V-day, right?

February 14th, 2012. Today is Kathryn, my roommate's, birthday. And for this I am truly thankful. I have never been really pissed at Valentines day, have not let my feathers get too ruffled...but it honestly has always been a little bit of a sting. A small barb from the dark powers that be, to make glaringly obvious my many and varied failures in the field of Relationships. And....I hope Jon is okay today. I hope he gets his sweet little girlfriend something sweet and is sweet to her. I for one am going to celebrate Kathryn's life this evening and be thankful. Thankfulness is the cure for what ails ye, I believe. Hell I'll make a thankfulness list just for the HELL of it! That's how positive I am being today!

Thank-Ful-Ness List:
1. Masala Chai tea, currently drinking, brought to me by one of our clients.
2. My first organic chem test has been pushed back to this coming Monday. Glory Be.
3. My eye stopped twitching the moment #2, see above, became reality yesterday in class. It has been twitching for four (4) days so that was nice.
4. Someday, irrevocably, I am going to heaven. WHAT.
5. My car is running, mostly.
6. I have a nice quilt on my bed.
7. I got to gchat with Cam this morning.
8. I am glad for Jesus.
9. My nephew.
10. My niece.
11. My health.
12. I am very thankful for the Pilot Light and all that it is and does. I love the community there.
13. I am thankful for my mom and dad, they are the best. Seriously the best. Like seriously. The best.
14. I have a really fancy warm coat that I got for christmas...its super nice and I love it.

Happy Valentines Day Ever' One.

ho him hum

BGN LAME BLOG POST. Srsly. So cold outside. Hate the cold. Hate it, hate the gray, hate having no fireplace set, hate having no hatchet, hate having no couch, hate having no Cameron. Hate having no Patrick, hate having no hubcap, hate having no money. Negative money, today actually. 

Now I feel guilty for complaining. 

Fuck it. This is why I don't write blog posts unless I am feeling dramatic enough to be despairing eloquently, or happy enough to spread some fucking cheer. END LAME BLOG POST

the child

Two beautiful things

One: Cold air, pale blue light, glints of sun on the frost everywhere, I'm functioning on auto, got to get to work, car's broke driving the Tahoe can't find an ice scraper. My old standby, the check card, scraping the frozen hard frost off the windshield, I come around to the side, my hand lifted to apply, flash. Through my mind goes the knowledge that if you reveal only part of an image, if the revelation is uniform, the picture will complete itself in your mind. And isn't that so, Lord? We don't need to know it all. I love the processes of intuition, they are mysterious and beautiful, and there for those with eyes to see. I swipe the card on the window. Back and forth, back and forth, leaving large spaces of frost in between the swathes. I get to the bottom of the window and there, clearly, I see my face and hair. The completed image, the knowledge, finished, only in my mind but accurate as the cold clear light of morning.

Two: Driving down Central Avenue, the light diffusing and getting softer, peering through the hole of clarity I made on the windshield, the sun blinding, right in my eyes, I catch movement in front of me, a man. Running across the road. A brilliant gold halo encircles his head. Long shaggy hair, a hat, baggy coat. But mostly just gold. Shooting out around his form. I see a thick swirl of warm breath curl out and above his head, through the gold, into the pale blue sky. 

huh

have i mentioned i need a job? tuesdays and thursdays. need it. want it.
don't know why this is a relevant blog post. perhaps someone living in knoxville will see this
post after trolling the internet and comment here and offer me an interesting low-key high-paying
job on tuesdays and thursdays. don't ever let your dreams die.

A letter I wrote to a friend explaining why I like that book, Suttree.

I have always been able to feel things, sense things about the environment that I am in, and even the environment inside myself, and in others. As long as I can remember I've been able to see things that other people couldn't and know things that other people didn't know. Jordan and I were close enough growing up that she knew that I knew things...it wasn't until we were probably 10 and 11 that we actually said anything about it out loud. Even then we just acknowledged it. Its because of this phenomenon that I always said, even as a child, that when I grew up I wanted to live in the mountains. The mountains seemed to me to be the purest essence of what I knew, what I was made of, what my life was made of. It was part of me, without all the messy. Thats why I loved them. It wasn't till later on in life that I realized where I lived was not just a yard, a house, a song, a road, not just a church or some people or a certain sadness, but that civilization had named it, called it a "city". So I learned I lived in a city named Knoxville. But everywhere I went, I felt and listened, and took on the habit of always discerning for similarities, consistencies, or vast differences. In people, in places, in experiences. And in this city there are themes that run unchanged, that are deeper than my simple experiences and wider than my understanding. I have studied them and felt them, been affected by them and tried to affect them, in my own small way, and I wonder even now if its worth it to mess with things you can never fully understand. The more you know the more you are responsible for. Amen?

When I read Suttree, it was as if someone had taken the spirit of this place and put it into a man, into a life, a book, into a feeling created with long strings of words and sounds and phrases. Exactly that.

People move here expecting it to be a very quiet and dismissive little city, with a small thoughts and even smaller aspirations. They expect to be able to just do as they like, live how they like and go about their business, unbothered. People in the distant suburbs sometimes manage to do just that, I think. They live in a subdivision and occasionally make it in to wal-mart or to Krystal. But the closer you get to downtown, the heart, the more this thing, whatever it is, will touch you. People move here with expectations, but before long, the discerning man will notice a certain stubborn despair that fills this town, dramatic despair that is at essence, unnecessary and extravagant. It loves fun, it loves music, it loves living but is ashamed to admit it. It is hopeful but spouts cynicism, it rejects material wealth as "dead" but embraces death in drinking and dancing and running away from life. It is hypocritical and beautiful, sensitive and good at things. It is smart, but too damn emotional to do anything about that. That is just what I see, as a kind of metaphor for the real thing...it is deeper than that and affects other people differently. My parents, for example, or the riverfront. My Aunt Betty. There is a history too, of poverty and slavery and sharecropping and mountain living, of dance halls and knife fights and segregation and the world's fair and those rich brothers. You see it most clearly in the young, and in the artists, dreamers, writers, and musicians.  It is so much a part of who I am... like it or not. 

But whatever it is, (and it is so hard to really put words to it) a perfect portrait of it can be found in that damn book. Suttree. Thats why I like it. Thats why I love it. 

Don't know if any of that made any sense. But still.

~nats

chronicles

You have never sat with perfect intimacy and watched one you love and have given yourself to die in your arms. Made all the worse by physical health the death of the mind, the heart, of light itself, fading slowly but undeniably out of eyes that you have bet your life on living, instead, dying, right in front of you, as you stare into them from inches away. The light fades, as you watch. You die too.

You have never fought to protect your little shrunken soul from a battering, from bricks and knives and weight, pressure so heavy you struggle to breath, forgetting its absence. You have never been scared of violence. Not really.

You have never prayed to God that you have always trusted for the life of your best friend only to watch him die slowly, with such pain. The body stays strong, but the soul, the man, he dies. You watch him, praying the whole time, terrified of what will happen, to him, to you. Absolute terror takes over and controls your life. Eventually you stop praying and succumb to the fear, listening as it tells you what steps to take and how to feel.

You have never walked with agonizingly slow steps away from a car with a yelling, screaming, raging man in it, still screaming through the closed doors, knowing that he was really just crying, a little crying boy, knowing that it would do no good to cradle his head in your lap, knowing the rage would prevent the tears and any healing found in them.

You have never heard him pray to God, in your car, after a fight, heard his weak voice asking for help, heard the precious tiny amount of hope, begging this unknown God to help him feel his love, a moment of truth, where he humbled himself and asked. This was early on, before. It did not happen again.

You have never held his head because it was so beautiful and you were seventeen, and ran your fingers through his thick hair, held his head three years later because it was beaten and bruised, unconscious, and told the doctors of what you found there, held his head because he was asleep and you were twenty-three and you had time to glory in every eyelash and the thin, olive skin, held his head because he was sad, and he needed your lap, needed you, held his head because he was throwing up all the pain he tried to swallow with port wine, knowing he would still wake up tomorrow with dead eyes and just as much pain as yesterday, held his head two years later, drunk again, making sure he was still alive, 3 am, getting in your car and going out to find him because of text message that woke you up, your love, alone in his room, two years later, twenty-seven, you weep but he doesn't know, you wait for him to fall asleep cradling his precious head in your hands.

You have never known real guilt. How it lasts, how it remains, how it cripples, how it haunts. It stains the very marrow of your soul, never to be cleansed, not really.

I don't wish that you had known these things, I just wish that I hadn't, either, or that I could find a way back to you again through these winding dark forests of separation. Then again, maybe you got lost on purpose? And who am I to change the way things are?

I didn't (still don't) know how to find you. I was lost.

Each of our pains and sorrows create a unique landscape of suffering in our minds and hearts. I don't mind it. I want to share it.