Well, its new years eve again.

I’m back on the farm. I finished off the classwork for this degree I’ve been working on, so I’m taking care of the homestead ‘till the bosses come back in a few weeks.

Then, I’m not sure.

Its new years eve and I don’t think I’ll be up ‘till midnight. Got my first day back on it tomorrow. Lots I’ll want to do.
Hopefully I’ll get to do some reading and some writing along the way. Hopefully work on music.

Then, I’m not sure.

Its been gorgeously fantastic weather. I went hiking on the West Coast with a classmate from Alberta And had to remind them that it was December. The skies clear. The days beginning to get longer again. I’ll be here for a month likely.

Then, I’m not sure.

I’ve been dreaming of journeying for a long time; finding camaraderie on the open road or pilgrim’s trail. Do you have to know why you’re leaving? I won’t likely have lots of extra money, but I consider myself blessed to have got through my degree without much debt. I’ve romanticized just taking my backpack and walking out my door. “It’s a dangerous thing walking out your front door” said Bilbo Baggins, “You never know where your feet might take you.” I’ll be thinking about some options over this month.

Cause I’m not completely sure.

I’ve been thinking about heading south, finding a bit of warmth for a while, hopefully finding some new experiences, different people, time to hike and time to mull.
I’m not sure, But sure enough, and that’s good enough
For me.
For now.

By Grace.

Cause I'm not completely sure.

111

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This is honey off a knife's blade
Berries through the thorns
All we saw was your metaphysics
Show my my death,
and I'll show you Yours

-----------------------------------

Say you've got, only so many days
all your choices supposed to be crucial
boiled down to moments
of impulse or rage
do you run
or do you stay

in the camp or out
into the house or not?

To the things you've known
or to the things that dreams illuminated but never revealed?
to love known,
or fantasies unknown

into your rest or ramble?
Into your love or theirs
Haven't you known it?
-----------------------------

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.
But See the movie had it wrong
we were supposed to shape our own lives by decisions
In a panoply of decisions
Co-creators the epistle said
More like Cusack in say anything than in serendipity… why?
‘cause you know what you want rather than waiting to be told,
relieving that anxiety. Bravery is striking out into the night with a firm grasp on reality and hope.
but not the hope in someone else's fantasy... To co-create a destiny which is probably unlike every meaning of that word we’ve ever had constructed for us.

---------------------------

Waiting for something to happen
The walls to fall
or the tide to come

Waiting's not always passive
Though maybe i could do more than this

something to anticipate
to just need
a little

quiesence on a shoulder of the sun coming up.

Reason to rise
beyond
a known repetition
so


-------------------















Its not always just that things can be so damn sorrowful

Its that we deal it

And we deal it alone

And even when i know you don't have to.
And you do too,

Inches apart
We're acres away

afraid as the silence
As the pain
a word away
and stuff it up with noise

The most sorrow blazed in caustic feathers, till they, raindrenched and bloody
are all we see

two great motivators
ever remaining
till consumation breaks the fetter for the free
Fear and love
in silence and noise
fear or love
compel us.










----------------------

So When language divides,
We will confide,
Upon a harmony
Give me the tonic
And I'll reach for the Quintessence

Forgive me, I'm just a bit sentimental
Regimental exchange
Has divided our plays
To a sense of economy

Your eyes reprise
falling on my ledger
Pupils like notations

to want the heart of home

Have you ever decided to do a major downsize of the stuff you own? I try to do this every so often with mixed results. Often I find myself staring at old books, nicknacks, and writing, not knowing what to do with it. Do you throw it out, burn it in a brave act of moving forward and fresh starts? I mean, honestly, is anybody EVER going to look back on the stuff you wrote and stuffed away when you were sixteen and learn something from it? On the other hand, I feel this odd anxiety, as if I’m saying that everything I did and were ten years ago will be invalidated if I burn it… Its like I want to prove that I really was the kind of sixteen year old some wouldn’t believe my 27 year old self to be. Some of the nicknacks seem like they’re the only things separating my memory from losing people and experiences that I think, for some reason, are significant… though I’m not sure they are.

I suppose we are trapped by time, because we see it as a jail with two walls at either ends of our lives, but these are just two doors, with hints of beauty and tragedy between. Opportunities to love. Opportunities to consider the concept of home.

I took a class which turned out to be surprisingly wonderful this spring. It was a writing class focusing on travel narratives. What is so compelling about the heroes’ journey? What is the truth in a first-person narrative? What is the documentary value of a story? These kinds of questions are what we had the opportunity to mull over. Another was, “what is home?” To help us envision this consideration, came the writer, Julien Hoffman, to lecture to us and to read to us from his book, The Small Heart of Things. I loved it.


“Anywhere has its stories if we look and listen for them
This is what interests me: How do we go about being at home in a world, a beckoning world, graced by murmurs at every turn. “

This spring I took a bunch of nicknacks I’ve collected over ten plus years and went for a long and meditative walk around, what I could consider more than anywhere else, my home town. Conveniently, this town provides a rocky walk along the ocean so that very easily you can find yourself feeling alone with the sea. Then I took the items out of my pocket: mostly things like rocks or carved wood that I had made into monuments along the road - things which I felt weren’t polluting as much as giving back to that great indifference and I threw them in- not all at once mind you. One at a time, with time to contemplate what each one meant to me, then I let it go with a throw. Then I walked on.

“Everything beckons us.”

In need of a folk song or conversation

had a bad night not long past.
My car didn’t go but,
My mind did.
don’t know what happened, except,
When you’re up shit creek
At 3AM,
Who you gonna call?
Becomes an important question.

Things I learned in 16th Century British Literature: lesson 3

“All We Saw was Your metaphysics” Blake and the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

From my Class Notes:
Blake licenses everyone to be a prophet. Prophecy is not dead. Generic incommensurability.
Juxtaposes philosophical with proverbs etc, and by doing so leaves huge interpretative gap.
People will expropriate properties of personifications and use it to enslave others. Blake says no.
We are makers. Genius. We make personifications. This book is a toolkit.
Power of imagery demonstrated in nation-making.
“as the eye so the object”
“all that we saw was owing to your metaphysics”
For Blake imagery is judgment. Makes the ability of the poetic genius. “The hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life”
Insanity cured by conversation

What I learned:
As a poet you can create your own metaphors, which is most all what any-one has when it comes to explaining the inexplicable. Basically, don’t let politics of control use fear borne of someone else’s dogma control you. Supersede that.

Also. A folk song may save you from the fear of superstition in the darkness of a drunken walk home from the pub.

Things I learned in 16th Century British Literature: lesson 2

Synecdoche In Burke’s A Sentimental Journey

From my Class notes:
Sentiment: an equivocal doctrine of virtue: spontaneous, especially resulting in Virtue.
The book is trying to curb male desire.
Sterne is more realist. There has to be some kind of euros. Metonymy of Synecdoche all over. Communication often the means of exchange. Snuffbox.

Where Rasselas said that “let all prevalence of fantasy over Reason is insanity” Sterne is just the opposite!
Takes pulse of woman. Fever associated with feeling.
French woman not concerned about having to relieve themselves while riding in coach. Escaping a prudishness.
Chambermaid. Coins in the purse. A joke, vulgar.?
Starling shouts “I can’t get out”
Yorick exchanges wet handkerchief with Maria.
Gloves. Swords.
A story about a male constantly diverting sex.

What I learned: So much of life is that existential problem that we are only us. One of our greatest desires is to close the gap between our experiences and that of others. What do we have but shared experiences and symbolic gestures. Sex may be the first act that comes to mind in this vein, but there are others, which Yorick ridiculously proves. A shared handkerchief, Cigar, Meal. These things can mean more than their conjunctions. Something in these things are beautiful. So it is sad when institutions of “morality” say that these things are immoral- like Jesus eating with sinners. How can you not see the beauty, even if it is, so often, a tragic one.

Things I learned in 16th Century British Literature: Lesson 1

Artists have long been philosophers, seeking to maintain God’s relevance beside the Natural World’s opposition to Religion

From my class notes:
Boerhaave sought to marry theology to botany, medicine, and chemistry.

Christian thought ought to take back modernism relativity and stop identifying with constructionist tradition.

But imitation in Christianity i.e. Thomas Aquinas. (How would Johnson’s approach to common-places effect idea of relative morality?)

Boorhaave cures himself at age 12. As a Christian, meant to bear pain with patience, but also labour: help to improve the world.

In an age of rising novel, Johnson concerned about how one can come to empathize with “mixed” character.
Biography more about imitation. Elements of life as instructive
Observation. A medicine application “empiricism” from observation.
Johnson to weld cure with curiosity. Curiosity as a value.
Cure is an antiauthoritarian strain.

What I learned: Curiosity may not be a stoic value, but it can be a religious one. Art, science, and religion do not negate, but rather, may depend on one another.

Its a dangerous thing walking out your door

In “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off” the great germ isn’t why everyone at school loves him so much, it’s why his girlfriend loves him. You think its because he’s charismatic, fun, unafraid, and takes her to the fanciest restaurant in the fastest car… but I think its actually because Ferris Beuller knew “exactly what you were going to do when you woke up this morning.”
He’s a man with a plan. Why wouldn’t a girl want that?
Integral to my lack of ever following through on a relationship might be the fact that I don’t have a plan… and I don’t mean career or whatever. I mean, I don’t even know what I want out of a relationship. There are appeals, but I don’t know which one’s I’m really willing to trade-off my current existence for. Sound ridiculous? I know.

I’ve blamed the Christian culture for a long time. In this culture there is often such emphasis put upon traditional coupling (marriage and procreation, preferably in that order) that girls will either shy from a relationship they fear they can’t commit to in a really serious way, or if they do, consider marriage to be right around the corner. I’m speaking only one gender side. I believe it works the opposite way too. Its just that I only want to get my feet wet. So I went out with a few girls outside my particular tradition, and things were slightly less complicated… but then, nope. They were complicated too. What do you want out of this? I suppose this is the crap that dating websites try to cut to the bone through, and about which no-one tells the truth anyways.
But talk about guilt complex, when you quit a relationship, having grown up in my culture. I’m really not sure if its good or bad to feel so much. Then there’s the division of breaking with the culture and with what you believe is actually right. They often feel the same, and rebelling against one’s conscience is a no-good thing.

I have a friend who knows what kind of girl he wants and what kind of commitment he’s looking for. He actually loves the idea of commitment. He will, undoubtedly, sooner-or-later join the increasing ranks of those guys around me paired off in steady and committed marriages of some kind or another. Maybe he’ll even settle down in one city with a regular job. Bold, undoubtedly, and good, for certain. Yet, here I still am, wondering at the diversity of experience in the world and wondering, probably very selfishly, but certainly with real curiosity, at the panoply, quite unsure of what I want. Do what you know? I don’t know. Do what you want? Does that include anything? Everything? Do you really even want it to?

I Just don't know. Tell me that's ok.

I’ve often equated my relationship to romantic relationships to the Joker’s explanation for his actions: “I’m like a dog chasing cars: I wouldn’t know what to with it if I caught one.”
In the film, Up in The Air, George Clooney’s character believes his own philosophy that less is more, is true. Watching his motivational speech in the film, I find it resonating.


Imagine you wake up with nothing “kind of exhilarating isn’t it?”
Of course, Clooney goes on to fall for a real human and find his philosophy crushed, But the romance of retreat remains.
Everybody I talk to these days seem to want to travel or to live in the woods in a “self-sustainable” cabin.

We love the story of an artist writing a masterpiece In a lonely house in the woods, or the breakup album written on a journey of self-reinvention, but aren’t the greatest creative works really collective; the product of a crowd working closely on the same project?
If we are told to own our choices, then we are implicatively responsible for our failures, and this is what I think I truly am afraid of… the breakup. The hurt caused to someone else. The scar inflicted on myself, about which someone else may someday, upon seeing, ask “how?”
Who says we can’t share our trials and errors? Who says they have to be regretted every time? Who says we can’t come home and admit our ideal decrepit?

I love the end scene of Cast Away

I’ve heard that dreaming about owning something can bring just as much pleasure as actually owning it. Say, a boat. I spend a lot of enjoyable time wandering around boatyards with a coffee in my hand imagining what it would be like to have one of them. Actually owning one, however, makes me think I’d be stressed when I’m using it that I had picked the wrong one, and stressed when I’m not using it thinking of the moorage cost. Then I’d also have to think about maintenance, insurance, depreciation, and safety. They say that the day a man buys a boat is the best day of his life, second only to the day he sells it.
The Romance of possibility is rather beauteous. There is this coffee chain that extends the island, and some of the mainland, and they all tend to have a similar ethos. The funny thing is that often when I walk into one, I am flooded with sentimentality, which I’ve placed in the planning I’ve made while sitting in one. Particularly it was one time when I was on a road trip and stopped in to take coffee, take notes, and decide my next road. The sentimental moment was one where I had few ties, no real obligations, a set amount of free time, and enough money that I didn’t have to think about gasoline. I could pick any road and go anywhere the road took me.
I loved that feeling and I’m pretty sure I think I still do.


But is this just fear? Would I be better off role-playing, living in fantasy all my life than actually taking the risk of committing to a destination? Maybe, but will I have lived well? This I don’t know.

coin flip

I don’t want to grow up.
I’ve never ever said this.
But I might have meant it.

There’s a Ted Talk by this guy named Shwartz who says that there is such a thing as having too many options. Economists say more the better, but Shwartz says that with many choices come a paralysis of decision-making capability, or, on the other side, regret that we haven’t made the best decision once we’ve made it.
I get this.
I’m the guy who, when playing a strategy bored game, will keep his options open, toying with each of the several strategies I could use to win, thinking that this will serve me, and it almost does, until the game ends and the winner is some guy who took a gamble and put all his tokes in one fire. I thought that this might have been my discipline of delayed pleasure, or of discretion, but I wonder now if it’s a microcosm of something else too…
One of my favorite podcasts is from Freakonomics, by the guys who wrote the books by the same name. Anyways, they launched this comically radical science project recently. They aim to collect a large data set of people who, upon the need to make a big decision in life (we’re talking, job placements, moving, marriage, changing religions, big stuff like that) are willing to give up the stress for an otherwise difficult decision and give it to the experimenters to take the burden upon themselves with the arbitrary flip of a coin.