I read this poem in baranoouji's LJ some months ago, and it's haunted me since, like some poems will do.

"Quarantine", from Against Love Poetry by Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking-they were both walking-north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and a woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

Fell asleep on the beach at Sauvie, Saturday. The sun did a number on me, but I can't blame it. I'm just happy it's out.

Headed out in a couple days for SE Oregon for camping with mutants, gone till Sunday. Incidentally, looks like where we're headed this year is the same as where the '97 rainbow nationals were, a forest east of Prineville where I hitchhiked with Jane up from southern California in late June when we were 18 year old vagabonds. It was a beautiful place, and I'll be glad to revisit, exactly 11 years later.

A toast to timing. In my last post, I described a place we visited last Sunday called Never Never Land in Tacoma, WA. Today, we heard that this forgotten little park is scheduled to be demolished this Thursday. Goodbye, Neverland.

A few more pictures in memoriam:

All aboard the pirate ship:


( Read more... )

PS. Two lucky finds today... I wandered by chance into a magic shop while at the hardware store picking up more pipe for hoops, and I walked out with a set of juggling balls. P. went to pick up a guitar off Craigslist on behalf of his mother and ended up getting a deal on a lovely Chinese hammered dulcimer called a yangqin. Our toy chest grows.

Quick photo post. Some words.

P. and I were up in Tacoma and Seattle over this weekend. Sunday, before we left, we dropped by a huge, gorgeous forested park in Tacoma: Point Defiance Park with P.'s young nieces and nephew. Within its depths is a small and forgotten pocket called Never Never Land, populated with child-sized houses and figures from fairy tales and nursery rhymes. The houses are separated by narrow walking trails through the woods.

Built in the 60s and many of its previous structures lost over time, Never Never Land feels dilapidated and abandoned, but this I liked. This gives the place a wonderfully eerie Grimm ambience, as if the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood could truly leap out and devour you as you walk down the pathways. ("I'm scared!" P.'s 3-year old niece Anora cried out at one point. P. assured her that he was a monster who would eat any other monsters we came across, so she was safe.) Peeling paint, rusty nails, penned graffiti inside the tiny ramshackle houses from what I'd guess are teens who go there at night to drink and make out. From what P. says, it's similar to Enchanted Village closer to Seattle (and Enchanted Forest in southern Oregon), but Enchanted Village is much larger. We plan to take his nieces & nephew there sometime this summer, since neither they nor I have ever been there.

Playing with my hoop inside the entrance:


( Never Never Land & more on hoops )

I will be in Seattle Thurs-Sun. Paul is playing a show at Fuel in Seattle on Thursday night, and another show somewhere in Tacoma on Sunday night. I will likely be guest spotting on keyboards for one or both shows.

We're staying with his sister up there, and I'll be working from my laptop - any recommendations for good free wifi spots in Seattle or Tacoma?

Also, heads up people, Four Tet is playing a Portland show in June at Holocene!

P. is a latecomer and entered the Radiohead 'Nude' remix contest with only a week of voting left. Voting ends May 1st. There's no prize other than exposure.

Please listen to his remix if you have some time and vote if you like it. Here's why I like it: he took the 'stems' that were provided and used them to craft a new song from the pieces. He didn't listen to the original while he was remaking it. If you listen to a lot of the other remixes that have been posted, you'll notice that many of them sound very much like the original, with just a few tweaks here and there. There aren't many that took the approach of, "Here are some sounds. What can I make from them?" But anyway, that's just my take. Listen and vote if you like.



PS. P. is playing a show at Fuel in Seattle on Thursday May 8th, and some other place in Tacoma on that Sunday. Hence, I will be up in the Seattle-Tacoma area.

At Rererato, an art space in NE, Alberta district. All-ages early show, P.'s project Sad Music for Happy Humans plays at 7pm. Details here. Stop by, say hi. Dancing after, but where?

pre-judgment: the illusion of thought. the abandonment of self-responsibility, a betrayal of self.

for example, as related to conversation and honesty: every time you think, "i can't talk to X about this because X would react in such-and-such a way/i can't be honest to X because X wouldn't understand" whether because X has not understood in the past, or because no one in a larger subset that X appears to be in has understood in the past, you have pre-judged qualities of X and have made that a part of a static worldview.

you have mistaken the map for the terrain.

the terrain is ever-changing, so wake up, look up, look at what's in front of you before you stumble into the abyss or get eaten by the lions or fail to realize you've been walking in circles for days and you're about to get sunstroke. the terrain does change, but not when you're walking in the same damn circles. your map has an expiration date of yesterday.

don't rob yourself of the chance to perceive for yourself, rather than dancing with ghosts of perceptions past. don't rob others of the chance to be perceived as they are now, not as ghosts. no, change isn't easy for anyone, so maybe you've become jaded to the thought that it ever truly happens, but when it does, you don't want to miss it for the world.

I read a thought-provoking reader review of the book 'The Selfish Gene' on Amazon.com some time ago. Excerpts below, and further thoughts from me further below :

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"The literal idea of 'The Selfish Gene' contains a mistake. The concept 'selfish' applies to entities possessed of a self - paradigmatically, humans. A gene has no self. To apply the term selfish to a gene is, thus, ( to make an error. )

Our minds want to tell stories.

A couple nights ago, I had a bad dream. It involved a certain sound, like loud static, which would repeat twice at sustained intervals. Slowly something began to bother me. The dream was very lifelike; I was in bed, alone, and I was arguing with someone down the hall, the bedroom door cracked open. But certain details didn't make sense, and when I noticed this, I became aware slowly in my dream, something like lucid dreaming.

I came to notice that I was very warm, for example, and in the dream I was alone in my bed. I focused on the bed and found there was a figure there sleeping next to me. With this realization I awakened, and I realized that the warmth came from the one lying in bed next to me on his side, myself spooned against his back. He was snoring very lightly, and the loud static sound from my dream resolved into the soft sound of his breath, in and out. As my consciousness hovered between the dream-reality and awake, between the internal logic of my dream and the waking world, something very real about how my mind works came to me with startling clarity, like the clarion ring of a bell. Not something I hadn't thought before, but not understood so clearly. I lay half-awake for several hours, listening to P. as he made small sounds in his sleeping, musing in the blueness of the pre-dawn light, but I still haven't got the words to express it quite right.

It's something about the way our subconscious spins stories, and what seems to be the human impulse to create meaning, and about the strengths and weaknesses this brings; it has something to do with the name of this journal; it has something to do with why I'm fascinated by mythology and storytelling and metaphor. Someday I'll have the words, but not tonight. I'm off to bed. Good night.

I am learning more and more that one of the most important acts I can do for those around me is to allow them to change.

And by 'allow them', I mean 'allow my thoughts about them'.

That means not holding onto ideas of who they once were, at the cost of not seeing who they are now, here, in front of me, or who they might become. Whether the holding on is out of resentment, or fondness, or nostalgia, or fear, or pride, or whatever the reason may be.

When there are those around me trying to create personal change, the more I hold on to my ideas/associations/projections of who they have been in the past, the more difficult I make it for them. If I'm on their side, I need to support them; I need to fully believe in their ability and motivation to change. And that means not only letting go of past images, but refraining from forming new static ones.

We affect each other in so many subtle ways.

Internal, self-willed change/maturation isn't easy. It's unspeakably beautiful to me when I do see it happening in those around me. I don't want to close my eyes to it.


Tangentially, note to myself: no one is at their best all the time. Everyone has their moments. Forgive them, and care for them anyway. That includes yourself. Your upbringing told you that it was never okay to do less than the best at all times, that you could never let your guard down, or trust others to pull the slack, or trust others to forgive you when you didn't. Hey, high standards are cool; it's okay to continue to strive for the best, but it's not okay to have a stick up your ass about it.

Sad Music For Happy Humans is P.'s solo music project. He goes on at 10pm, and I will be there making the dance floor happen. Come join me. Egyptian Lover and Who Cares bring the hip hop, SMHH will be more trip-hop-ish, dancey sounds.

Two tales of a nightingale. One bargains with death for life with song for love, and the other trades its life to death with song for love.

1. "...And Death gave back these treasures for a song. The nightingale sang on. It sang of the quiet churchyard where white roses grow, where the elder flowers make the air sweet, and where the grass is always green, wet with the tears of those who are still alive. Death longed for his garden. Out through the windows drifted a cold gray mist, as Death departed..."

2. "...Then she gave one last burst of music. The white Moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky. The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstasy, and opened its petals to the cold morning air. Echo bore it to her purple cavern in the hills, and woke the sleeping shepherds from their dreams. It floated through the reeds of the river, and they carried its message to the sea..."

The two tales are strikingly similar to me, not merely thematically but in tone as well. Both contain resonances not only of an achingly strong and tender love of mythical proportions from a humble nightingale, so blatantly told in parts that they flirt along the lines of saccharine oversentimentality. It's the lacings of passages of more acerbic tone in regards to the superficiality of human interactions that draw each story back to more bittersweet ground:

"...'What a silly thing Love is,' said the Student as he walked away. 'It is not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to Philosophy and study Metaphysics.'..."

And in the more wry tone of Andersen: "...The music master wrote a twenty-five-volume book about the artificial bird. It was learned, long-winded, and full of hard Chinese words, yet everybody said they read and understood it, lest they show themselves stupid and would then have been punched in their stomachs..."

I have found worthwhile teachings and practices in many religions and disciplines, but I cannot bring myself to subscribe personally to one, nor participate in the mix-and-match patchwork pseudo-mysticism prevalent in our age. I will admit to such indulgences as a youth while experimenting, but I can respect that no longer as an adult. As an aside, I've been thinking much the same about the emotional/relational practices of our present age. I think that one does harm to oneself and to those from which one takes, whether that's religions or people, when taking the approach of "A little of what I like from this, a little of what I like from that." As a musical group I like has said: constant shallowness leads to evil.

I also dislike when people say "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual". I wouldn't call myself religious or spiritual, but I do believe there's more than what we generally perceive or can perceive. Worlds beyond and in worlds. I'm drawn more by the subtle liftings of the veil, however, than seeking for the full frontal.

I strive to be awake and alive and aware as much as I am capable. I strive to find balances between extremes, but not to the point of shunning the extremes - balance does not mean stagnation at a single point, because change is a constant and the centre is always shifting, so movement and adjustment matters. I strive to experience without becoming lost in experience. With others, I personally strive to inspire rather than command or control, and respond best to a similar approach.

Listen to my fiance live on KBOO tonight (http://kboo.fm - 90.7 fm in Portland) between 11pm and midnight PST. They'll be playing his music and interviewing him. Aside from music, he'll be playing sound samples he recorded in New Orleans and talking about our experiences there, amongst other subjects. You can listen to the webcast from their website if you're not in Portland/don't have an fm radio. He makes amazing music, you should listen to it anyway.

Naftali was his given first name, but he went by Simon. The name suited him. He was short and gnomish, with wiry tufts of grey hair, spectacles, shiny black orthopedic shoes. You expected him to have a secret workshop where he cut, sewed, and hammered together leather shoes by hand. I favored black combat boots, and my hair was cut spiky-short and dyed pink. He was 87 years old when we met, and I was 20. ( We hit it off famously, of course. )

I rode my bike to a store earlier for cigarettes. A couple blocks from there, I passed an old man with long grey hair on a bicycle. He turned and said something about his slow speed; I flashed him a smile and sped by. When I emerged from the store, he was there with a red rose he'd picked for me, saying "You have a pretty smile. You seem like a nice person." He headed inside, I biked away. It pleases old men often to flirt this way with young women; I find such encounters usually harmless and sweet, intended simply to brighten the days of both parties. I biked home and hung the rose on my mailbox. When it's withered, I'll throw it away.

When I was half the years I am now, I kept mementos of everything. From concert ticket stubs to birthday cards, to flowers dried and pressed between pages of books, whether from small encounters or grand escapades. I liked having them there to remind me, and it gave me a twinge to ever throw such mementos away, as if I was somehow betraying the reality of the events, somehow erasing their value. (Keeping a journal is different: I write to figure things out, not to remember.)

This kind of sentimentality is something else that's gradually fallen away over the years. On the last night that I was in New Orleans, a friend strung Mardi Gras beads around my neck. When I left the following morning, I deliberately left them on the bathroom sink. I don't need or wish for keepsakes; that it happened is enough. I do homage to the moment by being present within it.

When I am dead, scatter my ashes to the wind.

I have literally never done one of these chain Q&A things before. These questions are from pk00101. Sorry, having limited time, I'm going to only answer a couple in full length for now...

1. As a virtual God, which aspect of being a deity is the most rewarding to you?

Tough one. There's so much that is rewarding in being an omniscient, omnipotent virtual deity, from world-creation to setting major events in motion and watching them play out. What I typically enjoy the most are the brief, spontaneous interactions when I'm playing an anonymous "ghost in the machine" and bringing the virtual world to life around the "mortals" in a way that builds upon and responds to their actions, mythopoetically.

For one small example, the players in my virtual world once held a funeral for an important character who had died, a very sad affair. Unbeknownst to them, I was watching invisibly, and at the close of the ceremony I spontaneously caused vines to erupt from the ground and twine around the tombstone, then flower, and a rain of petals to fall down around them. Little touches like this... the kind of thing that would never happen in real life, but is more real than real, more true than true: the logic of dreams.

2. If you were asked to gather a general consensus for the state of the "human spirit", how would you go about it? Could you do it in real time?

I'm not sure how a general consensus would be possible. I may return to this later. :)

3. What aspects of a relationship help it remain long term? Thinking of other relationships you may have been in, and seen others in, what similarities have you witnessed?

Apathy, cowardice, and deception can help a relationship remain long term, heh. But I'm guessing what you're asking is what aspects of a relationship help it remain healthy and fulfilling in the long term? :)

What has helped that in my present relationship is the striving to share ourselves completely with each other - without pretenses, sugarcoating, white lies, sweeping things under the rug - regardless what fears, hurts, insecurities, or defenses we may have or may result - no matter how uncomfortable or how painful or how difficult, how minor or how major. We may not (and do not) always succeed at first, but we strive on... and we do often succeed.

Sharing of course is only the beginning... one must also consider and work on how to present and how to respond to what is being shared. It doesn't help if you are sharing what you think, but you are doing so in an angry, accusatory fashion, or with contempt, or sharing only in order to provoke a reaction, for example. Or if you respond with anger, or defensiveness, or hurt, or just to prove your rightness on something.

But I'm not talking about blind acceptance... not some mindstate of "everything you think or feel is perfect"... you have to critically think about and question what you think and feel, but together, not as warring parties. Then it becomes not only about sharing what is already known but a joint exploration of the less-than-conscious frontiers of mind and emotion, uncovering not only ourselves to each other, but ourselves to ourselves.

Nor am I saying it's wrong to ever be angry, or feel hurt, or defensive... shit happens... you just can't cling to it, or respond only from that. Excuse me while I sound like a total hippie, but it seems to me that such communion can only come from a state of love; the ego needs to be discarded. And I'm afraid I'm not great at this, but I keep learning, and I feel that this is the most important lesson I've learned or could learn from and with another person.

I've reached minor levels of this in other relationships, but the level of intimacy where we are is entirely new ground to me, and we continuously seem to uncover more layers. I'm not sure I understood the meaning of honesty before. I don't know about relationships I've seen others in, because I don't know the extent of what goes on in others' private relationships.

4. Think of a different time and place in time, if given the option, you would go live in. If you could choose to be male, would it change the answer? Why?

The future, and no. I may return to this later. :)

5. When you hitchhiked around, did your independence highlight any aspect of your relationships with the people of your life?

I don't know if I'd call hitchhiking independence, since you are traveling at the mercy of strangers. I suppose it is an independence from structure, since you wake up every day not knowing where you are going, how you are getting there, and who you're going to meet. I don't feel that's changed in more than pace though... I still wake up every day feeling as if I don't know where I'm going, how I am getting there, and who I'm going to meet. Though life moves at a slower pace now than then, and I'm content with that. I may return to this later.

To continue the meme, you can ask me 5 questions or ask me to ask you 5 questions. If the latter, you can answer here or copy and paste the questions into your own journal to answer. Patience though... it may take me a while to get back to you.

(My (non-blurred, non-human) favorite of photos taken in New Orleans.)

"Every so often I need OUT; something will throw me into total disproportion, and I have to get away from everybody--away from all these people I love most in the world--in order to regain a sense of proportion...My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings...The brook wanders through a tunnel of foliage, and the birds sing more sweetly there than anywhere else; or perhaps it is just that when I am at the brook I have time to be aware of them, and I move slowly into a kind of peace that is marvelous, 'annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade.' If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns."
- M. L'Engle, from A Circle of Quiet

This is my twelfth day in New Orleans, and the first real length of time I've had to myself in that time. I didn't manage to fall asleep until 9am this morning. By the time I awaken at 11am, all eight of my cohort have departed, a sweet note left on a table to say goodbye. I shower, dress, pack, leave a generous tip for the maid in apology for the ruinous state of the suite, and turn in the suite keys.

I have over six hours of time to myself before a metal-winged bird is scheduled to return me to Portland, and I'm glad to have this.

Oregon sits at the other end of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which began on the Mississippi River with the primary goal to find an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean; the expedition found its destination at the mouth of the Columbia River, the river that defines the border of Oregon and Washington. So hello to you, those in Portland, from the other end of that all-water route.

With no particular destination of my own in mind, I walk out of the hotel, my feet turning with aimless certainty towards water: the mighty, muddy Mississippi. My instinct is always to head towards water, towards ocean. (Going away, away towards the sea/River deep, can you lift up and carry me.) First down Conti to Decatur, then down nearly the entire length of the French Quarter to the French Market area near Esplanade. Turn into ( Cafe Envie )