le weekend.

Anyone else feeling super-neon-happy right now?  Somehow just the idea of Friday feels like the future to me, but that just might be the music. Been playing it loud all. week. long. Maybe possibly also dancing along. Unashamed.

Anyway. Thought I'd share.  Happy happy weekend.

(and if this isn't color enough for you, do the electric twist to one of my most favorite music videos here)

I want to write words tonight but I cannot seem to catch them, they are twisting all around me formed and unformed, absurd. I do not know where this is going. 

Write a haiku to contain the universe, he says, and it feels especially genius because he is the one saying it and also there is much to say about passion, how it can stir you like unsuspecting sand under a winter breaker, physically up-ended from your apathy into pure movement, suddenly gold and glittering on the surface against the sun. It is an exercise in the small and simple, he insists. Haiku are so informed by their littleness, they are saying who we are and how we are and where we are is sufficient, even amongst the vast and eternal. Write a haiku to contain the universe. For a short spell I am caught up in the current, but in the undertow of afterthought I settle again to more shallow shores; his words are pretty but impossible.

Haiku haunt me. It is a personal prejudice, a hatred happenstance of the very first round of my second spelling bee in my fifth grade year. For days afterward and even when I ran into him, once, on an elevator in a city twice removed and unexpected years later, Ben Bertch breaks it down to me by way of greeting, H-A-I-K-U, he says, and I feel just as useless in that moment as I did in the one where I stood absolutely letter-less, the expected champion outdone by Japanese verse before ever even getting around to spelling denouement or entelechies, both of which I knew but maybe did not yet understand, not beyond dictionary definitions anyway, because this was back when things were less complicated, when real heartbreak did not yet exist and I felt betrayed only by my first love, my wildfire ardor for words and the shaping of them; haiku made me useless, so useless, therefore, was the haiku. There it is, I have decreed it, it is so, and such stands the ego limping even eleven years after the fact. Universes? Hardly. There are never even so many seventeen syllables enough to contain today.

 

At home tonight my best friend tells me about her day. "I talked to so many useful people," she says, and I find this inherently hilarious, unable to breathe, because how many useless minutes are there, anyway? I remember that part of the morning where I suddenly sat incapable on the couch for the space of a hollow heartbeat, or the time when I took the stairs only to find the bookshelf empty of the novel needed and so I just turned right back around, back to where I came from, nothing gained, not even any new thought.

But I also remember the text first thing that said isn't it beautiful today? and the way the mountains moved especially lush and lovely in the morning light and how the air against my skin was barely below the heat of my blood in a fusion that feels a lot like floating, one of my favorite functions of fall. I think about reading Sartre with my glasses on, when he sees her with her face towards the sky and I wondered if I were not going to love humanity. I remember the girl who daydreaming came so close to walking right through a lamp-post, another girl who said your sweater sparkles! as if goshdarnit life depended on exclamation marks, the boy who ate lunch alone in an empty courtyard of the library, carefully folding his chip bag across the string cheese wrapper like a boyscout boondoggle. I think of the kid in my film class who I am secretly in love with writing REDEMPTION REDEMPTION REDEMPTION across the top of his notes for Le Corbeau, I think of the trumpeted symphony spilling from the abandoned car in the Smith's parking lot, the trunk oddly slightly open, like a toddler's mouth while dreaming.

The world is a thrumming throbbing fluttering aflame thrill of a place.

Have you ever at the beach been waylaid by a wave? You turn your back to the sea for only a second, your mom wants to know if you put extra sunscreen on your shoulder, your sister is wailing at you to wait, the Amtrak pounds past and you are wondering about its passengers but the breaker rumbles suddenly too close in your seashell ear and takes. you. out. You are all arms and legs and unprepared lungs, you are going to die, you know it, you know it especially because you can see it, strangely, as if from above: the vision is murky like the water thrashing all around you and the sound is submerged, but it is there. I have read about Near Death Experiences (NDE) exactly like this, this angelic perspective and the choice to return--which you do, spitting and shaking on the sand--but what is amazing to me is the duality of the drama. You are here, you are there. It is at once absurd and absolutely plausible, you are testimony to it, you saw your own wild eyelids flickering blind.

 

When I was little I assumed this was a peculiarity of the sea only, but since then and hundreds of miles from any such coastline I have been metaphorically mauled by the surging surf enough times to count far past my fingers. I have watched myself say sentences like I woke up this morning and felt like it's over or listen to an entire lecture unaffected or hear heartache and accept it raw, without question. Sometimes I seem to have been drowning for days. I thrash against the words and images all around me--excavating dinosaur bones in my front lawn before kindergarten, holding hands in the Smithsonian, building cairns for my family to follow to Nine Mile Lagoon, falling asleep across three chairs in the EastTV studio, watching a cast-off cat tip into the gutter while I learn the flavor of sop buah on my new tongue and across the broken road a veiled woman lights a candle from her open window. Grasping for ground long since swept away.

 

The apostle asked us what we wanted from all this, our purpose in coming so far to often only be able to say so little. He had a very specific answer in mind, one printed out in a small, neat sentence within the first few pages of a book we all owned, but I liked Elder Lopis' answer best. To be useful, he said. I would like to become a useful person.

(A haiku humbly/to fall and to resurface/sufficient to save.)

photo | words

just a little sm*sh for your monday.

you're welcome.

lately.

baked a cake.

climbed a couple mountains.

got a total of three hours sleep in the course of two full days.

read quite a lot.

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have entwined together, that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion . . . that is just being 'in love,' which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.

But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees have no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.

louis de bernières | captain corelli's mandolin

watched this.

wondered and worried and wished with kimberly.

saw leaves turning autumn colors.

Someone in every photograph is on the brink of some apotheosis or other.

dean duncan | home video

 celebrated sara's birthday.

took the color code test. again. am still very very much blue.

tried maple-bacon ice cream.

discussed hunter-gatherer societies and the impact of agriculture.

Whites provide remarkable clarity. Whites provide astute perspective when solicited, but rarely express themselves unless asked. They enjoy their quiet awareness and modestly consider their remarks less significant than others. They have a keen eye for connecting the dots and making meaningful contributions when invited.

dr. taylor hartman | the people code

missed this. til it hurt too much.

wore boots.

watched a young father help his tiny daughter into her miniature peacoat.

checked out a book called what it all means. 

how delightfully pretentious.
(but at least someone's got it figured out.)

It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house---like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.

philip roth | the plot against america

I found myself sticking around, spending more time than was necessary, watching the planes bring people and take people away, I started coming twice a week and staying for several hours, when it was time to go home I didn't want to leave, and when I wasn't here, I wanted to be here, now I come every morning before we open the store, and every evening after dinner, so what is it, am I hoping to see someone I know get off one of the planes, am I waiting for a relative who never will come, do I expect Anna? No, that's not it, it's not about my joy, the relief of my burden. I like to see people reunited, maybe that's a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone, I sit on the side with a coffee and write in my daybook, I examine the flight schedules that I've already memorized, I observe, I write, I try not to remember the life that I didn't want to lose but lost and have to remember, being here fills my hears with so much joy, even if the joy isn't mine, and at the end of the day I fill my suitcase with old news.

jonathan safran foer | extremely loud and incredibly close

escaped again to the mountains.

fell asleep in the sun.

while Olivia read.


and I thought about you.

For our hearts are not pure; our hearts are filled with need and greed as much as with love and grace; and we wrestle with our hearts all the time. The wrestling is who we are. How we wrestle is who we are. What we want to be is never what we are. Not yet. Maybe that's why we have these relentless engines in our chests, driving us toward what we might be.

brian doyle | how we wrestle is who we are

I am going to close my eyes.

I only want five things,

five chosen roots.

One is an endless love.

Two is to see the autumn.

I cannot exist without leaves

flying and falling to earth.

pablo neruda | i ask for silence
 

mission accomplished.

awesome via etsy | headshots courtesy of the highly addictive incredibooth

Last time I wrote, it was going to be a good day. 

Then it turned great. 

And actually, it was awesome.

Behold the power of the Chanel makeup counter, a fifteen dollar manicure, and taking yourself out to a legitimate dinner. Also, friends. The best you could ask for.

sleeping it off.

frames of reference | la.la.liv

In my dream, my camera--except for a breath's hesitation between on and record--works, more than works, this time it is filming and in my dream I file frames of

Lani + Lisa running at me in flight patterns of the insane, zig-zagging across the jungle-hung field before dark.

Rose quartz striations across Rock Canyon in early summer sunlight.

Ben Covington saying to me look, for some reason, she cares about me. And on a good day, I feel like I might become everything she sees in me.

A ferris wheel.

My first road into Jakarta, the baby goats on the highway, the fruit vendors bending over truckloads of mangoes still undecided green or red or maybe even yellow, the signs about death to drug dealers.

Naomi on the front porch like a muse for Ralph Lauren himself, all-American and exceptionally beautiful without ever trying. She laughs.

Sand-shaped roots on Rabbit Island, collecting shells small and round as a child's ear, Miss Ruby in the parking lot, Tahunanui across the bay. 

A day that can't have happened yet. 

The way an Incan-gold sunrise plays across the last hour of a night train from Solo and that day I see Lani + Lisa again, my heart racing flight patterns of the insane.

And when I wake up Lily has made pancakes and also there are strawberries and she says It is going to be a good day and I say Yes.

UPDATE: thunderclouds + lightningstorms. great day.

some people are made to sing together.
what a spectacularly sad song.

In the end the solution is equal parts motorbike and picnic plus a double dose of true-blue friend and I feel like thinking in scientific terms because that is how he talks, progeny of the Crabtree building, and because that is what I need. Logic, straight-up and undiluted, he is waiting for me after class and when I take backseat on the bike he says you ride like an Asian and I say except that I'm actually wearing a helmet.

Still a compliment, he says. The highest.

The thing about old friends in new places is that you get to forget for a minute, you are straddling time, there is past and future and the present bleeds into them both, you are ubiquitous, ubiquitary.  On the hill with our French bread and our German cheese and the Swiss chocolate he insisted on arguing about I can watch the whole winking world and somehow, with the sunset, it doesn't weigh a thing. We talk about mountains and responsibility and Thailand and architecture, family friends marrying Tongan princesses. He worries that it's too cold but I am raising my hands to the stars just to feel my especially amazing hair come especially undone all around me in the canyon wind and as he lays back laughing he says that's right, you're autumnal and it's true, the fall is my fever and for the space of a shooting star I wish for real magic, a miracle. It is quiet, and cold. Apples in October? he asks. And we are there and then, it is the first time we were ever friends, we were lying on grass just as green as this present park, we were watching stars from the same season, there are the apples and the cider press and seven years since. Seven years full of everything and nothing at all; if, for a second, I close my eyes, I am sixteen again, and today has never happened.

to live and let diorama.

turns out we don't ever grow up

Ten points to you if you both got the GG reference and therefore understand absolutely everything that I am actually saying here. Bonus if you didn't immediately equate me with Paris (thank you).