saltwater

we walked along cobblestone streets, gaslights burning above the doors of colonial houses. the air was warm and wet, with all sorts of old moldy, salty smells to it. the sun was doing it's thing, going down, turning the cumulus clouds a bright red-orange. my sister and i walked toward the Battery, a few miles south from the King's Courtyard Inn.

we talked about you, you know. it's been awhile since we had really talked, so all the time capsules were opened and perused. we passed all the closed stores of King street, some with display lights begging our return in the morning, others just dark and nothing else. brick houses everywhere. ivy on the brick, white fountains in private courtyards. everyone seems to own a steel gate with a code pad here. i don't know who they're afraid of--barely anyone was out. not even the homeless. the emptiness of the streets would have been frightening, or maybe only threatening, if it hadn't been for the muggy Charleston air. it was the assailant. it alone was on the prowl.

but we talked about you, in an effort to try to fix something. i did my best before, and i have to say i did a decent job. but there is still work to be done after all, because tonight i realized something. standing on the concrete boardwalk of the Battery, looking out at the dark water, the black sky, the moving lights on the water, the glare from the lighthouse, i realized something. i felt the tip of it immediately when you left, and the blade sank deep in the months that followed. but what i realized tonight was that there is a gap, a new void, a wound created when the knife is withdrawn. i realized this while watching the black water create white foam on the rocks below the boardwalk, sucking on my own tears.

it was a quiet walk back to the inn. when the only thing to do and the hardest thing to do are the same, we don't have too many options, do we?

i still have visions of the beautiful northwest. reminders find their way to me, though i have not called to them. the clear air, the pine trees. i know i have to return some day, on my own terms and for my own reasons. this way that i'm living just won't do. many days i don't even realize that i'm living my life. i don't even realize that i'm hanging by my feet from a globe suspended in space by gravity, that i have any influence on anything, that i could. in fact, as sad as it is, many days i don't quite care.

but don't worry. trust me. i read my blog more than anyone else in the world. i'll read this ten times and analyze myself and figure out what's wrong with me. this is just the whimper over salt in the wound.

i believe that charleston is haunted with history and thought.

i finished the dharma bums today, and i think i might have a new favorite book. my old favorite was...well, anything by j.m. barrie. but dharma bums has such a poetic prose feel to it, the kind i would probably write in if i ever wrote a book, and it was a fantastic read. even though it took me two months.

impressing impressions

there will be a base. there is always some way of seeing it. this. always so easy to step back and understand or stand and see. i write words because i like them. ah, the whole world falls asleep on me every night and then i'm left sitting there and here. what is the stars? what is the moon? take off your moleskin trousers and your coat. did you see where i put my papers? there was a being who grew up somewhere and learned things but specifically how to make the glass that holds my water. what a path that must have been, that story never told, and who was that being? we are unaware of infinite stories. the stories we see push and shove their way to be noticed and known, but there are others. these other stories and similar sorts of things cripple me. the unimportant untold. it makes me cry for the whole silence of it. i don't like by the way the clarity of my writing. whether it is unclear or too clear after all i don't like it. i like more than it the movie in the background where all the characters have unintelligible irish accents and the fuzz sound of all old black and white movies fills the space between the flubba lubba dialogue. and a scene of a view out a window, staring at a downpour, and the sound of tommy gunshots. i can't even tell you what this movie is about. i think the theme of the story is the overwhelming nature of gray noise. crackle crackle crackle shhhhrrrrhh. i'm can hardly believe this is hitchcock.

i had a conversation with a co-worker a day or two ago. it was enlivening to talk about the soul-sapping nature of perpetual broke-ness, of working to fuel the materialistic cycle that we didn't want to be in in the first place. our desires to live in...

... a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures...
-j.k.

...oh, yeah...that's just the utopian-minded beat people at it again...with their ideas of simple peace. the world isn't that simple. we have to have our east bank/west bank divisions. we have to protest and judge and think down upon and distrust...others, those others whoever they are.

i know i want to travel the world. it has beauty that i may never get to see. it holds sub-heavenly, yes, but hearts-softening things that i would like to see. but there are all those threats. i was born in the states, therefore 75% of the world dislikes me because of four words on my passport: united states of america. without even meeting me. before knowing that i would love to meet everyone on this planet, see how they're doing, who they are. everyone.

this is a sad state of affairs. or am i making excuses. hiding behind little fears?

my co-worker asked me, almost in tears, what it did to me to lose the only love i had loved. didn't it ruin something in you, didn't it change you inside, didn't it harden you and break something, how did you make it through, how did you go on? he said all this with a passionate red face, speaking from experience, and relating, and sympathizing. and i answered his questions with the best answers, the most honest ones, that i could give, but honestly felt weak or broken or empty for obviously feeling less passion about it, about other things too, than he showed.

the walls form on their own. they say the great wall of china can be seen from space. it was built by slaves over years and years and years, but it was built by someone, for some reason. he asked if it made walls form around my insides, my center, my heart, soul, hopes, feelings, dreams. it did, but these walls were not built by someone for some reason. they simply became. they arrived and they exist. some call it lessons learned and others call it defense mechanisms. maybe they are just memories with minds of their own, more capable than we might think.

but he wanted to leave his three jobs and pursue his dream of teaching english in africa. i told him to go for it, of course. we share the same feeling of slaving for no reason at all, burning away, growing old, and watching our friends grow up and blow away. it really is a pathetic/desperate state to be in, to have an overflowing heart in a city of deaf ears.

but i don't know. i ask myself if it's all a bluff. an attempt to find some specific kind of so-and-so. yes, the years are burning away, maybe faster than we think. all the people who've walked this earth, from the first to the last...who has really understood the brevity of our state? little puffs of worry and concern. spitting and sweating over relative blinks of the eye.

ex·is·ten·tial·ism (ěg'zĭ-stěn'shə-lĭz'əm, ěk'sĭ-)
n. A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts.

i had the wrong understanding of that term. i thought it meant more of a perspective which tends to be skeptical, but more importantly stands back from everything....everything... and tries to figure out what really is happening. i thought it to be the nature of doubters, which i thought i was at times. but this definition seems much more atheistic than i thought the term was. this uniqueness and individual power to determine. why be so prideful? it's a ridiculous idea. why? because it makes it easier for some people to sleep to slip into a life of self-defining yourself and everything. plus, you can be self-righteous about the fact that at least i'm not a nihilist.

but what we realized is that we are not happy with the way things are. with the way that we work to be broke, the way we love to be unwanted. it would be easy to get sidetracked in laughter at the ridiculousness of it.

but still we try. millions and billions and thousands of people keep plugging along, trying. who are we to do any different, to sit thinking sadly of anything or any other way that would be better? the world feels too worn and numb for any sort of revolution. we have our two political parties, it's simple us versus them, vote A or B. we have our wendy's, our Volkswagens, ours strip mall nail salons, our wal-marts and french fries, our theater blockbusters, our talk radio, or endless Web sites to tell us anything we want to hear, our low fat cheeses, our carpet cleaners, our business expressways to clog with our cars...

ask yourself this...and i do every time i see it... why does it seem weird to see someone walking on the side of the road? this might seem ok in places like new york city, l.a., seattle, san francisco, chicago. it's ok to walk places in big cities where having a car is a burden.

maybe it's just me. but i know that families in guatemala would walk miles through the mountains to go to church. and it's weird to walk a couple miles to the store? is it? is it just me? i just worry where this country is going, not really for political reasons...just human reasons. i have this sense of some mass group think across the lands of our country just dumbing down and losing meaning and changing for the worse all that we could enjoy about being a nation of people. supersizing their fries and apathy and expecting their morning starbucks run to be like a dash through mcdonalds.

slow down, people. do something of value. mean something. love people. and i don't mean annihilate yourself trying to love every being on the earth. start with the people around you. the people you actually see every day. the people you think about between thoughts. give these people everything you have. the kid that makes your coffee. the slack worker in your department. the person next to you at night.

i dunno. this is what i try to do. i'm too practical sometimes. but my friend and i will both be 27 this year, and we're worried. he said, with mild profanities, that if he died today and looked back on his life he would be depressed by how little he did that was of real value. and i agreed. 27 years of always working for something in the future. school to prepare us for a job to earn us money to buy us things to trap us.

ugh.

my candles have been burning faithfully for several hours. i think i'll give them a rest, and join them in their sleep.

the question of: audience

you told me you loved me
that i'd never die alone
hand over your heart, let's go home
-kings of leon

who is that this that you are, that you've become?
these theses arrive at a weak thesis, therefore:
god, glory, gold. displace my experience to a simple
hypothetical or a distant historical. do you see?
but suddenly it is no longer you, the ears,
the consciousness pandered to or pondered,
already existence fretting to another deity.
however: honest, to be truthful, honestly being,
and this line already passed on to another,
transition taking place as if facts were faced,
to: hello there. i once met you somewhere,
learned oh such-and-such more about what, your
brilliant this and how you judge and handle
all the forever this-and-thats. now please.
where i stand thinking, this side of everything
that i face, as if toward, as if knowing,
as if the peripheral blinders were put on:
(eventually i'll shake this perpetual reverting)

dear someone else, i am expandingly full of me
and before you know i exist, you already deserve
all your favorite apologies. the ones that work.
this this that i am, this me, forgive me.

but there are waiting days, if not tuesdays
then fridays, or some days or sundays. and if i
only lay here in my creaking bed, if i do nothing else,
or if i contract my muscles, run to the end of:
dry land, solid matter, neutrons, crooked thoughts,
painted things on dusty shelves in a dream,
if i do nothing or if everything i can do i do,
then who are you? where do you find yourself
existing in your current state with life
in your allness for a time? what i want to know is--
what i mean is... who are you and
what is going on?

is this the root of how we exist?

you were a sixth child of nine.
you were a hair stylist in the bronx because don't they need one?
you were a runaway child who never found anything better.
you were a success and bitter on the same day.
you were a gorgeous this and a decent that.
you were a story one friend told another.

and somehow in the evening there is a still water.
let us never be used up and shown the door.

"...hey, you've got to hide your love away..."

i missed the exit for hwy 64 somehow. accidentally drove to sanford on the 421. and so my short cut was 20 minutes longer than the long way home. now after watching the lady in white, and the time closing in on 4am, i find myself here. two scary movies in one day...the other being the uninvited...and i don't even like scary movies. especially before i sleep alone. i'm a big baby about it, really.

i recorded a cover of "king of wishful thinking" last week. i remember driving down a certain road in raleigh a few years ago thinking that it would be a fun song to learn. i think there are a lot of '80s songs that would make good covers, good acoustic songs played by other artists. however, rascal flatts's version of "life is a highway" is an example of how to make a song worse.

i'm really starting to feel like people have more in common with each other than they might think at first. by "people", i mean everyone. try digging deeper with people. i see it all the time at starbucks. customer walks in. customer appears reserved/distracted/grumpy/etc. a simple "yada yada yada...so, do you have any big plans this weekend?" triggers a conversation, and i find out that this person is going to do such and such and knows some other person who is a friend of my friend. and what i get out of it is the feeling that the world is not so big...as to be afraid of it, anyway.

i almost started this post off by listing all the strange things that women have said to me over the years. but the contents of that list would require too much explanation, and it wouldn't be just a list anymore. one of the strangest things i've heard--and i've heard this several times--is that i'm too nice. it might be true if it can be true. it doesn't really make sense to me. But, i think women want a nice, wild, dependable, bad man. unfortunately, only they know what that means.

in 1994, i had big, gold-framed glasses. that is amazing to me.

i guess it's time to sleep.

i sit here waiting for hot dogs to thaw. they are rochester dogs. zweigle's: since 1880. "Famous Quality Hot Dogs, Sausages and Meat Products for Over 125 Years!" they say. i think i'll cook them in todd's three philosophers, also a product of NY.

this is an example of lacking transition, moving straight to: my brain jumps madly. professors and theory and editors and peers stress transitioning from paragraph to paragraph. look. i can. but no one's paying me here.

a decent thunderstorm is happening. it did not occur earlier. it is occurring now, just as a recording of 'each coming night' is... well, i suppose the laws of grammar will not allow 'occurring' here. it is streaming to my speakers, to be exact, if non-physical things can stream. but i have to admit that i don't know whether it is physical or not, those waves of substance reaching my computer. are they magnetic? what are they?

Presently.
Proportions.
Presently.
As proportions as presently.
Father and farther.
Was the king or room.
Farther and whether.
Was there was there was there what was there was there what was there was there there was there.
Whether and in there.
As even say so.
(G. Stein)

so the rain pours and i wait for joules to take affect on the unknown processed corners of parts of pork, water, and beef salt.

i'm thinking about poets. poets i have known, poets i've seen, and poets i've read. i wonder if "the ancients," being the older, more dead poets that i enjoy, conformed to the fashions in ways i've seen poets do. are poets trendy like musicians? i wonder who is doing poetry right. who is doing it how it should be done because that is the right way for it to be done. i can think of one or two names, but.

it's not any better to say

it does go on (life)

than

life goes on.

because the idea is a cliche, and people don't want to hear cliches. they don't want to hear them because they don't have to hear them. they already know them. that is why they are cliches. that is one thing that makes poetry so hard these days. divide the entirety of everything into wow and who cares, and it seems that so much falls into the who cares when looked at from the average (american?) perspective. so as a poet, you may find yourself wondering, "who will read this, and will they care..." and i'm not sure you can write good poetry when you are in the position, behind the keyboard or hovering above the page with pen/pencil in hand.

80 degrees is the warmest i can set my AC to. even that feels too cool for me. but without it, it's Cast Away clothing around here.

i think these hot dogs have been frozen since 1880.

growing up. everything becomes a social network of some sort and you are either in the loop or out of the loop. or maybe just a lot or some things or nothing becomes that way. i don't like how skeptical i can be. or how out of the loop i can be.

i didn't shave today.

"i've been down this road before. i walk out the door." i know, joshua. but don't we all have growing up to do?

i paid the USPS $1.00 to change my address. the people upstairs have lead feet, i believe. thunk, thunk, thunk.

i'm in the middle of reading six or seven books. the middle of a book is the safest place for a reader to be, i think.

oh, whatever.

type "joe purdy" on www.pandora.com

my weekly posting, i guess. thanks to coty and my mom, i'm out of the old walls and into new walls. what does this mean?

means i'm a farmer with 6 pepper plants in my living room. well-potted. well-fed. plants grow.
means really quiet nights. quiet as a shadow.
means painting at 2am if i feel like it.
means existing in underwear if i feel like it.
means sole ownership of: things.
means most of all solitude.

i focus on details at times and love to do so because i'm so oblivious at other times and i realize it later. can the equation be balanced? realize: people don't come over if people are not invited. well. yes, of course. and yet, i sit around for days wondering "where is everybody?"

but really. what got to me today is that i don't remember writing a whole, entire, complete song in about 5 months. i keep trying and all i get are snippets and fragments of ideas. i've been giving up easy. a few verses and a chorus idea, record it real quick. just get it down. like i'm going to have years and years of time to come back to all these things i never finished. or maybe i think it doesn't matter if they get finished any more than they are. i do it for me, and whatever comes is what it is.

but i'm not happy with it.

covered over the "abstract" painting i did, the one she helped fix, sorta. painted a decent plant on it all. i painted over it all with white paint. shows through like things tend to do when they happened and existed before.

there are always possibilities for me. they come and go, and i am always somewhat dependent on the comfort of them being there. even when they disappear like they always have. several of these possibilities have faded lately. it's always the same old "of course" feeling. so here it is again. not that love is ever easy, but i always had a feeling it would be extra hard for me, if it ever really, really happens.

hector was a jalepeno plant. charlie's plant. i've been cat/plant sitting for two weeks now. hector has died. the other seven plants are fine. there are a few possible reasons why hector has passed on. i might have over-watered him. but i think it had more to do with the fact that he was in a starbucks steaming pitcher, which had no drainage. he also had tons of aphid-looking pests on him.

therefore. i went to the farmer's market. i convinced hector el segundo and his friends (habenero and big bertha peppa) to come live with me. four dollars and fifty cents. and i love peppers. i'll tell them about hector when they're old enough to understand.

i realized that ginsberg's "america" (audio) is moderately obscene. it is probably anti-capitalist. it is probably offensive to many people. i think it is one of my favorite poems.

eh. i have three candles. blue, white, and green. the green one is the tallest, for now. i also have several other tea candles. but the three i like are sitting here on the table, burning.

these new walls are on their way to becoming old walls. who knows, torn down in 50 years?

why'd you fill my sorrow with the words you'd borrow from the only place you know? this is not an easy fix. it just isn't.

because love. wants. out. walls walls so thick and always some reason. and then again i find myself, lesson learned and ready to be taught it all over again. she, all the shes ever, may have done me good and then there's the other side of the equation. does it balance? will it ever be overheavy on the good side?

i sigh and let the candles burn however they want to. some things don't accept directions.

and they say the world is small and shrinking? i just don't know about that, They. there are more people. but let's not kid ourselves. nothing is getting easier. the cheat codes are applied, but the game changes. the vaccines are given, and the virus adapts. there really is a big problem here, World.

america this is quite serious.
america this is the impression i get from looking in
the television set.
america is this correct?
i'd better get right down to the job.