nyssa

glassonionage @ 2009-11-01T22:44:00

2009-11-02T04:12:13Z

man I was gonna do my homework but sorry I was really busy having an awesome weekend
that I will tell you about on the floor surrounded by love
or really comfortable adulthood like
everybody is casual responsible independent
jerome and alyssa are watching mulan
in a potluck dinner party hangover jerome is texting his friend from burlington hoping she will give him a ride home tonight so he doesn't have to sleep in alyssa's bed again -
(alyssa used to have a twin size bed then she got a full sized bed then she never got rid of the other one now her room is a bed)
- like eight other people this weekend (but not alyssa).

Friday was BASH bash bash Alyssa made her costume in forty five minutes arriving at the house with bags of fabric and exploding in a flurry of sequins and fur emerging as a snow white unicorn While I was busy making my costume three years ago (MILK which I wore to Latin Club Halloween junior year and won $20) so I made rocio a zorro sword out of cardboard and duct tape because she was all busy event planning and staying up all night I dunno whatever architecture design students do
we pregamed at katie-the-cow's, do you know what pregaming is? it means that you get drunk before you go to the party so that you don't have to carry alcohol or a jacket and it took forever and like a million bathroom breaks to get giant eyeballs and vulcans and reindeer and black widows all to BASH bash bash
oh and I danced baby and it's hard to dance in a milk carton
the tricks are you can close your eyes and RUN into the crowd (everyone will get out of your way)
or fold up really tiny inside your milk carton and plop down (people will take pictures and say oh how funny and strange)
but pretty much you have to do all the dancing with your legs
the lights and costumes! it was like sequins and carnivale and history diced up real fine and held up to the light like a kaliedoscope yeah that's what I thought then but frankly I was drunk and dancing, doubly intoxicated
working the ticket table was the way I got in for free (and the way a lot of other people got in for free...) and as soon as I was done I was freeeee to go to bed

but I woke up to a cop and an inmate in my kitchen talking loud and eating pretzel chips And I was like uhhh are you here with someone?
and they pointed incoherently down to darkened hallways but thank god they left and locked the door behind them
it was five am and oh shit I was awake guess I have to sit down for tea and writers block no nevermind I will go back to bed

saturday morning I seeded lettuce trays for three hours
captain volunteer
breaking my back (don't let me fool you, it's easy, yet back breaking)
while other volunteers got to do fun things like pick tomatoes!
I biked home with two dozen eggs on my back twnety points for not breaking a one
and

glassonionage @ 2009-10-20T20:36:00

2009-10-21T00:38:02Z

I have made an itinerary for tomorrow
already lived my whole day
down to the ice cream cone at 3:30
All that's left now is to actually do it

well, I could never do it on saxophone

2009-10-13T00:20:45Z

yessir
gonna get me a piece
a dirt put some apple
trees innit
gala honey crisp take a bite whenever I want

ask a man to be my wife for
the cookin and cleanin, cider makin.
already got one picked out
with a sun tan and a girlfriend.
s'alright I'll wait around on you old blue eyes
I ain't
in
no
hurry

glassonionage @ 2009-09-30T21:32:00

2009-10-01T01:49:00Z

today in college all of my classes had something to say about one eternal topic: the human condition

in poetry we struggle to make our abstract problems (grief, aging, love) into concrete images that we can hold in our hands like little baby birds, which makes them much easier to deal with
oh, I see, he was displaced like a plant cutting. I can hear underground that sucking and sobbing as he tries to take root.

in math we take reality and make it more abstract.
I have 300 m of fence, what is the biggest area I can enclose? is turned into a quadratic equation, a sentence in a foreign language of exes and seconds and then even one more step far removed from reality it is a line drawn on a grid which I can point to and say right there: that is your answer.

and in psychology we make fun of the human condition. see how stupid your brain is for believing optical illusions? you make stuff up because you have a blind spot because there is an elephant there only you can't see it when your eye is a certain distance from the page.
and the trick with the most utility is how to take advantage of children under the age of seven who have not developed the "concept of conservation." observe:
I have two graham crackers. A small child has one. I ask, "is this fair distribution?"
"fuck no," she says so I break her graham cracker in two. "How about now."
and the little sucker giggles with delight.

my mom who isn't afraid so much of getting old
or dying as of not being alive confessed
"i am boring" conceding that I know everything
and I agreed: what is life if not sensation?
Which was too abstract to really be useful, like
all sensation is too: what is cold, sad, loved,
hopeless, anxious, relief?
I answered these questions from a catalog
of experience on a rainy afternoon and concluded
that she is just too good at life
I tried to explain it to her like
I am now too good at hitting tennis balls
against the wall and I hardly ever get a workout anymore
chasing them across the gym
and she didn't get it still so I said frankly
just fuck up sometimes you know
Get a bad habit so you can get over it and feel
really good about yourself
or lose your umbrella and go on a long walk all day and
make friends with the homeless people under the
bridge while you wait out the storm who may offer you
a sandwich because I know they are scary but the not
crazy ones are decent people, really
OR you can instead feel fear, cold, and wet, which are all three exhilirating.
MOST OF ALL, I said, make something else for breakfast.
I know that egg on an english muffin has worked for you all these years
and to switch now would be inefficient but
sometimes you're going to have a shitty day anyway and
it's nice to blame it on your oatmeal boiling over
not your husband or menopause or whatever
When the pancake doesn't flip and you have to
eat pancake scramble, believe me, the fervor's in the failure.
and when you barely can sleep because you can't wait to
try frying tofu like bacon and then it works,
success tastes so sweet!

glassonionage @ 2009-09-08T07:52:00

2009-09-08T11:56:59Z

the last three things I ate:

"negative" pizza: fried purple fingerling potato slices on homemade wheat pizza crust with feta cheese and (ripe) green tomato slices. It looked like the negative of a regular pizza.

french toast tortilla "crepe" with cinnamon, peaches, and chocolate hazelnut butter

cheddar cheese grits baked with butter-fried mushrooms and fresh field peas

why would I ever go to a restaurant?

glassonionage @ 2009-08-13T23:36:00

2009-08-14T03:39:11Z

oh I was so sad to-day and so angry because I had NothingToDo; the curse of my class and generation
my grandma lived in a sod house with dirty elbows and she had to scramble around on her knees and pick up filberts off the ground all day when she was twenty

glassonionage @ 2009-08-01T22:00:00

2009-08-02T02:37:10Z

here is what I did today
first I was writing an email about how much I love food to email to this catering company begging them for a job. This was from 11:53 to 12:30 so technically the day started partway through. I was sitting naked on the floor of my apartment because it was hot as shit, with all the cabinets and shelves empty and their guts scattered all around the floor with me because I was starting to pack but lost wind. I have been drinking three or four diet wild cherry pepsis a day lately so even though I had bicycled far too much from home to eco farm and back JUST in time before the storm and had to wake up very early, I was wide awake all the same. Work at eco farm yesterday was fun because it was my last day so John said "fuck it" extra early to the sungolds and we went to Fiesta Grille. Fiesta Grille is nearly reason enough to quit eco farm so that you can have a last day lunch fiesta.
so then I slept for about five minutes or five hours but you could have fooled me either way and then I woke up and drove to eco farm. actually I tried to drive there but kept pausing in the early morning glow in my apartment pondering on piles of possessions and generally getting distracted. I got to the farm only twenty five minutes too late and folded a couple of tablecloths to put in the white and black truck so I could see over the steering wheel and drove to cary and got there early. I am a genius.
I arrived at the western wake farmers' market at 7:40, last one to get there (except alyssa) but not the last one to set up my table and tent. This is because John didn't give me shit to sell, or otherwise John gave me shit to sell. Either way, I had very little produce. Only some pathetic crookneck moldy squash, twenty five bags of aROOgoola, and about a million pints of sungold tomatoes. Alyssa came in the nick of time and made the display beautiful just before the opening bell rang. I am excellent at making people buy things when they don't (yet) know that they need them. We sold every vegetable by 11 and then we had nothing to do but sell pork and talk to the cute fishermen across the way. It was a whole lot of fun. And lucrative. Farmer John treated us to the weekend buffet at Tower Vegetarian Indian Restaurant in Morrisville and I was pretty sure I was going to wet my pants because it tasted really incredible but I didn't. I ate black chickpeas and paper thin pancakes and hot potatoes and tomato vegetables and paneer butter (which makes me cringe a little bit thinking of eating cheese butter) and yogurt rice and holy fucking shit. that's the only part I really needed to say. Sometimes I didn't even know what I was eating but on the most primal and essential levels of bodily desires, to which names of vegetables mean nothing, it did not matter at all.
I went on a walk because I hadn't all day and it turned out that it was my only one of the day. Just before that I went back to eco farm to drop off the truck and to lose my cell phone and found John napping on his bed so I started jumping on it and surprised him. I hugged him goodbye which was truly sad. I tried not to lament or look to hard at the trees and fields and tomatoes or the big old hackberry tree in the rearview mirror as I drove away or I probably would have stayed for the rest of my life.
Back at my apartment there was still a lot of shit to put in boxes that I didn't have and the rest of the food in my fridge which could have lasted three weeks two days ago. I made a couple of impressive left-over frittatas and salads which tasted absolutely mind blowing, but like Tower Vegetarian Restaurant, no name I could have given them would have convinced you to eat them. The frittata which I had for breakfast which I made last night before I packed away my cast iron frying pan looks just terrible but tastes complex and satisfying. It is purple because it has purple cabbage and carrot salad and purple sweet potatoes which leached over everything, and nasty looking cherry tomatoes and some of simon's-of-implausible-strength's dill chevre and eggplant stew and oh probably lentils too but I had it for breakfast and either I was hungry or it was good. So anyway, I did a good job whittling down the contents of my fridge.
I packed and got distracted and threw away things and discovered missing tweezers and packed and was just started to lose wind when my mom pulled up bustling with energy. Everything I owned was on the porch except my couch. When I moved in, I came by myself with one carload in my Kia Rio hatchback. Now I was pretty sure that I would have to rent a truck. My house, which had seemed so concise, neat, ordered, and minimalistic, was just loaded with essentials in the closets and pantries and drawers. I believe that fish grow as big as the pond they are in and that I have as much stuff as drawers. Also since moving in I brought up my desk and a lamp and bought a bicycle. My mom is practically a genius when it comes to packing so while I worried about how nothing would fit, she loaded my hatchback and her hatchback before I had time to notice. I was distracted, because not only was my concise, neat, ordered, and minimalistic apartment crammed with stuff, it was also really dirty. I scrubbed things for three hours which is neither of these things: an exaggeration, something I wish to repeat ever again.
You can imagine that the hours are ticking by and I have only done about two things that day. I had (and have!) a cramp in my scrubbing hand so we start ignoring stuff and cutting corners and call it quits and eat at the wooden nickel on churton street, the main street through town, sitting outside watching night come and throwing french fries at hillsborough walking by.
Then it was almost nine all of a sudden and we still have to go to raleigh and unload and then mom has to drive home but at the on ramp of forty I say fuck it let's go to burlington, which required me pulling off the road because I don't have my cell phone.
so here I am at my mom's house in gibsonville. not my apartment in raleigh with dirty carpets, a pole in my room, flies the size of my thumb, or alyssa, who is scared and sleeping in it by herself.
and now it is now and uwe wants me to see his new projector and bluray player and I only went on one walk today.

glassonionage @ 2009-07-02T22:58:00

2009-07-03T02:58:22Z

Poetry of Departures
Philip Larkin

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It's specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

glassonionage @ 2009-06-18T10:07:00

2009-06-18T14:11:20Z

INERTIA

I am rich these days. I can take off a day of work and get dressed up and go to warshington if I want and by damn, I will. I can afford to stay at the Holiday Inn Express and even eat breakfast there in the morning. I will drink coffee while I plan my day and then go back out to my car and roll up the sleeping bag in the backseat.
There is free parking, I hear, at Glen Echo park in Bethesda, MD which is fair because anyone who is willing to walk seven miles SHOULD get free parking. There is a network of trails along the C & O historic canal and I will stop at rest stops and piece together Virginia on maps and figure it out
If I go by myself I can be messy and wake up early and go to bed late too
I can wander for hours and hours aimlessly and morosely and absorbently
I should go to the museum of Natural History and fight for a look at the hope diamond but then leave and look at art but not picasso, Luis Melendez, and scorn, and then leave there too and nap on capitol hill
I am so rich that if I buy dinner in china town and order lotus roots off the vegetarian menu and it is full of meat, I can just give it to a homeless man on the street and cry and then buy ice cream.
I should take a cab because it is a special occasion and a cab is a special treat.
I don't even have to stay in washington dc if I don't want, I can up and go to another holiday inn express in the shenandoah mountains and listen to the rain outside and wake up to see it cold drizzle and hike the AT anyway and then say fuck it my neck hurts from sleeping in the back of my car and drive home.

and I did.

glassonionage @ 2009-05-10T08:38:00

2009-05-10T12:39:08Z

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

elizabeth bishop

I ate butter today.

glassonionage @ 2009-03-24T17:13:00

2009-03-24T21:21:13Z

this is a bad day: you drive forty minutes to where your bank lives to cash a paycheck and you reach into the envelope to find that you have lost the paycheck and that what you pull out instead is two copies of the gas bill you were supposed to pay with it

I had a dead guy ale last night and I liked it. don't tell noah because I don't like beer and that is why we broke up. he came over yesterday to drop off a window for his aunt and he was looking damn sexy but don't tell him that either because he doesn't like to be objectified.

I like Gertrude Stein because she is clearly a genius and she is sure of that and also sure of what she is not, which is a painter or a sculptor or a poet of another language, but she could appreciate the genius of that too so she surrounded herself with geniuses.
I like Augusten Burroughs because he makes me feel good about myself too, but for different reasons. It is because I am so glad that I am not THAT fucked up
and that he can still laugh or be cynical about being an alcoholic or nicotine gum addict or gay(not cry)

and let the thinking begin about Canada
and failing a class
or two...
so it's not so much of a surprise later

CATHARSIS

2009-03-18T03:42:56Z

today in english I could not pay attention to the education of henry adams
because it is very boring
and also because this girl wore shorts today
and she has incredible legs.
I could not stop staring at them. They were powerful and muscular and feminine and seriously beautiful.
I reacted to myself and asked myself if I was attracted to these legs or to the female attached to them.
I searched myself for sexual attraction and found none and was confused as to what emotion I felt toward these legs.
Later on I looked up at one of three guys in the classroom, who I think is dirty and cute. He is quiet and doesn't pay attention a lot of the time because his classmates and mine are stupid sometimes. I have a crush on him.
In light of my earlier meticulations, I felt it appropriate to review this assertion. In myself, I found absolutely no sexual attraction to this male. He is a crush because it is of societal appropriateness and importance that I center a male in my trajectory and make him the object of my desire.
As a matter of fact, I do not feel sexual attraction toward anything. You will find this a running theme in my livejournal.
I write this to explicate my confusing feelings about beautiful legs and beautiful people. UNC-Chapel Hill is absolutely crawling with well groomed people, and I love to eat their faces alive with my eyes. I am a robot because I do exactly the same thing at the Nasher Museum of Art and with all other things that are not human. I write this also because I think many are afraid to use the word "beautiful" on peoples of their own gender and I am not anymore!

tonight I am going to cuddle with someone who I am not dating any more because cuddling is one thing that I understand feels good

I used to shoplift from grocery stores but now I am just a better shopper
(and can't eat yogurt)

glassonionage @ 2009-03-05T23:51:00

2009-03-06T05:16:31Z

"everyone must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs."
Henry Adams

romance in flat world

What a tender and terrible morning is Point A
where the inclining ray takes passing interest
in a segment of decidedly more platitude.
some hide their jagged edges in jagged mountains.
some hire a life coach to address the oblong consternation
who hits it until it fits and her too in the great shoe box.
relish this, transitory affection of momentous direction...
not unlike the train that admires its propinquity in intervals
though it is certain that I am not the train.

What you are tasting is inescapable archetype and you brush your teeth every time,
it is so human and it is so frightening.
I taste you in my oatmeal that douses midnight's bile
and residual ague and
I will digest all three by lunchtime.
swallow without chewing, those and this:
resignation to, not from, one-shit-a-day that's all there is-ness.

glassonionage @ 2009-02-20T09:32:00

2009-02-20T14:32:25Z

well, I know what I WANT to be when I grow up:
wise.

then when I am dead they will stand over me and say "Oh, what sagacity perished here!"
it's not a stretch, I have already learned how to fake it by not opening my mouth. without betraying myself I can tell you, this works.

here I am living in my sunny house. it is two boxes, now, connected by an antechamber. I used to be afraid of the other box because it was big, empty, cold, and for all these reasons uninviting and scary. Now it has a mattress, a keyboard, a couch, and a heater, and the feng shui of nameless abode is restored. And shoot, this is the closest thing to luxury I could ever imagine. In the other box is a huge fridge and stove and oven and best of all, a crock pot. There is also a desk that occasionally I will use for antagonizing or finger-poking letter writing. There is this red and white metal table that is too high to eat or type at, or maybe the chairs are too low. It is not ideal and maybe that is so I don't sit at it forever. My bookshelf is the Orange County Public Library and that is also where I can hang out until 8 pm monday-thursday and meet the coolest locals.
There's something to be said for having a great purge of everything you believe in now and again.
The wind and sunlight evidenced by the view from my windows lead me to believe that it is a beautiful day, but I know it is very cold. I am not fooled. I have modern technology to protect me. Had I been only thirty years or so more primitive, I might have wandered out into this weather taken completely off guard because I wouldn't have worn my long underwear.
So the way I spend my time is Living. How strange. Involved right up to the elbows in every process I engage in, and then doing my homework or the crossword in the Indy when I have time. How strange.
Bread is done.

glassonionage @ 2009-02-18T22:06:00

2009-02-19T03:07:44Z

HERE'S a question I want to ask out loud
(to a soul who knows)
what happens to people like me
when they grow up?

or,

what would all these terrible adults be like if they grew down?

and this is how I feel about emily dickinson:
soooo she was in love with this newspaper publisher, right? That's what I heard in class
or was it unrequited love for her sister in law, who gave her the harshest critique?
she was so lonely and misunderstood that she wrote letters all day asking "do you love me" worded as "do you like my poem?" and never left, because you can't just up and marry your brother's wife! poor emily, tortured into creativity.

OR fuck! Maybe she didn't love any old body at all and maybe our heads are just exploding because she is out of format where she HAS to tie down or have some residual passion somewhere

what I learned about emily dickinson is that her poetry that we read in editions that we can afford (dover thrift) finds itself in just the same predicament posthumously: squished into a format and dashed and titled and parsed

maybe we should just let her lie in her alabaster chamber loving no one or everyone and maybe we should photocopy her poems to be sure the dashes are just right.

and finally, the best reason to live by yourself: no pants.

glassonionage @ 2009-02-13T23:31:00

2009-02-14T04:31:30Z

I had 75 grams of fiber today

and intestines of STEEL

glassonionage @ 2009-01-15T22:36:00

2009-01-16T03:44:57Z

isnt it funny that my life is this way
that I played a video game about cooking for an entire hour and it is because I am too full of food to cook
and I ate as much as I could because I walked four hours just so I could
and three hours at least every day
I do not know what is good and what is bad;
I know what is
but I do not know what isn't
because it is too far away

now
I am simplified to a little box (it's all I can keep warm)
it has two real windows and two electronic windows with a better view sometimes.
Not at seven in the morning. That is when the real view is better.
All of my soft things are being kept warm in here and they are keeping me soft
it is symbiosis
and every thing likes to be soft and warm

tomorrow
I can fight my brain
and stay in this little box.
Nyssa, it's cold outside. Where are you going to walk to anyway? Oh, to get a broom. You need one of those.

I will get a broom.
I will sign up for a class.
I will right a poem. probably this one.

glassonionage @ 2008-10-23T17:28:00

2008-10-23T21:30:37Z

I do not do not do not want to get drunk on franklin street

but I guess I have to.

Also, I am like, "really, do I have to vote? look at everyone here, aren't they all doing it for me?" but I am pretty sure that the whole world is not like the carrboro bubble.

glassonionage @ 2008-10-09T22:47:00

2008-10-10T02:47:28Z

today I thought
why do I continue the canine confinement?
it is a question of convience, this custody
I am certain it is not civility

omar sharif, he is the guy who plays yurii zhivago, well, david lean told him to act like a poet in the movie. that means have very wide, teary eyes and stare at everything.
all I do is write poems about fights:

"you used the word 'exasperated' "
oh, noah,
you are not sorry that you took a bite of the apple.
I know, it is only the tart mouthful of the all or nothing
sweet gala of my heart.
I know, it is as ludicrous as this poem! You were waiting for me to say that
but all of those mean things
if I keep letting you think they work!
all of the mean things you say that are reciprocates to my fruitless ego feeding
well, my goodness, look where it has gotten so far.
so I cannot tell you that an apple is an apple
but believe me, I know an apple is an apple as good as anyone.
if you were looking for some thing to be indignant about then this is as good as any one.

except when I write poems about pumpkin cookies for your pumpkin, for moneys

glassonionage @ 2008-09-23T20:44:00

2008-09-24T00:44:16Z

does anybody else stare at the world
their family
their friends
people walking down the street
and wonder how can they all be so irrational, and what have they got against me being rational?

well: one of us is wrong.

glassonionage @ 2008-09-16T09:16:00

2008-09-16T13:19:20Z

something WONDERFUL (almost) just happened!
on a weight machine in the basement.

glassonionage @ 2008-08-12T09:32:00

2008-08-12T13:32:47Z

oh man
How about an international entry? From Barrington, Nova Scotia?
Let me tell you, the Mounted Police of Canada did not want us here.

glassonionage @ 2008-08-08T19:32:00

2008-08-08T23:53:55Z

yesterday I said
"let's go back to the jungle gym"
"?"
"I'd really like to scramble across those rocks, just dance across them"
"if it will make you happy" (it will not make me happy and I will sulk) he didn't say
(I am not good at rock climbing but I think scrambling is a lot of fun and it is better than watching you all day) I didn't say
it will and it did and with climbing shoes on a pile of rocks - gravel for giants - well, I just danced across them.
this is at the precipice trail in acadia national park.
actually, off the precipice trail in acadia national park, where the guy in the rock climbing store said there was some good bouldering. that is free climbing with rock climbing shoes on great big, wonderful heaps of rocks that you can go at fiercely from any angle, any skill level you choose. it is fun for noah who likes to cling to a rock with his fingers and fun for nyssa who likes to shuffle up and hang by her ankles.
next door to these boulders off the precipice trail is a great big landslide of pink granite that stretches on into an incalcuable, appreciable distance.
and so with all my bottled up energy, even more than usual, I ran at this pile of rocks
all limbs equivalent and as important as each other
shifting my weight from ankle to toe to shoulder to fingers to hips
not even looking up because I am just moving forward (and that happens to be up)
pink granite is flashing by me because I am scaling faster than a spider monkey

as I get higher, the rocks get bigger and fewer, and scrub starts to crop up between cracks of rock. I can move back and forth laterally across the entire face, 200 feet. here I pause and the view is wonderful, just above the trees next to the road, and noah dares me and then races me to keep going
and I scale with my hands and feet doing things I never thought that they could so fast that I don't even notice when the boulders become smooth rock face and that I am going nearly straight up, all I can see is a flash of blue and plaid and curls and my sight is set on it and I am honed in on catching it , pulling myself up in cracks and in juts and by ancient wild blueberries tiny, ripe, and sweet.
it is so foggy that water droplets form on the tips of noahs curls and I can see moisture in waves in the air, fifty two degrees

these are things I would have noticed if I weren't moving so fast racing up the face of this mountain so far above the jungle gym and it seems like it will take forever to reach the top so I stop and eat blueberries, pulling off a handful in a swoop, eating the stems too because I am in such a hurry. when I rest and look out (not down!!) I see a cruise boat and islands in the bay of fundy or sometimes nothing at all when the fog is irritable. I don't think I will ever make it and I will never make it and why haven't I made it yet. I have been climbing so fast for so long and layers of clothes are coming off, jettisoned on the side of mountain anonymous until hey,
I made it.
oh shit, I will never make it down.

it is contrary to the scenery, the discussion I had at the top
I had about the same one at cadillac peak five hours ago
I want to know what reminds me that I am alive
or to have a good reason not to die because life is so complete right then.
I do not want to remember that I am wearing this wristwatch or that someone in the world, even me, has or ever had an agenda or conflicts or an agenda so obstinant with conflict so trivial or really that the town of bar harbor exists.

I do not think that is has to, or any of those things really.

but anyway: I was trapped by minutiae but the view was amazing and there we sat gorging on blueberries and life and each others' brains and the view until we were cold again and I decided to finally look down. oh shit. how did we climb this wall? it is straight down, and it is wet, and I am tired, and I am hungry. (this is when super cool nyssa jumped out and I used everything I learned in boy scouts to slide and scoot and pull myself across a rock face (with just my fingers!!) to avoid imminent and impending and surely disaster! a fantastic tale of team work and amazing stretches, death defying stunts five hundred feet in the air! the audience is on edge when the ancient brush, never disturbed by human hand or nesting peregrine falcon, is our hero's sole support for her life and the plant itself begins to lose its grip on the rock. can she shift her weight fast enough to escape, without jarring the plant or her fragile position, sprawled flat on a rock?? gasps where I think, something I never think, that death and pain are perhaps real and tangible things, and also perhaps propinquitous. and then finally, still about a mile from the bottom, when the rock face shifts flatter and the rocks are crumbled apart when I know, whew, I am home free from here unless I do anything stupid.) so I got to the bottom and smoked a cigarette and then peed my pants.

it is in bar harbor, maine, that I appreciate the dynamic of human emotion
that human emotion (frustration) is real and when I learned that I am learning that with just the power of knowing, it is as real as you let it be.
between the walk it out or talk it out or rock it out, what I prefer is difficult to say.

of this trip, here are the rules so far:
1. one-way tickets everywhere

glassonionage @ 2008-08-07T11:49:00

2008-08-07T15:41:30Z

this is quick because I have to pee and noah has to eat a hamburger
I AM IN MAINE and cold wtf with this weather but MAN the aesthetics are great
staying for free with food historians and americorps super heroes and work-to-camp on plywood outback hostels
hiking through resort towns and island crazy towns and beach towns
making variations on eggs/oatmeal/pasta in a pot mixed with any combination of apples, peanut butter, tomatoes, tomato paste, cheese, salmon, or tofurky
seeing, learning, cleaning, mowing, squishing snails in tide pools or slugs on porches (because they are everywhere not because we are evil)
alright

glassonionage @ 2008-08-01T22:30:00

2008-08-02T02:41:09Z

I must be crazy,
is what I think sitting inside the office of the farmhouse on the farm where I spent and am officially ending the best summer of my life.
By my own hand ends this summer and I must be crazy because even though I am absolutely not going to school this summer I am not hanging out here either
nor in burlington.
no, I must be crazy because I am running away
after willie
with dear noah
to the utter dismay of the ones I love and who love me!
I must be crazy because whenever someone tells me I am dying I can't even tell except that I am dying the same way you are, and the same way a tomato plant is that doesn't even have flowers yet. I must be crazy when they tell me this because dying is exactly the opposite of the thing that I am planning on doing for at least awhile and in fact, whether degenerating or not, doing all this at the offense of people I really love is also the exact opposite of what I want to do
and that is something that drives me a little crazy and sad.
that is about all anyone expects from me to say and think and vice versa; we're pretty predictable as far as archetypes go.

ohh I'm on my way
don't know where I'm going
yeah, I'm on my way
taking my time but I don't know where

ohhh
for a couple of frightening hours this afternoon I was yoko ono and I have got to tell you that from her (my) shoes it is not so malicious, because maybe yoko just decided it was time to be in like and maybe paul and john had hit a rough patch anyway and why put that on her?