I am lik­ing today.

Despite being tired, there’s a dark, pow­er­ful push that lingers behind the cur­tains. That’s the best way to describe it, the best I can think of: imag­ine, if you will, a slowly brew­ing storm-cloud, a thunderhead-to-be, full of force, slowly becom­ing some­thing ter­ri­ble, inex­orable, natural.

The ‘por­ten­tous storm’ feel­ing is helped, no doubt, by the grey, wet sky and the chill expectancy that swirls around my naked toes. With the song ‘Closer’ by Kings of Leon puls­ing with dark, torn, sex­ual sob­bing out of my speak­ers, the moment crests to a per­fect, pre­cise point, and I look out the back win­dow to see the august sil­hou­ette of our res­i­dent hawk on top of the tele­phone pole.

I think it is obvi­ous that good things are on their way, just about to break into the sur­face of today.

So, a fine repast of words to break the fast of a colder night, fol­low­ing on the heels of the dark cof­fee of morn­ing. Echoes of some of the ecsta­tic ver­biage I myself have employed back in the vision­ary days of music and art. It’s a nice part­ner to the well­spring of moti­va­tion I feel this morn­ing, com­ing as I am out of a cloy­ing blan­ket of ill­ness. Things never look so clear, and hands are never so pur­pose­ful, as on the morn­ing after. So fit­ting to catch an affir­ma­tion on a day such as this:

This is my liv­ing faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to ques­tion, explore, exper­i­ment, expe­ri­ence, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, lis­ten, argue, speak, write, read, draw, pro­voke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, cre­ate, con­front, con­found, walk back, walk for­ward, cir­cle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the ques­tions, be wary of answers.
- Terry Tem­pest Williams

Now, to dive into the com­putur­gi­cal world of ‘code’, where every word itself is an action, not trans­mit­ting so much as instruct­ing. More later.

On the eve of my dear wife’s Cit­i­zen­ship Cer­e­mony I have a few moments to untan­gle the skeins and make sense of august, the most august of months: play­ground of the leo; birth day of my daugh­ter; string of sleep­less nights; frac­tured arrhyth­mia of unfo­cused days; the late night slosh-and-hum of the dish­washer; the bram­ble thicket of inchoate words that never quite man­age to stain the pages of my jour­nal. A month of blurs, with a few moments that sur­face in clar­ity: a beach party & watch­ing my daugh­ter weave her way in and out of her friends; a dis­cov­ered fever for the micro-blog; rat­tlesnake (!); an inex­orable (though anx­ious) roll towards Iryshka’s cit­i­zen­ship; a watch that informs me of the tides; stunned paral­y­sis in front of the mixer; a touch of the beau­ti­ful sun­set after weeks of cloud­less, clean fades; the weight of code and pho­to­shop files that drags my face down into a soft jelly; sleep train­ing long over­due; the teenagers’ passion-play of love & betrayal as an ancient rit­ual played over and over again, every gen­er­a­tion; the grad­ual but inex­orable meta­mor­pho­sis of songs that start out too over­run by their influ­ences but begin to sound more and more like just me every change; days of par­adise walk­ing along the ocean, feet in the clear water, watch­ing mas­sive waves curl in slow motion and pound the surf with a fluid strength that has built to break­ing over geo­logic spans of time; Infi­nite Jest by David Fos­ter Wal­lace; being reminded every day how amaz­ing humans are– what they can do with their incom­pa­ra­ble brains– by watch­ing the mir­a­cle of con­scious­ness explode expo­nen­tially in my child.

As I fin­ish this, I real­ize how Leo­nine this August really is… it’s a water­shed month, it’s a turn­ing point, it’s the peak; in so many ways, it is (impe­ri­ously) deter­min­ing the months to fol­low. In like a lion, out like a maiden.

It is late, it is early, it is dif­fi­cult to decide. I am hun­gry, I am wasted, I am aching, I am wired. It is dawn some­where in the world, right now, this moment. I have a puls­ing vein in my tem­ple, I have a an excess of ions in my blood, I have bur­dock in my eyes, I have two iron legs. I have found that chas­ing demons tends to bring the Devil him­self out. The baby starts to wake up, and when he does– well, then it’s his world. The churn­ing of the dish­washer merges with the soft plush implo­sions echo­ing from the speak­ers, mak­ing a sort of liq­uid insect sym­phony. That reminds me that the sound­track of life is rarely a melodic one — rather, it is com­min­gled tex­ture; com­merce with the ghosts; ethe­real entan­gle­ments– invis­i­ble, tac­tile, & some­how– in the end– inter­nal. I am rid­ing a wave of choco­late con­scious­ness, a hazy sub­tle orgasm of endor­phins and a con­stant push towards unblink­ing­ness. I know it won’t last. There is a place in your head that gives all thoughts extra­or­di­nary depth. There are only 2 ways of look­ing at your mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions, and one of them is exhaust­ing. In the end. 10 min­utes have passed. Good Night.

Sit­ting in bed, in the silver-blue glow of my lap­top, watch­ing my son sleep, sooth­ing him first with sound when he wakes. Inter­est­ingly, more than half the time he wakes with a vio­lent start, and starts cry­ing imme­di­ately — before even open­ing his eyes. So I have to ask — is he hav­ing night­mares? Or is he sim­ply hyper­sen­si­tive to his sit­u­a­tion– in the crib, not in the bed, and alone, no bod­ies next to him? I can’t decide. I know that he’s upset before he’s fully con­scious. It makes me sad to think that a child of a mere 8 months could have any­thing in his head other than warm, fuzzy, liq­uid, fleshy happiness.

So maybe this isn’t the best topic for this moment– re-inaugurating the ‘blog so to speak– but I had this dream the other night about which I keep think­ing: it’s sim­ple, and it’s also per­haps indica­tive of my computer-addled brain, but I dreamt I was using this computer-drawing pro­gram that was some weird intu­itive merger of Pho­to­shop and some 3-D thing like Maya. The idea was that I could draw any­thing, and when I held the ctrl but­ton (to be hon­est, I can’t remem­ber if it was a Mac or PC), it imme­di­ately ren­dered the draw­ing in a sim­ple 3-D. But the best part is, when­ever I did that, it would turn my pen tool into a knife tool so I could carve off bits, and they would fall off with vir­tual grav­ity. Per­fect for draw­ing a ruined cas­tle, which– you can prob­a­bly guess– was exactly what I was drawing.

As a side note, doesn’t Sigur Ros sound like some­thing like the slow, majes­tic, time-lapse march of gold– and emerald-colored lichens?

Our deep­est fear is not that we are inad­e­quate. Our deep­est fear is that we are pow­er­ful beyond mea­sure. It is our light, not our dark­ness, that fright­ens us most. We ask our­selves, ‘Who am I to be bril­liant, gor­geous, tal­ented, and famous?’ Actu­ally, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your play­ing small does not serve the world. There is noth­ing enlight­ened about shrink­ing so that peo­ple won’t feel inse­cure around you. We were born to make man­i­fest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we uncon­sciously give other peo­ple per­mis­sion to do the same. As we are lib­er­ated from our own fear, our pres­ence auto­mat­i­cally lib­er­ates oth­ers.
~Nel­son Mandela

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the tri­umph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who con­quers that fear. ~Nel­son Mandela

There is a vital­ity, a life force, a quick­en­ing that is trans­lated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expres­sion is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your busi­ness to deter­mine how good it is, not how it com­pares with other expres­sion. It is your busi­ness to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the chan­nel open. You do not even have to believe in your­self or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that moti­vate you. Keep the chan­nel open. No artist is pleased. There is no sat­is­fac­tion what­ever at any time. There is on a queer, divine dis­sat­is­fac­tion, a blessed unrest that keeps us march­ing and makes us more alive than the oth­ers. ~Martha Graham

I remem­ber an argu­ment– a nice one– that I had with my brother Matt once about a poem, a Mark Strand poem, called “Keep­ing Things Whole”. I do not remem­ber it in its entirety, but I do remem­ber Matt’s reac­tion to the theme, which was, I think, about per­sonal mean­ing in life… the nar­ra­tor talks about his pres­ence in the world; that is, when­ever he walks through a field, he is what is absent in the field. After an array of such remarks he says that while oth­ers may have their own rea­sons for mov­ing, he moves to keep things whole.

Now Matt, at the time, was dis­dain­ful of the cen­tral­ity of the man, con­scious and per­haps even boast­ing of an imag­ined role of keep­ing things together, even if by virtue of his sin­gu­lar­ity, or dif­fer­ence. I under­stood Matt’s point– Matt always seemed to like the poems that demol­ished man in favor of nature, I think– but it has stuck with me in a remark­able way, creep­ing into my head like a periph­eral glance in a mir­ror, one that occurs uncon­sciously and you assem­ble later, cubist dis­tor­tions nor­mal­ized by the kind gen­er­al­i­ties of the mind…

This arises because, I guess, the present is one of those mesh­works, half safety-net and half Gor­dian knot; both ways it is easy to feel essen­tial, in the micro-zoom, in the day-to-day. It is easy to feel the air you dis­place as you move for­ward, and feel the gap you cre­ate filled in by the inde­fati­ga­ble atmos­phere, and it is easy to know that you are like the key in the lock, a per­fect shape and size for the present; that you and the world are each other’s neg­a­tive space.

I can hear the sound of the ocean from this Del Mar aerie, perched as we are above the High­way 101, the new vein my cir­cu­la­tory sys­tem. Iryna stares down her poor lap­top, chaf­ing the atmos­phere around her with impa­tience. And I sym­pa­thize– some­times, our knot­ted net can seem like a noose, or at least a jun­gle trip­wire, and I am a very impa­tient man. In fact, we could both stand to turn some pages through the old Lao Tzu. Throw some sticks or coins. Sh’eng, Push­ing Upwards…
But the real­iza­tion of the night is this: we are mov­ing. And it is not that we out­weigh the world in impor­tance, it’s just that we’re here, through what­ever stroke of ran­dom grace, and there­fore essen­tial; and what’s more, our motion of late– how­ever ardu­ous, or sisy­phu­sian, it might seem– has been foward. Inex­orably for­ward. Con­tin­u­ously, momen­tously, for­ward. The air has been clos­ing in behind us