Distorting time

A cricket jumps off of the picnic table in the back yard. It lands in the dew soaked grass and disappears.

A cricket jumps off of the picnic table in the back yard. Gray clouds of varying darkness pass over the sun. A train passes by, slowly. It lands in the dew soaked grass and disappears.

A cricket jumps off of the picnic table in the back yard. Gray clouds of varying darkness pass over the sun. She walks from the porch to the waters edge. A layer of mist hangs above the still water. A train passes by, slowly. It lands in the dew soaked grass and disappears.

A cricket jumps off of the picnic table in the back yard. Gray clouds of varying darkness pass over the sun. She walks from the porch to the waters edge. A raven with a beetle in its beak, watches. Wet pollen and pine musk in the air. A layer of mist hangs above the still water. A train passes by, slowly. It lands in the dew soaked grass and disappears.

A cricket jumps off of the picnic table in the back yard. Gray clouds of varying darkness pass over the sun. She walks from the porch to the waters edge. A raven with a beetle in its beak, watches. Drops of blood make a path from the bathtub out the back door. A scream is caught in the china cabinet. Wet pollen and pine musk in the air. A layer of mist hangs above the still water. A train passes by, slowly. It lands in the dew soaked grass and disappears.

She jumps off of the picnic table in the back year. Gray ravens of varying darkness block out the sun. A path of blood makes its way from the porch down to the waters edge. In the bathtub, a cricket. The air screams of wet pollen and pine musk. China mist hangs above still waters. A train of dew soaked grass slowly disappears.

This is how it will begin, with a cricket.

Simple Subtraction

Fogging Over

On a colder than normal morning
a fishing boat
has gone missing.

It should be there
in the gray, blue dawn light
bobbing near the curved horizon.

The anchor chain
lies serpentine
On the ocean floor.

And, an empty boat is making its way,
pulled by the current
towards the far off island of Madagascar.

Remember those quiet evenings.

The power went out in our house on the cliff in Santa Barbara. A tropical storm had been battering the coastline for the past couple of days, and finally, our section of the power grid went down. I remember thinking at the time that I wanted to have family time with my roommates. Two of them had fallen into relationships, and we had been seeing less and less of each other as the year had progressed.

Night fell, and we lit candles and sat around the living room talking and reading each other interesting facts from the reference books we had on our laps. Jacque Cousteau’s epitaph is “Jacque Cousteau has returned to the silence”. Reno, Nevada is further west than San Diego, California. I walked into the kitchen to get another bottle of wine, and when I turned, the flickering candlelight slipped in through the doorway, followed by my friends’ voices and laughter, and I felt happy.

Hours later, the two roommates with significant other left to spend the night elsewhere, leaving me and Brit to fend for ourselves. We ended up going downtown to the bars, looking for girls. A few hours later, we came back to a dark and empty house, drunk and alone.

Cut a Vital Connection

Sometimes I fantasize about running away. One morning, I will get up, pack my car and drive off to somewhere else, maybe Oregon. At first, people won’t realize I’m gone. Then, after a couple of days, they will start to ask questions. But, by then it’ll be too late. My cell phone and email will have been discontinued, and there will be no way for anyone to get into contact with me. That’s all. One day, they will wake up and I will be gone.

I find this daydream funny for a number of reasons. First of all, I care more about the reaction people will have to my absence, then the new life that I will be leading in a far off city. Knowing that, I have come to understand, that it is not being absent from people that I dream about. The kernel of gratification that I would reap from this disappearance would be lost because, after all, I would not be around to experience the reactions.

Knowing this, I dig deeper. Is it the desire to feel needed: to know that I will be missed? Why do I have to go to such an extreme to feel desired?

More to the point though, why am I afraid of people knowing me?

I think of interpersonal relationships as being vital because other people remind me of who I really am. I can spend hours, days even, in a fantasy land, spinning off into the stratosphere. But, each time, I get pulled back to reality be someone or someone else. My friends and family are my grounding points, and without them, I would be able to live in the blissful ignorance of my own imagination. They remind me of my human folly: the desire to be loved, the mistakes that I make. The people that populate my life remind me that I am human.

Abandon Normal Instruments

The first thought would be to re-contextualize certain objects. A wall clock becomes a plate. A book is now a coaster. Then things get a little bit more strange. Paintings slide off of the wall and become oil iridescent puddles on the hardwood floor. A guitar screams like a murder of crows. I have a vision of a man being lowered down onto a stage. He is sitting in the crook of a crescent moon, playing the guitar. I have another vision. His father is the captain of a ship. He and the ship are both lost at sea, under a blanket of stars. The compass will not work. They are too close to the North Pole, or if that doesn’t work, the water is magnetized. The captain uses the stars to navigate. What makes the scene so much sadder, though, is the knowing that the stars are actually Christmas tree lights, and the lights are being used in place of spoons.