1. Matthew Barber — Ghost Notes

2. Blind Pilot — 3 Rounds and A Sound

3. Kristy and Shannon.

(If you’re stuck in yer RSS Reader, you need to visit the site itself to see it.)

Yes, this was a good use of time.

I made this new header for us.

The drive from Reno to Lake Tahoe is not long in terms of distance but the definition of length of trip is affected by a few factors: mountains to climb (or to cut back and around), degree of motion-sick-sensitivity, whether or not one sits in the far back seat of a 15-passenger shuttle van.

We came to a beach, a commodity rare in North Texas. I wore a peacoat on a beach, even rarer yet!

On Sunday, my traveling partner Daniel and I decided we’d rent a car and make the loop of the entire lake – about 74 or so miles and split by the California and Nevada state line.  It was my first time in California, and, decidedly not my last.

We rented a KIA with automatic windows so we could roll them down.

This is Emerald Bay in South Lake Tahoe, the most famous and photographed place on the perimeter of the lake. Any postcard of Lake Tahoe you see probably was shot somewhere in this area.

After spending some time at Emerald Bay photographing and growing terribly cold in t-shirts, what remained on the road before was about 36 miles untile we were back at Incline Village in North Lake Tahoe. Before the sun set, we stopped for dinner at another beach just east of Emerald Bay.

On our last night, we packed everything up and headed back in to Reno, the city from where our plane would ascend the next morning. We decided to go cheap instead of paying another day’s fee for at the resort which’d been comped the two nights prior. We quickly located a motel whose name alone was reason to book a night.

The next morning came early.  But what you’ll find in Reno is that it’s never too early to gamble, and that there is no place unsuitable for slot machines. This may or may not be the amount I won on Wheel of Fortune while waiting for our flight.

Here is an airplane under sunrise in Reno.

Here is a photograph I took of Phoenix from an airplane.

When back in Dallas, feeling renewed and with conviction and clarity about purpose, direction, and understanding better my own part in the Whole.

A sip in and suddenly I’m slipped into a circle of lawn chairs around the makeshift centerpiece of guitar road cases and some citronella blaze. The solemnity of that sound – the cooperation of the wind some & fading leaves which catch and carry the overture, descending periodically in to brush & tap our shoulders, eventually settling to neighbor our black boots.

We both cinch the collars of our peacoats to our neck, fasten the scarves in a way that they rub at the hair on our jaw and secure in some warmth to our necks. As you light your Camel and flick the ash to your left, I raise the Malbec sip and it is as rich and spicy and this is a compression of how I viewed my own life again, finally.

I have not felt as I do now in years. It’s odd to think how quickly years pass and yellow. Perhaps since I moved from New York and my child was before me in greater measure than before, and I explored possibility more than previously – maybe the realization of capability?  But no end was in sight for my time here. It was a sweet and innocent episode (but no less genuine) – a time portioned for growth but mostly I see for experience of others, for understanding of self, and for the enjoyment and distribution of God’s great gifts to us as his creation. I think I was the most joyful (I often avoid that word for its subcultural connotations) I have ever been, and perhaps that I have been since.

October is a quite important month.  Not that I have rationed it so, but experience in recent years past seems to remark that this is the time when Things are revealed. Cycles are rebuilt and recalled, rhythms of death are replaced with rhythms of life and of renewal, and deep, sometimes caustic searching of self – of motive personally and socially led into a greater self-awareness than that which preceded (and giving light to what proceeds).

Ellsworth will remain, I assume, forever, as the place I began to learn to live. To feel no need for control or paramater or answer. Accepting the grey, working hard, and loving deeply. It is within this context that I began to understand the importance of mutuality, its balance with introspection, and the necessity for slowing, silence, and trust. And my relationships were strong, and my desire for them as strong, creativity rich and my experience of and search for Truth more hopeful than before.

Things since that time I have not consistently been able to incorporate into the rhythms of my life, especially since leaving my office job and entertaining the particarlities of freelance and the way living alone is (and must be) fleshed out with comm-unity in world-view.  And I have tried, but then there are scars. Little pieces of pink skin that are indicators of believing one thing and seeing it not embodied as it ought to be, but I refuse to allow only personal experiences be the hinge between Reality and my own perception of it, though I also can’t deny or avoid the effects of it periodically.

I want to look back at this October and know that it is as monumental as the past three consecutively, and from what I am currently experiencing, realizing, and adjusting to in my own person, I have few doubts that this will be among the most important yet.  I welcome the realization, and look forward to how it receives flesh in my daily behavior and the eventual behavior to which it leads.

If this is an Ellsworthian season, I do not think of it as anything but positive. Extremely so. My things are gone, the excess is stripped, and I’m left with nothing but camera gear, a few plaid shirts, one pair of jeans and the book collection I only temporarily attempted to rebuild after I left my entire library on the front steps of East 97th Street.  I feel more free in my person than ever (the connectivity of things and experiences is real, but this is not even half of what I mean), without expectation, and willing to trust more honestly even than I did in the year before Ellsworth when I thought I had nothing to lose.

And at a time when I finally feel like there are incredibly important aspects and parts that make up the whole of my life to this point, I do have have a great deal to lose relationally I believe (and what is left is the supporting data to that headline), and that I shouldn’t do so especially for my own self-seeking, comfort, security, and service, or because I understand and perceive myself to be much more important than I am. That would be foolish, and of course if there is any direction my life is taking I would want it to not to be that. And so I’m not.

And for lack of a better word; I’m not an Island.

There are definitions of home. And there are ways to rehearse.

it is a Good thing to continually realize my importance is far less than I once I thought.

I invite the self-perceptions of it to keep drowning.

Here is an empty room, (but less the emptiness) years of hardwood cigarette stench in the glossy tops of tables; a red light sparkles stern in the shadows, and the overture of yells for a band who hasn’t played here in years — it burns and sticks.

I wouldn’t have known the difference of some oak tree branch squealing in the friction of glass, an eloquent sweep through the midnight caught up by the pane and your voice. Centered, provocative, magenta-skin voice.

Can you believe these are the sorts of things we wrote to each other? Assume it’s par for that year’s course. And when you take all your cues from (or the breadth of your personal reality is defined by) a movie, there can’t be more to expect. Even though — terribly — expectations were all we owned.

As it goes, though, the definitions move from wide to small as our experiences go from few to many, and you know that if I do by now. You’ve always known things a few years before me whether or not I could (I never could) admit to them.

I hope you are well in Denmark. I’m still in the town I grew up, and everything is not different. I’m stowed in the loft of a bar where we once swept the billiards.

Winter is on it’s way, however slowly and playfully.  Wrapped tightly in a black trenchcoat I bought in SoHo, I can’t help but guess each of these seasons from now yet will be subsumed by the head of the one we knew.

I still wear the scarf you knit and I’m damn proud of it.

Archie

[First objective, make up words.  Second objective, mull through some sentences and bruise syntax and fight my way to the period, if not a semicolon first. Third objective, don't stop.  And press "Publish" {which makes it sound quite romantic} without a redaction.]

Lately I have written more letters to persons than I have journals here, and I mean that is currently what it looks like for me to document a certain sojourn, and, well, I think that is more of the point anyway.  A point I have been missing for a while.

It is not that I have not taken to the discipline of letter composition in the many years of stops along thispresentsojourn, but perhaps it is that I have begun to understand its importance at the expense of this site more than another time before.  I won’t think that is something for which I will never apologize – silence — especially I think if what is silence to some is to another laughter and tears and hours and hours laying on our backs in a pre-war bedroom on the cold wood floors of fall.

So as I prepare in the next few months to take quite a heavy step on the way which Call carves, I might begin to post some letters from throughout the past year, some anonymously, and some maybe as a fictional correspondence 0f fictional characters. Who the narrator is we might or might not be able to gather, but what is the point anyway is that people are built in such a way that they are incomplete without others, and letters speak to this more than what I’ve been so focused on here.  Not to say this is unimportant (or I wouldn’t be writing these words at all).

Here is to another shift, and to the acknowledgement that each day is a shift in a Shift, a becoming in a Becoming.  And on the days we are shitty and destroyed do shitty things and destroy others because of it, our hope that somehow and someway we through and by that and moreover our dedication to the interconnectivity with others we are and (I think) miraculously being made whole and right.

If reality is a fabric that is stitched together by participation and by mutuality and by love, then the snags and tears and rips caused by the inverse will be repaired, and the repair will somehow be better than the original garment. I can’t say I’ve believed that for years — at least as much as I wrote it down and wanted (forced myself) to think it True.

Anyways, as is my fascination with letter-writing and the desire to see that sort of correspondence on a deeper, stronger, more human level than the lofty, propositional, self-examinatory, open-audience sort of way (that was congruent with my stage of life that began in a certain City and carried on as a deeply search-full postlude) which in fact became the reason I purchased a domain name and hosting in the first place. A documentary of a becoming. Of course this is still that, but how that is fleshed in writing is as different as how it has been fleshed in experience.

& now am I

bet | in | ween,

atsametime
on E-

ither side, circle . circle
in, close
out, b r e a t h e