Honestly James!

I made a pot of coffee this morning. I measured the water and poured it, peeled a filter from the stack (a difficult task with short fingernails), evenly distributed the grounds like I was planting a flower bulb, flipped the lid shut and tapped the "on" button, all the while feeling that small rush of maturity--'I'm making coffee, I'm an adult, I'm an addict, respect me, pity me, gaze upon my scars.'

It finally hit my cerebellum; I'm not drinking coffee for its flavor, its zest, its warming energy rushing into my cold and listless blob of biology, but for the title 'coffee drinker.' When I'm done downing the bitter stuff (I drink it black), I wait for the caffeine to take me in a firm grip and sustain my awareness and motivation to work and play. I am drawn to the sense of identity of 'coffee drinker.' I want to be treated as the hard-lined, weather-beaten, life-beaten, dependably dependent, terse, bad-ass (OH! sensitive, wise, and compassionate too) who inspires and will have never be embarrassed or caught unawares in any situation. A James Bond sort of guy.

Actually, all of that is not what I really WANT at all. The last paragraph was the cannon ball launched to puncture the smothering blanket of selfish arrogance and angst in my mind and heart. What I want is to be me--to be honestly me. I wrote all of those coffee-motivated desires down to bring them out from the cloudy comfort of my thoughts. I drew them out with words to be struck down by my soul. Dear Reader, you've been witness to a battle on the Personality plane. I think I'll make a movie about it--then everyone will compare me to Martin Scorsese and my identity will be complete! HA! There they are again, those agents of selfish distraction! Back you fiends! Back! Quick Lieutenant Courage, prepare another barrage of Compassion Burst! And......FIRE! Yes, good, very good, that got 'em.

So yeah, what I really want. I want to stop drinking coffee. I smoked cigarettes for the reason the volunteers warn you about in D.A.R.E classes--approval. Peer pressure. Those ads on television where some 'cool' kid offers pot, cigs, alcohol, sex, coke, or some other malicious substance (sex doesn't really fit here, but, you know what I mean), and the shining protagonist refuses. When the screen fades to black and the calm narrator's voice enters, the message is over and the ball game is back. It's the truth of it all though that when that nay-saying kid goes back to school, work, or the skate park, the pushers won't go away, they don't like being miffed, and more offers will come, along with harassment. So, the point of all that explanation is that this thing called reality isn't rolled into little 30 second anti-drug ads. It's a shifting dynamic of choices, risks, and moments to stick up for what you really feel is 'right.'

As for my bottom line here: I'm kickin' the coffee drinking. I'm putting away the pot (the electrical one), tossing the beans, and chopping walnuts in my processor in future days. I don't need caffeine to be my identity PR guy.

I'm going to make a breakfast burrito. Bombs away!

Disgruntled (or, Love Part II)

The magnitude of frustration is difficult to describe when I am holding my breath underwater and, for some reason, am caught and cannot reach the surface for more air. It brings tears to my eyes. This anecdote is all I can think of to describe my feelings at the end of this day.

Public speaking. Ever since my freshman year of college, when a professor of mine actively called out those students in class who used improper language and grammar, I have been annoyingly more cognizant of these habits in myself and those around me. "Um," "Uh," "You know," and the ever popular "like" (incorrectly used) have become like the sudden spike of squealing when a mosquito ventures too close to your ear, sending shivers of irritation throughout the body. Thanks John Andrews! Gaa! They're place-holders, meaningless junk that distracts from conversation. For years now I've been listening to friends, foes, and strangers speak, only to stumble over their misuse of their own tongue and their linguistic stupor knocks my attention flat as well.

Bah! I had a discussion with my mom tonight about the church we've attended for over 10 years. I can recall so many wonderful experiences: van rides to mountain camping trips, taking photos with disposable cameras, throwing rocks at food-stealing squirrels, climbing rocks, gambling with soda straws, playing basketball, staffing food drives, landscaping rundown neighborhoods, giving blood, and worshiping God together, with hard-earned friends, kids you could trust, insult, and stay up all night talking to. I remember looking forward to youth group and arguing with my parents about what "dressed up" meant each Sunday for the service. Ah, it felt like home.

Not anymore. I've grown up and seen the uglier side of my childhood haunt. Politics, hidden agendas, stubbornness that would leave a spoiled 4-year-old in awe, the adult human beings in charge of the institution I put trust in, rotting its core with the "easy way out," the "more profitable turn," the "good of the community" arguments. All the while, my accusation are in doubt because I know so little about what's behind the scenes. I loathe the reputation my faith has accrued over the millennia, the narrow-minded (though often not unjustified) opinions of the "Christian," the mind games, the logical booby-traps, the mistrust, the anger, the hearts of stone, the ears of wood. It's all shit. The way I clung to, the words I grasped for some real essence were these: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." The rules, the commands, the edicts, the covenants--these all were created to appease the fear and doubt and stupidity that continue to proliferate, on, and on, and on, into each generation. Where did that 'greatest commandment' get lost?

Sure must sound all high and mighty and, ultimately, cliche. Well, fine, if that's how you absorb this ranting Dear Reader, then I have failed again. I am not the sharpened tool, the focused beam, the perfected light to show the path. The reason I attached myself to that philosophy above, the necessity of Loving all around me, was because it brought, and brings, me joy incomparable. Not a 100% on a midterm, not a juicy paycheck, not the beating sound of applause after a successful speech, not alcohol or drugs, not even the healing of all wounds and aches, physical and otherwise, radiates the ecstatic pleasure of genuine Love. Its calming torrents soothe the bitterness of contradiction, the embarrassment in my upbringing, the pain when a friend derides what I feel to be vital for happiness.

Ahhhhh, well, that's better. I think there is hope for a new view, as long as someone hopes, and knows what they hope for--as long as someone Loves, and knows there are no bounds, no locks, no separations. Fear is as nothing in its presence. It's the way I feel when a good song comes across the air molecules to slam against my fragile drums. As Anthony Keatis sang: "Music, the great communicator... ." That's a good song (Can't Stop by RHCP), but that line strikes me in the face most of all the lyrics. I feel the same jubilance of Love when listening to some songs. I can't yet put some definite criteria on it. The song just has to move me (a truly 'bad ass' piece).

There's not really an end to all of this business. It's a continuous adventure, as unending as the Mobius strip, the horizon, and the number of ways a woman can surprise me. I'm a dirt-poor example of what I believe, but, hey, I'm still searching ... so be patient!

Thank you

Well,
It's a Friday night and a Saturday morning all wrapped into one. About this time of night it blurs; it being my perception of time. I've had some incredible journeys this evening. After a pitcher of superb beer with a few friends, a home-cooked meal to refresh the taste buds, a movie ("Waking Life" - yes Thomas, I finally saw it), a sauntering walk up to a going-away party, hookah, handshakes, hugs, laughs, (inner) tears, AND, finally, a stroll home, I am adding to my blog after a month of silence.

My friends are awesome. I've been forging through novel terrain in my life for the past year now, and so many of my companions have stuck with me, giving 'shoulders' to lean on, cry on, and pound in frustration. Late-night conversations, phone calls, invitations (I wish I could accept them all), have been wonders to my soul. The Love of an amazing woman has kept me sane too; all these elements summing together, flowing into and through me. I have fortune beyond count.

I don't know what adventures are ahead, and that's just plain exciting. Terrifying, but thrilling too, a mix of emotions. I am tired, so adjectives are not coming easy, but I know, somehow, the Sun will shine again. The Sun will shine again. The Sun will shine again.

I Love you all.

Love

Trying to define Love may be one of the most difficult challenges I've faced so far. Love is the subject of unknown numbers of books, papers, dialogs, television and radio programs, movies, and nearly any other media category. I see it plastered on billboards, in newspaper ads, thrown about in the classifieds, and inscribed upon bathroom stalls. Love is pervasive (at the very least as a word). I mentioned in one of my first posts that I would be making a future entry on Love, but I've been uninspired lately. A conversation I recently had with a dear friend was the catalyst.

As introduction: I Love Love. Why capitalize Love? The big "L" functions as a way to highlight Love's importance and give it a sort of personality, as if it were a living, thinking, dreaming creature sitting next to me. I imagine Love as overall androgynous, though a great deal of the time it comes into my mind as a woman. But the image is never clear. There aren't any boundaries, hard lines, or logical direction. Love appears in my dreams as if all of space around me were filled with color and light. It's like when I gaze into the night sky and a starry point of light becomes fuzzy only when I try to focus on it. In peripheral the image sharpens, but, because it's peripheral, I can't focus on it. Love is everywhere in my dreamscapes, in the minute spaces between my cells, encasing my body, always flowing, never smothering, visible, never containable, and, after that long string of descriptives, still as undefinable as ever. I am trying to express a paradox I feel about Love. I seek to put descriptive limits on Love, but, by my definition, there can be no limits. Love is unquantifiable and unmeasurable (by conventional means, compared to the wavelength of light or the stress on a steel bar). It has no units, no boundary conditions, no one-sentence definition (not even a 10,000,000 sentence version). No telling where it began or where it ends. Maybe I'm a nutter and you see it differently Dear Reader?

Love all, Love all. Love in your own way. For me, Loving is finding joy in their joy, pain in their pain, wholeness in their wholeness. Loving is devotion to individual choice. Loving means overthrowing all mental walls, criticisms, and assumptions to view them through a Lens of Love. I say a "Lens" to further stress the importance of relativism. Love is how you see it. I believe in no absolute definition of Love when considering fine details (good example of the Absolute/Relative paradox ... I'm all over the paradoxes today). Specific perceptions, scenarios, and experiences create a vast spectrum of Lenses. Yet, I think the absolute theme in Love is connection--relationship. I cannot conceive a circumstance where Love exists without connection of any kind, brief or long, intimate or distant. Maybe, you have examples Dear Reader?

What a lot of words. As far as I know, every human language has at least one word for it. Love is the ultimate one-way radio. It effects me, but I cannot change it, give it form, find the limits of its curves, the endpoints of its influence. I'm like a point charge so close to a surface it makes up my whole reality, my whole existence. Metaphors and Similes aside, Love is my world, both waking and sleeping. I am not always paying attention to this fact and exude un-Love. Yet, even when I feel consumed with anger, fear, and bitterness, I have always ascended from those lonely depths to see through my Love Lens again. I cannot say anything for indisputable truth (as is true for all of this post), but I deeply believe I belong with my Lens at every instant, waking or sleeping. I Love Love.

Guest Appearance

I want to preface this post because it is, beyond this preface, not my own. I am placing a bit of fiction here, written by a good friend, Mike Raevsky. Through a collaboration of our own reasons, it is appearing here in Wanderal. A note to you, Dear Reader: The content is not light and may cause you to think deeply ... or, perhaps not. Your reaction depends, forebodingly, on your perception.


Deja Vu

The conniving controller created a swirling cacophony of colors caustically crossing his vision contriving a low level panic. This was the Somnatextorix's job every night; to oversee the maelstrom of dreams that hid her creative process. Now, the floor dropped out from under Maxwell, and he was swimming in a giant tank with fish, manta rays, and most quizzical of all, audacious swimming parrots. This didn't seem strange to Maxwell because, of course, he was dreaming. It happened every night. The sun rose below the ocean, and the diaphanous explosion of salmon and burnt umber hues evaporated the sea. The fish and manta rays became cats and cars, and Maxwell flew far above a typical English countryside. Exultant in the feeling of flight, Maxwell was dry and weightless.

Somnatextorix couldn't feel. She understood the idea of emotions much like a physicist understands that electrons are waves and particles, but she couldn't fathom what they would be like. She attributed colors to them, named them, and above all, she inflicted them on Maxwell. The key to the whole process was to drain his mind of any possibility of remembering the events of the evening. The cheery green hills and vibrant blue sky filled with impossibly puffy and white clouds began to gray. The undersides of the clouds began the process, and as they expanded, they foretold a violent storm that would rend the world. Maxwell was dimly aware that the flying had stopped and the world was fading. He was along for the ride tonight.

Maxwell walked past street lamps, grateful for the light they gave off. It wasn't as cheery as the setting sun, but ominous brick buildings blocked its warming glow. He wanted into the door. He needed something inside that building, and the door was locked. Of course, he'd left the key. The crushed sky made him feel like he had sepia toned sunglasses, and the shadows from the buildings cut across the street, stark and mysterious. The transformation from dream to
nightmare was complete settings wise, now Somnatextorix infused the plot with details from his ordinary life. A hurt friend inside the building, the key at his work. Maxwell was running by this time. Endurance is never an issue for Maxwell because he is a confident man, but in this dream, he could never be fast enough.

His office is locked, so he climbs up the outside to an open window on the second floor. Somnatextorix added another floor between him and the open window, and then another. The journey must be interminable, but when Maxwell reaches the open window reflecting the sun like an egg white on a cast iron skillet, he looks down to the harsh asphalt just one floor below, unsurprised that he's only climbed one story.

The office has been ransacked, and he trips on his way to his cubicle. The light switch doesn't work, and he walks by inference through the subdued navy and gray tone shapes to his desk. There is a meatball sandwich with lettuce covering the meatballs on the left, and on the
right, he sees a stack of papers. The key! Maxwell exits the front door without incident, but he can't remember where the building is. He runs in what he senses is the right direction. There are new turns on his route back, but Somnatextorix guides him with her most ingenious creation. Death would not be so frightening if you could see it. The Enemy has no real properties except for its shining red eyes and the sound that it makes as it follows you, just entering your sight as you round corners, always encroaching. Like a kitten playing with a mouse, the Enemy guides Maxwell and his hammering heart to the building with the nerve jangling sound only possible within the confines of nightmares.

Somnatextorix inserts a fumble before Maxwell gets the door open, but he is inside before the Enemy reaches him. The search begins again, and when Maxwell finds his friend, there isn't much left. The sadness that would accompany an ordinary death doesn't strike Maxwell; his terror and self-preservation instinct cause him to coldly examine the red splatter painting for patterns that might lead to the killer. Whether Maxwell is intent on vengeance or flight is unclear at this time, but he studies. Limbs seem to be strewn over the floor at random, and a grisly head with eye-sockets and upper teeth glares at the wall in a pose fit for eternity. Maxwell finds tracks in the blood. They are the Enemy's, but Maxwell does not know this. Maxwell wants out, and he would like to wake up.

Somnatextorix pulls him up just enough to feel the comfort of darkness and blankets before bringing him back down to a red velvet room. The windows have translucent white curtains that gently flutter in a breeze that Maxwell cannot feel. There is a four mahogany post bed in this room, and a doorway that leads to a bathroom. Maxwell is wearing faded blue jeans and a tight white T-shirt. His belt is simple, well loved leather, and a pair of old cowboy boots adorn his feet. He smells flowers and turns around to see a woman, five foot eight and draped in a satin night robe. The sunlight flows freely through the windows that do not allow the wind to pass, and he moves to her.

Some part of Maxwell knows this is a dream, but running his fingers through her auburn hair and tenderly examining her stunning hazel eyes, he lets himself enjoy the foreplay. She runs her hands up his chest, fingernails first, sending chills up and down his spine, and he pulls her robe off with a flourish to reveal beautifully freckled, somewhat tan skin that runs all the way to her toes.

"Max" she breathes. Her deep purple bra only just holds her breasts. He doesn't know her name, but this is a dream, so what the hell. He reaches around her waist with his right hand while running his left hand's fingers up her neck, into her hair to pull her face to his. Their kiss is slow and passionate, allowing all 20 fingers to explore cheeks, then necks, then backs, then breasts and buttocks. He picks her up just above her thigh, and she wraps her legs around his waist while he carries her to the bed. It's a dream, so she doesn't weigh anything; all he feels is her warmth encircling him.

She reaches for the ground with her toes, and when he lets her down, she unbuckles his belt, and pulls it out with a satisfying snap. With a devilish glint in her eyes that never leave his, she belts his feet to the bottom of the bedpost. Her fingernails push his T-shirt up over his head, but by some trickery that Maxwell doesn't understand, his hands are locked above his head by the shirt, and she is kissing his chest as she unbuttons his jeans. She moves with a frenzy that would
have scared him if he'd been conscious, but he's not. Her bra and panties vanish and she's kissing him and standing up on the bed, holding the bedpost above his head. She bends her knees to position herself and pushes him inside her, warm and safe. She holds there for a full minute, kissing his lips, neck, and chest. He kisses her in return, but as she moves out of range, he is forced to look at her hungrily. Again, she grips his hips with her legs, but this time, she moves her hands down the bedpost behind his head, and leans back putting tension in her arms.

She lustily looks into his eyes as her hips begin to move. He can see her lithe thighs, abdomen, and hips flex in a slow, coordinated symphony of movement that has brought men to their knees from the dawn of time. He moves in time and out of phase, all the while yearning to taste her lips on his. Her wanton eyes loll around the room as she moves up and down on him, and he watches her breasts and stomach. He can now feel the gentle breeze flowing across his bare skin, pulling the sweat off. She moves faster and faster, and he surges to keep up. Maxwell is virtually senseless with ecstasy but as she reaches her climax, the world fades to black, and the real dreaming begins.

Somnatextorix could not have said if she was the woman in Maxwell's dreams. She did not have emotions. She could not feel. She certainly moved her, but those two things perhaps aren't the same. Then again, it doesn't really matter. Maxwell's emotions had run a brutal gauntlet, and now that he is drained, she goes through his life as it will be for the next month. She builds the scenery and the images with an amazing eye for realism. Part of what makes Somnatextorix godlike is her ability to build realities with whatever stylistic bias she wants. The dialog is infinitely faster than the backdrop. People transmit infinitesimal bits of information over periods of hours, while building a sunset requires an incredible swath of data for every changing instant and every viewpoint. It was the rare person that valued her work, but again, she could not feel; she could not care.

She weaved her creation together with the realities of nearby people to create a seamless version of their lives yet to be. As she finished up with his dinner, he began to recover. He rolled over in his sleep, and she considered the possibility that he would remember this snippet of his future. The stars came out after dinner as he walked away from the restaurant, and she pulled out. She'd have to finish his month later. If she could love, she might have had feelings for Maxwell; she always gave him more time than her other charges because he stopped to enjoy her sunsets. It did not occur to her that he might be watching her sunsets because they were more beautiful for him, or that if he was simply watching because he enjoyed them, that his life wasn't as preordained as she believed. A small part of Maxwell knew though. What made Maxwell special was that he also knew that it didn't matter, and that made the sunsets worth watching.