Cracks

Savage luck, savage luck

green-eyed barnyards

crisp air

the cup brimming,

 

basically, skimming

emotions beckon

 

Syrens.

The Mist Kissed The Creek

Read my journal baby

hang me out to dry

 

careful, though

don’t let the wax

drip

 

lest I discover

or find a hair,

golden

 

mocking

 

lest I discover

you in my pocket

with fiery wrists

 

careful though

stay in tune

 

lest I discover

your note,

golden,

 

gawking.

 

careful.

Fir

the highway

roared in the dark

you and I

the ditch.

 

Wolves in wait

russian firs &

tea steaming,

5 AM at best.

 

but the neon, gnawing

 

tears lurched

between the space

yet clenched together;

 

we decided this. 

We decided on it.

Alive

I’m gonna go out

to all Spanish clubs

and get drunk

 

yeah spin ‘em

’round like butter

 

weave and dip

the miami keys  ablaze;

 

my skin,

Alive.

 

The heat on her hands

glistening

pointed

sharp

 

O,

Dynamite.

That’s What

He asked me about the flag

upon the wall;

a bedroom

a final sweep of emotion.

 

I replied,

the best woman I ever loved

was from Japan-

She rose like the sun each

morning

or like the tide at night.

 

He put his hands in his pockets.

So what

 

So sweet Jesus come back to me

the rest of them are just

pilot lights, burnt out.

 

Goddamnit.

 

and he said

ah,

 

that’s what.

On Fire

I’ll bet a hundred dollars

it was you

it was you all along

I knew it.

 

I threw it,

no not my heart

the cliche blistering,

on fire

 

the lake received.

relieved,

mountains breathed.

Upstream

I’ll walk out on the porch with you girl

the road will be all wet

from the afternoon

 

upstream, green leaves

listen

for your dreams,

just freight trains

 

in the country, where the fall is wild

coyotes howl in the dark

you shiver beside me

asleep.

 

before, we drove

the outlights were dim stars, the distance taunted

snow drifts, silence

the big old moon

just a lamp for the hills

to read our story.

 

bedtime,

asleep.

 

upstream, green leaves

listen

for your dreams,

just freight trains

 

that whistle, the morning chill

and a cup of tea

 

out on the porch, cedar creaks,

bare feet.

Perfection

 

            Lately I have experienced a fluctuation between deep happiness and poisoned dissatisfaction. Sometimes, like now, I arrive at a place between, a neutral area of relative calm but not altogether holding the desired element of stability.  The presence of a cup of silk road loose tea greatly aids in my balancing. So, Hare Krishna for this humble pot in front of me.

 

I have thought about what is causing me to fall for longer than what is lifting me up, for the latter is obvious: music, true words, the stunning beauty of nature, the scents and feelings of fall, laughter, good tea; these are the cause of great ecstasy.  But I have written about these things at length before. Tonight what concerns me is the falling down, so inevitable lately and consequently so frustrating. Today as I took an unusual route home I reached a conclusion, however temporary, that the cause of my headaches, droopy energy, bolted meals and general mindclog is my unremitting search for perfection, not only in the outside world, but more often and specifically in myself.

 

The need to have a perfect stomach. Flat and contoured, deemed correct in the eyes that have been tinted by the popular view that culture supplies eagerly. The desire to receive high marks in class all the time. The need to achieve fluency in two foreign languages as fast as possible. My pipe dreams for my career, modeled after only the most pleasing images available to me in the form of star musicianhood.

 

Concurrently, I wrote a list of all the current outlets I am directing my energy toward:

 

1. Songwriting

2. Guitar technique improvement

3. Maintenance of drumming skill

4. Recording of songs/EP production

5. Development of a live show: practicing, setlists, advertising, etc

6. Learning basic piano

7. Voice improvement

8. Maintenance of a healthy vegan lifestyle

9. Expanding culinary skill

10. Development and Maintenance of a sustainable exercise plan

11. Finding a new drumset and possibly a classical guitar

12. Development of interpersonal skill / Meeting excellent girls

13. Building a social circle

14. French Fluency

15. Spanish Fluency

16. Maintaining a respectable GPA

17. Managing finances / in and outflow

18. Working on lucid dream regularity

19. Learning how to astral travel

20. Adopting the habit of daily meditation

21. Planning and executing a juice and a water fast in the near future

22. Reading some of the bookshelf of books I haven’t gotten to

 

 

These may or may not have similar motivations of perfection, for I have not analyzed them all. As a whole though, they converge to create a very serious image, very high and demanding.

I thought a strange thought: How much of my life, of my thoughts and corresponding journal entries, songs, diction, dreams, has been in negative reaction to life?  How much have I said that essentially has been a denial of the circumstances of my life and myself at those given moments? How much has been because I have not been meeting up to my expectations of myself, of achieving a focus toward the above interests? I became afraid because I knew that if I looked back upon my journal entries from the past years they would be heavy, tainted with a deep urge to “get there and away from here,” always out of whatever situation and forward in time to a better, more congruent situation. Where everything is perfect, myself included.

 

I am confused as to where I will move next. I have in my hand a bundle of expectations for myself. They represent my highest ideals for my life, the things I am most interested in. There are many other ideals I have had to drop along the way, permanently or temporarily, such as travel plans, weekend camping trips, school clubs, my teenage mountain biking hobby, maintenance of certain friendships and most recently the role of camp in my life. I remember these as I ponder my next decision.

 

I have been told that I take on too much. From what I have just wrote, I’m sure that’s true. I can’t help it though. I’m just too interested in everything. The world is a beautiful temptress. Whether it’s the boundless wealth of the internet, books, other people, music or nature, or much anything else for that matter, I become enraptured very quickly. Thus I tend to rocket off in simultaneous directions at once, as the above list demonstrates. Then I come to the point I’m at now, where I cannot possibly satisfy my expectations to excel in each interest. I’m both an adventurer and a perfectionist, which has gotten me in trouble.  It’s a dangerous combination.

The simple answer is to drop some of my interests. Perhaps this is the right one, as Ockcam’s Razor would suggest. But it is also a very painful answer. Giving up one or more of these interests just creates pain in my mind. It’s like I’m doing an injustice to that thing and myself. I cannot explain it eloquently. I just feel emotional pain when faced with having to give up an interest, for most often my heart has led me to these things. But the question that begs is whether it is less than the pain of falling short of my own expectation.

 

Another option that perhaps needs to be combined with the first is to attempt to relax. I tend to want everything to happen immediately. I suppose the unconscious connection is that if everything happened immediately, I would be happy. Of course this is illogical. Imagine if you had only 10 of the world’s best fireworks, created by a mad pyrotechnic genius, for your new years party. Exploding them all at once would mean you would be bound to miss their individual subtleties and visual gifts. It would be one big messy sky for about 30 seconds, and that would be that.

 

Obviously I understand this contradiction of reason in my thinking. But it’s so sneaky, I just succumb to the wanting of perfection in an instant. If only I could astral travel tonight, after cooking the best vegan meal ever, cleaning the apartment, doing all my homework, going for a 10 km run, writing a song, recording it, calling up this girl, reading half of some book and buying the week’s groceries. If only.

 

Some of these interests I demand more from. My body is probably the primary, followed by my career/musical interests, then school, then girls, and on. Lucid dreaming and finding a drumset are lower on the list, but still, after all the time and energy is used up and I find I haven’t moved these things forward at all in 6 months, the frustration builds.

 

I just want to be happy like everyone else. Mabye I place too much emphasis on the outside world and not enough in just relaxing. My mother often wonders aloud to me on whether I have forgotten how to relax. Some people smoke pot, others watch tv for a while, or walk the dog, or go to the pub for a drink. She’s right, though, because mostly every action I take is imbued with a sense of advancement, as in, it needs to be furthering my goals or it’s not legitimate. I can’t really think of anything I do that doesn’t, apart from facebook, which is largely discursive.

 

I find this complicated. I cannot draw this to a pleasing conclusion. My dedication to my interests combined with my perfectionist nature allows little room to move. I believe my perfectionism is a place to start. The ability to relax must be allowed to flow back into my life. The perfectionism basically is a future seeking action, and so if I surrender the hope of the future and the constant movement toward it I may have success. This is still awkward and will require additional distillation in my mind over the next however many days.

Dear Heather

The moonlight, dim and calm

Like puddles after the rain

Storm, storm away

Off the South China Sea

I am wrapped in chocolate;

A learning expectancy

Yearning like no other.

Lately

So I’ve decided to have a go at this whole open thought thing again, even if it just turns out to be a one-off post. Alot of water has flown under the bridge since I finished riding my last stream of consciousness. I guess I haven’t felt like putting myself out there again until now.  

I was looking at my old blog just now, the one I’ve forgotten the password for. It appears foreign to me. While I can vaguely remember thinking those thoughts, I can’t really believe myself in many instances. Like mabye I was writing so that certain people would read it and think something about me, like how interesting all of the things I had to say were. The writings appear contrived. In a way I’m glad  I forgot the password. 

In any case, I wanna make a fresh start in this club. It’s April now. Already. I practically just got back here. As some of you know, I’m very excited to leave again, for good. While the year has yielded some jewels of experience, they have admittedly been of the personal, introspective type. In other words, I’m not sure how much outward progress has been achieved, and that’s been frustrating. The environment has not been conducive to my creativity. I’ve been consumed by pithy acquaintanceships, irrelevant courses and the ever-astounding antics of this madhouse residence. I don’t want to spend too much time on these things though. Now that the light at the end of the tunnel is growing stronger every day, it doesn’t seem worth it to dwell further on the darkness. 

So, what to speak of then? The Future? Well…

I’ve been waking up to my obsession with “what’s to come.” It’s gotten to the point that this could almost come off as cliche. “Yeah…okay, we’re supposed to stay in this big “now” moment and it’s all going to roll out. Been there, done that.” Think what you will.  

About a month ago, I was consumed by my to-do list. It was always burgeoning. I wrote a new one every 3 days, always trying to get the next thing done. This was probably necessary for my efficiency, but it lead to an overwhelming focus on the future. When it came time to start looking for summer jobs, apartments, choose my next university, etc, it was like looking at a photograph of myself staring at an oncoming tidal wave, doubled up and set to strike. Except it never did strike. Always stalled in “just about to happen,” just about to get figured out, if I get this done, then I’ll be able to go there, or do that, or see her again, or whatever. Constantly, plans, possibilities, dreams and fears were being stirred up with each other in a massive vat of confusion. I would put on my tapes of Terence Mckenna just to get my mind onto something else (DMT, Ayahuasca and Psychedelic Mushroom neo-shamanism, as it were). That was interesting as hell, and sort of tweaked my perspective on natural drugs – I had completely blown them off before without a thought – but it didn’t really help me make my decisions. Everything was still a very big deal, all the time. Luckily, and the mechanics of this are just now starting to make sense to me, I never had  a problem getting to sleep. As an aside, I seem to be blessed with a gift for falling asleep. Ha ha. No really, everyone in this particular psychiatric ward has insomnia, or so it seems. I wake up to take a leak and everyone’s doing laundry or making KD or love. I stumble back to bed, baffled. Asleep in 5 seconds. I suppose I’m pretty lucky in that department.

Continuing on. I was getting stressed out. It seems so long ago now, but even New York was a haul. It amplified my desire to get to the future – fast – I think on account of everyone else who was there thinking the same thing. It’s a very forward thinking city, in a hurry, cold-faced in many ways. When I returned from this trip, my landing gear was pretty shot up. I had to face my decisions again, except that I now believed that time was closing in with increasing ferocity. The question of summer loomed. Late phone calls to Victoria and home, speculations, ideas, fears, impossible wishes, burning desires (Get to Haida Gwaii at all costs), creative starvation, longing for space, everything was a huge deal. If I didn’t get things figured out right, I risked losing my summer to the black hole of unmet expectation. I only had one chance. Welcome to Hollywood.

This is where it gets blurry. I believe at some point I may have given up just enough for life to come through. All along I was being told to chill out and let things ride out a little bit, drop my gargantuan expectations of myself and the future, and afford a shred of faith. My intuition was sick from yelling at me and not being heard. Finally, probably overnight (most things happen overnight), I eased up just enough for the idea of a simpler summer to come through. My mother and I discussed how we had overlooked the great and unnecessary costs associated with summer apartment living, and I swung back round to coming home and, as she put it, “enjoying a psychic rest.” Bike to work, play guitar into the night, hike on the weekends, go out to Victoria for August. I eased up and out of worry just a little. Many unanswered questions still ran rampant.

Then I got the idea to apply for camp. I had an interview for Hector, the one in Kananaskis. I was offered the job I wanted, and I’m sitting on it right now. Then I called up Thunderbird and had an interview with them, yesterday. It went far better in my opinion, but I won’t hear back for probably a week. I want this job passionately. If I was hired, I would go on a 4 day wilderness backpack and a 6 day kayak trip, for training, followed by 8 paid weeks of leading 13-15 year old kids on similar trips. Like before, I have become consumed with the possibility of making the summer hit. This time though, some alarm bells went off. And I listened. They mentioned the danger of becoming attached to any idea. My mind went to the other, consistent battle I have fought with myself over the pros and cons of seeking a relationship. The same idea applied. I thought of my creativity and how I would nuture it this fall, what kind of situation I would set up in an ideal world, and how badly I wanted it. I thought of Haida Gwaii, girls I can’t get off my mind, guitars I want to play, the unwritten songs, surf trips…

This happened today in Odell Park. Odell Park is the true jewel of Fredericton. It’s one of the only things I’ll miss here. The energy is astoundingly clear. It’s perfect for distilling my mind; I walk there often, through the cedars and deep snow, alone and safe. It’s one of the best parks I’ve ever had the luck to find. I always say a prayer of thanks upon my departure.

Before my departure; on my entrance, actually, these thoughts brewed. Then it crept up on me, the realization. It was difficult to pin. It still is. As far as I can describe it though, it was the knowing that in order to move forward, it was my responsibility to release this plethora of future thoughts. I thought of who I would be releasing to. I had meditated a couple days earlier and received an image of me standing unclenched, lightly smiling, releasing. Releasing. I remembered that and it didn’t matter so much who I was releasing to. I told myself, “the divine timing of God, if no one else.” That fit.

If this is all absurd, I don’t mind. I can feel a change in my outlook subtly occurring, and it’s very welcome. This process may be augmented by the relief that the year is now but glowing embers; thats fine with me too. The point of it all is that I’m finally getting it. It. That life is not the future, and that it actually is contrary to logical thinking to not have faith in the divine workings of situation and circumstance. My previous life experience is a bulk of supporting evidence for some sort of great, mysterious timing. It’s fascinating.

I hope to keep this subtle momentum. I realize that things are either meant to be, or they are not. My fight against this truth and my constant clenching at what I believe is best has yielded lukewarm results, whereas whenever I have been forced or chose out of my own accord to float downstream with life, wonderful things have occurred. 

O Life, let me move with grace, supported by faith, allowing what is to come with a simple “Yes.”