i was

[nowiunderstandx]

django

i was struck today by the measure of space between my window and my desk. 

i fit a white orchid below the 3 legged chair i found on the street. it gently shook in the wind for a moment and then i closed the gap between the sill and the stretch of white painted wood.  

i sat upright in front of my speakers with a pot of black coffee. steam escaped in pirouettes and i began an attempt to chase it with my thoughts. imagined it was 60 years in the past, but nothing had changed because it was still me in my own mind wondering how i might rediscover a song, or myself, or sunshine and the morning paper. 

i took my time seriously and carved out a four by four space in order to capture any intensity. the tall chairs in my kitchen became a desk and i had two stations on either side of me. a guitar in hand and a head full of speed. tom waits said that songs are just things you do with the air. i had every window in the apartment wide open. you must understand how to harness energy

if you want to

the fact that there is only one main room. and you see the front door locked. spend your whole day in here and everything shrinks. how big can a cage be. what if the world was the size of a marble. i never understood sitting at a desk all day for work. but here i was, sitting at a desk all day, working. it's really about space, time, content of work. turn off my internet to shut off the paths outside. once you turn inwards; loneliness is a wilderness. pioneers marching across the old country, heading west, dreams full of gold and hands caked with mud and everything that missed the fingertips. 

once i was in love.  a few times this has happened. i felt very good and very bad, very often. i crystallized my happiness under the dream of everything it could never be. because dreams are just quiet whispers that blow away when night falls and a crescent moon stabs you in the chest.  i better watch myself. i'm wandering from the campsite and not paying attention to my direction. i'm shedding all the essential items of survival in favor of fresh ideas. i could never make it in these relationships because i was and am nobody. i am whatever i have done and thought. up to this point. but now that i am here, at this point, im gone. i can still smell and taste but i need to remind myself of my body. so i grab my skin bare. someone else used to do this for me. i lose myself. i have not done or thought anything. i press just below my eyes and into my nose, then pull on my ears and breathe deeply. i put on amon tobin and think back to an acid trip in which i performed the same actions. i needed to, in order to remind myself that i was alive. taking an hour long steaming shower was not the answer since i had already taken two of them immediately before. the trip lasted close to 24 hours and it reminded me of life, which had lasted close to 24 years. 

during heavy hallucinations there is not much to grab hold of except your body and your conviction. life unfolds in front of you like a red carpet roll and you need to throw your arm out every once and a while and cut through the fucking thing. to create an explosion. to make sure someone else knows that yes, you were here, and there. not knowing didn't stop you. because at any given moment you can stop the world (or so don juan says). 

i sat on the staircase smoking furiously, realizing that certain elements allowed me to place myself spatially within the world. perhaps my feet were not on the ground but there was smoke in my lungs. i had lungs. i had smoke. i held fire. 

when i look back again on love i remember hotel rooms and traveling, an eagerness for culture that was sadly anchored in the man i was back home. travel must always be light and quick. in few pockets can you reach your hands for a moments rest. there isn't time. anyway, any bit of solitude and solace will be immediately glaring in retrospect, since the rest of the journey was a bolt of lightning. that is how i traveled once, and maybe a few times after that. 

each time you love you kill a big piece of yourself and so you spend time afterwards trying to give birth to something new, in order to survive and become whole again. it is quite beautiful as it happens. like watching a flower start to bloom in the rain. or when nightfall trips over the morning. 

i mean to be quite clear. i have 4 markings on my skin that refer directly to the concept of overcoming. and now that i am falling asleep, i awake/django and think that it doesn't really matter who i am.

"People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does. 

[nopalize]

If you’re going to actually commit to reading this article, this part has to be brief because there are lots of words ahead. As the “curator" of Nopalize, it has never been the intention of this blog to glorify our restaurant. We’ve pretty much stuck to storytelling.-then this. One of our...

[nowiunderstandx]

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

rumi

[nowiunderstandx]

slingshot

[nowiunderstandx]

A remembered relation of spaces, a hole, a circle, a shaded area — and a whole life comes alive. The real appeal of the map, perhaps, is not so much that it stores our past as that it forces our emotions to be pressed into their most parsimonious essence — and, as every poet knows, it is emotion under the force of limits, emotion pressed down and held down to strict formal constraints, that makes for the purest expression. These maps are street haiku, whose emotions, whether made by the well known or the anonymous, are more moving for being so stylized.

gopnik

[nowiunderstandx]

gimmemyvoice

i still hold my lungs in high esteem

breath before the next act

loosen your tie 

ok. i give up. sardines are my preferred lunch twice turned corners notice the salutations 

and hellos building goodbye castles

for the dukes and peasants

let's make this work for everyone

i give up eventually very much nowhere find me in the wasteland yea, april is the cruelest month april is the cruelest month

i drink my wine in soft melodies don't tell me who i am interestingly never in the position to remark  slurp the soft you're voice is strange,  can't you whisper the bending isn't becoming for you

bangs for whimpers lungs for ashes cold tongues encased in brittle...

simmering flawlessness rose mouth, ice frothing lips don't kiss me, I'm a wanderer

[nowiunderstandx]

6.9

struck with a thought

cradled a thought

found  a thought

stumbled upon a thought.

encountered a thought.

inhabited a thought.

lost a thought. fought a thought. still fighting thoughts. thought i thought. gave a thought. or gave a shit. want to think? thinking. i thought.

got a thought?

[raynoll-deactivated20140224]

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

M. Foucault, preface to Anti-Oedipus (via raynoll)

[nowiunderstandx]

Nabokov on reading:

"Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book."

[nowiunderstandx]

you need to eat memories and digest them on a regular basis,

like kale and garlic and wine

[nowiunderstandx]

dream 1

i read a Brodsky poem earlier today,

('i sit by the window')

so of course, 

i moved my chair and pulled back the curtains:

"i said the forest's only part of a tree, 

who needs the whole girl if you've got her knee?"

and i remembered late last evening when i decided to sharpen a few knives,

slow swipes back and forth across japanese stone, 

then stoned,

to bed,

and my dreams largely consisted of this act - sharpening select blades

and cutting white paper suspended in mid-air.

small cuts of life make up Life, 

or maybe Life is only a piece of small cuts,

and the forest's only part of the tree...

[nowiunderstandx]

nin/miller

the days when i witnessed myself as a conductor

and coordinated sweeping passages of my own life

with broomsticks and lullabies of monstrous childhood fears

i feared the day the sun would stop burning at the age of 6

and one can only imagine how petty my fears are now

growing inward, sadly,

preferring to spread out like moss which holds life beneath snow, ice and the driest winters. 

i recently went to the snow for the first time in years. Our cars slid down the hill and missed the driveway on the first night. we rose the following morning to shovel ice and snow from the driveway, tossing massive chunks into the neighbor's territory; we carried firewood on our shoulders and the tops of our heads; we teased darkness, gambled in the wretched outskirts of Nevada and smashed icicles from the edges of our cabin. I cannot recall the last time i laughed so tremendously, three days in a row, my stomach was sore; we tended to a roaring fire which has only now caught up to my soul and ignited some furious desire for life in all its naked intensity and melting. 

*and here begins another attempt to write on a consistent basis in this goddamned blog*

it's now a sharp and bitter san francisco night. listening to sally whitwell play philip glass, reading henry miller's letters to anais nin, flipping pages in "sons and lovers" and finally, after a week away from my apartment....

to bed.

[nowiunderstandx]

li

st make

more

2. other accomplishment

3. hawk siting on thanksgiving

4. armless

5 the solitude of moving forward

6 leaving space ahead of oneself

7 performance

8 photographed music

9 systems of sound

[nowiunderstandx]

o

visionaries

electrifying quilted minds

on the spotted table married to former desires.

lightly walking towards the funny corner wanting peeks lowering my eyes to uncomers

i felt necessity lifting my gaze  into an eye peering deeply

silly games of look, look look like you want something

[nowiunderstandx]

l4

another night and rimbaud turns off my tav

smells the mold in the latrine

i find nearly eleven words to explain my state

nine of which are insufficient and tossed aside for icing on future cakes

pennies on my executive silences

in a stranger's room, late in the dusty afternoon,

john smokes my cigarettes and i nap on my stomach

my mullet hanging into the sleeping box

[nowiunderstandx]

L morn

wendesday lived quietly.

i spent the past four mornings born after sunrise

she quietly sipped on my becoming sleepless

hardly took the time to measure my goodbyes

of swift visions, isolations, victories or sailboats

my sadness was not becoming

undone as i was in the smile of her first eyelid's twitch

when finally i was

no longer as delicate as the beginning encouraged me

being such a thorn as to protrude violently into the sunlight  

cracking through my eastern window

expecting two bodies sprawled

like woodless pioneers

clipping sheets

for winter fires

[nowiunderstandx]

split milk

there was the situation today, 

a morning espresso at matching half with @benjaminlotan

to discuss travel, business, future plans,

not much sleep last night:

lotan working until 7am,

i, drifting off, after intense conversations, at 3:30,

and upon exiting, a little girl was standing in the doorway,

in a puddle of pure white,

wondering why it got on her dress,

the mother anxiously trying to clean everything up

but keeping it cool so the girl wouldn't get upset. 

for the young one it was almost comical, but curious,

and even slightly spectacular, since it was quite a scene, in the doorway of a busy cafe,

and she was right in the middle of it all.

as we left, ben remarked that perhaps 20 years down the line,

that might potentially be her first real memory,

vivid,

wild,

pure white against concrete and doormats

grey and windy san francisco swaying curtains in the background of her childhood