zen = amnesia = book = notes = type = profile = nhwc = px
43things = soma = three dog party = fotolog = host

the wind coins new words which i promptly forget...

i've been listening to a lot of 'magnolia electric company' and 'songs:ohia' as i drive around western massachusetts lately... cycles of fog and night and afternoons with green bleeding into all shapes and on every plane--more shades of green than my human eyes can even perceive (they almost weep from the squandered excess)... and fog again and roiling cloudbanks fueled by the blue sky's fits of modesty and then unabashed blue punctuated only by the whims of birds...

i must not become seduced by the images in my rearview mirror, where the stark silhoutte of a barn against the hillside seems perfectly composed/framed like a still photo or painting and invites close and focused observation (and oh how my memories are similarly seductive, similarly tempt me into a ceasing of forward motion!)... and all the while, day or night, the air rushing through my windows imbeds particles of summer into my nose, ears, eyes and makes my hair dance the timeless medusa no hat or headband has ever fully tamed.

when the cars are mostly all asleep and stoplights trade their 3 colors in for the metronome of orange, cicadas and peeper frogs impersonate the cadence of machines, clicking and chirping in mechanical harmony with the blinking light. their nighttime is a factory of sound producing memories... copious memories from sleep-away camps stretching into infinity (way back to the sleep-away camps of dinosaurs, where wee stegosauruses drank primordial-soup instead of the modern generic bugjuice-punch of ambiguous fruit-flavoring and intense artificial crimson dye). i remember soggy sleeping bags laden with dew (the emission of dusk), the once-excruciating homesickness for one's own bedroom, and melancholy vespers punctuated by mosquito bites.

in korea when i'd ride my scooter around i would often repeat to myself, "wow, i am really here in korea. this is real. take it in..." and yet somehow i felt that physical visceral reality of sea and mountains could never entirely perforate the membrane of disbelief. korea, for the most part, remained dreamy. when it was not full-on dream caliber strange-feeling, it was laced with the sort of disorientation one has upon first waking, when through eyes gunked with the remnants of sleep one stumbles to the bathroom and the sensation of the floor under ones bare feet seems oddly unreal and somehow only the flow of urine itself, the grounding nature of such a physical act rarely performed in dreams, alerts one to the reality of being awake....

well, now i feel this sense here in new england, too... and so i drive. in order to digest this current reality, i need motion--it has enzymatic properties it would seem... strapped into the cockpit of my subaru station wagon (appropriately liberal-minded bumper stickers keeping the tail-lights company, smugly declaring their agendas to the captive blacktop), i trail my arm out the open window and the music collides with night air, my fingers register the cool resistence of space, and with time it all merges until the car and the smells of exhaling plants and the lyrics and my own self are just one limitless 'now' and i feel at least for a moment, that i am home (in myself, in the universe).

before = after