Hey, Ju Ju
These nights are full of autumn air & as far as this beard is concerned the summer is over. Good riddance to the summer’s sticky wavering of air & wet heat. I am at my best in the fall when things are crisp & clear. Already though I have warmed my mouth too many times on Elanor’s lips (Yes, I name my pipes too… Elanor is from Tolkien; it combines the Sindarin words for star & sun, and is the name of a flower in Lórien with gold & silver-petaled blooms on the same plant & sometimes even the two combined). Already I have taken too much of her sweet smoke into my lungs, and I know that there are many more nights to come of sending cavendish circles into the cloudy sky.
Beard racers, there is not much to report. The words I had about the aftermath of Irene & of the days & days & days I neglected the blog are behind me. I have moved on. I finished Blue Highways, in case I never mentioned it, & it was a joyous & sad moment; a moment of knowing, of love, & understanding that I know will all eventually leak away into forgetting. It was a moment of ings, it appears, & now I have ventured into more dangerous territory.
If Blue Highways was a test of my willpower, a test to see whether the remembering would tempt me to the places Least Heat Moon & I had both known, then On the Road is a test of my soul; a test to see what will come of all this newness & raw truth. Savannah tells me it will destroy the impulses that hold me back from becoming a traveler again. The rational fraction of my brain, however obscured, is terrified.
I’m still not sure that I’m ready to be reading this, and I think that somewhere in the twists and curves of my mind I knew that it would be a rough road once I set out on it. I’m committed now though & more than halfway through & I’ve only grown slightly madder. Still, sometimes, if I read it for too long at a go, it feels like my soul is being yanked around like a spider in the wind, & every thread I set just fails me.
I think that this will be a short blog, my loyal little beards, & probably you won’t mind that too much. There is another pipe waiting for me in a few minutes, and a bottle of spiced pumpkin beer to be had. And now there are fireworks across the river & I can see them in the water & the sky – these quick thunders of incendiary light are harmonies to my heat lightning heart.
I will leave you with words beardlings; weird, unedited, halfpoemed words fresh from the almostended notebook #39: (Click me to tumblrtravel to the future where this will be audio, not written words...)