until again

would that i not be independent: that i couldn’t stand without your support, for a small, selfish part of me would very much like to just lay down.

would that i not be self-reliant: but as much as i like having your arms around me, i have to hold myself together in order to be yours.

would that i not be self-motivated: i could easily live my life for you and you alone, but only i can be responsible for my successes and failures, and i certainly wouldn’t pin the latter on you.

i feel incomplete without you, but i can’t feel helpless when you’re gone, for the hole you leave inside me is covered by all the things i appear to be and do.

and that vacancy is quite large, echoing with the sounds of my self-reliance, resounding then fading, as if they were searching for you, calling your name then chasing after you until they disappear over the horizon.

left alone, i return to myself somewhat, but it is, in truth, something less than what i am, when you are with me.

i might hide it well.

perhaps.

but i miss you already, and you’ve only just departed.

i live in a moment of barter which makes no sense, for nothing has been tangibly exchanged. yet it seeped through me, runs over me, and the only word that comes to mind as description is barter: i have traded something away and gained something very much more. describing it, defining it: these things are beyond me today.

there are no storms, as if August came and swept them all away so that my center would lie elsewhere. i do not grieve for them, and yet, for a while, they reconnected me with my past in their warm, wet, intimate way. and that, of all things, was the healing i needed. i am not groundless in this. i do not waver constantly without my center. i know where it is, and what it awaits, and that, today, is centering enough.

it is a different time now, a different place, a different measure. all the might-have-beens were washed away this summer—all the could-have-beens, the in-betweens, and the waiting for them that bled and bled and bled my life away. even alone, i live more fully now than over the past decade.

and that word. that rarely-seen, unfamiliar word that has come to me infrequently over time, came up again in my last writing. and it has interpolated itself into something more than it ever was before. recalescence: that ever-ephemeral glow of molten iron as it cools. somehow, over the years, i’ve managed to keep my own core malleable, workable, changeable, adaptable, and to keep that recalescence alive. i thought i’d lost it, yet it burns within me still, though it seems like something close to forever since i last saw it shine.

i thought i’d traded it away for stability—for that constant, inconsequential insistence that all is well. if i’ve failed at anything in life, i’m pleased to have failed at that, then.

and she—she only begins to know, to understand. she hasn’t been a part of all of this, and she didn’t know she could be burned by my recalescence. i try to shelter her from it, yet having failed at least once (at least partially), she remains, voluntarily, and pulls it—pulls me—closer to her heart. i cannot fathom why, or even pretend to. i simply cherish it, and cherish her, and walk alongside her, hoping neither of us burn.

for i’ve traded the insularity for brightness, and that brightness came with the death of the all which never was.

there are many things that come to mind, many things that seem to be, and the seeming is the arrival, and the arrival is the impetus behind other thoughts. there are days like this one, and in it, the seemings, disarranged, facilitate the extravagance of all that waits to be known.

i try (and the attempts are trials), to maintain composure, but sometimes, the way in which life coalesces merely compounds the idiosyncratic tendencies of everyone around me (or at least my perception of them) and every plan, every expectation, every hope, turn into something other than what we supposed it would be—what we had dared to dream.

fragments of other people’s songs, their lyrics, their own communion with the world: these things i use, to trace my life throughout the confluences of existence, and even to define my interrelation with the world. there was a time when those were my songs, my lyrics. for a while after the spirit died within me, i was bitter, but the music never really left me. it lingers yet.

waiting.

waiting, like so many other days in my life.

but this waiting, this moment, this churning, has a glimmer: a spark.

a recalescence.

there is something about this time, this moment, that shines. the waiting, this once, is a good thing, for i wait here, willingly, at the end of the all which never was, and the dawn of the all which might now become.

(earlier this week, I took an old draft and turned it into this. something significant had happened the previous night, which i’m not going to explain it here, but it was a good thing: one which changed the entire tenor of the original draft from July 8, which was a much darker time. i am driven by rainstorms of late, and they drive me towards a glistening light.)

i sit beneath the rain again. it pages down, an unwritten book that so many have read since time forgotten.

on nights like this, it hollows crevices in my mind, and slowly fills them with melancholy, nostalgia, and stupidly even hope.

i am of that nature, possessed of the ability to dream, but not only to dream, to segment the dreams from the reformulated memories, the fears of what remains unknown, and the brief foreshadowing of insights i will later fail to recognize.

i don’t see everything, but what i do see, i see quite well.

which is not to say i always glean the right impression. especially when the rain comes, and then with it, the thunder and the lightning redefine every thought before i ever have a chance to set them down.

i breathe an air that is flavored with, colored by, comprised of this rain, and i remember all the things i wanted long ago, and none of them stand in my future. and no matter how deeply this rain saturates this moment and me, i come no closer to bringing them back to life.

and everyone else, having read these pages since time began, probably knows them for exactly what they are.

Sometimes, I wonder why I do the things I do. I don’t refer to myself in the third person very much at all, but I do quite often stand outside myself and become at a loss for what’s going on inside. Perhaps my communicative problems from the past really are grounded within me. I think I sometimes fail at giving myself the fuller insight as to what’s going on internally.

As a result of that, when people ask me what something I’ve published up here means, I don’t necessarily have an answer. While I’m not saying that not asking is the better course, just be advised I may not have what fits your definition of “clear answer.” I work a lot from the subconscious; it’s nothing mystical, it’s just unplanned. I feel no real need when it comes to the creative process (and my life definitely fits under that order of precedence) to direct every action, every movement, every response.

Only this, perhaps: The majority of my life is spent in waiting for things to come. And the waiting for it bleeds. I am somehow both too active to wait indefinitely, and too pensive to force my own hand.

Time is the sort of thing that can beat you coming and going. I try not to chase it too hard, but that rarely means I’m doing it right. Peace and closure are unattainables: meaningful ideals that have little true function in the world.

I’m alone right now for a reason. I only hope it’s a good one.

things like dreams and dreams like days and days like things i’ve never known. there are no in-betweens when everything keeps to the edges. and there are no divisions when everything subverts everything else.

but there are no dreams, not truly. there are memories and a confluence of biochemical processes. there are phrases turned in wistfulness and the desire for pain to subside. and yet, a life without pain is hardly one worth living. and so the dreams, the memories, the processes all bring a pain that is both a comfort and a lie.

#1 Son turns 13 on December 20th. We’re sitting together at the breakfast table the other day, and I’m reading this letter to the Spouse Unit written by this guy who happened to be around at a certain car dealership the day she decided to purchase her car, and who has apparently believed himself to be God’s Gift to Carbuyers for roughly the last two years. Anyway, it’s a one-page handwritten letter (very thoughtful and personal, of course), that in four sentences contains more spelling and grammatical errors than typically exist in one semester of assignments in a second-grade classroom. So, I read it over, hand it to #1 Son, and ask, “Okay, kiddo. What’s wrong with this letter?”

He reads through it, chuckling several times, thinks for a moment, then answers, “He didn’t have someone else type it for him so he wouldn’t look so stupid.”

Deadpan.

Yep, the boy annoys me sometimes, as all kids occasionally do, but Gawd I love ‘im.

this looks like a screwed-up photograph, but it isn’t. although i will admit it was difficult to keep the wind off the camera during the thirty seconds it took to take this photo at night. i don’t get to do as much late-night photography as i’d like (and i’ll readily admit that Nikon DSLR’s aren’t really the best tools for dark shots), but the color here is completely unretouched, taken at ISO 800, f/5.6, 30″ in the light of a nearly full moon. the camera is pointing roughly west, about 2.5 hours after sunset. even that long after sunset, there is still a noticeable gradient to the light falloff. i just kinda thought that was neat. sadly, the rest of that night shoot was pretty poopy, because i had to use longer lenses and the wind was such that it was impossible to keep them from shaking over such a long period. this one and a couple of others are all that are going to make it.

well, i guess that’s about it today. best be shoving off to work, work, work!

but not on a jet-plane. and i DO know when we’ll be back again, even. it’ll be sometime after i leave. i promise!

but yes, we’re going to bail for a bit up to the in-laws place. in the meantime, visit the folks i just link-loved from here. gah. i need to update this blog’s blogroll. yeah, yeah. i have time for that. really. pfft.

oh yeah. it’s thanksgiving. supposedly we should give thanks for all the shit in our lives. so, at this time, i’d like to give thanks for all the shit in my life. and for all the non-shit. and maybe for all the people, but probably not for their shit. wow, i just used the word ‘shit’ in one paragraph four times. i must be the shit.

okay, maybe six.

anyway, i’m rambling because i have this tooth that desperately needs to be extracted and i have to wait all the way until the freakin’ 29th. it’s fun, let me tell you. especially when i’m about to go stuff my face all weekend. mmmmmm……i just can’t wait to go love me some dentist. eight days. shoot me.

okay, well, the last proof site i was trying to get uploaded finally uploaded so i’ll see you later. have fun!

Okee, so like I turn 41 today. Nifty. *yawn*

Unsurprisingly, it’s just another work day, and I say that with no chagrin whatsoever. I’ve allowed myself to get too far behind this autumn, so I’m going to be playing “catch-up” for another couple of weeks at least.

Sherri admonished me this morning: “…as you take time today to reflect back (and I know you will) on the many, many years you have spent on this earth, try NOT kicking your own ass for a change. Try acknowledging all that you have accomplished and all the good things in your life.” Easy enough for her to say, since she turns forty in five days and thus is 370 days shy of my ability to screw things up. But, I’ll try to give it a whirl while I’m letting a batch of photos run here.

Things I have accomplished in life:

1. I have managed to live significantly past my 25th birthday, and not even in a wheel-chair or mental institution. Let me tell you, as I contemplated this fact on my 25th birthday, it was such an intellectual surprise that it became one of those “pivotal moments”.
2. I have, for the most part, managed not to emulate my adoptive parents in the rearing of my own children. I haven’t chased my kids around the house with a belt yet, threatened them with relatively implausible bodily harm for disobedience, or attempted to shame them into compliance to such a degree that their self-esteem evaporated.
3. I have not kicked, drowned, strangled, tossed off a balcony, dumped in the forest, or otherwise rid myself of the charming-but-annoying felines in my life who insist upon climbing up my leg to greet me, walking across the keyboard in the middle of a PhotoShop batch and stalling several hundred photos in process, sitting on my face in the middle of the night, randomly attacking my toes as I’m walking by, attempting to lay upon my feet while I’m walking (especially at the head of the stairs), bringing half-dead animals and insects into the house, shitting on the bed after we’ve been gone on vacation, peeing on our luggage before we leave for vacation, and playing war games across the entire house at full speed and volume in the middle of the night.
4. I have remained faithful to my wife, but that’s less of an accomplishment as it is an acknowledgment that most other females in my life have had a better sense of discretion than she has, and I felt so lucky when she chose me that there was no way I was going to screw that up.
5. I have tried new foods throughout my life. Some of them, I even liked.
6. I quit smoking over a decade ago.
7. My kids still think I’m relatively cool. I know it won’t last, but it’s still kind of neat if you ask me.

So there. That’s seven accomplishments I can at least be proud of. I had thought of a couple of others, but there was this g@dd@mn3d kitten crawling up my leg and it kind of distracted me. Besides that, I’m actually a bit sick today. Me and the Amoxicyllin are trying to kick a throat infection. Germs are bastards. Hence the wording of the title of this post. That’s about what I sound like right now.

I have not had a good summer and early fall. Not that I mean to complain, or even excuse myself. I’m behind on work, I’m behind on some personal goals, and there were some projects that #1 Son and I had intended to complete this summer, and here it is a week after the first frost, and not only are those projects not finished, but they were never begun. Naturally, I beat myself up over this virtually all day every day, but I’ll get over it.

One of the reasons I feel like I’m riding the fine line between depression and simple angst is because I’m continually tired. I’m in pretty good physical shape (heck, thanks to taking up TaeKwonDo last winter with #1 Son, I’m in much better shape today than I was last December), but we simply don’t have enough referees out here to cover all the soccer games that are going on. As one of the instructors, I’m going to have to help come up with a way to curtail our attrition and to recruit more adults into serving The Game. For the past several weeks, I’ve averaged 13 or 14 games every six days, and most of those being High School or Men’s League.

Eh. Waaaah. I’m tired, go figure. Sorry, I don’t mean to whine. But it’s somewhat relevant to everything else that’s going on. Try as I may to get enough sleep, eat right, and stretch before and after games, I’m still getting up tired each morning. It’ll thankfully be over in a few more weeks, but in the meantime, I worry about what I’m doing to my liver with so much ibuprofen in my system, heh.

I’ve got another wedding to shoot tomorrow, and I get to meet the Power and Influence behind tramplingrose first, which is kind of cool. We’re going to do coffee together before I head over to “Touchdown Jesus” to shoot the wedding. In my previous visits to Brookings, SD, I don’t recall having seen this particular church, so I’ll make sure to get a good shot of it for all my photoshoppy friends to play with.

Which reminds me, I guess I better make sure all the camera batteries are fully charged.

I’m sorry I haven’t gotten more kitten photos uploaded. They sure are growing fast. It’s pretty hard to shoot ‘em playing when there’s not someone else around to keep them somewhat together and focused, and they have, for the most part, taken the fine advice of the older cats and pretty much snooze when it’s only me around. And in the evenings, as you know, I’m usually out refereeing, often with #1 Son, and it’s even harder to shoot then, heh.

I’m hoping that come the end of October, I’ll essentially be caught up on everything and moving forward again with some of my personal goals, which include the redo of our business site, and finishing some metaphysical studies. I really do want to incorporate the metaphysical stuff up here to a greater degree. It’s not quite what most people think it is. I’m certainly by no means one of those overtly-esoteric patchouli-smelling who does little more than philosophize on everything to the abject ignorance of reality, but I do find some interesting insights to the world we live in and life in general that aren’t really found by other means.

The photograph is from late last January, the morning after an overnight storm which rimed all the trees and plants from the south (left). I always get in these kind of moods before winter.

Anyway, wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, do it well. Peace to you all.