So this is the new year.


Frame upon frame upon frame has compiled itself into the film of our last [365] days. Minds capture what the conscious self draws from this earth and we are left with a neat series – incomplete but complete – which says it all. Sloppy, oblique, yet authoritative, the days have strung us along like marionettes. The sun. The moon. Temperatures. Laughter. They’ve come and gone. Will come again and leave. For the moment, we are given the moment. Slipping between decades, we reflect on these first ten years of the 21st century. Harrison said that we ‘know a great deal but not very much.’ When all seems broken it merely means the machine is running well enough to fling clarity with nary a ripple. Tense is like time is like water. We cannot stand in one place even once. Happiness is as fleeting as 2006, but lo! we celebrated then and we’ll celebrate now. 2011 is a prime number, a mere digit away from Kubrick and Clarke’s take on what hasn’t happened (yet has already been eclipsed). Here the thermometer swings the bat to the tune of -25. Not a prime number, but tell that to my chilled, winter-tired bones. If it all goes to pot for me here in the mountains – hello Japan, how is the new year, old yet? – I’ll go down [sic] with the stars — they’ll at least get me into the sky, that much closer to the heavens…Grab whatever instrument, reckless or otherwise, that inspires. Fling yourself forward, babbling the while like a drunk, or a brook. I’m here just like everyone else.

Solstice. Up today and reading Harrison’s Letters to Yesenin. The wood stove ticking like the clock that hung on the wall until I took it down, mercifully placing it in the pantry where it can better serve to remind the canned goods of their shelf life. Better them than me. Of course when I look out the window and see a sun that like everything it bathes is colorless, I consider pulling that time piece from its dark cave so I might ride with the second hand in clockwise [sic] circles, advancing across the all-too-familiar face. Enough laps and we will cross the finish line of spring. To say nothing of the beautiful, ineluctable months of winter seems in cultural vogue. I’ll mention only last night’s lunar eclipse floating miles above in a cold, airborne sea. A slightly azure moon, something dulled by our earth and made interesting again, shone tarnished.




The full moon in various states of exposure:

Books read in recent pasts: Jim Harrion True North, In Search of Small Gods, Denis Johnson The Name of the World, Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, Tim O’Brien Going After Cacciato, Franz Kafka Amerika, and Cormac McCarthy Cities of the Plain.


Now go enjoy the solstice and witness the complete lunar eclipse.

It’s nice when beauty rises to swallow your circuitry, blowing out the ever-crazed realities of the mind. Here we have fierce river willows that rattle amongst themselves like women at a church social. A visible fire that denotes water in the landscape. I sit and watch them, river flowing beneath like a dark, liquid scar. They are ascetically thick, camouflage for wintering moose. They are resilient, serving mostly unnoticed, a texture upon the landscape. In their most poetic moments they can be seen as a spreading, molten mass, something born from the center of the earth. With surface air in their lungs, they clutch and gape, exposing the pulsing core of this world.

The reading list grows more list-like:

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

The Crossing & All the Pretty Horses by McCarthy

Abbey’s Desert Solitaire

Jim Harrison’s The Farmer’s Daughter

and Tom McGuane’s The Bushwacked Piano.