somewhere north of dusk

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THE PRESS NEEDS A NEW IDOL TO WORSHIP EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES. IF YOU PLAY YOUR CARDS RIGHT, IT COULD BE YOU!

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One Week In

Before I moved into the city, my barber warned me about all the weirdos on the bus. As a weirdo, I took offense quietly without raising a fuss, as I did not want to put my hair in danger of retaliation.

I know that one day someone mean-spirited will raise their voice at the bus driver, but so far, all I have seen is kindness, and the driver greeting his friend on the crosswalk, and old ladies shouting delighted good mornings as they settle down for their daily route.

I walked down Fifth Avenue in the rain, and barely anyone had umbrellas, which is enough for me to feel instinctive community.

During the rain, the rooftop patio was an invisible garden where invisible flowers were more fragrant than ever. They shivered (the good kind of shivering, like when you hear a piece of beautiful music) from the same rain falling on their distant cousins across the Sound and in the windswept towering mountains, where the flowers are more visible and just as fragrant. I saw the peaks sunk back in the rainclouds, and this made them feel less lonely, and for a little while, they felt like part of the city, even though their heights are much wilder and enduring than any of the peaks in the skyline. I felt cozy, and I imagine that someone in their tent somewhere in the trees and hills felt cozy too.

At night I see city lights from my window, and they lose order as they disappear toward the horizon. Nearby the cranes are sentinels of order and economy, their lights perfectly aligned. But to the south, the lights condense into industrial nebulae, all horizontal and vertical inclinations lost to the warp of distance.

There is so much else to explore.

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Upstream Color [my thoughts]

Trying to work out my thoughts about my re-watch of Upstream Color. This is a story where a state of hypnotized suggestibility inflicted by parasitic worms works as a metaphor for emotional vulnerability in abusive relationships; where the transplantation of these worms into pigs (a process that seems a perversion of Jesus casting demons out into a herd of swine) creates a psychic link that causes the central characters - Kris and Jeff - to suffer feelings they cannot explain, representing the traumatic residue of the past intruding into present recovery; where a Sampler harvests sound effects from the environment and imposes them on Kris and Jeff through the psychic channel of the pigs, elevating the trauma of the past into the aural plane; where Kris and Jeff rehabilitate their emotions by recasting formerly parasitic gestures (such as forcing someone to copy out the text of Walden) into mutual experiences (such as reading Walden to each other); and where they finally assume ownership of their past by killing the Sampler and ending the cycle that will send more parasites out into the world. We see Kris cradling a piglet, seeming to embrace and nurture the new life that has emerged from the past. In short, there’s really nothing else like Upstream Color. 

One of the most affecting moments is when the Sampler drowns the piglets, and Kris and Jeff react by holding each other in the bathtub, struck by a sort of inexplicable grief for the loss of a child they never had. A blue mist escapes the underwater corpses of the piglets and washes downstream to color the orchids that will allow the parasites to grow again. It’s the inevitability of memory, the idea that the past must always wash downstream to become a part of your identity. And yet, Kris and Jeff seem able to change how they let the past mold them. As the film’s tagline says, “You can change your story’s shape, but the color will always bloom upstream.” They begin to find a kind of mystic synchrony, like the two boys who effortlessly match body motions in the opening scenes. They begin to share the same childhood memories. And that synchrony comes through in the form, too; one of my co-watchers noted that this film works as a fugue, both musically and psychologically. Images occur and then develop through repetition in different modes, until all the images interweave and become more difficult to decipher. There’s a quality to some of the images that transcends my admittedly oversimplified reading of the themes, like when Kris and Jeff watch birds flocking upward in perfectly choreographed swirls. There’s something about the order in the chaos that seems important, but that doesn’t capture the whole feeling of the image. The image moves beyond that, which is the point of film as a medium, I suppose: why try to tell something if you could show it instead?

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The problem with the NFL protests has nothing to do with the protests themselves; it’s that the people who need to hear this message (cough the right wing) are talking about the protests instead of listening to them. Don’t make a fuss about disrespecting the flag in order to avoid talking about racism, especially not if you’re wearing an American flag T-shirt or if you buy American flag styrofoam plates for your Fourth of July party. That, unlike kneeling during the national anthem, is against the flag code. How about we listen to people and focus on what they’re saying instead of how they’re saying it. HAVE SOME EMPATHY FOR ONCE, AMERICA

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i. the front yard

look how far down the driveway I can ride and still hear you reading aloud. look how my tire rolls up onto the curb. I can ride at dusk when the neighbor kids have a kind of halo from the incandescence in their garages. the timer for the street lights is late tonight. our spokes whirl up the particles of dusk and spin them into pinwheels of lost sunlight. you have to put away your gardening tools now, but the night is too warm for sleep. curses, I say, curses. I shouldn’t say that. I shouldn’t say that. the sprinkler is cold cold cold and makes my shirt heavy and makes the grass well up, and look, look, the droplets flock up into the understanding breath of the night. their murmuration evaporates. their vapor mists my eyes with the kind of mist that belongs in mountain forests and far-off countries and beneath the wingtips of storybook dragons.

in daytime the plum tree is good for spying from, in case the black and white dog got loose again. I can go faster than you think, even though my tires are smaller, and I can spread my arms even when I stand on the pedals. on Thursday mornings I can dodge the trash cans on the sidewalk, but you can’t even dodge the garage door. dent. tuck your shoelaces in, or they might get caught in the chain. when it’s only me, the street starts to fade out as I circle and circle and the stories in my head give an unseen color to the sidewalk and the overcast. the streets are empty except for good and evil from other worlds. what, I wonder, is on the other side of the sky? especially when the trees are red and orange gateways before dusk, what is on the other side of the sky?

to taste the seasons, I have to pedal down the street as fast as I can and open my mouth to fill my lungs. October is the flavor of grey clouds and unlit jack-o-lanterns and the chilly breeze that must creak the rafters of haunted houses in some secret neighborhood nearby. I hear it all when my tires whip over leaves. on Halloween, candles in paper bags will line the curb and keep me from swerving into the street. later my fingers will be numb and I will breathe again and see frosted lights strung across gutters and eaves. a spaceman would look and see an LED constellation of many colors. from the shape of my neighborhood, he might name it after a horse or even a brontosaurus missing its tail. but his wonder would not equal mine.

even later summer air is gentler, and mixed with sunbeams it patches the cracks between leaves, an invisible mortar. drink the warm air and the milk of stars, eight minutes old, cooling fast. drink from the flask of whiskey with the Celtic knot: just enough to make my chest warm, I say, lying, lying spreadeagle on the driveway. she smiles. someone laughs. let’s walk to the bench, then, or the reservoir, and the stars will shine down all the brighter. let’s walk to the high school and its lone stadium light that tries to outmatch the stars. let’s find somewhere better than the neighbor’s garbage can to hide the bottlecaps. let’s just walk, and the streetlights will be ailing stars demoted to the service of our neighborhood. bean bags on the driveway and a blender on the front porch, a purplish cyclone of frozen fruit and chocolate milk. manycolored lights in the sky, as if the LED constellation exploded to celebrate our nation’s birth. the air that was pure is sulfur and saltpeter now. the fuse burning. she’s arcing upside down through empty space and the memory of droplets flocking like birds. the pressure escaping a newly lidless bottle of cider. mint and crimson fire exploding upward. a broken wrist. the tires brake hard, and here I am again, on the border between the garage and the driveway. the threshold between the warmth of comfort and the warmth of freedom. I dial a number by instinct: we’ll both walk and meet in the middle, at a different border, one we may not understand yet. we’ll walk and see how far these roads will take us or if they’ll just take us home. we’ll walk, and our words will evaporate in the air and whatever is left of them will float up toward nameless stars.

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all time best

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Billy Pilgrim says the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures either. They see them as great millepedes - 'with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other,' says Billy Pilgrim.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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when I joined tumblr, they neglected to give me a little disclaimer explaining that fuckyeahmountains stopped posting in March of 2013

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Yeah so uh this little story about an animated anthropomorphic alcoholic horse has pretty much turned out to be the most insightful and sympathetic confrontation of depression and self-loathing that has ever snuck its way into a comedy show conveniently packaged into 25-minute episodes for mainstream audiences - or really, into any show. Not to mention the stunning character development of the other characters aside from BoJack. Not to mention the cutting satire of Hollywood and contemporary political issues that leaves almost no one unsatirized. Not to mention that it’s all fused with some of 2017′s most witty and consistently amusing comedy, including but not limited to subtle visual jokes and impossibly obscure media references and impossibly elaborate rhyme schemes. Not to mention that I’m only HALFWAY through the season and know the best is yet to come.

“Piece of shit. Stupid piece of shit. You’re a stupid piece of shit.”

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It was decent, except why did the soundtrack of EVERY SINGLE horror scene have to be dissonant strings getting louder

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quiet beneath Babel

driving over the Columbia I see through smudges and bugstains on the windshield and I see the immense onrolling of our national experiment and I see early December days spent in the library and I see you looking up, a little tired, right when the glow around you was tucked back behind your ears and someone blew out a candle: your eyes, moons, reflecting light from a secret sun. I cross the Vantage bridge and like most bridges, it is a piano string tuned tight enough to sew together banks and coasts and even continents, and like most bridges, it is a scrap of thread in a ragwork attempt at mending. and like piano string, it sings, and the song I hear this afternoon is dissonance, is clapcracklebang, blacknblue, choking, thrumming. warhead hum and tire screech. the huddled knuckles of a foreign knock muffled by drumbeats: we run aimless down the warpath. knock, and it shall be opened. can it be opened against the towering, the babbling song that builds walls with its sound and flames crosses with its heat? it is not the song we have sung, but it is the song to which we have listened, and the voices left unheard are still and small. is it right to hear your voice instead? is it right to dream new suns for your eyes? is it right to give myself again? is it right to give up? yes. I’ll sit on the first step of Babel and look for you in a crowd of lookers, but you won’t be there. you’ll be playing a quiet song again. I’ll be looking instead of listening. I’ll be looking for a new listener: the listener I should have spoken to all along, and into his hands I will commend my spirit. into his ears I will speak the words I do not deserve, which are not mine. this song, confused as all languages, has overpowered and burdened my ears; but he is coda. he is mender. he is opener, and when it opens, there will be silence in heaven; and let it be so on earth.

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I’m glad Sydney Carton is one of the few characters from nineteenth century literature who has maintained a fanbase of teenage girls

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It pisses me off that it’s impossible to emphasize the word “I” by means of capitalization

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a coast on fire

Cages incandescent in the dusk, burning: houses without fire and without faces in the windowpanes. I breathe invisible clouds of forests now embered, and trees, vapor and swirling, prickle inside my chest, coat my lungs with phantom sap. I will not cry for the forests, but they have forced a mournful cough out of me. They haze over the valley to  reprimand me, and I ask them what they wanted  from me. You could have cried, they say. We needed all the water we could get.