"But love, that word...Horacio the moralist, fearful of passions born without some deep-water reason, disconcerted and surly in the city where love is called by all the names of all the streets, all the buildings, all the flats, all the rooms, all the beds , all the dreams, all the things forgotten or remembered. My love, I do not love you for you or for me or for the two of us together, I do not love you because my blood tells me to love you, I love you because my blood tells me to love you, I love you because you are not mine, because you are from the other side, from there where you invite me to jump and I cannot make the jump, because in the deepest moment of possession you are not in me, I cannot reach you, I cannot get beyond your body, your laugh, there are times when it torments me that you love me (how you like to use the verb to love, with what vulgarity you toss it around among plates and sheets and buses), I'm tormented by your love because I cannot use it as a bridge because a bridge can't be supported by just one side, Wright or Le Corbusier will never make a bridge that is supported by just one side, and don't look at me with those bird's eyes, for you the operation of love is so simple, you'll be cured before me it'll be someone else, you can change things the way you do with a blouse. So sad to listen to Horacio the cynic who wants a passport-love, a mountain-pass love, a key-love, a revolver-love, a love that will give him the thousand eyes of Argos, ubiquity, the silence out of which music is possible, the root out of which language can be woven. And it's foolish because all that is sleeping a little in you, all you would have to do is submerge yourself in a glass of water like a Japanese flower and little by little colored petals would begin to bloom, the bent forms would puff up, beauty would grow. Infinite giver, I do not know how to take, forgive me. You're offering me an apple and I've left my teeth on the night-table. Stop, It's fine that way. I can also be rude, take note of that. But take good note, because it's not gratuitous."

Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch 93

Commit! "Second star to the right, and straight on till morning."

I come to you by way of Sam Cooke

Somebody have mercy, I wonder what is wrong with me

...

When I think about how she do me, the tears fall down like rain

...

I'm going down to the bus station with a suitcase in my hand

...

Blow that thing for me

...

I'm standing here wondering baby, will a matchbox hold my clothes

Were you done that bad Sam? You think a matchbox will hold your clothes? I take a quick trip to google and come across Michael Ventura's Austin Chronicle column and article, Will a Matchbox Hold My Clothes. Extremely well written, a perfect balance of information and beauty, exquisitely worded opinion and description, with a rawness to it that is not messy in the least. Exactly the type of writing that prompts me to stop everything and write myself.

Somedays it's harder than others. Somedays I wake up quickly as if a knife were slipping down my throat, desperate, completely mad to get to a white page and write before a certain death will overtake me. Other days I wake up with nothing and must work towards needing to write again, I must do it blindly, mechanically, without any urge. On the days which I am not driven to any type of word, I must seek out inspiration from reading such writing such as Letters at 3 am.

I browse Ventura's other articles and come across the Manifesto. I love any manifesto. Any radical, meager, foolish or brilliant attempt at subverting the current state has my attention immediately. In the words of Henry Miller, Avanti, Avanti! Get those greasy ducks! 

The Manifesto was meant to challenge, and subsequently must be given some push back. So here we are.

GET STUFF OUT THERE

Hasn't this become as big of a problem as it is a solution? Self-publishing is growing at an alarming rate. Literary magazines, E-reads, vanity presses, and independent presses are popping in and out of the market online and in print constantly. There is no shortage of "stuff out there". Social media and the rise of technology has provided everyone with a working knowledge of language and basic access to computers to publish anything they want on the internet, from one liners on twitter, to full blown notes on facebook, and lengthy novels immediately published on Amazon. It's so easy to "get stuff out there" that everyone and their mother has broken the floodgate between their mind and the general public. We are now inundated with worthless "art" and pre-pubescent opinions of those pressured to opinionate or fear being ridiculed for not being an individual or having a voice all their own. This pressure and access to the public has brought about a false need for immediacy, voices without bodies, beggars at a banquet...

We live in a culturally unprecedented period, with literally everything we would want to know at our fingertips. The Internet has amalgamated all history, we can bring up all the information we've gathered since our inception as a cognizant, conscious species, up until 1 second ago. Where as before, if one wanted to learn something, you would be limited to whatever was available in print in the library. Now you can sit in your bed and learn everything you think you can handle all at once, while watching a movie.  

I believe Junot Diaz said somewhere that there isn't a problem with literature today but with the readers of literature. What is wrong with the readers exactly?

Atemporality. "Immediacy of access to unbounded information has dispelled both the predilection and capability to ground oneself in any particular grand historical schema. The yearning for futurity and veneration for the past has been upended in this situation, leaving only an extended present – atemporality."

Think Borges, Funes the Memorious.

We have become stifled by the bombardment of our access to everything. We are without slowness, meditation, impatient for lengthy dissertations and novels for fear of missing out what quicker cultural documents we must choke down next. Fully jaded, overly critical, insulting from the balcony. What happened to reflection? What happened to the pilgrimage? What happened to these young idiots climbing mountains to spend time with the enlightened one in the cave and come back changed forever? 

The problem is specifically that there is too much stuff out there. Most of this stuff coming out today is seen as already done and seen and heard in countless transformations and transmutations. We are easily attuned to the patterns repeated like the make-up of blockbuster hits, we're hardly even aware of how many times we've seen the same piece of work. All we know is that we hate everything that claims to be new, with little understanding of what it really has to say. There is too much garbage covering everything that might be of worth. 

And there are things of worth coming out today.

This is one of the main reason I am near completely opposed to publishing to E-readers (I say nearly because I like to always remain at least 2% open to having my opinion changed). It's just too easy. I have friends who have halfheartedly published books on Amazon, fully aware of their incompletion. They have nonetheless already made 300+ dollars on it. 

My other reason for being against E-readers (and furthermore, long form online publication) is that I believe wholeheartedly in the book. There is so much more magic involved with having a physical copy of a book, running your own on the cover, flipping it open, front gutter, free end paper, Also by author, maybe a frontispiece, bastard title page, dedication page, contents, prologue, this is the slowness, that allows literature to breath and which makes books so important to an age like today, where every medium and style of life is quick and dead and numb. Flipping page to page, smelling it, getting papercuts, scribbling between lines, using book marks, not having fluorescent light berating your eyes as you let yourself be wrapped in and slid off to a world of purpose and beauty all crafted by a grand master of art. 

Bomb Magazine has written of Argentinian writer Cesar Aira:

He likes that his books “don’t go offering themselves to readers—like prostitutes, almost,” and prefers that readers make the effort to go searching for them. He consider himself an “unrepentant reader” who has always been able to hunt down seemingly unattainable works, and as such, believes that if people really want to read his books, they will find them.

But if we aren't just trying to get stuff out there, and if the problem IS with readers today, how can we perpetuate this craft of great literature and great art? What can we do?

The problem then becomes, how can we cultivate a desire in readers of great literature today? They are certainly there, if not a little or completely jaded about the state of art today. For this, what more can we do but read great books, undaunted, voraciously? Mold yourself as a alcoholic works, drinking desperately with a reason. Become critics both tempered in the fire of knowledge and elementary in the heart, in the soul. Critics with eyes for what always must be present in great art: mirrors for the blind, authentic communication, helping hands to the sublime, conduits, desires to connect humans to each other.

Throughout all of this and every day, we write. We read, we find our voice embattled with these great works. We take what we like from them viciously, like kleptomaniacs. We practice all styles of writing, journalistic, diaries, poetry, verse and free verse, dialogue, stream of conscious, automatic writing, drunk writing, sleep writing. We walk outside everyday and look at the people all around us, speaking to a new person every day. We write in complete solitude and abandon and we write in public and in transit and under duress for everyone and for no one and just for yourself.

Understand that there are the dreamers out there. You are not alone, though the early morning hours are always dead silent. I'm writing this to you now, and I should be the least of these. I just googled a song lyric, and old blues proverb, with no intentions of writing this lengthy entry about the state of literature. There are many others out there like me, smarter and wiser than me, hidden deep in the folds of this fat world, dead alley coffee shops and bars or trekking streets late at night, in anonymous warehouses and abandoned construction sites, traveling cross country early mornings, trying to forget or remember the drive of life under draughts of dark, surly beer, we are searching even if we don't admit it, we have hope however faithless we think we are, we want to be proved wrong, we want to believe that this is not the end of art, that there is still more to say and that we are the ones to do it. And though the Internet has brought about a quickness that more often than not serves to deter and stifle us, the possibility remains of one day harnessing it all (foolish of course, but divinely foolish).

your time is gonna come

by Randall Mann

The Sunset 

Fog, like reason, settles on the peeling district.
This is the new money. The new economy.
Where my lover lives. When I left him,
I left books, coats, silverware. Things.
It wasn't charity; it was an impure,
commonplace case of forgetting. (May he find some use

for my low-rent betrayals.) Land ends
with miles of aloe along the Great Highway.
Surfers strip off their suits, half-naked
to the naked sea. The sand's ignored
BEWARE OF THE UNDERTOW signs:
these are the notes of the drowned.

BOLANO wrote a book called 2666

"Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown, they choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."

When what else is there to do but lose your mind

Peeling paint

Where are you buddy?

Oh you know, just walking down the street, daytime, though actually an early night time, or a late night time, or an early morning--

Alright, idiot. I get it. You're lost. You don't even know what street you're on, I bet. You know only what cities you aren't in.

Not sure if I'd go that far, All I'm sure of is that I'm in a city.

I'm sitting down, headphones on, I can see someone's fingers clacketying on a laptop, a spider tied down to the keyboard, so delicious to see, to taste these sounds

You can't hear it

Oh I hear it. I take it in the eye

You're the end of an odd fetish

Just the beginning, just a little tinge, a squirt of it.

You weird little fuck

Fuck off, You project upon me sexualizations. Your ugly eyes. I'm enjoying myself just sitting and thinking of the little tactile pleasures of life, thumbs in concave doorbells, fingers scrambling on the clean keyboards, typewriters are even better, dust jackets on books, peeling plaster, cases encased in cases, russian dolls, hammering single swing straight down to the head, pushing nails into styrofoam, a tight fit in the hips--

I told you! its not just projections of sexual fetishes!

Fits, perfect fits, it's delicious of its own merits

Who the fuck are you anyway

I'm the great you, while you, are merely a pocket of me

holy fuck!

that's right boy, now get out of here.

LARS IYER

"

Once upon a time, writers were like gods, and lived in the mountains. They were either destitute hermits or aristocratic lunatics, and they wrote only to communicate with the already dead or the unborn, or for no one at all. They had never heard of the marketplace, they were arcane and antisocial. Though they might have lamented their lives — which were marked by solitude and sadness — they lived and breathed in the sacred realm of Literature. They wrote Drama and Poetry and Philosophy and Tragedy, and each form was more devastating than the last. Their books, when they wrote them, reached their audience posthumously and by the most tortuous of routes. Their thoughts and stories were terrible to look upon, like the bones of animals that had ceased to exist.

"

READ the rest of it.

little yelling words ten blocks away

Dear idiots,

I only reflect upon you what I've already put upon myself, so we're even, so you can't get indignant, so fuck you. 

I despise you sentimentality.

Melodrama drunk in the ocean on the roof trying to pick out dried vomit from receiver.

Fancy yourself on an impossible journey for quick riches

cause you read a book.

Stuffing myself down a hole of solitude three hours at a time to get back to the word. 

and what is the word?

then you lose it all in the dictation and translation

precognition of the world you saw right at the beginning

the whole universe on the tip of your tongue

and it's not your fault

its the neighbors and the roommates and your phone blowing up

outside dragging you at the feet

take part in our feverish bullshit discourse!

the night is young!

the hours are waining!

Drinks on me!

Music all about the town!

friends to be made!

lovers to be fucked!

Few people are more interesting than these books I have in front of me.

The problem being,

everyone thinks of their lives as more interesting than a little chunk of time a day for words

idiots with alcohol under their nose

with kisses to be had in the asshole

with jobs to be attained and rules to memorize
with wars to be fought
with other people's lives to rein in
with new laws of happiness to be dictated

Those who turn these cumulative hours into that loud solitude

that juggernaut of time chunked out of space

The guru den with the hourglass on its side
not me I fail every other day

increase your capacity for loneliness

milk it for all its change

beat it if you can, make fights from nothing

babble and sing like a demented duck

lose your kids and slice up your darlings
The point to lock yourself in jail
because you also want to be like everyone else

but this lack of a moment resounding with mountain to mountain to mountain

back and forth, side, swing side, swing low and high
has a secret pleasure all its own, you know it

get to the floor and break your knuckles for a consonant

How are you now?

Yes, melodramatic

Love is the answer

Touch is the need

A little conversation for a mental beggar

a tiny stage for a low life braggart

I want to juice a life with you

not to you and not for you

moron, you don't get it

you don't trust me

you deliberate me like a man drowning in culture

I am just an idiot on the periphery.

drunk because you're sober

sober because you're drunk

give me days I'll go on and on

give me a second I'll give you a word

SHHHHHHhhhhhhhh…

Notes from underground, Dostoyevsky

Human--A biped, ungrateful.

What comes between us

is only memory

Inspiration comes best from all back alleys...or bad physical states mixed with good mental states

today I got up with the intention of reading and writing ALL day. I woke up at 10 am! which is early for me...got all the bullshit out of the way in 1 hour and was out the door... but it was so FUCKING hot I couldn't concentrate, thought maybe I had heat exhaustion, probably didn't drink enough water...was getting tired and so lethargic I thought I should just drink a shit ton of coffee and make it iced to cool down...had some cigarettes for fun but it wasn't fun in the heat...kept going into the freezer section at QFC sticking my head into the ice cream door to cool down...all this all this made me tired so tired...went to the park sweaty couldn't sleep tried to pass out heaving exhaustion...probably didn't drink enough water felt like blacking out constantly but couldn't cause I ddrank too much coffee.....went back home to try to pass out and not have to worry about all my shit getting stolen..still couldn't sleep cause of all that coffee but was so tired decided to go for some porn due to hallucinating some metaphor of desert and sex, or just the latent tie-in of languid dull idiotic states and dumb bliss pleasures like masturbation, but still was too tired anyway....too tired for anything and still couldn't sleep...

well, but, well! when I finally recovered after lying down in my room with movies and water and fan on full blast, I tried to write but couldn't, brain still melted from the sun though my body felt more or less normal, I decided to watch another movie--besides Naked Lunch which I had just watched--which was THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU, which I felt bad about because I told myself I would be writing ALL day today but haven't yet got a single word down and only read 3 pages of LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS the book I'm reading too, so I says to myself, I says, okay, I'll just watch about 15 minutes of this movie and try to write or read again...well needless to say the whole movie goes by, or nearly the whole movie, 1 hour and 16 minutes to be exact, because right at that moment, and it's been building up to this point throughout the whole amazingly engaging movie, I know something, I understand something, it has been made clearer, or clear enough, of what the ending to my novel will be like! the ideas have been laid bare, stripped by three key things--Time of the Assassins, a study of Arthur Rimbaud by henry miller, History of ART by elie faure, and the adjustment bureau...(coincidence plays a facile part in my wonder of how perfect these works, and few others, have engaged in the conversation my own novel is bringing to life, or I could say instead, sewing together, a mere combination of previous ideas into my own sort of cohesion). I started writing...............and the horrible day of mishaps blossomed in the end...its fucking hilarious how it happens like that...(and other days when I can actually stay in one place all day, sitting at the computer or with a book I probably get the same amount of work done as I did today anyway, I fuck around with distractions so much I guess all that matters is to keep the ideas stewing in the brain rather than SPECIFICALLY sit down and try to beat it out of yourself)

well shit. I kind of forgot where I was at. maybe I said all that I needed to say, maybe all that shit above doesn't make an ounce of sense, I'm too lazy to go back and read it. Now, instead, I'm gonna drop a bomb on you, the one I intended to drop on you anyway before I spontaneously started to type out all this about my day. I present you with! the outline to my novel! It's a fucking mess, and I think it's awesomely terribly hilarious that way, and wanted at least to send it out to someone...well well well! as for me, I'm done now and gonna watch the ending to that movie. I hope it doesn't suck.

thoughts on the new generation of writers...

I think stating that you think something before you write what you're thinking is repetitive and sounds stupid and is stupid and is a waste of space and a waste of letters and narcissistic.
"that's a thought I just thought"

when will words start to jump off the page again? come at the reader with knives and cleavers! Unplug the deadpan sinkhole! Are authors attempting this today? Are they in the twenty-something generation? Who are they? Allies, come forth, or lie down and die! Bring your words to life, come out from the shadows, move out from your parents shelter, your prepped up and cotton filled studio, unzip your hoodie, drop your diapers, lay down your pansy gown and drag on...show me your guts you filthy swine...yes! I like those dirty teeth you bare...take out your earplugs...show me what you're listening to and play it louder, aw that stuff is shit man, come on, get some soul into ya self, god dammit, get on the floor! jesus...get some blues in your bones, (and you there with your blue boner...HAH) death don't have no mercy in this land! Be a rolling stone, what? You gotta move! Go fall in love, and bring it on home to me....give me shock treatment, you brat...and I'll come right back and beat you up with a baseball bat.... think about the laws of motion:

1) a body at rest will stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force
act and let yourself be acted upon (or, you sit and rot, unaffected and unaffecting)
2) F=MA
become a force, and USE the force!
3) for every action there exists an equal and opposite reaction
challenge other forces! Don't assimilate mindlessly, eh?!!!


...

comatose stigma

the blinds stick still by the window, and I am all about them

in my room, dead, dog, laughing at commas, lit trend heroes, 2 second gifs, memes,

thinking alternatively about maxim's hot 100 women,

and behinds, fine, fine, yoga booty...

curve, hip center, sway inward like record revolution, music melts at the center,

distracted by bladder. pee in the dark.

taco meat smell faint through the kitchen back to my desk.

back stretch and again crumpled in the chair. 

fart cushion, flattened cotton, the 2 dimensional qualities of

distraction.

your mom...

that's what she said...

the gap is bliss...and holes are everywhere....

I'm only walking so that I can fall accidentally.

something about the way of the body...pleasure IS the time killer,

and I'm encased in glass, a glass man,

forgetful, wistful, meaning less and less when night deepens and turns...

everything has bellowed out their bottoms, and emptied out to reform what they truly are...

which is...

...

shit

People get so lost in

More...

anywhere

every once in a while,

when you've found yourself not thinking of it

make sure to take a walk

to somewhere you haven't been.

closer to the trees, listen,

be a bird hopping on the side of the road

let people stare at you from afar

make them wonder dreamily

about your progression

as you look towards the sun

and pick at the ground

and take some arbitrary steps

to where you haven't stood before

excellent!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

dear zen lunatic

may you be
two children
laughing on a mountain peak

don't dumb it down

as kid gazelle says, "the messiah is gonna come out while you're washing dishes."

a bullshit process

sleep
wake at 8
shower
sleep
wake at 1
a day off, with open space
work needs to be done.

face the clock by forgetting about it.
set yourself up in the space that allows you to forget about the space.

how to work towards what needs to be said?
realize first that you always have something that needs to be said. If not for the sake of others (those close to you) than for the sake of yourself.
Do not be afraid of your own stupidity.
smile
release
weep
drool
like a dog. dogs don't give a shit. they exist madly, happily, stupidly. give back like royal servants. live in the moments. rejoice with every communion as if it has never happened and will never happen again. Precious.

how long has it been since you last expressed in such honesty? this will determine how you now say what needs to be said. if too long to remember the last time it was, journal in the most private way. reach down to the inner depths. you are not open. time without reflection closes you up, lets you forget about your world. you are a shadow lingering in the world forgotten by itself. float on, disappear without a trace, join the traffic crawling along the lines of oblivion. nothing.
(art, writing, expressing, is at first not about beauty, but rather, about honesty, connections, community, relief, therapy. As therapy, there is no need for adornment, no such idea as cliche, but only ways in which to understand the truth, the heart of what is being said)
What is truly unique is not how you have learned to play with your artform. what is unique is the YOU simply. The angle at which you look at and take from the blood of life, source of all creation. Find yourself and find your medium. You have not been under the sun before you. You are no cherub or seraphim or devil creature. You are mankind. Human. Human walks, runs, sings, bleeds, dies, rejoices, weeps. The purgatory status of being. your struggle will define you. embrace it and remember that all around you there is light, even in the darkest cavern you can change your lens. retake your mind. Become the god, dog, god dog.

day to day I am bothered by a loss of friendship. feel an odd betrayal and realizing that the only grudge I have in all my years has been towards Stasia.
have recently
grudge has morphed memory into this sense of betrayal. Wonder has fed it. It grows behemoth unspoken of, unchecked it flourishes. a weed grown multiplied in an untended backyard. I haven't closed the door, it's black vines creep in through the screens, to the kitchen and the living room. No ceiling built up upon it the winds bring in unknown seeds.

(tired of writing now. coffee nausea. distracted by internet tabs. the coffee shop opens up again, I know where I am. Eliot bay bookstore. friends, acquaintances. Seattle. forget it all. write through bullshit. talk, unload like a dump machine after rounds, after hours. reach the clean slate of having vomited, shitted out the monotonous blather of intake. find the bottom golden platform from which you stand. resist the ADD urge. Do not resist. do not. donut)

I am moody as the ocean. if I am too free I sway and turn and say nothing altogether. direction ceases. Perhaps not a total waste of time. You can always look back on the mess of diarrhetic (diary) writing with sober eyes and ears, pick from it like a crow and build up your monolith.

From a flat tempur pedic bed ridden with sex and lethargy, I set the stage for nothing. I enjoy myself, fall into sleep deep enough to not remember anything. to process something then bury it in snore. We fuck we smile momentarily. We grow closer, know each other physically, laugh and make farting jokes. It becomes a simple excuse for something else I can't render mentally. Happiness, perhaps. bliss without reason, simple and undeserving. Donut be too hard on yourself. life is already hard on you. give it a break, you know. we embrace all of ourselves. If born in sin and contempt then breathe easy. we are animals. we are gods. we are the link and ladder between heaven and hell.

Life should be a balance of ups and downs, but is never really in tune with itself. things are udders of bullshit. everything a bad pun, but still a little funny viewed from somewhere.
My friend and I (both 27 years of age) bought separate ant farms and released them upon each other at the pinnacle of their development. They unleashed "hell" upon one another without a known reason besides the fact that they were released upon one another. What they had each believed was their own since birth was threatened. The war of a thousand ants with lint and splinters was hilarious. Then after thirty minutes of this we grew bored and distracted by the television. A Seinfeld episode about the Soup Nazi. The ants ended their affair in some fashion or another, then all died out the next day for we had forgotten to put them back up in their farms.

You will go crazy in the near future. don't be afraid. hold onto what you can. live continually, as if death was no option. For all you know, it was never your option anyway.

Realize you may say things you entirely disagree with. you are working towards something. you are swimming in a sea, but it is easy enough to link arms with all the bodies next to you. the buoyancy of a thousand million billion breathing men and women is untold. perhaps we could have taken to the skies years ago had we known or embraced the idea of holding hands.

artist

must be expansive
sensitive
must give time
make time
must take a walk

God dammit if you are a writer in seattle, please hang out with me

THIS IS FROM MY SECOND BOOK, MOTHER

reflections

Leaving seattle, the suns, the clouds

I dream of leaving Seattle, seeing the world, connecting to souls far out and away across the expanse and realizing and no one is different, that we are all a part of the same struggle and praise of whatnot, I dream of leaving and I already miss it. I close my eyes and nostalgia sets in. The clouds cover me and I retreat with every watered-on melancholic citizen here. I am afraid of the sun as much as I love it. It spurs me into states I cannot forever excel in. Am so prone to burn out, fragile flower. Being from California and Hawaii, my soul has been attuned to the light. I took it for granted growing up and walked around the town rotting and melting in milky ways of boredom, heavy monotonous glue oozing on the sidewalk thinking of nothing but spreading myself dead-like through the cracks, gaping at the sky, heavy lethargia. So I fled to drearier places to provoke myself, stew discomfort where the sun would peek a glance much less, a pillow of light soft and nearly forgotten until the day of first spring (that's really almost summertime), where the winds are fierce as greek gods changing the tides upturning the world hues, no more! they say, and there the stroke of light announces the blue bed above. And the moment is glorious, only so because of how long it's been, and because of how long before I have been sitting and wanting it anticipating it's arrival. Oh but then it is gone and I close my eyes again to chase it's wonder, attempt to mimic the energy it gave me--I awoke and felt stupid euphoria and thought everything of its simplicity, told my fellow man, I am doing so well! when he earnestly asked me how are you today! And yes he said, I really like that answer!

And the other thing. To attempt to bring about that feeling of standing in the sun after a stormy year of damp gray is for me to live in the glory of imagination. It is much the same, but perhaps longer lasting, bringing about an independency and power of a lesser god, a man of my own wills rather than an ant tossed about by lightly dripping weather, comparably not violent at all. I awake and, not caring to be out in the miserable air, but so wanting to connect, to be social, to leave the house, make my way to the coffee shop. It makes sense that all the cloudy cities have created these places. Without it we would go stir-crazy, sleep in hazy depression, unaware of anything outside the mire of drowsy retreat. I transport my wills to the book I will write, to an author I've had on my to-read list for ages, I grant myself time to work on my individual. Clouds bring the necessary retreat, in a fashion, mirror the mess inside of us, make us ponder wonder get lost to a point where you must find out where you are in order to get back up and out into reality, stronger this time, you found freedom and light within yourself! You are the sun to this city! You defy the deft heavens! Bask and release, set free and fly!

I miss Seattle. The summer came last summer for three long weeks and when it rained I just stood outside with arms raised outward, strong-armed and battered by the wet wind. I did not move. My cheeks crept up and I dove into my dreams. The sun was just as oppressive as the clouds! It drove me to only action, I stumbled about blinded and merry, too drunk to dream and giving out everything in me till I was an empty shell of slurred nonsense. Action without thought, action, action, thoughtless, thought. Everything is too much, everything is too little.