Dirty feet.

The tile floor gathers dust rather quickly in our large, fairly spacious kitchen and despite my best efforts to sweep at an almost compulsive rate the ubiquitous and ever present dust bunnies continue to congregate together at the bottoms of my feet. As I scrape my heels along the inner sides of my calves to remove the dirt, I feel a slight tickle resonate along the heels and balls of my feet, and a smirk tenderly forces itself upon my face, subtlety reminding me that we are all just people. People who go about our days gathering dirt, shedding off dust, tracking our steps from the outside world slowly into our home, where together we sweep behind our past hours and the pain caused by trying to forge our existence into this world. And together we cathartically exhale our days through noise assuring each other that dirty feet will always be welcome here.

Day 1

So there is this thing that happens. We are bodies; we are flesh and blood, bone and skin. We are living beings that communicate, think, act, move and exist. We are us. Human together.

It takes a lot of getting used to, this whole "body" thing. And maybe that is the point, we never really feel at home with ourselves, because the way we are trained to think about ourselves has been hijacked by the world of consumerism and marketing. Making us feel like we are never enough of who we are supposed to be, when as a matter of fact we are all sufficiently ourselves.

Together we embark on an imaginative (and when i say "imaginative", don't think unreal, but think "bodies") adventure/experiment. The world we live in is full of harmful toxins, harmful environments, and harmful ideas. More and more as we live in this world we become inundated with things that suppress the power of life and the ability to see, enjoy, and create beauty. We get pummeled by the weight of a world that permeates death and destruction to the point that our ability to see life and hope.

If we can peel back the layers on our lives that prevent us from seeing and experiencing beauty, we would live more freely in the moments that give forth life and joy. We could see the world being painted with new colors, and imagine the shades that color our vision in a darkness of life where hope unfolds from the margins of the pages, where advertisements are merely shadows of life and harm reduced to simply the pain that we bring about by our own humanity, trying to figure out 'just what it is we mean.'

Thoughts on Identity

Thoughts on identity, Per Craig Keens class, modest mouse, reflections on a book we are reading, thoughts from fellow travelers, stories from fellow exiles, and tears from fellow sufferers, and my own messed up story being written as I close my eyes and write these scribbled lines in the sand, hoping that some words might stay, knowing that nothing will; 

and we'll all float on ok. 

it almost defines us, as a generation, we have generally been unwilling participants in the game of classification. The web and flow of information, culture, and story, has spread so quickly through the mainframes of our collective consciousness (via internet, technology, facebook?) that we no longer find a sense of belonging in our "sameness" of culture, or "identity," but in our differences of creating identities. 

and we'll all float on okaaay. 

It's too simple to say that we all want to be the same, and it is too difficult to say that we all want to be different, yet in the same way that we seek acceptance and affirmation, we shun conformity and sameness. The counter culture has always been a staple of each generation, and its presence has always been a testament to the fight against hegemonic forces that seek to control the way we see the street signs, read the newspaper, and navigate through life with the symbols and words they give to us. I suppose i mention this since i loosely find some identity in this "idea." But as I move forward, i sense that this loose description of "counter-culture" will lose its meaning and slip through the cracks, even as I reach for it in these words.

Already we'll all float on Now don't worry we'll all float on 

All this of course is only relevant to speak a little bit to my own story, and to speak to others that might benefit from hearing a story similar to their own, and willing to accept that in the midst of difference and the struggle for identity, we might have to allow some space for unconventional and subversive ways to arise from our discourse with identity, but also allow for hope to guide us into something that finally brings us home.

Aliright don't worry even if things end up a bit to heavy 

I am lost in my own identity, and I sense that the more we seek for something to hold on to, the more we slip. Each moment we try to stand on something, we get undercut by the moment of being just a second behind, or a second too early, or maybe you finally got there on time, only to find that the second you were there, was literally a second long.

Even if things get heavy we'll all float on 

It may be foolish of me to believe that we are all hiding, grasping, running, reaching, yearning, for something. Something. SOMEthing. SOME EFFING THING. But in my foolishness, i might be convincing myself that "something" isn't to be had, or made, or synthesized, but imagined. Imagined in a way that creates space for new or foreign experience, imagined in a way that allows for the in-breaking of difference and the other, followed by the experience of being thrown off-center into something that dislodges us to just enough imbalance forcing us to readjust our steps, to get back into focus. There is room for this imagination in our collective psyche, yet our willingness to participate is cut-off by the discipline of hegemonic forces. We are disciplined by the tides of capitalist language and structure that give us the road maps by which we translate the rest of our realities. And we seem to be stuck in between the flow of where all the fish are going, and knowing that where all the fish go leads only to death and destruction. 

Don't you worry we'll all float on 

Perhaps we need to find a way to stay a float on the slipping slide that is our identity, or we can continue to mingle our difference in the words that are not spoken, and wander around pretending to fit into something that no one even asks us to fit into. If our exclusion is too abrasive, our inclusion is even more oppressive, perhaps they work in the same proportionate measure. 

We'll all float on... 

If we are on a journey to find ourselves somewhere, and yet we constantly find ourselves nowhere in the midst of long and grueling excursions, perhaps the map that we are using to get there is a bit off, or maybe just completely wrong. We’ll never really know until we are bold enough to ditch the map, and navigate together in the dark. And maybe if we all just whistle loud enough without fear of being off tune, we will finally be able to participate in whistling the same tune together. 

All float on.....

There are rare spans of time in a persons life where the convergence of different and separate events culminate into one glorious moment interspersed with days of mundane existence, trivial pursuit and frivolous frivolity. Yet those separated moments in between somehow work together to piece together a time that can be remembered or recalled with a fondness of kind memory, and smile making faces. The wonder of this phenomena can come in many and various forms, perhaps in the form of chance encounters with random but connected people, or the convergence of artistic inspiration. Yet the common theme that makes these connected moments stand out are the profound moments of silence and despair that exist in the moment. We are never fully aware of our own despair yet our connection to it is never fully eradicated. So we learn to live with it, and we must learn to recognize it. If we stay connected to our despair in a way that allows room for it to exist, but not manifest, then hope can continue to flourish within its presence. Hope is not only a future moment, or a feeling that extends into the future tense. Hope should also be the present, and the actions that we take to make true the reality of a world that would rather give its energy to peace and love, than death and destruction. Yet we are thrown off the course of this path by the unfulfilled desire of consumption and consumerism. And we have yet to find a way of this path. As all things in life, we grow and reach a limit of our growth, and begin to deteriorate. Somehow people believe that the open market is not susceptible to this way of life, and that our tolerance for over consumption and consumer driven lives will never be satiated or curbed. We are creating a beast, a beast that is growing well beyond our means to control, and a beast that will inevitably fall giving into the rules and ways of life's cycle. Will we finally be able to recognize this? Or will we fall into the abyss, killing ourselves in our consumption?

This is what Kicking Ass Looks Like

If we could catch water with our hands

If we could just carry things in our hair.

If we could just laugh at all our imperfections.

Ziplock Bags

And we will head out into oblivion
Head first with our eyes closed raising our hands.
We will need no light and the T.V. will not be on
because we will remember what they told us
"the revolution will not be televised."
We will remember that we forgot to lock the door
but we will not care if they steal our shit
because it never meant much to us anyways.
Days will be hazy but memories will be sealed
shut in a plastic ziplock bag
that way we can keep them fresh in time for spring.
We might get lost along the way
but we'll always find our way back
because I paid a lot for this stupid compass.

I'll let you know when its time to sleep
and you'll tell me that I need to eat
that is what friends do for each other.
I thought that maybe we might get lucky
and stumble upon a pet along the way.
We'll name him Gratch
I like that name because a charachter in my favorite
fantasy book named his pet Gratch
and I remember that he was awesome.
There may a possibility that Gratch
could learn to talk if we taught him.

We can tell each other stories as we walk along the road
as we reminisce of our childhood days when
we cared far less than we did
about all this useless shit,
and we will remember that we will always be Jr. High
no matter what we think.
I'll know how much you despised your older brother
and how you wish now that he was still alive.
And you will know that I never knew my mother
which should explain why I am the way I am.
To pass the days we can make up our own language
and I think that will be fun to do
because I already called dibs on the curse words.

After a few months
we will realize that this journey is a bit boring
Roads will get repetitive
our food will get stale
and we will run out of interesting stories to tell each other.
Maybe you will get sick of my constant need for attention
and I will hate giving you piggy back rides every 10 minutes.
Our feet will be too tired to walk,
and our backs will ache with road sores.
The ziplock bag will probably tear open
and our memories will get spoiled
well before we make it into spring.
Gratch will die from the lack of nutrition
and we will bury him along the road
constructing a memorial for the first ever talking pet
but no one will believe that we taught him how to talk
but we will always know that he did and he was awesome.
The language we made up
will be used strictly for vulgarity
and it will only be heard as bitterness
in the diction of our voices
Our compass will break
and we will get lost while we go in circles
trying to find our way home

Then when we feel we can't take it anymore and our patience is at its end
we will go back home
turn on the TV
to find out that the damn revolution was televised all along.
No one stole our shit
And the lights were on the whole time
But we will not worry too much
Because I know that soon enough
we will be making new plans
restocking our old bags
and getting back on the road.
Because this is what friends like to do
only this time we will make sure to bring a sturdier ziplock.