Category: Strange Thoughts

You can’t take the future with you

July 21st, 2024

On the path, you take the tools. Tools take you? No. Your journey.

Oh but is it yours? What is yours? Are you on the ownership trip or the skipaway ship across the bay?

The difference is subtle, the difference is suffering. Which do you want? Doesn’t matter. Want and need are different beasts, far cousins of greed.

The bush is orange flowers, the vehicle is the wheel. Do you control either? Does the bush control the wither?

Do you take a bath in your body odor? How far out is that, what was I saying?

Make plans for Thursday, is that day yours, is that future where you got to Thursday something you can keep, is that scum on your teeth going to stay there until then? If not now, when?

I know I’m asking you a lot of questions, I know there’s something I’m getting around to, I just haven’t found it yet, it just hasn’t stumbled onto my path, it just isn’t here yet, I’m here.

I’ve found that the longer I keep writing the farther from nothing am I, I’m always here, present, checked out, in the soup, part of the group, part of the swamp. It’s warm, the sun is so big. It’s there, will it be there? How about that green sign of the congressman, will that be there? Immortality is only the monuments, after all, metal rusts, stones fall. Ships are sinking. This is everything now.
Move Your Hips

November 21st, 2023

Alright, here’s the deal: you have to move your hips.

I’m not normally one to give advice, especially not without being asked, especially not on the Internet, and especially not on a blog that’s normally so…

You have to move your hips. You have to move your hips. You have to move your hips.

Does your back hurt? Move your hips.

Do your shoulders hurt? Move your hips.

Are you stuck in a dark emotional cycle? Move your hips.

Is your spirit something you don’t experience? Move your hips.

Our hips are the home of our emotions, they hold up our entire physical body, and they are seat of our creative spark, what many would argue is the seed of divinity within us.

If you have experienced physical, sexual, romantic, emotional, intimate trauma and abuse, your hips will physically hold onto that pain, which will keep your nervous system experiencing it over and over and over again, and if your body is sending you signals that you’re still in danger, your thoughts will race, you will feel emotionally unsettled, and experiencing what is beautiful and sublime about life will feel impossible.

I’m not a doctor. I’m not a mental health professional. I am someone who has been through some shit.

I could not begin to move through the aftermath of my experiences until I released the visceral, physical pain symptoms from my hips, and I would not have been able to heal, at all, from any of it, if I hadn’t trusted my intuition when it whispered to me:

Move those hips, baby. What’s the worst thing that could happen?

No matter who you are, no matter your gender or its expression, no matter what stage of life you are in, you can, and you must, move your hips. Find a yoga practice, take a dance class, give yourself a massage, do anything that calls to you as a possibility for your healing, and trust that your hips are holding onto all of your pain because they are strong. Because your hips are strong, they can heal. And they will. Please, please, please, give them the chance. They will carry you.

The movements of joy are accessible to you when you open up. Release, breathe, hold, move.

I believe in your hips. I believe in you.

Move love. That’s all you have to do.
The Crow Answers

November 19th, 2023

“What do you see up there, brother?”

“No more than you.”

Perception is an illusion, and we are the aggregate. Is there more to say?
What Are Tears For?

November 18th, 2023

I shed them often, I shed them long, I shed them for anger, grief, joy, suffering, anything I can get my tear ducts going for.

And I don’t understand them.

If I shed them for the slaughter of children whose families I will never know, do the buds regrow?

If I shed them for my own deep inside hurts, did time turn back on itself?

I know they are a primordial vent but I don’t know what they’re for. They don’t do anything.

Except everything.

They cry to that oldest force, “I’m here, damn you, I’m here!” They are stronger than the rain and softer than a shower of petals.

I could not do without them.
In My Life

November 17th, 2023

I’ve passed countless hours on the road, so many that trying to corner my thoughts on this subject is slippery business. I’ve seen rainbows, moonbeams, blood smeared on asphalt, unrecognizable metal and carrion, towns without name, cities without faces, entropy in wheat fields, the erection of man’s progress, his folly.

I’ve run for my life, I’ve stopped the world, I’ve cried until I couldn’t breathe, I’ve smiled at simple presentations that only a slip of crushed stone could throw up for the eyes to take in.

The road accepts my syntax, lets me leave behind my choices. Forgets who I am.

Liminal spaces are so hard to find because they are everywhere.

We never leave our vehicle, we are always going somewhere, we are never where we were, we never return to a place, there is no way home.

You can certainly lose yourself.

Do.
Subjective Visibility

April 11th, 2023

I’m on a mission.

I want to read a shitload of books before I die.

I’m going to leave the quantitative interpretation of ‘shitload’ up to future me. If they’re really lucky, maybe the walls of their house will be constructed from the stacks of books they’ve acquired over their (I hope, very long and exquisitely fruitful) journey on this pale blue dot.

At this moment, 26-year-old me is new to being late-twenties and feeling a little woozy about it. I’m reading ‘Galapagos’ by Kurt Vonnegut on the recommendation of a now-former roommate.

I’m also back to basement-dwelling. This time, at least, I don’t have an egomaniacal 200-pound tumor following me around and chasing me out of any other meaningful human interactions. The ghost of my first cat lives here with me. The remorse and the grief perfume the walls. She rests inky on my shoulder.

I’m feeling a little woozy about being a 26-year-old basement-dwelling, tumor-less, cat ghost whisperer. I’m reading ‘Galapagos’ to invest in future me’s deathbed book shitload. Vonnegut is a masterful storyteller. We know this. I aspire.

In the third chapter, Vonnegut describes English scientist Charles Darwin as having been “a mere stripling of twenty-six” when he sailed aboard the Beagle in the 1830s.

And this stripling is living in a basement, behind a wall of three lifetime’s worth of junk, writing a blog post for a website they’ve forgotten to update with the latest book of poems they’ve published. Is anyone listening? I doubt it. And maybe that’s alright.

Darwin didn’t publish his ‘Origin of Species’ until 1859, several decades and an entire family life after he embarked on his grand adventure.

No matter how old you feel, you’re younger than you think.

My fruitful life, my shitload of books, will build slowly.

If I keep up the pace, maybe my north-facing wall will be constructed of the pages I’ve written. Maybe I’ll read each one to myself over the last year of my life. Maybe I’ll pull the rug out when I’m done, just so I can feel the full weight of a shitload of books on my old body.
Dreaming of My Love

February 21st, 2023

It can be hard to believe that anything happens after we die. At least, anything meaningful. It can be hard to believe that any of us, any part of us, linger after the only carrier of our Self has been placed, with finality, out of commission. For those of us raised with religions we grew out of, hanging onto any kind of faith in a beyond feels sticky.

Last night, I dreamed I was dancing with my grandmother in her kitchen. The one we left behind, when the feet of her grandchildren got too large for her tiny hallways. We waited as long as we could, waited until my grandfather died while I was dreaming of him as Johnny Cash at a summer camp, and then we exploded. The new house has never been my home. It’s a storage unit, one which seems to be fit to burst at the seams with loneliness or unused relics of another life.

I danced with my grandmother in her kitchen. She was heating a cup of coffee in the microwave over the stove, and I was proud to be tall enough to reach it for her on my tiptoes. As the coffee went around and around, she stood behind me and led me in a dance my earthly body has yet to master. She had been a square dancer, and a damn good one alongside my grandfather and their best friends, but this dance moved to a Latin beat I’d never seen her move in her own earthly body.

I’d like to think that Heaven, whatever it is for or to the rest of us, is a dance floor for her. At least some of the time. I’d like to believe she’s dancing with a host of new friends, who also loved moving their earthly bodies more than anything. Their celestial bodies must be learning from each other. Can you imagine? Square tango, Lindynatyam, whirling waltz, any movement we make in joy on Earth, combining and amplifying beyond human comprehension somewhere beyond.

She visits me in the birds when I’m awake, and always with a hug when my eyes are closed. I’ve learned to be thankful for every dream, especially the ones that bridge the distance between MeeMee and me.
Miss Someone Terribly

February 16th, 2023

I’ve turned my shoulder to the wind, but there is no end to the old road I was on. I can’t un-walk the miles, I can’t take back the time. I can only carry on. That’s the danger of colliding with other people. Not the collateral damage you do to each other, or the ache in your fingers for theirs.

The distance between your lunch dates may span lifetimes and lightyears, but you’ll always find each other in your most mundane dreams, pretending not to see each other from the corners of third eyes.

You may turn your back, gather your sacred things, leave each other out of conversations, but when you get a ringing in your ear, you’ll know it’s them. When you think of them staring out your kitchen window at golden hour, you’re doing dishes in each other’s imaginations, you’re inhabiting the same sphere of unacknowledged spinal column sensations.

Our every entwining is a maybe, a question mark, an uncertainty of anything, a throwing of the ropes to a nor’easter and a hoping for a something. And they never, ever end.

If your heart breaks, so does mine. If my heart beats, does yours? I think so.

“Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day.”
The Impossibility of Living in a Stream

February 14th, 2023

I like to take the time to type, tap tap tap tap tap, because the sounds feel nice in my jaw home, at least when my ear isn’t fit to pop. The typing is a challenge. My fingers are clumsy. The fear is true, I’m just a challenger with no direction, but as much as I want to get to the other side, I’m not sure there is one. I choose a peaceful path, but the path that chooses me is rocky and ready to punch. The quickest way to derail my train of thought is to stuff a pinecone in the rails. Is there such a thing as a healthy anything, or just an owl sitting on a tree and hooting for the pleasure of making the sound? The struggle of love is apart from what we were made for. Happy Stolen Pagan Holiday. I’m dressed as Hades. I want him to love me. Tap tap tap tap tap. I deserve love, huh? Cute. I do care, I really do, but what’s the point? My gums lost their flavor a few years ago. I thought it was July when I kissed last, but it was November and it went nowhere. I’m not settling anymore, but…tap tap tap.
Hamlet, My Grandmother, Good Grief

February 6th, 2023

“I rode on your back / until your knees broke and now / one mile left, I must toss you” – Victoria Chang, Little Soul

“There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.” – Hamlet

.

I have been mad. Have you?

My grandmother is dying. I have the privilege of being a caregiver to her.

Have you ever watched a body decay with the wearer inside?

You don’t stay the person you were.

Death of every kind shoehorns something fundamental into our consciences. The metal on the heel, however? The demise of Greece’s mightiest. I? A mouse.

If your recognition of that animal is of a drawing, you have been conditioned. If your recollection of another human is ugly, you have been lied to. If your response to skin is bite, you must stop. Tip your compass on its ides for a moment, the alchemy is off.

It is an honor and a rite, guaranteed us by our birth, to love the dying, the dead. The blow of a hot iron mallet, it is, but so much more the blessing.

But what world is our state than the tax collector of blessings, the grindstone for the ones outcast from garden? Are we given choice, or is choice the price? If choice is but the choice alone, are any of us free?

Let me grieve. Good gods, if any, let me grieve.

The rest I need is coming. Rites be returned to the trampled, that death be sweet return from whence we dance, and grave be a hairbrush and a bird away from waking sleep.

A people deserve their elders. A person may not yet choose to live. A white ship hoists banners red as death and beckons us, “Aboard, aboard – to Hell, for high water and gains the more lashing to the tongue!”

Where are we? Our only hope is to be lost at sea and washed to the shore of a witch who will feed us.

Give us, this day, our dead. They have afforded our lives, though fight for the maintenance of which is lifelone.

The hand that crushes bugs is not god, neither are the bugs god, neither are the two together.

The fool who sees? A hill atop a cresting brow, or a whoman who is god.

There is not pity enough to stop the tide of harrowed bridegroom, raging sinner, before he to hands has brought the masses,

Then blows out the light.

Death without choice is punishment from on pillared high, for we?

We share the names, the faces, of the dead before us, pattern our lives after those who have not yet escaped, that we may be their freedom through our choice.

Only fate and fallacies do we own.

And all that, from a mountain of 500 year diapers.

You don’t stay the person you were.

Lenore, Dancing Dementia

– a new play by Danika Lorraine Wright, coming soon