sidewalk cracks and in betweens / life in a web

whew how the spirits of places guide our ups downs inspirations despair! been back 2 weeks in portland, bopping around writing hammering gardening dancing petting cats drawing pictures making epic dinners telling stories giving gifts.

hey you, wearing your nihilist craziness anxious ambiguity like a crown of clover buds and yampah roots, let's walk together behind the goats and watch their buttholes open and close like portals to another world where pooping is easy for everyone and we can digest much more of this world without being poisoned!

here's a question: what do we do with the products of industrial civilization and the industrial food system?
here's a question: how do you call yourself back home?
here's another one: when was the last time you did something unpleasant or hard for someone you love?
and: what plants do you use eat interact with daily?
and: how are you feeling this shift into august in your body, rhythm, state of mind?

hum, these days for me have been some HARDCORE HANGING OUT
which is also sometimes organizing & planning for the life and world i want to live in
i want for future children to live in
that i was called into being to help make
family-making without gettin wholesome
keeping my goodness and magic woven with nastiness and perversity
dancing out rhythms of place and being and priorities
drawing out maps of desire and walks

pshaw let me suck on your liver
taste the bloody dandelion root
drink milk-blood smoothies like i don't believe in the circuitry of disgust
raw testicles like the most special and most easy to put in your mouth
activate your third eye
touch your bones to help you remember their knowing
"your body evokes my body" we danced this
we danced slapped poked spun pushed edged this into being

what comes easily is not always because it existed before
but flows into existence because everything was ripe for its birth
already known and remembered even as as the most new just-imagined

ROOTS. BONES. MOVEMENTS. REWILDING. IMAGINATION. THE aRT wORLD. DROP OUT. AT HOME. ALIGNMENT. TENDRILS. LEARNING. BREAK. BUILD. WALK. SING.

an outline for stories i'd like to tell:
i. walking delicately in a web of beloveds / polyglamory and lessons on boundaries.
ii. moving from homelessness to homefulness.
iii. after death.
iv. nihilism and goat herding.
v. lessons from the hoop / dancing between the wild and the city.
vi. faeries and witches.
to be continued.

leaving soon to be moving again, back to the woods to the olympic peninsula to wandering to revisiting. lovin y'all like summer.

mugged by the muggy

it's been awhile--

my skin's a little browner, my tummy a little emptier, my room a little messier, a couple projects finished, a new couple projects in utero, my thoughts tumbling around like damp clothes in this broken-dryer-wet heat,

in the mornings, i stumble out of my bed (sort of like sheets left on the floor of a sauna) and put on the minimals and walk to the lake. so the first apprehension of my day is engineered, clear--i count to ten before i can dunk myself into the icy water. then i take a deep breath and count to ten again. and then i breathe for a little while. and then i dive--

this morning i sat on the porch swing with my coffee

and noticed a tiny spider hanging on a web
between the ropes of the swing

she must have built that home last night
while i dreamed of clay bodies

while no one was watching, she began to wait

and i watched her crawl around and didn't want to ruin the intimacy

(the promise of my silence, our tacit agreement that our shared story would turn out a particular way, that is,

enduring)

i didn't want to break our moment
by being the one to point out that

her home couldn't stay there,
that her home would be folded in upon itself

within the hour.
(and then that i might be the one to do it, to undercut
the optimistic fantasy that drove her to create a home.)

the man who supports the weight of his white crippled dog as they walk through the ally walked through the ally with his dog. the biker who lives in the house with the garden rolled his bike out, strapped on his helmet, and squinted at his watch. a car-driver in a car drove by. things went as they do, the listeners listening and the coffee-drinkers drinking their coffee and the bikers biking and the wakers waking and the sleepers sleeping.

LB wrote, "'i didn't think it would turn out this way' is the secret epitaph of intimacy."

(and i wonder, how do i change my living to avoid that--

not to say cynically, authoritatively "i knew it would turn out like this,"

but to think that in our intimacy, nothing is sure or promised or forever,

and this is okay and good and beautiful because it is)--

and to the spider, what i might have wished i could say was:
"i'm sorry i cannot be seduced by your web
but my aesthetics of attachment are not careful enough
for us to flourish together. it doesn't have to make sense."
but the quietude was tempting and i intimated with my breath
...it doesn't have to make sense.

last week my brother was here, what a quiet charming fresh young mind,

we adventured around and i felt my spirit of adventure returning,

to the MCA to live on metal mobile islands, biking, bäoing, sitting by the lake,

a sip of a beer is an illicit transgressive simple delight,

the world is not so hard, it is good, and the days flow by filled with ideas that are sometimes followed through till completion and sometimes the sketches are left behind.

and these days have been days of making and unmaking,

tinctures pickles lentils paintings drawings beginnings plans truths quietudes stories bread zines

promises obligations burdens annoyances aspirations falseness messes stresses desires pressures expectations stories bread zines

i'm finding great satisfaction in these small projects which have become daily rituals, and though sometimes the process is painful the reward is always great. i am content being alone and together, quiet in groups, fermenting and bubbling in my desires and allowing them to slowly unwind as i bike up, down, back, forth, through the prairie and the froth and the broken-dryer-air.

for now, that's all. i'm thriving on air and memories and presents and futures and glasses of water and icy mornings and the sparest of intimacies and the occasional loaf of hot hot bread.

at the madison infoshop

so geez i guess ive been in madison for three-and-a-half weeks now and haven't written anything on this here blog.
in the begnning i collected little sentences/snippets in my mind to share with you all: "i live in a home without keys" "both of the toilet flushers are sticky" "i have a carpet in my bedroom" "i don't want to assume that i can just absorb clint's friendships by association" "i have a door i have a door i have a door what do i do with this thing"

anyway but now that sort of amazement of the difference of mundanities is fading. except for every time clint says "bag" i still can't believe the wisconsin accent exists. (you should have heard my reaction to "snaggletooth"! he seriously said "snaeggle tooth" wow so cool!). my muscles have grown accustomed to the 3-block long hill i climb every day to get to school. I'm used to how still and beautiful my house looks with the white day light streaming through the red curtains and the hundreds of hankies hanging from the ceiling. the garden keeps on growing. flowers turn to squash turn to dinner. this house is so beautiful you guys. i can't wait for some of you to see it. (whoever comes, that is)

so my madison legs are growing you see. i dont feel as rootless, as vulnerable. the people i meet/have met are interesting/ed, friendly, supportive.

z:"guys, i really don't know about this kichadi, i think i fucked up. i think it's gonna be boring."
c:"you're doin it, you're doin it. at least you fucked up authoritatively and with confidence."
clint's comment made me realize i would never have done that until recently (past 2 months or so..."since india" i guess.) I am appreciated for what I bring to the home... no-knead bread, sweet oatmeal, banana bread, silly cartoons, the butt game (& "up your butt"), an appreciation of sphincters in general, dancing and singing, and a desire to live in the public communal space.
the roost enriches and supports the faux op, and i know when i return to chicago the faux op will nourish me there. i've introduced many roostisms: certain faces (maybe you know the one in particular to which i refer-- teeth out, nom nom), certain reports (fake chastising and self-deprecation). oh and BAO!
baos here at the faux op sound slightly different-- a little more like a dog's song. more at the front of the mouth. i find myself baoing much more here than in hyde park, though it's been less and less this past week. my first weeks here i couldn't stop. it was a home-noise. it made me feel comfortable & expressive when riding my bike, walking into and around the house...
===================
hours later, at home, i'm trying to finish up this post. i had so much more to write about, where did it all go? i am rolling and smoking cigarettes here, so that's a newish thing.

oh yes yes, the rain is coming, i hear it coming down. i live on a busy street, i hear the cars rolling by. i hear the folky acousticy music noah is playing downstairs in the lab where he grows mushrooms. oh rain.
i have been sleeping in the front room here. I don't like walking into my room at night and lying on my big empty mattress and closing the door (well, the door stays open). i dont like the sanctioning of space as mine. most of the time. it makes masturbating a lot easier than in the roost (wow. that was complicated, or at least obnoxious.)
though i have decorated the walls with little pieces of nice paper, reminding me of people and places. it all seems too quaint, too discreet.

so i sleep in the front room on a futon, usually after staying up too late talking and reading watership down with clint. a detrimental habit for both of us, as we wake up around 7:30 and make oatmeal and coffee and talk some more.
and then i go to hindi class. hours of sitting down in a grey room in a grey building with tiny 1-foot wide windows, talking about india. weird. but i have made some buddies there and like the social atmosphere very much.
it's time for me to write 10 sentences using the past-participle-adjectival construction ("the came-from-school boys"), and then drink some tea/tinctures and fall asleep.
I look forward to welcoming those of you who are in chicago into my home soon. july 16th to be exact. if you are hesitant to take a break from chicago, or feel busy... just give madison a chance. we can go biking to an old-growth campsite and look at STARS (so many stars) and stencil, garden, make food, bike around, go swimming, go to a local microbrew's beer tasting (every friday 4 to 7 at star liquors), etc etc. lots of fun lovely people await just 150 miles north!
love
-zee

like a dream but verifiable by other articulate beings

I had a slice of enlightenment handed to me just a night ago, and it was delicious. just one of those timeless spaces you enter where every thought presents itself with the light of day, hits the tongue and ripples off.

all of it with such ease and meaning. you are connected to everything living and vibrating in this universe, and although you've always known it with your rational and systematizing mind, you now feel it coursing through every fiber of your being. open system.

like a container, your body opens and begins to let in -- drinking the world in through large licorice pupils. like the 80% water that you are, you begin to resonate with the exact frequency of everyone and everything that encompasses you.

breath is full&deep, rhythmic, sweeps those cobwebs out of your chest.

you're probably taking in a higher dose than you normally do of the dear ones in your presence and the particles they're shedding into their chemical aura. they're probably breathing with the same depth and tempo and taking in from you too.

did you know that the literal meaning of "inspiration" is to breathe in?

food for thought

communication is flawless -- what isn't accomplished through a simple shared glance is given through a gentle hand and few small words. (!!!)

if that doesn't sound like close to perfect information retrieval, i don't know what is!

you're reminded of love.

love for the people who are not physically present but who linger in your mind exactly because you've been waiting and looking for some external inspiration to finally tell them -- tell them how you feel.

love for yourself and all these lovely people who perhaps at other times in other places can be monsters but who in this moment and underneath it all are beautiful children who just want to be held and told that they are good and have big hearts and that everything's going to be alright.

--rant to be continued and related to scifi, fear, e=mc^2, feedback loops, information processing, dance, the physical manifestation of harmony (it's structure and anatomy)--