Long Life

"…to welcome the unexpected with an unsatisfied mind…" — Lambchop

It’s been a few months so this post is a bit longer and stranger than usual – please bear with me! And if you skip it, skip it now, I’d hate for you to leave it half-eaten…

---

---

Doubt

I almost quit again. We’d been in limbo and hit the crease in the ravine. I thought about leaving Spencer and Ben for dead, breaking my lease, and moving home. 

One night, I walked out of the office and the parking lot was so dark and the wind was so pleasant that I paused for a minute. My silver 2013 Corolla was the only car in the lot. Ever since I drove it to Seattle I’ve identified with it: the misaligned seams, tightly organized interior, the surf rack that says “Go Bananas.” It sat there under the street light in the cold.

Feeling alive is one thing by the ocean, but it’s another thing after a day in front of the computer.

I cried. Life is short.

—

George Oppen didn’t write poetry in the middle part of his life – instead he fought in a war, was a carpenter and an activist, got in a car wreck (in no particular order). It was never about “keeping the spark alive” – the spark is just a momentary thing. Who’s to say when it comes.

What do I want out of this newsletter? Evan asked me that once. Can we leave it at the question?

---

Confused Squirrel

What do I want in general? My wishes are like monkeys in a canopy. They think something is lurking.

Sometimes my mind is like a tree that slowly bears fruit. Today it’s broken from the source – my mind is in the fallen leaves.

See how I jump from metaphor to metaphor, like a determined squirrel? It’s January but I feel the buzz of Spring – what is it, the smell, the pattern of wind, the energy of lovers?

---

November

I knew her for a month. A month is long enough to run through what it might be like to know her for a year.

She liked this song called “Let Me Count the Ways,” a short piano improvisation that starts with a melody and unpacks it, revealing its depth. I like to think of it like that, as if the rest of the song was there to be discovered. What might be there after the song? What was there before?

The morning after the last time I saw her, I woke early with the wind at the windows. Outside, the light came straight down, flat and white. Wind shook the cypresses all day.

---

Long Life

The final song in the album starts with a discordant thump of piano keys repeated a few times in a non-rhythmic, probing way. You imagine Lyle Mays bent quizzically over the piano. The entire 10-minute song is spent “resolving” it, making sense of it retroactively.

It seems to say: Eventually you will reach the center of your origin, whether you plan to or not.

---

Dirt

My dad was playing basketball and noticed that he could barely jump. Jump shots used to be his “bread and butter.” He laughed about it, but he brought it up again later that night after a drink. It’s strange, both watching someone grow old and watching them learn what that means: “… the old / New to age as the young / To youth”, Oppen wrote.

—

In the opening scene of Gladiator (one of my dad’s favorite movies), Maximus runs the dirt through his fingers before battle – as if to say, we’re fighting over this?

Finally my dad is selling the buildings. He prepares for the next stage.

---

Sky

I died to myself recently, too, waiting in the cafe outside of the Eviction Defense Collaborative, looking out onto the red graffiti. Separately, I’d learned that my Corolla was towed. I thought of it in the yard.

A strange feeling came over me. I smiled – not a twisted smile but one of actual joy. I left with my papers, floating.

I mustered, for once, the spirit of the incongruous, a thump of random piano keys and a love of the grating, a love for the bitterness of coffee. Like she said in the meditation: to love and welcome everything with a smile starting in the eyes, to feel the smile even inside the mouth, to feel it everywhere…

“Imagine an open sky and the shape of a smile spreading through it”

---