivered under the hair-raising scream of a cougar in the dark, found the softest peace in the damn chill of the long, long descent. Twelve miles the major climb and twenty the descent and I'd no company but the dark, dark road; pillows of foggy clouds surrounding me on up, and then passing over the wall that'll make the crest of the Cascades, I'd no sooner begun the descent than the sky was awash with stars. I rode these miles almost entirely by the dim light of the night, flicking on a few lights only for the sound of rare life. If I ever see the Amtrak man again, I think my wish'll be to thank him.

So it was that my week began on no sleep, but I'm glad to have rediscovered the heightened acuity of such fatigue, the contrast of deadness (legs, mind) with the lively (perceptions of connectedness, scents, sights, sounds). I'm glad to have rediscovered the joy of nights in play and days in work, and there are these new discoveries each day, of students and math. I find myself again watching students work with transversals and power rules and shift laws and... I'd missed this more than I realized. The joy of learning, lights flicking on, the evils of math no longer quite so scary. And I'm remembering again the simple joys of grease and fine-tuning derailleurs and being busy with my hands. I'm waking to the world again, eating a dozen cookies if I feel like it (for a third breakfast!), forgetting to eat when I'm busy and eating all the time when I'm not; bloody mary and a beer and I'll call it a first dinner, the rest of it all coming after, fatigue included. There's less room for too many questions these days, and I'm thankful.

If I'd forgotten how simple the days might be, I'm glad to have stumbled back upon it. And, realizing what dates like today might have symbolized? I'm only the more glad for it. I prefer these roads to that one.

Weathered

2010-09-30T06:25:00.000-05:00

Correspondences in dormancy these past few weeks, and it's there, so near sleeping, that perhaps I've finally learned a hold to bind this tongue. Still moving and yet silent, I answer no one but the sky and these distracted legs. Irresponsible it felt, admittedly, her neuroses - but it's discourteous to not reply within a day, I can hear her saying - having, in those years together, also become my own. Funny to me now, in hindsight realizing how many these adult behaviors I've picked up over the years from women I've loved, their families, our shared friends. Contexts and backstories and so on: we're all adaptable, always, aren't we? Save, of course, when we choose not to be, heels dug. Seems to me 'special sort of stupid's not so far from irredeemably obstinate, you know. But who am I to say what we may choose to be?

I'm writing more and saying less, it's true. Tact yet may be a thing I learn; already I've this realization I'm learning caution, having never before been the sort to wear a helmet if I could justify not. But, then, live with a seven-year-old: perspectives change, and I've some idea now what his eyes follow. Similarly, I've never before been the sort to turn from a bridge 'fore it flamed, but, then. Maybe now I am? If the aches of these joints most mornings (already!) will teach me nothing else, maybe age'll yet temper some of these impulses.

Busy likewise finding me more again these days, and this playtime's begun diminishing, but given the toe that's likely - for the time being, at least - for the better. Still, I'm appreciative this desert became the lush valley. Sometimes I think you're living only in metaphors and images, she said, but from four months of unemployment and touring uncertainty to three jobs taken and several more turned down and likely grad school again looming (a third go'll be different, right?)... well, it's true enough, I suspect. More transitions'll yet materialize, as always they do, behind and ahead.

And so it is that I've seventeen starred emails awaiting replies, those the ones I intend to get to, eventually, besides all the others I'm just ignoring. Four of the first six speak of tumult wrought and sought, and the others just wait and wait - impatiently, as if they'd lives their own. Silence I'll likely savor a little longer (obstinate, yes) - but at least I've finally learned to ask for time, or even to walk away before the burnt bridge'll turn me back. Maybe that's progress, perhaps it's not. Have I any reason to claim a knowledge of the difference?

I'd ask in earnest, but your answers aren't any better than mine.

Veneer

2010-09-28T06:12:00.001-05:00

We remain after everything's been washed away...

This computer'd crashed and I thought sure I'd lost it all again – was this to be a yearly ritual? – but I've it back now, all sorts still marred and perchance only temporarily among the living, but still another ghost from the grave, dead as I'd considered it, gone as I consider you. I've this idea these issues an offering forced by universe's sense of humor, a strange sort of penance I'll find in troubles found and lost. For what, you'd ask. But if you've not the code, never likely shall you; not a man of many regrets, I've at least this one, of time slipped past and over as soon as begun. I've some small pride, you know, the smallest bites often festering the most and too many bridges burning behind me to let this one in flames go by. Not the courage, you know; even with a toe perhaps broken (say it ain't so!), I've more flight in me than fight. So hobbled off I ride away, ignoring the scent of smoke on my skin, instead trying to remember the smells - vanilla and butterscotch! - of those pines I've loved near most, the thoughts the trees kept wisely for themselves.

...By the rain we will stand up right as we stand today

I'm writing more and saying less, I realize. You'd approve, maybe, except of these images, shadows and smoke and ghosts let slip through cold fingers, and the ways I've yet to learn to tell a story. Which is to say you'd not approve at all, if I've understood anything. So it is. No more can I tell you the things I dream; I've more songs yet to learn to play.

Fogged (At Any Rate)

2010-09-27T07:19:00.001-05:00

I've as many 'perhap's and 'maybe's as 'don't know's, and as the days go, I'll perchance yet learn to peace with these matters of pieces. Or, at the least - I say I will, even as I remember a surprising mirth I'd seen neither coming nor going. At any rate, spilt from the coquette's tongue, eyes aglow, coded phrases and late, late nights; at any rate, progress is a forward thing, at least in theory, so forward I'll go. Seems the things I say I'd prefer to forget most I'll remember easiest, and goddamn if this isn't a familiar drill. All these old habits I'm remembering, sleepless nights to run and ride and drink, repeat; now the drinking's less, and the miles likewise (damn toe!), but the riding's more, and I know well how even as we age our escape routes remain familiar.

Give me an answer, but please don't tell me the truth

Another playlist I've here, alone with these wandering lines, wondering at what'll make bravery cowardice and cowardice bravery, those things I've often as not wished interchanged. Don't you put yourself on the backburner, you're gonna bring yourself down, and I've no better way for saying so, so I'd rather not try. Bound for a place I could only reach alone, I've these nights still restless, and if the evening brought a dusk laced with the scents of long runs past, who was I to refuse the sort of soft September fall that lingers so? Too many memories, too many thoughts, too many hours in each night.

Faced with the dodo’s conundrum
I felt like I could just fly

A small bottle of this drink I'd preferred years before, rum and twenty-three flavors, I'd beside me, so a bike of lights I loaded and launched into the night and the moon swallowed me 'fore I realized I was even off. A bat with memories for sonar, I climbed into the darkness, asked it a question and let it swallow me up. Loops and loops of spinning tires and the lights shut off, I rode and rode, as full as only the emptiness'll allow. The air coolly drank me in and I sat atop the world and watched it sleep, before - as I began waking - the slow gold of a shadowy start accompanied me back down, returning to the tethers of this world once more.

Call on the fates, this'll take a second
While I fall on my face, like everyone else

All of which is to say: I'm not quite floundering. But neither have I much confidence in these bearings.

Print

2010-09-25T21:12:00.000-05:00

"What becomes of us?"
"The world will decide. The world always decides."

By the age of six, I was convinced I'd an eternity of damnation ahead of me; tear-streaked afternoons I piled up, the realization I'd never stop sinning such a cold one. At age eight, my bigger concern with heaven was flying jumbo jets nearly there, for I was going to be the best airplane pilot ever born. By ten, I'd clearly demonstrated I was smarter than any of my teachers could ever hope to be - adults were so dumb! - and did my best to ensure they knew it. By twelve, I'd realized everyone hated me for it. At fourteen, I was a teenage mess: no one had ever been like me before; nor would there ever be anyone like me again; clearly, no one would ever understand me; god, how I couldn't wait to be an adult and run my own life. By age sixteen, I'd discovered running, and swore I'd be the first person to run the Boston Marathon in under two hours. It's likely for the better that I spent large portions of the next four years battling various injuries. When I was eighteen and newly discovering the world, among my finds was the DSM; immediately I suspected I'd spend at least part of my life institutionalized, because ohmygod I was most sorts of mentally unwell, the manual said so. By twenty, I'd fully embraced religion, was going to spend the rest of my life a married preacher, an Alexander Supertramp spreading the gospel and accordingly blessed. (Later I'd argue this was a far greater insanity than that of two years previous.) At age twenty-two I was sure I was well on my way to becoming the Next Great American Novelist. By twenty-four I'd fallen passionately enough in love with ultras to assume I was on my way to world class ultramarathons. At least in theory, twenty-six brought the realization that what I know best is just how little I do know. Next up will be twenty-eight, and I've no idea what even the next month will bring - only that I'll fall into it wholly prepared by not preparing at all. I'm probably more okay with this version of planning ahead than I should be.

Swim

2010-09-21T18:06:00.000-05:00

Time runs in strange rivulets these days, not unlike sweat or muddy ribbons down the back of legs, regardless whether the memories spurring them on are fresh or well-worn. Run to remember, run to forget; ride to remember, ride to forget. A Hemingway quote I’d just once more stumbled upon the other day: you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. You’ve your definition the loneliest feeling; he, understanding me best, would likely claim another. My own definition I find myself rewriting each day, all the while wondering if I’ll ever again find the ability to stay still.

Gather up the lost in your soul
Gather up the painful
I’ve been told to give up the ghost

So many hours I’ve spent alone, being only with silence. I’ve preferred it so; running, biking, simple existence the company I’ll choose over most others. Yet it wasn’t until you two each suggested that I was lonely that I imagined I could be. Truth: hearing those words from anyone else, I’d always known they simply didn’t know me, had misinterpreted based on some random collection of snapshots, an errant sample size. When you leveled the charge? I wondered if I hadn’t misunderstood myself.

Perhaps we were all wrong. In more cynical pasts my retort to such a charge might have been akin “but I’ve company enough in these ghosts.” Of course, you’ve now joined that company, haven’t you?

I’ve been told to give up the ghost

You are a specter in the cool mountain air, a ghost lost as easily to the brilliant woods as the charred canyon, as quickly come and gone as the drifting clouds. Peaks are less in the sun these days with the weather ever changing, more often seen shrouded, cloud-draped, that too’ll seem fitting, the mystery, rock ever shrouded. Up I’m always drawn, run or ride or hike, and inevitably there’ll be views and thoughts to rediscover. I’ll watch white blue skies fade to grey, clouds drift above and below and over and off, smell the still silence that’ll be broken only by the fluttering of leaves or grasses, punctuated by the smoky scent of a charred slope. I’ll wonder what you’d make of it, dream of skies dotted only by stars, ponder metaphors and allegories and the stories we learn as children only to later forget. Distance I’ve found, distance I’ll yet try to put on.

All the things you’ll love,
All the things that may hurt you,
All the things you shouldn’t do,
All the things you want to…
They’re calling your name… travel safely.

These shorts I’m rereading others found funny, but I’ll just find them sad, heavy and altogether far too true, a world I’d prefer weren’t, though it clearly is. Suspicions I’ll harbor that you’d love such a book, but I’ve a preference for the lived-in moment, not the tragedy of a worn-through history. Alas, I’ve more hours these days of looking back than ahead, and I’ve these suspicions that the narratives I’m reading may be far more true than the journeys of which I dream.

You’re finding your way, I know, and in some sense, I suppose so am I. Still. As he’d noted, some familiar tags – “there will be weather,” “shit happens,” “the only constant’s change” – are less than inspiring. A slick, solo two-step, I think, even as another friend jests the other day that ‘acquaintances’ are merely shorthand for attempted conquests. How little we understand each other, even he and I, brothers, I think, and yet how much less understanding we’ll find elsewhere. I’ve all these conversational fragments – yours, mine, his, theirs, lives past – that’ll ring hollow as these thoughts rewind. Again, again.

Let’s call me a Baptist, call this the drowning of the past
She’s there on the shoreline
Throwing stones at my back

Descending from the clouds, then an arc of exploration, sure, but more so to: where we’d been; where we’d started; where we’d parked. Through the thick and wet world of shadows, I’ll branch off, find mossy stacks on which to play. Chutes I’ll slide down, stacks I’ll scamper up; photos I’ll snap away. But, as always, there’s time behind me, and hurry I must to catch the others. It’s then I’ll knock the rocks loose, one of which’ll catch a toe. Immediately I’ll not be running a few days is the thought, yet two days later I’m atop another peak. Even coming down, as you well know, restraint’s never been my gift.

As long as you trust yourself, you wrote me once, you’re not lost. A counterpoint, then: these sorts of things are – at least as much as a matter of trust – a matter of direction. And even if our compasses were pointed the same, say 180 degrees south, we hadn’t ever accounted for declination and the earth’s shifting magnetic fields. As always, often as not, words are more a failing than a success, and so we find lines to read between. Unmet expectations and a wasted life, he said, and maybe that – fear, in the middle of it, the weight of it – is where we’re least alone, most like each other. What a sad thought.

Now the water’s taller than me
And the land is a marker line
All I am is a body adrift in water, salt and sky

Not About You

2010-09-15T20:03:00.000-05:00

Thing with couples is that there's no such thing as a spontaneous decision, no spur-of-the-moment just-felt-like-it sort of running away. There's always schedules to compare, coordinate, control. Disappearing into the open wild's a hell of a lot harder with the weight of another; even with friends this is true. But, perspectives: you've never understood how to be alone, just as I've never understood how to be (put) together.

Show me an angel
And I'll cast away the devil
But I won't trust
No I won't trust
Those wings of yours

We claimed a friendship, I remember, but I've my suspicions you've even less skill in that arena than I. [Friends] don't digress you from your goal... don't scatter you. Clearly this is just another thing fucked. Walls we've built, or clouds we've to veil the peaks, seas to drift on without glimpses of land - use whatever imagery sounds best today.

And I've got people to see
And places that I need to burn down
And secrets that I need to burn out of my head

Stories you say you want. But there's no story outside the miles and mountains and fatigues of these days; these tales of children and family are only entertaining when they're the bulk of your life, when they're your stories. There's no story in these hours spent around the house reading and writing and sitting, either recovering from what was last or waiting for whatever'll be next. Bumdom intermixed with these mild self-abuses hardly makes a treasure trove of tales.

I'm through with lonely conversations
And heartfelt contradictions
Give me grace

There are names you've used, as if titles were better than weak excuses, you know, but I hardly think they fit. More accurately, perhaps, you mistake self-centeredness and a narrow vision for some sort of spinster wisdom, where it'll have a knack for highlighting most our immaturities and insecurities. We're all just damn fools, you know. Still, I've this wish I'd called you on it earlier. So...?, said the kettle.

You made the ground unsteady
You made the ground unsteady for us
You dug the holes and you fell in
You dug the holes and I fell in

Fatigue you'd rather not hear of, but that doesn't change the tiredness twitching in my eyes. As usual, not sleeping unless I'm half-broken, or at the very least, broken in; otherwise I've the night awake; or, I'll catnap without meaning, hours into days disappearing away. I've time, hours and hours of it, always time. Time best for planning lessons, this being the school year, it being what I know. Time best for running or biking, a transition from summer tours to fall races, it being what I know. Instead, though, I've this. These quiet hours I don't talk about? They're silent because they're empty.

I'm gonna run this jealous heart to the ground
This jealous heart to the ground

The fight's gone right out of me, maybe. I've enough of these miles at all these varied elevations these last few weeks that my ears are still consistently full and even off now, over a month later; I've a sense of being both literally and figuratively trapped inside my head. I'd plans today of waking early, running to this nearest peak, and from that high vantage watching the sun greet the earth. Instead I slept straight through all three alarms. I planned to make phone calls and do research and write; instead I dozed straight through the hope of a re-discovered equilibrium.

I'll be fine
I'll be fine
As long as I
Shut this mouth of mine

So now it's mid-September and I'm still not planning lessons, alarmingly wrong as it feels. I've always been good at procrastination, but I've most the knack for putting off my future; maybe next year'll be the year for a proper teaching position? Maybe the year after that'll be the year I start growing up? As I told her, I've lived more my childhood in my twenties than I did in my teens, and I suspect the statement's mostly, sadly accurate, though I suppose that too'll depend on how you'll do the math. In theory I'm employed again; in practice, I've still yet to meet my students. More accurately, I suppose, they're not mine at all. But I never did much learn to share.

I'm over lonely picture-makers
Who scatter their hearts
Give me guts

I'm sick of neurotic picture-makers
And heady confrontation
Give me heart

I'm through with tragic picture-makers
And optimistic suckers
Fuck off

All lyrics Matson Jones

Milepost

2010-09-13T01:57:00.001-05:00

You biked across the country this summer - will biking ever replace your love of running?

A Sunday of escape and play: four hours; brunch and, at least in theory, rehydration, then two more hours on my feet. 'Bout time to once more mold feet to mountains, to ferret out a peak roundtripped entirely without wheels. Twice I'd planned to run the loop (what a day that'd be!), but, still. Distracted explorations of trails up high made it not so, but I've no regrets; nothing on my mind, these miles I'm an empty wanderer, surrounded by these vistas: more peaks, ominous clouds veiling just enough of the west and north as to make them as terrifying and intriguing as challenging and inviting; to the south, the ridge I'd run just a week and a half before; to the east, and far below, the Columbia a twisting silver ribbon. If there's any thought at all, it'll be of patience, of moderating damage, less a gauge of effort as of the rate of breakdown, where and what and how so.

Monday, then, a holiday and necessarily a follow-up: sixty-plus miles, and this business with the bike'll have me just as easily distracted from this intended recovery, wheels turning over and over and over. steady miles along the river, a climb here and a vista there, riverbend and crescent bar down below. Three hours on the bike hardly qualifies as a long day, but even shortened, it'll be representative. Some of these same satisfactions I'll enjoy on a long ride the same as on a long run: covering ground I'm physically connected to, these wide vistas and big skies, even the same accomplished sleep after (first night restless, second a dreamless coma), the same uneven tossing and turning the night before. I'll find the same delight in drawn out muscles, an unfamiliar lean figure facing me in the mirror (less vanity, this, than fascination with the body's potential). I've even the same curiosity in either sort of play, an inquisition of limits and capacity; so too I've the same idea of a separate awareness, of being outside the self and into the moment, this sense of an extra-dimensional connection to the world.

This isn't to say the two forms of exploration are without their differences. They've each particular qualities and quantities of quiet, each a particular body awareness, each their own emotional range and cycles, each their own peculiar sort of fatigue. On a long ride, the quiet rarely lasts long; even if, by chance, I've found a route that'll not carry much traffic, there's still usually enough ground behind my wheels that I've plenty of time for wildlife, the wind whistling across trees. On such rides, long silences stand out, oddly apocryphal, as if the world's peeled away but for me. On a long run, even if I've not been fortunate enough to find trails, I've still my quiet routes, miles passing slow. Silence is only intermittently broken, and when the stillness does bend away - with exception of wind, perhaps - it comes as a surprise.

Body awareness is likewise different: hours on the bike come detached and dreamlike, these two (or four, if towing the trailer) wheels simply an extension of myself, and I a mindless extension of the machine; running, especially these long days full with technical singletrack, requires a near-constant presence and attention to detail. As those miles pass, footfall after footfall after footfall, always there's something to monitor, the breakdown of each muscle and joint; carefully I note how the steps before linger in the sensation of each step this particular moment. Questions to ask: are these aches - hamstrings, calves, quads - what they should be for where I am, at this mileage, this slope, this time, this surface? Am I working too hard? Not hard enough? When to ease off and when to push on - this is the thin line between successful accomplishment and painful wreck on such a long run. Long rides, by comparison, are far more forgiving.

Emotionally, too, there's no comparison. As awful as some of the summer's rainy days may have been, and as exhilarating as those few great ones, neither crescendo nor diminuendo offering comparison to those of a long, long run. I've yet to find a thing that'll probe quite the way a long, long run will, have yet to find an experience that'll rip through to my most primal basic being like long runs consistently do. I've had few darker clouds than the worst long run moments, laying down in the middle of trails (voluntary or not, legs buckled, undone) convinced death'd be a better option than another step. My first fifty-miler, in a conversation I've no recollection of, I cussed my then-girlfriend out for not talking me out of such a wretched idea only moments before thanking her for being a supportive angel; this was either thirty or forty miles in, at which point each step mattered more than the sum of those before and I'd only a rudimentary understanding of anything beyond that left. Not all long runs are so demanding, it's true. But many of them are.

As a result, I escape from the task at hand very differently as well. On the bike I whittle hours away in unconsciously writing, long letters pulled from corners in which they'd long ago turned mostly over to dust, the places where memories die. Not uncommonly will I find myself pulled over beside the road, grabbing scrap paper and pen in an effort to jot enough notes to preserve some bits for later use. Amidst the fatigue, this is often a losing effort. Still. It's a marked contrast to these runs, where after the first few hours there are no thoughts, no stray lines to follow, even if I'd so cared. Instead, there's the steady drumbeat of footfalls slapping time against trail, rock, road. Instead there's the constant monitoring of damage done. There's no room for lost notebooks of script, though the blank slate is an equally necessary recharge.

Fatigue, as felt and expressed, is, at least at this juncture, the area of greatest difference, however. On the bike, I'm learning, it comes as a slow deadening, the thickening of sinew from waves to sea ever turning over, to cold molasses. I drift from free pirouettes to stiffly churning to simply stuck, bogged. Several times I've hit the wall at which there's no more, bonked hard and fallen off the bike as a result, but every time I've known it was coming, that I was out of fuel, undone. Fatigue on the bike is never a surprise; I'll feel it in heavy shoulders, in grit behind and under my eyes, a dull throb deep in a thick and fading awareness. When the effort becomes a ghastly weight, and these muscles give in to the ghost, I'll have known it was coming for some time.

Not so on the run. Having monitored, I'll know my legs are getting thick like tree stumps, that every step further'll take yet more in tax, but when the first wall topples me down, unlikely it is I'll have known it was beside me. Legs may quite well physically buckle without clear explanation, save they've decided they're done. A strange war'll take hold, body and mind and mind and body, endorphins flitting and fluttering across unevenly drawn battle lines, chemical warfare across weary bone and desperate sinew, and I'll drift entirely on a strange sense of dreaming. A second wind'll bear me aloft, running hard and light as the breeze across alpine meadows, only to hit another wall, and this one'll always be worse than the first. Each successive lift and each successive fall knows new heights and depths; every moment is more acutely experienced - spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically - than the succession of those that came before. Havoc it certainly is, but rollercoasters have their appeal.

Could biking ever replace running? That's not the question, though. For it's not the act in either case that I love, but the experience of that act, the stage it sets before me, all the world indeed. And if it's about the experience of the act, rather than the act itself? I've no idea. There's only miles and hours and hours and miles, and compromises, too, like Friday's doing: fourteen hours of putting it all together, biking and running and scrambling and climbing and swimming and running and biking, of exhaustion and the sweet fatigue of completely forgetting the possibility of moderation. Amidst all that, what need have I of any sort of replacing?

Ask me anything.

Bridges Back

2010-09-05T03:32:00.001-05:00

Seems often as not these words we've bartered are at least half, if not more, apologies, and matters of space and distance and lacking communication are most often our discourse still. The further we grow apart, the more I realize how we resemble the caricatures we were then, not much more than the children we left behind. So it goes.

But, the requisite apology: I never did get back to you. Your last night in the states, and I once again shirked those near-familial duties; as if to spite you, never gave you the satisfaction of that full conversation we'd hinted at near a month. I could, of course, take another tack: call it fate; call it a conversation that'll happen in the reality of one location, not in static crinkling across satellites and space; call it fodder for coffee and a meal, a long walk, even the course of several days. Excuses, yes. We've years of making up to cover over now, you realize, and the deficit continues to grow; these divergent and parallel lives we're leading are as much pretending at a maturity we still haven't found as slinking away from old immaturities in pursuit of new ones.

Another battery these stories run on: I've no good words - and strangely, thought to ask you - for whatever it is that occurs to thoughts (which may have budded towards that sun we'll sometimes call love) when they're obscured by transitions, fogged up in the space of stop-start conversations that are as often aflame with misunderstandings as aglow with comprehension and the eerie ability to sink perfectly into the tracing of another's shadow. I don't know much of these things - an ignorance I'll admit easily - only that I often find myself mistaking one thing for another, never having been much good with which one of these things is not like the other? Plenty of things I did properly pick up in kindergarten, but if this was supposed to be one of them, chalk it up as yet another failing. Not the least of many, I realize, as guiltily fallible as ever. I was a good Lutheran boy once, you remember.

Of course you've your own issues - embarked as you are upon such treacherous adventure, be it for love or a resolution to loneliness or self-identity or whatever we'll call it, I wish you well - but. I've questions. For instance: how is it we've maintained this tenuous grasp on each other even as we've each found ways to unravel damn near every other sinew in each our bodies (especially the important ones, like the ones that keep us from flinching at a stranger's touch), even as we've burnt far more bridges than ever we'd known to cross? You're a bitch, I'm an asshole - and these are familiar refrains, even as, it seems, we'll take some pride in them. Looking back, I was obviously mostly terrible to you; looking ahead, I've hopes I'd do better, substantially better (remember the two princesses?), but, well. Hopes and dreams and the stuffs of fairytales, perhaps. Similarities have some predictive value, I'd think, and we've both this skill; damn fine we are at talking ourselves right out the backdoor. I remember you being good at it, anyway. I know I certainly still am; what's a welcome if not worn?

Choices, then. I've these interviews falling together when I've resolved myself most to want options least, to follow the land as it'll lay, these mixed metaphors woven unquestioning. You know the drill. Always escapes we're looking for least that we'll stumble into first. Defined however we'd prefer, we're still each as much a mess when pulled together as when pulled apart.

Not a chance this carries much in the way of clarity, time better at the moment for erosion than filtration. Just words after all, and even that'll likely be lost in the void of all these miles and the months of silence that came before. Still, I've a hope, that someday we'll learn to build bridges, and not to burn them. If not, there's always this bridge. That has to count for something, right?

Distill

2010-08-31T04:57:00.001-05:00

Weekdays bring silence; weekends, static. Connections to past lives, each of which'll flicker all too easily across space and time. 'Tis another fruit of modern technology, these satellites and the spider webs of memories attached to them, reminders of homes left behind and futures left undone, be it on the planning tables of indecision or beside a forking road. As always, the miles between these lives are as much a matter of timing as location; this idea of geography as destiny we'd toyed with could mean whatever we'd care to make it mean. Another abstraction: there's as many sorts of tired as algaes, and nearly as many collect in these slow green eddies of questioning days; behind the seemingly stagnant calm lay the spaces where each of these tenses stream together into one murky hole. Fish it if you dare.

My case, in short, was what it always had been, namely, that I did one thing while thinking another and in this welter of difference I did not know what I was.

She's a flight across time zones and an ocean now, and we never did have that last conversation I'd promised. Perhaps, as usual, I'd been just a wee bit afraid. No matter. How little I'd changed this past decade, she told me, and though I'd argued then, I'm tempered down, more inclined to agree now. More static. Another call, another life: they've fire on their minds and their tongues and in their bellies, the night's shenanigans full. I've nothing to do with this particular blaze, but still they call, they text, knowing just how at home I'd be amidst the mess, and of course I'll ever so briefly find myself pining for the flatlands of summer corn and winter cold. I've the realization she was entirely right; some things haven't changed at all. Least of all this preoccupation with looking ahead even as I'm stuck with an eye in reverse.

When he looked out he had seen a crack of light on the leaden horizon. Was it the day still going down or the morning coming up? He smiled sadly. This was what his life was like now, this faint glimmer between a past grown hazy and an unimaginable future.

Nights and days are likewise transposed atop each other, quiet dark as much a part this tale as hours busy and sunlit. An uneasy truce I find myself making at each day's close, falling headlong into the night with hopes of a fluid amnesia. Night has yet to swallow me properly, as I'd grown accustomed to those days of riding and riding and riding, and now, not so sated, more often I'm faltering and turning fatigue over on a splintered edge. But so it is. Being neither quite properly tired nor quite fully rested, I've altogether too much ambiguity in the thoughts of such a stumbling stupor.

'I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.' I had burned my boats, the years were strewn like ashes on the water. I was at rest here, in the calm under the great wave of the world. Yes, I felt at home - I, who thought never to feel at home anywhere. This does not mean I did not at the same time feel myself to be an outsider...

Similarly, I'd grown used to rarely remembering dreams, but these past few weeks I've found exception, waking not with whole scenes, but certainly impressions. More than once I've come around to morning only to put away a night dotted with phantom shapes, undefined light and shadow and the feeling of a ghost tucked around the corner, a ghost I've not yet the experience or skill to coax out. Seems some sort of gentle tragedy, living forever passing by like a roadside fruit stand lost in late afternoon soft shadows, the vibrancy of living fully lost for fear the twin reckoning days of responsibility and maturity. Dreaming my way through the current doing, I've a serenity in passing, of passing, a sea of forgetfulness each night treading through uneasily. These cares I'll transfer over to this apparition filling in for sleep, a ghostly amnesia that'll still leave me these lingering sensations, a breath dissipating like exhaled smoke, from form to mild mist to nothing. Of a mind drifting somewhere between port and sea, ideas arise still-born, half-formed but without hope of further development, and I've strange notions of mountains harbored as islands in the clouded sky, a calmed violence amidst so much civility. I imagine I've become the ghost trapped in memory and passions laid dormant long ago, and only one curiosity remains. What is it that moors, anchors the rock atop the sea of sky?

excerpts from John Banville, "Ghosts"

Lucky Me

2010-08-28T04:25:00.000-05:00

I'm out of images, out of words, out of sorts, out of breath, out of shape. A flimsy box kite, flitting about on the uneven winds of change, as likely to crash to the rocky sea below as find myself on a mountain side thermal. I've stops and starts, on the mind and in my dreams, the open road twitchy in my fingers, evident in bit-down nails. Call it a disease of the limbs, perhaps, this need I've found to take space for myself, as if a century before, claiming lost peaks. Contentment's one of those words I'm more familiar with in theory, and in moments, than in practical application, another reminder that silence is so much more than just stillness and space. More simply: I forget the fatigue I require these days for fuel.

Are those dreams inside your head
Is there sunlight on your bed

Another ritual, these days of perusing, though never before so far into the fall. Once again, applications. As always, far more in progress than finished, remembering all too easily that hitting send is harder than editing, editing is harder than writing, writing harder than searching. Oh, searching. I've all too keen this knack for seeking out something, anything else. Mountains serve a fine distraction besides, as if this brain weren't already addled enough. Sleepless nights I pull apart like a cinnamon roll, but without the saccharine beauty. "You sound tired," he says.

And every time you're driving home
Way outside your safety zone

So, distraction in play. Riding and running, mountain lakes to swim in. I've plenty of distractions in these mountains, but those are still hours to feel guilt at the progress I've not made, the cursor still waiting. Other distractions, then: emails to catch up on, reading to savor, writing to practice. This guitar I've pined for most the summer. Of course it's this song I'll stumble into, the chords altogether too familiar for a song I'm just now learning. Signs, you know.

You're putting on a shirt
A shirt I'll never see
The letters in your coat

Another escape, this one accompanied and better for it. We've sunshine and a breeze, laughter and children playing and beer, whitecaps dancing on the water. All is well, and sure they're invincible, these children, but sometimes I've this mistaken notion I am too, a strange sort of seven. "Making up for lost time," she says. I've two more years of dreaming allowed me, perhaps, if we'll allow for such foolish bargains. I suppose it doesn't matter much, though. I've been way out of sync from the very beginning.

But no one's in your head
Cause you're too smart to remember
You're too smart

Recompense

2010-08-24T02:47:00.001-05:00

Of late, sleep comes in waves, as too, I'm finding, do these days. I'll terrorize this tired body, only to find myself awake, not sleeping; after a day spent in slovenly lingering, nothing but job searching and writing, a ten-hour coma's my reward. There's the doing and the already undone, and, it seems, I've sometimes minimal skills in differentiation. At any rate, they both leave me tired.

This doing: though long climbs are certainly less slow on two wheels than four, miles and miles of effort (and headwind) are regardless miles and miles of effort. Plans'd been made to meet the others at the campground, but I've arrived early, and thus, with play, find myself distracted. These mountains I've surrounded myself with, that distraction's a simple enough thing: gravel road enticing, a steep climb in need of two-wheel conquering. Naturally I'm up and off; by the top, the grade's as much a part of these legs as the fatigue. Ah, satisfaction. Of course the trailhead's full and spilling over, but knowing the lake atop the trail, I'll all too easily forget the schedule, instead change shorts and shoes and find myself off once more, dusty footfalls and dry gasping breaths. Cold cold water awaits, though, and the swim, frigid it may be, is more than worth the effort. Just below a glacier, brilliant peaks surrounding, sky brilliant near-white swirled with harmless puffs and the grey whispering reminders of a nearby fire, this is heaven; even if the trail was crowded, here I've my own particular nook and the only sound a symphony of mountain breezes. That I'd perhaps not have made it back to the house were it not for the significant tailwind those last twenty-five miles is, besides such glory, a minor footnote.

This the undone, nights and days tumbling over each other. Sore with doing; tired with sitting and sleeping. Hours rung with mixed metaphors, still ringing, as easily as the ever present, forever question: "well... what's next?" What seemed promising, near inevitable, now looks to be a door closed; what seemed a closed and bolted door now warrants another knock. I'm reading and writing these days in stops and starts; truths seem as like fiction as fiction like truth. You've traded in traveler hobo for stationary bum, she jests, but there's truth behind the laughter. You always were an overachiever, she says, and I wonder if she ever did understand fully what I meant when I called my clan slackers, especially at seventeen, eighteen and stupid with our invincibility. Seems this is one of the few pasts that hasn't transformed itself, undone and rewritten, in all the apparating of a decade since.

Awake I lay amidst this dreaming, the middle of the night finding me most alert and alive; in the breath that runs through these days, everything's tinged with a dream-like haze. This has nothing to do with an intermittent ringing in my ears, everything to do with the beat I just can't seem to find; another run just in, my legs may be throbbing, aching with a fatigue heavy and full (though doubtful it'll sink me under), yet still. I've yet to find the rhythm each day's song. As habits go, these things are elusive.

Concentrating on the familiar: I've the scratch of sun-filled days in the back of my eyes, where I've stored the thick shafts of light in which I bathe, a sandpaper weight that still hasn't the heft to sink me to the depth of thoughtless oblivion and quiet nights; I've quads thick with the bees' swarm of buzzing sinew, spasming that'll tell me there's blood like a rushing army off to repair damages already caused; I've these pops and creaks and grinds with which to greet each sunrise, altogether too plentiful to tie stories to any of them. Inflammation may be the proper word, but I'd rather think of it as a clock by which to measure the meter of months, the progress of summer into fall and years into age. Improperly, I'll call it satisfaction.

I've mountains here to embrace, just as I did there, just as I always should. They're a tangible part of who I am, you know. Money runs out, you tell me. So do days lived fully, I nearly retort, but a tongue bit is sometimes more useful. No matter; you've good intentions, I know. Here, now, I've the gravity of a ticklish child and bicycle peddling and days come and gone, the dream of a late autumn fog in which to hide. I've hopes like lighthouses in a weary seaside cloud: memories, misadventure, voices the other side of crackling space. Sound and satellites, magnets and the pull of the moon; this idea of hibernation, a cave set deep against snow-capped peaks - fatigue like this holds its own permanence, a fingerprinting scent that'll accentuate each bleary-eyed morning and weary-limbed afternoon. Beside such a river, the rest? It'll resolve itself. There's no room for worries in these legs.

Recoup

2010-08-16T06:40:00.001-05:00

Tired. Tired as ever perhaps I'd been, and this bed laid out in the sand it's own poetry, the sun's rays fast a fading memory against the quickly darkening canyon walls, and I've no mind anything other than sleep. But - always but - they were friendly and cute, their dogs likewise, and stars had just begun a slow dance across the sky, the sky itself a darkening bruise overtaking the day, and so we sat, all of it tied with the promise of a beautiful night, even before their promise of cold beer. We sat, burbling water dancing beside us, quiet rustling the breeze across the tree-lined banks. We sat, and we talked, and the canyon walls were slowly lost to the sky, the difference increasingly told only in the consistency of their blacks, this ceiling finding itself ever more brilliant dots upon her formerly blank canvas.

Shooting stars we counted. Beers we drank. Stories we shared. And if I've no memory their names, it was for the distracted thoughts I'd of you, a river running through most these sentences I'd formed, ever less coherently as the night in a steady pulse beat on. I woke several times that night, in dreams askew; I'd retired before I'd too far sunk, this being a river beside us, and the bottles we drank not my own, but still I swam in a distorted sea of memory and possibility. Their golden retriever the night spent whining beside my feet, they the night propped beside the sweet-nothing whispering waters, and you the night in my head unsettled. But, then: with these roads more open often than closed, settling seems less and less the point; I 'not of the type,' as you'd said; nor, I suspect, are you. But this story, of a river and two strangers in the night, is hardly really the story, is it?

You know if she makes you unhappy..., the conversation went, this of another friend, but also of you and I and of so many other places too. But then all these phrases floating – hypothetical, each of them, you know - could well be fragments out of puzzles we'd not a clue to assemble, nor, for that matter, might they even be the tools. No matter. Admittedly, I've hardly an idea of reading you - no skill in deciphering the intonations, as you'd put it - and it may well be that there's part the joy, another puzzle, another jigsaw for which this keyring's no current solution. I long ago saw beauty in a word such as 'impossible,' but only too rarely have I found application this idea. Well, then. I've ever unreasonable hopes, but you've yet assistance to offer in cracking least some these codes.

As in times preceding, I'll still ever ride to forget and I'll ride to remember and I'll ask you to spell it out even as I've an inkling why you can't. I hear the exasperation, of course; later you'll text, "Dense. Yes." I've no argument otherwise. Stones don't fly, darling; even in the ocean, salinity an extra aid, I never did learn how to float.

Caffeine and miles, ahead and behind, and even if I'm not much for paints, the future as blank a canvas as any I've held. There's a million sorts of extraordinary in the chaos these ordinary days, the joys of simple living and loving and doing and being. I've these canyons and climbs ridden, these miles of clouds and sun and sky, and in all of it a ceiling I've yet to find a limit in, even as I'm aging, sure, and this body tells me the restorative process'll take, well, longer. The miles don't come so easily, day after day.

A first day I'll be sluggish an elephant; a second day I'll be climbing to the point at which body and gravity collide and there I'll be ill, yet climb on; a third day I'll find a body desperately boycotting the process, sick before I'll even begin; a fourth I'll find slow, slow miles and a nap atop the pass; the fifth and beyond I'll find rest, rest, and more rest awaiting. It's less a matter of fitness, now, and more of recovery. Time, time, more time.

But, time: a full summer behind me now, ever of doing, doing; we've a time that'll know neither name nor number, and more recently fires I've only a knack for inflaming. You've far more languages at your disposal than I, so if you'd translate: what's the word for recovery in such as this? Or math, if you'd prefer; don't forget to account for gravity and friction and magnets, the pull of the moon. I know I've not, and won't, and far as I can tell, couldn't.

On closer thought, though: don't. I'd rather not know, actually. Magnets are magnets are magnets. Maybe you're the hypnotist and I'm the mountain. Maybe it's all shiny baubles. Maybe the unpredictably of it all's part the charm. I don't know. But, besides, who are we to measure the day up, attempt it's portrait? I've not the photographer's eye; you've as little idea the future as I. At any rate, I've my usual preference, the moment. Anyways, the after effects? Far less enjoyable that the doing, during.

Setting Out

2010-08-08T22:13:00.001-05:00

There's been miles and miles between us most these years, words and this make believe world we live in being the common conduit, and if the gaps'll find themselves for a weekend shut, I'll not know how best to approach. Awkwardly, sure, but also intimidated, mythological internet abstractions seemingly come to life. We'll drink, of course, it being what's most comfortable, and we'll talk, try to match up the nonfiction (you're real?) with the fictions words and space created, and inevitably, time's too damn short and too damn fleeting, and the weekend'll end not long after it'd begun. Two days, three days, poof!
The shorter version: good people are good people, even (especially?) assholes. Or: let's do this again sometime soon, alright? And hit up the barcade sooner?

Now, though, sleep; it's August, and I'm tired. Back to the open road tomorrow, least for a few more days.

Lift

2010-08-01T23:31:00.001-05:00

"You know, when you used to say you chased tornadoes, I always thought it was a metaphor."

These metaphors keep repeating themselves. Themes, perhaps: a sea in which to drift, swimming 'til I've no memory of land; fires in which to snap and crack and burn through the tossing night; fire, volcanoes, tornadoes, and other beautiful disasters; the spaces between waking and dreaming ever more blurry. It may be they're taxonomical, categorical, as you'd suggested, but you've not the history we've had in their company, these ghosts and a brother and I. You've still an incomplete understanding the encryption, perhaps. Riddles have their own reasons, especially as I've far fewer words than hopes and dreams, especially as I'm sliding back into the rhythm of this former life, this former city, whiskey with breakfast often as orange juice. Repeatedly, consecutively, I'll make attempts at running and riding through walls. History repeats, and I've nights of sleep without dreaming, days full of dreams unresting. I'll caffeinate as the sun sets, booze as it rises; time'll run backward as easily as forward, and just as often does.

I'm not the kind of man
Who's into looking downward
I've drank my share of pity
From the bartender's cup

Transitions I've on the mind these past few days, the idea of embracing one world at least in part to lose what came before. A slippery argument, and I've an inkling you'd misunderstand, so easily it'll tumble us both. But words and phrases are limiting, too, and so I've no better way of saying this... perhaps I'm trading ghosts, having already found least enough length from which to dangle, undone. We've quite the vista, this cliff, but if it's already crumbling? I've some mind just to jump, see if I'll fly.

Got myself a mission
I'm going to find heaven
I made crepe paper wings
I think they'll carry me a while

Gravity this beast I'd prefer not think of, I'll on two wheels fly instead. Proud Mary's just back the shop, and unhappy as this body'll be, damned if I'm not as antsy as she, the road waiting and impatient. We go. All these roads, familiar if not friendly, the bulk of them having seen me bruised – ass and ego equally – and drunk. Liquor more often than love, unfortunately, and maybe it's best I not say more. Instead, riding: miles pile high and hard and fast, and a teacher-rider stalwart companion I've gathered for these trail miles west. I've forgotten our covenant – I ride loaded, he does not – and so, unloaded, break him without any such intention, the pace not breakneck, but neither slow. The only weight I'll carry these rides is that of memories, and that'll be all the more reason to fly, and stories shared and dusk coming on, we part ways. The hammer drops and I roll on through, cruel meter of the pace burning in my quads, breath ragged as I'd prefer. A century and a lifetime and an afternoon run into evening, and I've no memory of a joy quite that of this heavy fatigue.

I think I'm growing feathers
But I'm not quite sure of it
'Cause I started getting dizzy
About a Hundred feet up

Riding, remembering. I've left myself scattered in all these places once called home, found loves. And so it is, this particular century in need of close, that I'll blitz each the five addresses held here, ever better at moving than staying still. Dreams I've left whispering on the wind, and a limb here, another there. Pieces of me strung across the country, now, and perhaps eventually the world; I've no experience but that of burning up hot and fast. I'd want it no other way.

They say that I'm a lunatic
They say that I am full of it
I say that it's worth dreaming
Just for the dream of it

Seems that's some sort of living distilled, this sense of fire, and thoughts of another ghost remind me he'd had it too. Our mountains, we held them with a sense of urgency; I'd push the climb, he the descent, and all of it was quick, painfully beautiful. Having pedaled to his old home grounds, of course I'll think of him, and it's only natural that I'll stop by his stone in departure. Strings to tie it all together: afternoon musk in the air, a thick August blanket come early, this mid-July four years past. Giddy in a post-run puddle of sweat, I'd dinner on, sesame sticks with which to snack; the phone rang and rang and I answered and the world changed, then and now. So here this stone monument and I share the grey-white waves of humid sky; sinking into the grass, fatigue leaches into the earth beneath me, and I float still on the past behind. Felt the dry grass itching the back of my neck, the thick prickling static of the lodgepole groves, the sharp lines of the big granite Sawtooth slabs. Felt the sweat and sun, the tickle of the sagebrush sneeze coming on. Remembered the vistas and dirty snowball fights and mooning the camera. By god, how he'd loved the living, and he'd have wished the same end for me, I know, but still, this is a visit with ghosts, and the rest the ride still waiting.

I made friends with the clouds
I made friends with the birds
If you ask a goose a question
He never shuts up

So I ride once more. Climb steadily, his St Croix below and beneath; climb steadily, earth and thought falling behind; climb steadily, lose myself in the simplicity of a ragged breath. I ride angry and possessed, a fine fire from fingertips to hips to toes, and the wrath of righteous thunder a murderous pulse in legs bid on. Sweat runs in broad rivers even as the world crashes in and down on a head dizzy and full, vision narrowing and other riders left breathless. "What the hell..." trailing off behind, half-angry, half-stunned. Miles roll into each other, until they'll not bow to will any longer, the world left red and peripheral; gelatinous wave upon gelatinous wave, a world is retched, upturned and violent. I gasp in the grass and the world spins and time stands still and the moment holds me firm and it is good. The memory of he and I and the world we'd owned and this world owning me and by god, it is good.

It's all about passion
It's all about perception
Don't call me on my cell phone
'Cause there ain't no reception
When I'm gone

Miles and miles and miles I've gathered: another good. If neither bike nor body are particular grateful these renewed abuses, having had near a week respite - if neither bike nor body will recognize this as more than slander against muscle and memory, well. Still. I'm closer whole riding and running than the scattered parts I'll find in the still places this city. These fool's errands are as much me these weeks as the thoughts of you that'll fill the much-maligned dream spaces, or the morning I spent entirely thinking of memories and erasers and you smearing ink. Everything's indelible, nothing's forever, as the dream goes. It may well yet be that this'll prove to be the dream, buzzing, but at any rate, time's a river, swirl and eddy. What is, is; what's done is done; some things are forever present. Theories of time otherwise be damned.

And honestly I miss you
And I hope that you're missing me
Cause I could use your lips on me
And a little bit of Dramamine

Theories, theories, you say, even as you've these questions you'll defend as harmless and idle, and it seems to me they're just as grounded in curiosity and theory. But, no matter; this is hardly a reproach. You've left me these words in which I can hear you laughing, and it's delicious, the soft sparkle tapering off and an audible grin for backing. You've your tree hollow now, you say, more given to silence. Fitting as I'll find the image, it never fails to remind me of my reading cave beside the muddy Mississippi, a forgotten hideaway amid the city. Some of these words I found there, you know. More often, though: Sunday afternoons in the sun, a backpack full with beer and books, a clove or two if feeling so inclined, and so the clamber to my hidden chamber, where I'd whittle away the hours in peace, in well-being, forget I'd ever a trouble.

And my fingers, they are blisters
And my eyes, they are bullet holes
But my hearts still beating
Guess I'm pretty lucky

I've all these memories harbored here, these cities, but the present I'll treasure too. We've guys' night: Juicy Lucy's on the grill, garlic bread and Newcastles and a tangy slaw, Dylan and Guthrie and the stink of bike grease and dirty hippie laughter well into the evening. Simple living and good folk and our company - fluttering moths and the humid night - befitting. And in the car between dumpster dives (free parts being free), we'll talk of Bill Murray, stories of running up behind people, his hands over their eyes. "Guess who?," he'd say, then, "no one will ever believe you." and it may be I've realized some experiences don't need belief, are better without such a requirement, though I've yet to find a way to prove it, much less live it.

So many people
Wondering "What's the right direction?"
As far as I'm concerned
There's only one way up

So our conversations continue in circles, and we all hold all the same familiar positions. I'll talk of mountains and they of friends and you of commitment and propriety and I of instinct. It may be that this is how we're most comfortable with fire, that these words are thinly veiled flaming arrows; it may be that we've all this urge to bite at each other, with hopes of drawing blood; it may be we're all cannibals. But I doubt it. So, a last request: please don't prove me wrong. All I've to fight it is words and this belief, this instinct, this feeling... this something that'll go yet unnamed.

I left you a love poem
The best I have written
My favorite words
Were the ones I couldn't spell

Bad Form

2010-07-26T14:32:00.003-05:00

Couple slugs o' whiskey & there's this morning's drive through the past, Jack Johnson and wind and memories blowing through the trusted steed this jeep's often been; another race morning, and it'd pain me to think last time I raced sober, had I any shame. Perhaps it'd be this race, two years previous, but I'll recall a few small races run the summer after, summer previous this one... a year, then. Just over. I'd forgotten how the racing nerves left me shaking (the metaphysical is the physical too, the figurative some part the literal, I remember telling you). Jameson's of small comfort.

Spent in St Paul are these days now just past, and so too'll be the days just ahead. I'll find myself unthinkingly leaping the present and right back into this river of memories, a force of habit, that, and the ghosts too, with their way of hiding 'til I'll once more'll feel a cool breathe against my nape, have returned. So it is that I'd not seen the storm approaching, all these nets once more, all these eddies in which I'd swirled previous, all these currents I'd forced myself forget. Or, more literally, how I'd not seen the gaggle there waiting, waiting for their turn with a table, out beside the curb, and each of them staring through me. Distracted, disconnected as I am, it'll only finally register, their venom, and even then, a moment I'll need to place the river in which I'm now swimming. A knot tied to a woman past, I realize - some her college friends (once our college friends) - a woman I'd loved and so wronged. No words are offered, nor conciliatory gestures even hinted, and so I'll slide by. Shadowless. Once more lost to the St Paul night, this stomach bug'll again say hello, and apologies I'll owe the neighbor's yard. For your re-done bushes, good sir, my apologies. As always, from there onward, of course, for drinks with friends await. I'll not be the the liar to say this was a first.

I've all these stories, of fact and of fiction, and sometimes the tales least true are most accurate. Whole's least as many definitions as I've difficulties in waking, differentiating sleeping and dreaming, at least as many definitions as love. Venn diagrams are something, sure, but well, analysis has so many shortcomings. We'll test boundaries, and at any rate there'll be trouble, I having perhaps never learned to say 'no,' until the moment I damn well dig my trench, from which I'll hardly be budged. Defensible spaces are as necessary in fire country as in warfare, and I've long ago found myself at least as much tinder as those dry august timbers. Perhaps you're lighting the match; perhaps I'm digging my trench. Perhaps I've no desire simpler than to see the world in your eyes. I've, of course, yet to find the right way to ask, and so the fourth door remains untested.

Most simply: I've only all the words I gave you, stripped more bare than naked, bones left somewhere in the miles behind. Maybe you've crawled beneath my skin, or maybe I've crawled beneath yours. I've a sense of quiet desperation, we each reaching for very different things, each centering on a different definition of patience and time. Patient for you is sometime, somewhere; for me it'll always be here, now. We've very different ideas of the line between dreaming and sleeping, perhaps. You tell me you've developed a taste for movies ending poorly, absent the happy finish; I've dreams of Patagonia. I've at least as much desire in running from as running to, and in particular, running away. I suspect Patagonia could be anywhere.

Or, a dream, which you'll mock endlessly. Sparsely furnished rooms, bare hardwood floors that'll shine after a good sweeping, and here we are, the two of us and the small and old Japanese man who'll spend most his time in his room reading. Except, of course, the parcel of time he spends each day perusing his medicines, the books and the vials. After looking them over, he each day makes the same drink, an alcohol now lost to me. In the dream I ask him why, and repeatedly he tells me, because that's what the medicine calls for. Finally I decide to write him a letter asking for further explanation, clarification; the mystery is too much. Each day, he ignores the letter. Time passes, and all of us together age. Eventually the man passes. Instead of a will, he's left a letter; in the letter, an explanation. His wife had died years before, and he's been drinking her each day, refusing to forget. When she was gone, he wrote, so was he. But you mock the dream so, and the next night, dreaming again of the small Japanese man, I've nothing but fragments, bit pieces of dialogue. Perhaps you fear the meaning I might ascribe such a heavy-handed dream? (Truth: I won't; haven't.)

Maybe you're growing old, you jest; this time next year, you'll be eight. Or, upset, you'll offer insult, make it five. But it's true this child I mostly am, and I'll say it again, that I'm likely as not to stay seven, forever equally lost in the world of 'grown-up' niceties and knowing how to hold my cards close my chest, ever preferring to play open-handed and what a dangerous game that is. I hear no one ever wins that way, and yet, still somehow I hope, clearly a fool. We play the cards we're given, you say, but I don't think you realized I'd play them so recklessly.

Besides. We both know I'll sink the whole ship if you'll only give me a chance, hang myself with the rope you'd offered. Maybe I already have; you'd likely know better than I. This was never the myth you accused me of seeking. And what if the story ends before it's even begun?

image courtesy Emily Stanzyk

Lonelily, Redux

2010-07-21T13:38:00.004-05:00

Nothing starts. Nothing ends.
We're a study in contrasts and the more different, it seems the more alike; the more different, the more alike. When a tornado meets a volcano..., I'll think, fire and fire, wind and wind; with disasters having such beauty, such magnetic attraction, seems this mess's the only natural reaction. The smell of trouble attracts, like a highway wreck. I've all these miles to think, four or five days of sitting on each side, the largest difference the company. Proud Mary may be a better listener, having her own sense of insight, intuition, but trouble, it seems, is always more fun. We'll say nothing and say it all, playing in codes and riddles and all these images: prism, hypnotist, shiny bauble. Neither of us much good with bricks, building walls or safety nets, but maybe secrets are overrated? I've this hope not easily shaken in which we never forget the keys to the words ever standing in for what we mean to say, the ever wavering belief that if we burn up hot and fast it'll be worth the cost. But there are no constants, true, save change, and certainly no guarantees. You say I'm fearful, and it's true I am, even when I'm the more confident. I've said nothing new, nor am I ever likely to. We're each an amalgamation of what came before.

Everything starts. Everything ends.
But of course I'm still aflutter, a leaf on the wind, bones in the breeze, all of this one big hope of landing somewhere nice. Riding will help more than we'd either realize, this solitude and the long lines of my thoughts dangerous, sure, but often as not it''s riding or running that'll write these pages and pages of letters not sent. Storing snippets in back corners, some of which I'll rediscover later: these trips are a watered seed, if the soil'll ever have it. So gloomy, you say, such a pessimist. It's not true, of course. I'm simply a pyromaniac with a fear of fire; all that rushing blood's been known to get me in trouble.

I ride, then, a more acceptable way of running, perhaps, or perhaps the simplest sort of digestion. The next morning my shoulder's perhaps seventy-five degrees of not quite right, but until then it's Living on a Prayer I've stuck in my head and the breeze in the morning mist is quiet, perfectly reflective. Dew collects on the golden exposed hairs of arms and legs, the sun slowly dampening the grey mist, and though an orange glow is hinted at, still, the orb won't quite show. A fitting metaphor, I wonder? (Or is that pessimistic, too?) Birds warble and chirp and tires over gravel's the only other sound, least 'til a stick'll jump and I'll slide and slide and slide, but what need's skin when we've bones of air? The days have been apocalyptic quiet, these roads and trails deserted, and it's as if the world were left only for us wanderers, a simpler thing, straight living.

When the birds are sleeping, that's when the trees sing... You left your winter clothes and teeth marks in my skin. Just one more dance to help me sleep.

These old rail tunnels. The third so long that middle I'll see neither end, both pin-pricks of light completely extinguished in the damp dark, and it's unsettling, but also homey. The second so lonely I'll pause to play my harmonica in the dark, and the sound'll roll off the limestone and trickle drip-drop back into my skin, and you'd have been scared, perhaps. The first was a novelty soon worn off. I wonder at all three, metaphors for loves past, each of them collections of pieces stolen from other originals. You'd not want to hear the thoughts I have some times; I've no faith for coincidences, but it was all the dreams written in your head, sunlight on your bed when we'd parted. Perhaps we've always been way outside the safety zone, maybe always will be.

But the riding. "What do you see?" Lots of farms: corn, soy, wheat. No dairy, though, and I realize I've seen little of it this trip. Rabbits scamper through the grasses, knots of raspberry and blackberry. Sunflowers, aspens whispering quiet nothings, a romance of the country evening. See ghosts behind shut eyes. Barred owls: who cooks for you? they call, and we converse in the night. Mosquitoes make a meal of me and I sleep under the pines and stars and in a quiet, intermittent rain. Fatigue is delicious and I miss something there's not a name for.

I've all these worlds intersecting, and sure I waxed poetic, ever the fool when the words'll roll so, but it's no less true for it. Places, of course, and people too, but more so abstractions with concrete pillars behind them. I'd take door number four, you know, if there were a way to open it; the first three having all been already found lacking. I've this idea of peaks, peeking across at mountain-laden miles ripe with possibility, this idea of loneliness and space that's as much our narrative as any fiction we'll run across. There are as many demons as angels in the lingering spaces between dreaming and waking, and this is more so even than being twelve, fifteen you say, all of it no less clear for all our meddling across the miles, time running together, all of it present. I something too much, I told you, but well. You know precisely. World's crash, but all of it's a slow dream, the right words leaves on a breeze that we'll chase but rarely catch. So we'll go ahead, lose our shirts in the fire tonight... coming undone, sure, but this flood'll be a beauty. Running's easy, you said. I'm not running, retract nothing. "I don't know that you are one who 'settles,'" you said. Neither are you, I suspect, though I've admittedly only circumstantial evidence. This may be the loneliest, most beautiful truth I have. It's certainly the only one I've to offer.

Dawning

2010-07-13T07:17:00.003-05:00

Another summer's sliding by, as always they do; full with weather ("there will be") and travel and days laden with change, with evenings that'll stretch into the wee hours, seems far too soon I'll once more be moving along, finding the next thing as it were. More so now than ever I find myself drifting slow, equally lost in memories and the moment: a lazy river in the summer heat, the worst of the rains now past, save this storm intermittently flashing. Or: I'm a junk show and you're trouble and all of it is altogether too damn temporary; restlessness is its own occupational hazard, and it's no shock if I'll wonder at just what I'm leaving in the moments I'm dashing through, passing up in favor of whatever uncertainty'll come next. I'm left with just my thoughts, she says.

I'll go braving anything
With you swallowing the shine of the sun

A tale she'll tell, of fifty dollars and being left alone, and at story's close, she'll look right through me. "You're not listening." A cue missed, clearly. "I am." I'm forever missing the point, it's true; explanations can come later, when all that's soft and easily bruised is once more assuaged, resting easily.

An astronaut could have seen the hunger in my eyes from space

And I'm realizing love's defined as much by context as anything. With all these moments piling one atop the other, scents rolling through fresh Carolinan highlands to muggy central Georgia to Chicago's earthy early morning stink in the space of only days? It's only natural that each Definition will be a monument to living and breathing and sweat that runs in rivers with the doing. I've long preferred to think of being as an active verb than transitive, even when it's rightfully neither; just we've each our own orbits, returning to origins, yet I'll stick with my preference for the unordered meander, the wandering long road, curves and climbs. No matter the trouble in fitting, we're each jigsaws, labels nothing more than precisely that, words themselves incapable of meaning anything more than we allow them to. Especially these words; they'll mean whatever you'll want them to and whatever I'll want them to and we'll each in some moments find ourselves alone in the dark continent of thoughts we'd rather not, the spaces where those meanings are not the same.

What makes you think I’m enjoying being led to the flood
We got another thing coming undone

Of course there's more uncertainty and anxiety, more questions than answers and more goodbyes than hellos. It seems only natural when we'll bicker and snicker and snarl even as it's wrapped in smiles; living in the moment's a fine philosophy, but for moments such as these, the necessary and inevitable transitioning, all the changing's a bittersweet thing indeed. Not that sustainability is often a concern, not with hidden bones and spilled guts having such beauty, we each a collection of pieces all our own. But, still. She's right, sure – that word again! – I'm rarely entirely at ease, unless alone with my miles and misadventures and lonely lines of flawed words; I'd wish I were a better liar, or more at ease with the difference between lying and comfortably lying well, but still. I've yet to find a philosophy that can't be distilled to one question, and that question so simple a query as what is true?

Every time you get a drink
And every time you go to asleep
Are those dreams inside you head
Is there sunlight on your bed

Contradictions are inherent. I'll forever be a study in simultaneous successes and failings, having both a love and hate of these days, finding equal parts truth in each. I've yet to find the best way to run towards, ever confusing it with run away; I've yet to find what I'm looking for, having never really determined what "it" is, only what "it" is not; I've yet to allow the smallest and most dangerous of words slip away, neither able to fully embrace responsible nor reckless. I've such a need of simplicity, you know. You make this difficult. You are trouble. Relevant specifics have never been my strength, but even less so brevity. I've no idea if this is a thing of the night or of the day. Nor do I know if it particularly matters.

Traveler's Prayer

2010-07-05T17:15:00.006-05:00

Traveling'll ever continue, regardless the mode; if off the bike, then it'll be train or bus or car, but ever there'll be the road. Waiting. So I'll heed, go. Two-laned or four-, curvy or straight, topographically varied or still. We've the land to see, this slope they've bought, a dream of the future. There's these things they here call peaks - mountains, they say, as if to make them larger than they are, as if their beauty were lacking without such a name - and not knowing any other course so natural, I'll of course try to make them mine. Virginia first, an eighth state's high point, and if I'll give it the benefit of such distinction, a fourteenth peak on the year. But that'll all be secondary to the miles that get me there, miles of trail - the Appalachian Trail!, they say with wonder - miles of rocks and roots and nearly barefooted wonder. This is play, child's joy, views spectacular sure, but even more a dream of being seven and running entirely for the feeling of fast and laughter. I'll grasp this feeling strong, fleet-footed and nearly nude, the earth passing beneath me and falling away and this is play, drinking from a spring, letting my fingers stroke a wide-eyed pony; splashing in mud and startling the resting deer (equally startled am I); leaping from rock to rock and hearing hikers gasp as I float by, silent, effortless. Sun shines brilliant as I'll sweat the bounty of god, and this beautiful and right and I'll so easily forget the miles of sitting, even if only for a couple hours, remembering nothing outside the moment. This is my definition of grace, of beauty, of holy.

There's others, too, of course: Sassafras, the high point of South Carolina; Brasstown Bald, Georgia's counterpart. But it's the trail, more so even than the summit, that'll seek, the miles of breath run hard but even, of leaping and pitter-pattering and dancing with roots and rocks. It's the roadside viewpoint that no one else stops in, birds chirping in the slightest of breezes and sun scattered across a web of pure green wonder; the state park we'll stumble across and the three miles of trails I'll loop and loop and loop through again, views for miles and miles and hikers aplenty, but each group laughing as they'll see me repeatedly by; the up-and-away and over-under-through of rock and dirt and crooked slabs - no number of nosebleeds'll kill the joy of these sorts of miles. This is, of course, grace and beauty and sacred, holy of holies.

Humor in the unexpected, wonder in the incomprehensible, and these are the joys I'll find. He's Spanish, I'm sure, the girl says, but the flag these shorts fly's that of Ireland; it's funny to see her older sister try and shush her. These tan lines, witness to bike shorts and bike jersey on a shirtless runner, are their own comedy. Blood-streaked knees and shins after the nose'll let loose, after everything else's been cleaned, funny. The four-year-old with both a southern drawl and a lisp, over-sized head replete with mullet and a smile, offering an hour-long narrative of the twilight series, telling me he's "new moon" and he's a werewolf and werewolves climb trees? Hysterically funny, even as his mom yells Matthew! Get yer ass over here! every few minutes. If ever I'll lose the comedy, I wonder if I may lose this sight of grace as well.

So I'll see the more views and vistas and places change, the more the living'll stay the same, even outside this need to move. He'll send me a text 6 jagbombs in a half-hour and say it'll remind him of my happy hours, this drinking with vengeance afore and afoot and ever through the search of grace and beauty and joy. I'll think how far I've come to go nowhere, sure, for he's a truth, even as mountains've a way of fixing things right even when they're not. Sun-dappled peaks and green laced with rock, trails of dusty dirt and crooked slabs all the better for bounding over and on, this'll be the heaven that'll answer the drunk, the escape that'll need no drink, the thoroughfare of better days and better ways and kinder happenings. I'm in his recollection the man of beverage and excess, and it's true, a truth, even if more so in past than present. This too is holy, a liquid sacristy; I'll treasure it accordingly, and a Sweetwater 420 beside me'll serve as an oath.

Or: he'll call, breath short, ask if I'll take a short test. You're the fittest person I know, he says, and I wondered if you'd qualify as fit according to this test. As it turns, maybe once I'd have done so, questionably, but these days, I'll not, having not near the strength, even if I've twice the stamina and stubborn stupidity. So it is - always a trade's being made somewhere. Today'll not care much for yesterday, nor tomorrow, and so it is. I'll make peace with this, in time. The holy's in the doing, the grace in the change, day from week from month from year. Fit'll be the doing, a matter not of where or what, but rather, how much? And sacred'll be known by the fatigue worn in the faces of those we commune with.

Or: they'll avoid the inevitable conversations, a first I think, of faith and faltering and how I've stepped away, out the fold and into the glaring sun. But, I want to say, I've found the better. I won't, of course, this most recent attempt at playing nice, reconciling even, but here then, as I told you once before: I've already my own religion, of the holy open sky and majestic peaks and hallelujah's mountain lake. The sacristy of a worn body, the grace of a full day, the forgiveness of muscles pulled to their brink. Poetry and salvation in the doing and being and living and nothing more. The creed of a life lived well and fully and nothing left for the day after, no disease of 'tomorrow.' Clearly I'm drunk on all of it, but the stars'll align so much more clearly here, with or without the mythology. And, as I've no answers for the past but to live in the present, no future to look for but to immerse myself full in moments such as this, that's a creed for which I'll ever thankful be. Ever and ever, amen, indeed.

Fogged Up

2010-06-28T11:43:00.001-05:00

The fog comes
On little cat feet.

Open roads, even under unfriendly skies, are ever a tough act to follow. Inevitably, though, all adventures end, and finding the follow-up routine becomes the charge indeed: bottling up the wanderlust, storing it away once more, finding normalcy and a daily rhythm that'll not require change, fatigue, large-scale movement. You know I'd no desire to drink then, amidst all the changing landscapes, not even much among the near constant rain; only of sleep and calories and dry warmth and friendly strangers did I dream. This, of course, is hardly to say I'll swill away the sorrows now, but I'll admit easily a want, this wanderlust refusing containment already and not even a week have I been still. Change being my favorite consistency, it'll see itself known; the stillness is only muggier, more oppressive by the day.

Tact among the things I've ever lacked, and alas, still it remains so. I never feel well when I'm here, and even if it may be true, I've gone and made the mistake of voicing it. This is home, sure, but every trip feels less so than the last, every trip a little more an intrusion, every trip a little more a stranger. Two weeks on the road, we'll say, and sure it could be good, potentially an act of wanderlust bonding, but just as likely it'll only accentuate the differences. Still, some things are owed, and if it's not quite gratitude, still it's a token. Hardly their fault I've remained an ungrateful jackal.

Realizations: she's never without a cause, and it strikes me that causes such as these might well make their own religion. Even as that big one's perhaps wavered (she'd not admit it, you know), there'll always be something to place unquestioned faith in, some ethic or expert to point the way. Thank god I've for once the sense not to say so. Or: he's ever as obstinate as I've remembered, even as he's softened in searching out the approval he'd well say he's not looking for, and by god, I'll find myself something akin. I am my father's son, but that won't mean I'm beyond fighting it.

I'll prefer the blank space of miles and time and the busy-busy-busy, the world familiar blood held at a distance of several states' arms, one time zone minimal. I've forgotten the unsettling of being among the settled, the close quarters and wanderlust turned claustrophobia. I've skipped out so many times before, though, that I'll not help but wonder if this won't perhaps serve as some small concession, a few weeks of some sort of apology I've yet learned to make. There's always a backstory to remain untold, and it may well be I've not yet outgrown the rebellious child.

Seems only natural that being back home as many of these miles are coming in the night as the day, scales sliding once more in favor of insomnia. Blame it on the stillness, the inactive oppressive flat if you must; fatigue's ever a favorite antiseptic, so I'll ride and I'll run and I'll drink and it'll tire the rest away, an overactive mind and memory quietly eroding in the long humid night. There's only time and there's only space and there's only questions best left untouched.

It used to be I'd only the knowledge of writing when soused, the words flowing only after the bottle'd a finish in sight, times both expanding and crashing in gulps of blurred past and present and future, all of it a single tense of 80 proof and all of it a river of words flowing as easily as the drink. Waterfalls in the gorge of memory, canyons carved out in sinewy fatigue and time, you know. But I've no longer the words that way, only the misconceptions of time; no longer have I the same sense of future (nor have I in several years), even as the past'll wind slow and murky as always she has. The present hangs, slack, as if it were itself the damp foreboding that hangs in the sky, portend of the storm forecast but still not come. I've no sense of forward but in abstraction; the future's a large thing, I might say. I've no sense of the future at all, really. No sense of the thing at all. No matter - she'll still come as only she does, and I'll only see the future in the prints left after she's passed. Pitter patter, pitter patter.

Ontogenesis

2010-06-16T06:57:00.000-05:00

So it is. Days keep coming, and I've neither the condition nor the fire of months past, of summers gone before. I've neither the drive nor motor, and so it is that I'll find myself staring through the trip, the weight of which has only grown with the wet, swollen miles. If the cities by the fourth were the goal? Well then. I've likely already overstayed. These homes, it'll seem, I'm forever swapping out, unable (or at very least unwilling) to claim and settle my own. There's the road, I say, always the road; lonesome traveler, you'll say, and I'll smile and nod, though you'll not see it.
These days hang full with pendulums and moments; seems I'll forever fail at not attaching too much weight to them. There's my future, I'll think, and this another crossroads, but then that's been the case so many summers now, and I'll still find myself no closer to definitions, forever instead drawn by the steady pull of questions, wonder and possibility. I'll overthink it, sure, even as I'll try my damnedest not to make it important. Bad karma, he says, this thing you're doing, you're ruining your life, don't you know? I'll shrug it off, drink the pint, call it a night, walk away. It's only later, once more pedaling into the past, that I'll think of it, for there on the paddle blade I'll see it written, a black sharpie string to that from which I've just run. karma. I'll laugh to myself, then, swallowing river water even as I do, and through the white we'll paddle, water cold and sun warm and laughter frequent. This here a family I'd claim my own, even as I'll run, and that there a shadow forgotten, passed. There are only moments in this world I've drawn, with not much care of permanence.
No past, nor no future, and amidst these resumes and cover letters, applying for jobs I don't much want, it strikes me just how little I care for anything outside the moment. Attention span short, as ever, I'm even just now wondering what'll be tomorrow, even as I've myself no idea. Some vision of a future I've crafted, sure, but without any clear route to forge ahead it'll seem unbounded journeying, infinite with an eye half open for someday nesting. All water goes down, he says, and it's true. Seems sure enough I'll eventually run down to some common denominators, gravity taking hold, but in the meantime there are all these peaks upon which to fall, and I'm a ready cloud of uncertainty. There are miles behind, miles ahead, and I've need of not much else, charging through alone as it were, unsure what I'm proving but in need of the challenge just the same. I've creation and destruction on the mind, with less certainty regarding the distinction, an uncertainty that there in fact is one.

I've miles, you know, and perhaps that'll be, least for the moment, enough. Outside of that? Outside of that, I know nothing. And in this particular moment, that's just fine.

To the Sea

2010-06-03T18:37:00.005-05:00

You must read him, she says, your style his, and that what drew me to you first. I'll pooh-pooh it, of course, having not even read him, but knowing the reputation, and from characterization alone trusting myself less skilled. But if an open afternoon'll allow itself, of course curiosity'll triumph, and I'll find myself flipping pages, lost in prose that'd take the breath of gods. A delicious and depressing thing, this, for though I see what she sees, i also see he's a skill I've not nearly dreamt of, succeeds in writing in a way more than I've yet dared hope, and I do not know whether to be disappointed or buoyed, for the proof of the possible or for the suddenly larger distance I am yet from it, my craft seemingly even more in need of practice than I'd imagined.

But I'll read and I'll wonder and I'll hope for the day my words find such a refining fire, a pruning shears that'll clarify the effort and hone the results. I've seen something akin to what I've hoped for, and this is most certainly a dangerous thing. This whole day, though, perhaps is a day of dangerous hopes. It'll seem only fitting that the day I've sworn off the bike as much as possible is the only day so far rain-free, even if the clouds'll still linger; seems only fitting that in re-preparing myself to leave the city I'll find myself in love with it, and these beautiful strangers, again; seems only fitting that so far removed from the mountains, I'll find myself surrounded by the things there missed most. There be books and beer and beautifully intelligent conversation, access to art and culture and even some semblances of community, of common identity. And so we strangers sit at the table and talk until the hours are beyond long; this is a country fixated on groups, he says, talking politics and religion, inevitably, but it is also true. Perhaps even this weakness is also our strength, the groups by which we divide ourselves also being the groups by which we come together. There is resiliency in some common distinction, perhaps.

And I've forgotten the dynamic that so often in past days has reminded from billboards and bumper stickers, that not all who wander are lost, but also, as we chat, that some are. It may be that we, ever weary travelers, no longer sure the difference either, and therein perhaps is both the challenge and the joy of our journeys. Without open skies to guide me, without the steadying draw of community circles, be they mountains or peers, it's hard to say where I am, save but in the concrete: Portland; before that, Salem; before that, Eugene; in between, the roadways that'll connect them each. And the where I'm going no more defined; without a clearly defined present, there'll hardly be a clearly outlined future. This is living, such that there are always more questions. There are always more questions. And this is perhaps both the greatest joy and frustration of all.

Start

2010-05-24T23:10:00.004-05:00

And so it is once more begun, that at sunrise I'll find myself off, wheels and feet in motion as if to chase down the sun, to alight on dreams, to become one with the sky and the earth, to disappear in the invisible and wide-open spaces. I'm by no means prepared, even less so than most of these misadventures, having barely ridden these past months on account of the snow, and today the first day with a loaded trailer since the fall. But... no matter.
I'll ease into the miles, only eighty or so planned the first day. My ass will hurt and my head will spin and my backs and hips will ache, least these first few weeks. But I'll sleep hard on bare earth beneath starry skies, and I've always ibuprofen and the roller stick and Thai icy-hot and a handle of whiskey for those things that'll ail me. And the day's will be as full as they are simple, and photos I'll take as I think of it, which is to not often enough, and the world will be my own. Some days will be miserable. Some days will be brilliant. None of them will be routine, none of them will be the same. The adventure will be what it is, part what I make it and part what it makes me. My flagship Proud Mary and I will be one, and it will be beautifully simple. The second bike summer's begun.

I'll write more as so inspired and able here: http://mattbikesamerica.blogspot.com

Accordingly, posts here may be less frequent. See you all on the flip side, if not on the road with me?

Ready

2010-05-21T08:40:00.001-05:00

So it is. As it always is. Nights of not sleeping, antsiness at full roar, fingers ever so slightly twitching. Too much writing, too much thinking. May be seemingly winter again here, with these low temps and intermittent snowflakes, but spring and summer on the mind, I've this trip for which to pack yet. The last day of teaching here has come and gone, and as ever, the constant I know best is that of change. The open road is calling once more.

Aren't you getting a bit old for all this, she asks. Shouldn't you be finding yourself some nice lady and a place to settle? We specialize in puzzlement and befuddlement, and there are these games, she having just in the last few weeks somehow having developed a taste for beer and snark. God, you're touchy tonight even as she curls back into me, fast-forwarding through the parts of The Princess Bride she cares for less. Our words and body language have this disconcerting habit of never quite matching, and it's entertaining sure, and just as much a mess. Ever blunt, never having been much for niceties, I've no clue how to read subtleties or between the lines she offers. But after years of a mind elsewhere and a body mostly inert, I've exploring and adventuring and playing ahead anyhow. I've never cared for sitting still; she's off tomorrow, and I to the road Tuesday, and it's likely all the better that way.

We've all these migratory impulses, zugunruhe they call it, but most have learned to ignore the antsiness. I have not, but neither have I found that buried map, hidden somewhere deep among the synapses and axial pathways, neurotransmitters and the code I've yet to crack, neither have I found the yellow brick road. But there are these roads ever for the taking, skies to breathe in and open air to gulp down, and all along the way I've been collecting homes and memories the way a bird'll make a nest. It's the season of flight once again.

All Alone Together

2010-05-15T22:44:00.003-05:00

The monsters underneath your bed
They're all just praying for you to let them crawl back home
I know it's hard to sleep
When you're so frozen
But we are all together alone

So I ate and I drank and I wept. We talked well over an hour, a long time as my phone calls go, but the kind of long time that can only seem not long enough, the kind of long time perhaps only brothers or lovers can share. It's a strange thing to eat sushi in the morning while snot runs both from wasabi and tears, but it seemed right and it seemed natural, and I'm forever learning the ways I'll get pulled back into not saying goodbyes. Worlds and words stand on edge again, because his world's on edge and mine's always shaky, and that's the way this brother thing works. I'd not change it for anything, save perhaps the part where bad things happen to make these conversations come 'round; this past year's seen us become remarkably adept, another item I'd rather were not so.

You won't find you
Unless you lose your mind
And you let go of all the things you cling to
'Cause we are all together alone

The past few years have taught me much about goodbyes even as I've not yet learned how to say them, and so these younger so-called peers have begun to ask me how, not knowing that experience has taught me the thing I know most is that I know nothing. An empty head is not an empty heart, however, and so weighted, there are trips to plans, open roads calling and the sky wide before me, before us. The disjointedness of time is perhaps never more pronounced than in farewells; a world of strike-throughs, she says, and I've never found such a phrase more apt.

Have we gone wrong?
Or are we growing?
I'm exploding from this beauty
Have we gone wrong?
Or are we growing?
I am crushed by all this madness
Have we gone wrong?
Or are we growing?
I'm exploding from this beauty...

And so we grieve our losses large and small, but the two of us in particular: he's a funeral to attend and I've this one the past few weeks so consistently remembered. There's a book about Jon now, the cover photo from the last peak we called our own together; the search for meaning in Brett's death's just begun. And yet their times are now and then and forever present, for nowhere does time work more strangely than in remembering the before. He'll disappear in silence and introversion and video games; I'll disappear in miles and miles and miles: run and biked and hiked and climbed, another peak to the tally. We are brothers so different even as we are the same, and the conversations keep going, and the days keep coming, and there's always hope that we'll find our way out of these respective holes.

Weeks Away

2010-05-14T06:39:00.001-05:00

Nearly a hundred kids this past week I've commandeered, and toss in the less mature chaperones and these instructors and it'll be well over. But for all the frenzy, for all the sleep a-lacking, for all the fires to put out - sick kids and no hot water, miscommunicated expectations and breakfast gone missing - the forest didn't catch in any truly terrible sorts of ways. Instead, it was all the small sparks, the sort that'll ignite the best of passions, on display, all the more reason to call the week a win. By god, how tired we are... but no matter. Seventeen-hour days have their merits.

Fire labs on the largest of still (mostly) safe scales, and the thousands of matches used to model various forest conditions; hundreds of pounds of sand and rock to move, goggles and spray bottles and cardboard cabins, defensible spaces and tinfoil fire-wising, and goodness the laughter and the screams and the science. For they'll use the process, test and revise those hypotheses, and by evening's end, have once more learned entirely by their own hands, novel experience it may these days be.

And into the field they'll go, one-day investigations to run askew of: wild edibles' preferred habitats; the suitability of various pine teas; fire resistance by bark type; camoflaging; soil characteristics by ecosystem. They'll dig holes and measure trees and eat the world around them; laugh and race and hold impromptu dance-offs. We'll watch old Pinky and the Brain episodes, cackle like mad scientists, plot to take over the world through science. They're young and they're dreamers and by god, it's a beautiful thing to watch a child's first love become science even as they're just learning how to awkwardly flirt with each other, all the small giggles and shy smiles. Maybe subtlety's in the course ahead, next in the math they're still just learning.

The world'll give, and the world'll take away, some of it natural and some of it so terribly not so. He's my brother's former best-friend, the one constant of so many years, just lost, and seen from this place, such a terrible contradiction of the good with the bad. All of it separated by so many miles and so many years and all of it connected. And the autistic boy writes in his Friday thank-you: you're an awesome instructor and you are fantastic and I love you, love, love xo xoxoxoxoxo... It all seems so removed, but this is the same place we live in, even as a child he works with threatens to poop in my brother's bag. Beauty in the terrible, beauty in the good, beauty in the commonplace. I'll refuse not to see it, because not seeing it I'll not how to make the days go. I'm a masochist and a lover, and he's a-hurting something fierce even if he'll not speak of it, but some things brothers just know, and it'll make a certain sick sense. We've all our particular vehicles to make the days go by, and besides the seventeen-hour days we're both filling, my bike's in the shop again and he's not yet started running again.

The lake's wide open now, no sign of the ice that even two weeks back covered it; the snow piles are disappearing; the sun's once again remembering how to shine and the sky to warm; a few spring flowers even have seen to stretch out, lazily unfurling after such a long sleep. These days are so full and so beautiful (in any sense you'll choose, of course) and there'll always be the chance to sleep when I'm dead. These moments, though? They're full of the living, of laughing and loving and lighting the world up with doing even as they're full of the hurting and the grieving and the trembling. Life is. There's no more I can say but this: mi hermano, there is love, love always. even when that's not enough, there is love.

Falling

2010-05-11T05:40:00.001-05:00

Been sometime since I've known hopeful that didn't require a breaking body in the process, and it wasn't 'til I was enumerating it for her that I'd realized what a year it'd been, between deaths, hospitalizations, and torched bridges, falling outs both spectacular and natural. You know you don't have to be an asshole, she says, or you, the same in different words, that sounds like a mental problem.

Of course you're right in the arguments you've made. I'm inherently selfish in these choices I make, life in the short term and ever present, no need of regard for the future. If I've still these same hips and knees in ten years, it may well be a surprise to them and I both. And if I'll count more than a handful of accomplices in these misadventures, the same, what with this knack I have for aggravation in others.

I ran four hours hard on Saturday, near racing, breakneck up and down the rocky trails besides the roaring rivers and falls, and as I fatigued, less and less attention I paid the foliage, my surroundings. Only the next five steps, then three, and so, with no regard for the future, it's no surprise my legs have these tell-tale signs of the poison ivy I didn't see. There's an obvious allegory, a lesson to be learned, but we all know I'd rather not see it, it not being firmly planted in the present.

And so it goes. I'm still falling into the living as fast and hard as I can, and that's the only way I've ever known how.

Starry Nights & Snowy Days

2010-05-07T00:07:00.000-05:00

Sunday: I'll still lay awake, not sleeping, ever forgetting how volatile I'll be without the miles to calm the demons, and as the hours pass ever so slow, it's no wonder I'll dream of better days. Re-viewing the pictures of last summer's big bicycle adventure, remembering the beauty of the miles and the solitude and, perhaps most of all, the simplicity of a life boiled down to necessities and no more: food, water, shelter. Just the road and me and the big wide sky and nothing more. And if there's the proper soundtrack, dreams of the wide open west, the wild calling, well of course sleep shan't beckon.
All of which is to not say much, except perhaps this: I'm okay, but I'd be better on the bike. The horizon's the only aim I've much care for these days.

Tuesday: but there's the teaching itself. And by god, any of these weeks, by the night before the students' arrive I've always re-determined this is the worst of all possible ideas. I fucking hate kids, it's true, never want to see them. But by the end of the first night, having gotten enough of a feel for the group dynamic and individual learner needs, I'm planning lessons, thrilled again at the prospect of teaching. Thrilled by the prospects of the week ahead: of molding malleable minds, of the thrill of exploration and discovery and the simple pleasure of seeking out answers by first asking more questions, of watching a group gel and become something greater than the sum of the parts. And in that contagion, no wage would be enough for an indoor job or a non-teaching job. This is what I was made to do, this teaching thing; put me in my element, and I will own it. When I'm on, I am jedi master ninja teacher, and those kids have no idea what just happened, just that something has changed. There are few joys that compare to teaching gone right. Unfortunately, there's also a whole lot of bullshit that sometimes gets in the way.
Which again is not saying much, except perhaps this: I'm well, but sometimes I'd rather be on the bike. The horizon's the simplest aim I've care for some days.

Thursday: and the sleep still hasn't come, and the miles haven't either (a full week now, though the swelling's finally down); with a week's worth teaching still not weighing quite one good long run, it may be the hours pass even more slow. But if I'm still awake, it's not to dream of better days except idly, lazily. For life is simple enough in some moments Of contentment, such as the satisfaction of a week well-taught. If they aren't over-privileged bastard fucks, I can teach them, and do a damn fine job of it. And if they are over-privileged bastard fucks, I don't know that I care to try. That's the bullshit I'll not care for. I don't want politics or games; I just want to teach.
All of which is to say this: I love to teach, but there are only so many opportunities, and it's just easier on the bike. The horizon's not the only aim, but it's certainly the least distracted.

Or, these paragraphs in a sentence: these days have a way of working themselves out; life is good; the open road is only the simplest of my homes; I'll ever teach, and teach well.

Orange Sky

2010-05-04T22:00:00.002-05:00

There are many reasons I came back to Idaho. One of them was clearly the beauty. One of them was clearly the prospect of peaks on which I could plausibly register the first ascent. One of them was clearly the job, which seemed perfect for me.

Well I had a dream
I stood beneath an orange sky
Yes I had a dream

But there was also the understanding that eventually I had to face the ghost of a best friend, the memories of our mountains, and all the what-ifs. Eventually I had to make my peace with the mountains, possibly on that mountain.

I stood beneath an orange sky
With my brother standing by
With my brother standing by

Try one was several Augusts ago, only six weeks or so after... it was too soon. Her knee said no just before the main ridgeline; my heart and body said no long before. I wasn't ready for this to be the mountain. I wasn't ready for this to be the day I said goodbye.

I said Brother, you know you know
It is a long road we ve been walking on

Try one and a half was the first race. A half-marathon in his hometown. I registered; I had to, it was named after him. And then I backed out. Wasn't ready. Not yet. But I drank myself silly the night before, and with such courage, decided to run from bar close to the race. Thirty mile warm-up and a short nap later, the gun went off, and so too did I, all the memories of lake runs and impromptu trail races and track workouts that neither of us were in shape for. But my cool-down took me past his parent's house, past his grave, and I knew I needed the mountain.

Brother you know it is you know it is
Such a long road we ve been walking on

Try two was this past September. I wasn't ready. spent all week not sleeping, working my ass off, running far too hard and far too much. Even so fatigued, still wasn't numb enough to be ready. Drank myself silly, got myself kicked out of two bars. Spent the car ride there sick. Spent most of the way up sick. Got to the ridgeline, and was done. Spent the entire way down being sick. Spent the next night sick. Spent the next day sick. And knew the whole time I was going back.

My hearts been broken
Sometimes, sometimes
My mind is too strong to carry on
Too strong to carry on

The students I'm working with this week grew up in those mountains. One of my chaperones and her son live in a house we more than once ran by; I'm sure we probably bought ice cream from her friends at least once. And so I'm researching the glaciation of their mountains, our mountains. And so I'm researching the one place that my heart has always called home, the place we called home together, the place that took our sweat and our blood and gave us everything it had in return, still uncompromising and hard and always wild, and I'm teaching it. By god, I don't know I've ever had quite a week on quite an edge. If I'd not known precisely the dimensions of the Cabin Creek morraine (up to 25 m high, 300 m wide), I still know it's smells and tastes and my feet could run it blind. So too could his. And their eyes know it nearly as well, for their home is my home was his home. And their experiences are my feet and memories, too, and she knows his sister, but we won't talk of it, can't talk of it. Some things are always too close until they've gone.

When I am alone
When I've thrown off the weight of this crazy stone
When I've lost all care for the things I own
That's when I miss you, that's when I miss you, that's when I miss you

Try three will, I hope, perhaps be this summer. In truth, I don't know what the summer brings. If I'm remaining in Idaho, then for certain it will; on the anniversary, perhaps. But winds of change blowing, I know only I'll head where the job awaits.

Well I had a dream
I stood beneath an orange sky
Yes I had a dream
I stood beneath an orange sky
With my brother standing by
With my brother standing by
I said Brother, you know you know
It's a long road we ve been walking on
Brother you know it is you know it is
Such a long road we ve been walking on

Time Is

2010-05-03T05:51:00.001-05:00

Am I loud and clear? ...or am I just bad luck?
Are we getting closer or are we just getting lost?

Worlds are intersecting these days, so many possibilities but most of the corresponding opportunities I've already found lacking; from words to words to words, all scattered, your words or mine or a stranger's, there's so much reading and writing and thinking (too much, perhaps) and so little resolution. About the only certainty I've left is that this'll be another summer lived by bicycle. But time's what we make of it, and by extension, life too; uncertainties may be no more than time we haven't yet lived. Other theories of course abound.

Let's compare scars, I'll tell who's are worse
Let's un-write these pages and replace them with our own words

It could be that time is a circle, that we're all repeating our mistakes, and we've never learned from the histories we haven't seen (but, of course!). It could be that death is its own living, and we are each, unaware, a phoenix. It could be. Seems clear enough that I'm repeating the lives lived before, anyways, making the same mistakes and foolish blunders, stepping into the same traps. Of course this also means I've the same joys time and time again, finding the same peaks, the same sun and moon and smiling friends and damn fine drinks. I'd not change it, for if some moments are less happy, the life itself is full.

We live on front porches and swing life away
We get by just fine here on minimum wage
If love is a labor I'll slave 'til the end

It could be that time is bubbling permutations of possibility, world upon world upon world of options, and the only limits to this universe are, in fact, our imagination. It could be with every breath new worlds are spun off as lazily as soapy water through a hoop in the middle of summer. It could be that possibility is a thing without end, never closing or melting or disappearing or dying, but only, on occasion, floating out of our sight. If it's so, then it may be that this geometry has more oddities than consistencies, but perhaps so too do I and perhaps so too do you; if there's a fork in the trail I'd rather explore the unmarked woods. I'll make each choice knowing that perhaps in the next loop I'll choose differently, but there's only this moment now. Gravity being what it is, I'll not think too much, but neither too little; you'll call me impulsive, and it'll be perfectly true, least this run-through.

I've been here so long I think its time to move
the winter's so long, summer's over too soon

Or perhaps it's a world of division, mechanical time and body time being distinctly different and oppositional things. If it's so, well then I'm clearly predicated by the latter and constrained by the former, for there are not days enough for these peaks and these ventures, and days too many for recovery and rest and the things we'll call work. Sure, it'll be necessitated by the costs of living in both times at once, but it'll hardly make me dislike it less.

I've got some friends, some that I hardly know
but we've had some times I wouldn't trade for the world

But perhaps time is tethered loosely, a fluid thing like kites and as the gravity lessens higher in the sky, so too does the earth's influence on time lessen as we move further from our core. Perhaps clocks are but a mechanical illusion as we rise into the sky, time a thing in theory only, an artificial delineation of past and present and future, for none of it matters if the world is taking place under the clouds below us, these mountains clearly having no need of such human inventions as time.

We live on front porches and swing life away
We get by just fine here on minimum wage
If love is a labor I'll slave 'til the end

And it's no wonder that I'll remember a conversation had in the dim corner of a dim Portland bar, and he asked about those women, always the two, and I told him before the though to censor ever came around: when I drink and when I write, time falls away; when I drink and when I write, there are moments, hand prints in the sand rather than a clear line where the tide's been; when I drink and when I write, there is only immediacy. It was the first I'd ever understood it so clearly, but still: there is no cause, there is no effect; there is no future, there is no past. As for other moments, I remember the laughing and I remember the drinking, I remember the kissing and I remember the crying, but as to how they're all tied – sure there are strings, but where memory's concerned, who's to say what falls under the jurisdiction of time? In a world where the past is disconnected from the present and the present removed from the future, there is nothing but immediacy, the moment, impulsiveness and absolute sincerity. There is only this present, and no need of continuity. Only this. There is no sobering the moment, only the drunkest of expressions, inhibition replaced with the liquor of now. There are no hangovers in the future that cannot be.

Swing life away

Or, what of time as an emotion, a thought, a feeling. Seconds might be bubbles of a universal expression of love, hours as long or as short as the passions with which we live them; ever a man of passion and action and not much for sitting still, this life'll not last me long. And I'm grateful for the brevity of living, full as it is. In this world, our lives are the moments we treasure, and again there is no past or future, only the present and the worlds of passions mingling therein, a strange dance if ever there was. Time is merely the blood that connects our fingers and brains and genitals.

Swing life away

In a last world, time is a thing we get stuck in. In this world, everyone is alone, for a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. This is the loneliest world of all, and if I was stuck there once, I'm thankful for the miles that picked me up and the winds that carried me away and the friends that would not let me stagnate, for a world of stuck time is a world of no time at all, a world without even a present. And it may be that I've no set future, and I'm doing my damnedest to forget the past, but by god, I'll own the present. The moment, the moment I'll make my own.

Swing life away
Swing life away

Idealogue

2010-04-29T21:26:00.004-05:00

Seems sure enough that it's on the runs to nowhere I'll forget the camera, and consequently want it most, this run in particular one of the most spectacular and beautiful runs I've known. If not ever, that at least since that foggy eighteen-miler in Glacier, August last, and this weather still unmatched. Two hours the run, and those two hours from hail to snow to sun to sleet to rain to sun to hail to snow, clouds lazily circling the lake, weather mischief the inevitable prank. My first run in the park since the snows first started regularly falling, and by god, how spectacular it is to be off the nordic trails. Precipitation and nature's bipolarity aside, the sun'll still somehow shine in the spaces between, a shadowy patchwork quilt of sun and shadow draped across the icy lake, which has only in the last week begun breaking up.

And as the miles accumulate I'll notice the marsh's become a lake; reeds, sedges, and grasses equally lost beneath the snowmelt cold and clear. Small sheets of ice drift asymmetric, testaments to a winter's chill we haven't yet quite shaken. The dirt road will show spottily; as frequently as it does, gravity will make pebble-banked spillways linking the autumn marsh and the yet thawing spring lake. Yet more frequent are the debris-littered snow drifts washing waves across the road, up to several feet deep and as likely crusty, shin-breaking ice as slushy mush, depending on the particular interplay of sunlight and shadow. A cool breeze unfurls unevenly in the yet cooler air, but the sun is bright when it shines, and the miles hold me aloft. There's no sign of others' presence, save the occasional fox or bunny print, no sign of any human presence in weeks, if not longer. The end of snowshoeing season a month back has left the snow once more unencumbered.

And so into this forgotten wonder I'll disappear, silence and sunlight and pitter-pattering snowflakes my only company. Prancing light-footed and lighter-hearted through puddles and snowdrifts, it's no wonder I'll lose myself in the sun-striped peaks poking out amidst misty clouds, no wonder I'll plunge straight through the ice-topped pool, crack the crust with soon bloodied shins and thighs, caught entirely unaware by the presence of water. But no matter. Beauty like this can't be captured or explained, only experienced and lived, and so I'll not mind the misery of flapping shin skin sparkling still with ice, or the way these ankles and knees and hips will twist awkward and uncomfortable in the mess of ice and slush. I'll set aside the misery with the realization that it's perhaps warmer, or more accurately, less miserable, to simply run naked, the only way I'll know to catch more of the warming sun. The snow and sleet and air may still be absolutely dreadful, but this mess just wet enough to make staying dry impossible, the cold'll be simultaneously exhilarating and miserable.

On I proceed, the ridge line sunny, more mud than snow, and the green alpine slopes below me steam, misty fingers sliding both towards heaven and the spottily frosted lake below. Again, experience defies understanding, and the magnificence will not stand still for words. I'll reach the farthest point, then, lake and sky and peaks and clouds my only neighbors, and I'll inhale deep at the pinnacle. I alone breathe this air, I alone feel this breeze, and I alone know this place. The scream will disappear in the cool, gray ether, lost until a ray of sun will pick it up in the memories that only light will store, not knowing time, but I'm alive! and this primal perfection is better than any movie, any soundtrack could ever hope for. I'll savor it long as this goose-pricked flesh'll allow, but lest I freeze, a stone monument to less intelligent life choices in all season, I must run on.

The delights will of course continue on. For if there are few things more deliciously primal than running naked through snowy woods on a sun-spotted wintery spring day, there can be nothing more deliciously strange than that same runner being followed by a large bird. More precisely, a pileated woodpecker, he (or she) being the only avian soul brave (or stupid) enough to fly in such strange weather. Only after my internal dialogue's exhausted my supply of related jokes, only after I've begun to approach those places in the park where I might conceivably see another human, does this companion part. And having grown accustomed to at least the occasional fox shadow when running in the park, it doesn't seem strange until after I speak of it later.

But these are the miles I run, and this is the place I live in, not the kind of place one can be ambivalent about, being the kind of place you either love or hate or both, depending on the season and the weather. It'll be a hard place to leave, that time coming 'round once more. Even when the miles are miserable, what a wonderful thing they are. And that's all I'll ever ask for, my preference being a simple sort of life. Miles of trials, trials of miles, and the days just keep rolling on.

Runaround

2010-04-28T00:23:00.000-05:00

What's your best feature? And, perhaps related, why do you always insist on calling yourself an asshole, when clearly you're hardly that?

Every dollar counts
And every morning hurts
We mostly work to live
Until we live to work

Stubborn as stone, and free as the wind that'll erode this will. These legs will break, but never bend, and so I'll never learn to work before I play, to find a pay except in forms of play. There's a reason I'd rather my bike for extended company than a woman, you know.

She said,
“You know
There's nowhere else to go”
But changing roles
It struck me that the two of us could run

She asked me once what I wanted most in the world. At the time a simple answer I gave: "you." But I've since learned these are the lies we tell ourselves under the guise of something we'll call love. Maybe it was true. But now I'm happiest under the open sky, atop the peaks, miles stretched across the open road and untamed west. It may yet kill me... but what a way to go!

Worlds away from cars
And all the stars and bars
Where a little bit of condensation means so much
And a little bit of change is all your little fingers touch

The snowpack so thin this year, and they'll bemoan it, as'll I, given the likely fire season, but goodness, how much easier it's making it to touch the heavens, peaks under only four-to-six feet of snow, rather than eight-to-twelve. Somehow it'll all feel a little safer than it might, that rockslide hasn't taken me out yet, and the thin lines where heaven meets earth, water meets rock, and sound meets the loudest silence are all the more alluring for it.

I said,
“You know
There's nowhere else to go”
But changing roles
It struck me that the two of us could run

I was happy to settle once. I've since forgotten how. And so another round of job applications, another round of possibilities, and travel's once more on the horizon. Two women once promised, and they've both remained in Minnesota even as I could not.

Honey, with you
Is the only honest way to go
And I could take two
But I really couldn't ever know

So I've traded them each in, one for feet that'll never stop and the other for a set of wheels. I'll run and I'll pedal, and this locomotion will just enough days outpace the memories to keep me in the present, just afore the past. And should the ghosts catch me, I've yet to find a better elixir than the good company of tired muscles and a small-town bar. 'whiskey, whiskey, whiskey, apple pucker,' I said, and the mustached man only nodded and complied. There were miles and miles and the farmland summer sun, and battered I was, and life was paying dues.

So lead my feet away
Cuz all they'll do is stay
And I don't think your eyes
Have ever looked surprised

There's miles of trials, and trials of miles, and these eyes'll measure up to one pair, the hopes and dreams of a once gaunt face and the experience only a mirror knows. The only face I'll answer to my own. Or, more simply: I'll be an asshole if I want to; fuck you.

Ask me anything.

Wispy

2010-04-27T10:20:00.002-05:00

The full moon's floating amidst wispy, misty fingers; alive as I'm feeling, it'll be a crime not to wander and wonder about, the peninsula park ever my playground. Besides, having earlier spoken of this new-found quiet living, seems inevitable I ought to blow up the whole routine, re-introduce a little of the crazy, especially given the wonder of the weather. So, the day full, I'll blow off work and job applications and school, all those things I should be doing, all in favor of play. So, play then: a morning run, a morning ride; an afternoon hike turned three hour run (with a rock slide near-miss, a snowy peak, and a hot spring, plus six or seven thousand vertical feet); an evening bike ride turned a couple beers beside the lake and altogether far too cold swim; a midnight run and walk.

So into the night I'll wander, fox kits and coyotes yelping and yipping in the clear and moonlight night, spring peepers noisy in the marshy corners of the thawing golf course, reminders of several past ghost-tinted nights. But I'll shrug off the memories, play like five or seven or whatever age it is we first begin learning inhibitions, let myself be wild and free. Under the misty moon I'll prance and hop and skip and jump and dance and barrel roll. Following only where the spirit'll lead, I'll pick my way across the sagebrush, barefoot in sand and melting snow; my feet are their own sense of time, and I am the land, natural and organic. I'll sit under my favorite of those big ponderosas, and the strange freedom of the night will cause me to sing, and once more I'll find myself floating on a river in the past, passing by other trees and other songs and other places, transported away by the cool, clear night.

Floating through time, I find myself easily back in the lonely Minnesota woods. Proud norway pines, once ours and ours alone, full of quiet secrets and the dark corners where we'd bed down like the deer, pine needles as fine a bed as any. And if we raked our fingers in the rich black soil, it was only to mark up such pale warm skin. Rolling and playing, we ground ourselves into the earth, and there was no clear distinction between heaven and earth, nor between laughter and song. This, too, was natural and organic, but those woods are no longer ours, and the dirt and bruises I carry these days are mine alone, as is this song. Simple and sweet, just a tad bit sad, this progression, had I my guitar: Gsus, Csus, D, Asus (occasional Am), capo three or four.

Or, farther back, so many summers before: I still just a pup and she four years older, that the summer of greatest insomnia. How well I got to know those trails, if the sixty or seventy daytime weekly miles weren't enough, so much of so many nights spent walking. My only company through the long hours either silence or softly sung camp songs, but in those days that was my peace, simple melodies and simple lyrics. No wonder was it that the night we kissed besides the aspens I'd I Love You Lord running through my head. There was a misty moon that night too.

Lonelily

2010-04-26T06:34:00.000-05:00

In the loneliness, oh the loneliness and the scream to prove to everyone that I exist in the loneliness. Oh the loneliness, to bring the blood to the front of my face again

Strange it may be, to finally find myself comfortable admitting a loneliness, introvert and recluse and lover of open wilderness solitude, but in truth, that is precisely the position I find myself in: in want of more interactions with people with whom I feel a strong connection, in want of a place that's clearly a home, in want of human touch and the delicately thoughtful conversations that come in quietly intimate small corners in the wee hours of the morning and night. But you saw this long ago and called it so.

Let's pretend I'm attractive and then you won't mind, you can twist for a while. It's the night, I can be who you'd like, and I'll quietly leave before it gets light.

A co-worker told of a dream he'd had, this last week, that I'd hooked up with someone in the small town were we were teaching. A laughable thing, sure, especially if you'd long ago decided I was foolish in love and all imitation facsimiles (and it's true, for I am), but I unabashedly admitted a lack of interest when he brought it up. As it were, one of my chaperones, a student's mother no less, made it quite clear she was divorced and found me engaging; by the end of the week most of the students were in on her game, asking as only fifth-graders can if I "liked her." But the awkward I politely avoided, we worked together with the students to help them see the wonders of the outdoor world, and there was no more.

Some nights you drink too much & smoke too much & just want to snuggle, & its a sad & lonely night. Tonight Imma gonna pass out rather than fight it. And I'll hope you are well...

And so the night'll roll right on into the morning, and I'll ever wonder at what foolish things have been said, this familiar routine mindful the past but ever still in the present. A kaleidoscope distortion, these memories and these words and the way time's all draining into one place.

Help, I'm alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer. Hard to be soft, tough to be tender. Come take my pulse, the pace is on a runaway train...

But in the van, from empty chatter to actual conversation; he wondered aloud if we ever really saw people. I of course misunderstand the target at which he was firing his idle query and took the metaphysical tack; she of course remembered her coursework and assumed I was referencing Descartes. You know, of course, that your notion of perception creating reality is in direct contradiction to any sort of ecological ethic, she told me, I took a class built entirely on the fundamental flaw of your thinking once. He, being no fan of institutional thought, immediately went defensive, but in truth, my aims were hardly so Cartesian or, for that matter, direct. I assured him as much. Instead of metaphysics, he explained, he meant actually seeing the heart and soul and being of the other person, freed from perception and the minute judgments even of biology and anatomy and evolution. Could we ever really love someone entirely for who they were, love in a universal sense, rather than say the love afforded a wife, the love afforded a daughter?

I get wherever I'm going, I get whatever I need, while my blood's still flowing and my heart's still beating like a hammer...

And so spun the conversation, the three of us going round, a fourth member largely mute, much of this over her head; a fifth intently driving, the canyon a winding, devilish thing; the sixth already miles behind, sitting at a gas station awaiting a ride in another direction. Could we ever think of love not as a verb or emotion, neither as a noun, but instead as a collective universal identity? And could a charter for conflict resolution ever be built entirely on the base assumption that we are good, that love is collective, and the earth will do best? Such questions!

If my life is mine, what shouldn't I do? I get wherever I'm going, I get whatever I need...

But, fitting. These curls growing back out, dirty and tangled, a windswept mess, and twisting thoughts slowly coming back round again to those glorified philosophies of years past, where I'm ever the idealist, ever the cynic. Sure thing I'm a romantic and a fool, and he's calling for a poet revolution, of language-less love, an abstraction made concrete. Of course we're dirty hippies, he and I, and she – with her policy degree and aspirations of environmental law – will naysay as often as agree. The topics get heady as if a late night college dorm roundtable, as if we were all somehow nineteen again, drunk on potential and ideas and the soft blanket of the company of a few good friends. The air'll be clear in our lungs like a late autumn evening, an early spring morning, the wee hours of a crystalline summer night. It's all remarkable, of course, but perhaps most of all for it's infrequency – for what could be more talked about than love, and yet talked about less?

Love, loves. Stranger friends, be well.

River Run

2010-04-24T10:11:00.000-05:00

Most comfortable as a stranger, clearly introverted, and quite possibly (okay, likely) at least a little insane: these are all things I readily admit. I do not like large groups of people, and have never been any good at commenting on others' blogs, no matter how much I may love their words. At parties, I'm the guy in the corner by the snacks, unless there's a quiet place to disappear outside, or a stranger equally apart, that we might chat. I am not a people person, except maybe with the people most easily forgotten, the quietly hushed and dirty corners, best a teacher with the kids no one else wants to teach and most comfortable in a group from the outside looking in.

And yet? There are those of you I'd love to share drinks with, together watch the night run into the wee hours of the next day, hangovers likely to follow - and that such a small cost as to not warrant a second thought. At least once, I'd like to try the group thing with all of you beautiful people, stranger friends. As such, this weekend had a strange allure: Vancouver, strangers, alcohol, laughter. All things I like. Having skipped each year previous, for reasons of economy or a fear of groups or work commitments, this was the year most likely to work. Still, it remained dependent on several variables outside my control, and the stars will only align so in the rarest of cases. It was not to be, and so it is not.

Instead, I'll take this crew of stranger children and we'll climb green ridge lines, cinnamon-trunked ponderosas and brilliant spring ferns, the Clearwater sprawling below, a thick grey-blue vine parting seas of green. We'll catch salamanders and garter snakes and listen to the ruffed grouse drumming and turkeys calling, howl like wolves and hear the echoed responses of other, lower groups. We'll smell the soil and catch bugs and hide in blackberry patches, apply yarrow and white fir sap to the resulting scratches, classify water bugs and nab a couple fingerlings with a hand net. It'll rain and the sun will shine and we'll laugh and I'll remember just how fun fifth-graders can be. And this weekend? There'll be copious amounts of springtime fun, between the miles ridden and run, the drinks had and laughter shared and salmon grilled. Mountains are calling, the sun is shining, the weekend's begun.

Trail Waking

2010-04-16T00:41:00.001-05:00

And so, in the absence of much work, this is what will happen, especially should the weather turn nice: I'll play and play and play. I'll play as much as time'll allow; I'll fall in love with the world, and it will be a beautiful romance indeed. Sunday a celebration, spring finally arriving, and so I, even still sick from the night previous, will struggle through the first two hours, these hours of intermittent rain and slushy soft snow and coughing, coughing, but how perfect it still will be, the day beautiful and the miles bounteous, four hours of primal running fun. And sure, there was Monday and work to follow, but as it happened, one more full day of prep work was all this project needed. So Tuesday off we went, exploring a few potential presentation sites, the sun shining and snow melting and mud thawing, the kind of day that'll make even the confederate flags flying in the valley less an eyesore. And then we promptly spent several hours shoveling a fifteen-passenger van out of a three foot snowdrift, slush and mud; digging our way around the van, underneath the van, behind the van, all of it wet, cold, messy. Finally ranchers came to our aid. Yesterday, then, no more work needed on the project: of course mountains and trees and mud and wonder calling, off I dashed. Ridgelines beckoned, and so I went, this time five plus hours the sum run. And if somehow the Nomex and ash and the sheer ridiculousness of our presentation weren't enough to dull the ache my legs knew this morning? Well, how the sun still shone this afternoon, and high fifties, warmest it's been all year: of course I ran! A planned forty-five minute recovery of course becoming three hours of snow and slop and muddy play, and an opportunity presented, the route back being what it was... of course I finished with a hard 5k. If I'll go by my common definition of long runs being three hours or more, that's three long runs in five days.

Then there's the stars so bright and clear, and these roads finally consistently ice free and nighttime safe, the first time in months a it could be a night run rather than a night ski. Moderation not being much my style, I ran once more. A fool's a fool, but I'll not mind. Hamstrings goaded me the whole way, but a spring in my step just the same, this being the best sort of living, and if a red fox cared to join, who was I to complain? More the merrier, and by god, how this world's my plaything.

So when I can't walk in the morning, there's always this: even at the height of my training (spring-summer-fall 2008), even in my highest mileage weeks (162, early-September 2008) and months (590, June 2008), I'd never done three long runs in five days. Three in a week, a few times, but never three in five days. So I guess there's that. And the weather's supposed to be back to its usual gross the next couple of days, so maybe my legs will get a rest. They could certainly use it.

Spring Wild

2010-04-14T20:48:00.000-05:00

Limits existing if only for testing, I'll of course take this free day and fill it; as the great Cassidy would say, miles of trials, trials of miles, and as I all too well know, the difference between 50k/50mile shape and 50mile/100k shape is vast. My hamstrings would clearly tell you (and knees and hips and ankles and feet, for that matter): I'm much closer to the former than the latter. Sure, the snow and elevation and long runs three days apart won't help much, but this aching's so delicious I'm hardly all that sorry, even knowing ibuprofen will be a necessary sleep aid. Maybe, the logic goes, if I really push boundaries, if I really make it hurt... well, maybe then I'll find myself back at that illusive racing shape all the sooner. These are the things I tell myself after Sunday's four hours and today's five plus.

But that all misses the point. For it's less the miles, more the outside hours; less the running, and more the freedom of a snow-covered ridge with no sign of humanity but my own tracks from days previous. It's about the exhilaration of standing atop a peak, bare-chested and bent over, gasping for ragged breathes, knowing full well it hasn't likely been claimed in weeks, months, perhaps even since before the snow first fell in the fall. It's about running only in how these legs will get me away faster, get me quicker to the joy of the backcountry and these wilderness miles that not even the snowmobilers'll claim, least not with the snow so soft and cruddy, and my god, how beautiful this escape is! Sure, there's once more familiar aches, and blood that'll pulse so strong through them; sure, there'll be aching knees and roughed up hips and weary ankles, cut-up shins and water-logged toes and sunburnt shoulders; sure, there'll be that nagging little voice that comes with the territory of tiring hamstrings, fatigued hip flexors – but good god, what payoff! And then, the extra little gifts, getting stronger and leaner, fitter and faster, seeing how limits peel away, change, expand into the bodies a body'll so quickly forget in the name of play. Or, say, the confidence of knowing, intimately aware, those muscle fibers – every sinewy one! – are back in a place you'd thought maybe they'd forgotten, weren't sure they'd recover. And if not quite as quick as the dreams'll be, well, still, one step closer to those primal ancestors all the day steadily across the savannah, slowly tiring their prey; still, one step closer to the snow leopard and the Tarahumara and the mountain goat. Hips and ribs and collarbones finding their way back to angular, fewer corners soft and round, and this too, is a clear sign I'm closer to fit. It's spring, a new start, and a mountain man must ready himself for the ventures of a summer ahead. This I'll forever know: the wilderness calls.

For clearly, it is in fact finally spring, the still multiple feet of snow not withstanding, and clearly it is calling. The birds cry it so, the now near-constant puddles of dirty slush attest doubly, and that buried bicycle in yurt village is once more visible. Even more clear evidence: turkey prints in the woods once more (first since the fall), geese calling at odd hours, fox and rabbit tracks at higher elevations, bird calls now reaching all the way up to the burned higher slopes of Crestline Ridge. I'll hardly be immune the charm of such a place, ripe for the blossoming, giddy even with the prospect of more ventures. These woods and mountains are my own, for I've declared it so, the wilderness my playground. Truthfully? I'd not have it any other way.