Heaviness set upon me just now. Color and contour warp, dim colors once bright. Heavy the gravity that pulls one into one, through the cracks in skin, beyond veins and messy insides, past our whizzing electrons, landing in a murky dark. It fell upon me, with a fright, without a fight.

Here's a cover my friend Clint and I did of AA Bondy's "Mightiest of Guns." He laid down the guitar at the beginning as well as the main vocal. Whispering, steel string, harmonies, and other weird crap was produced/arranged/mastered by yours truly. Started yesterday, finished a few minutes ago.

Click ----> Mightiest of Guns

I stood on top of a scene. From the staccato report of clinking glasses, the stool's weary creak, the tiresome whir of overhead fans, a melody emerged bearing more meaning, more importance than the vacuous symbols issued from its players. A composer before noise, an artist before lines, a god-man before death, I claimed meaning where there once was none, and there was meaning irregardless. I stood before and held the present, then slipped, and I was, again, a noise among many.

What an odd place a comparative few find. When, from the tireless chattering about us, a sea of seeming imperatives (why?), we, suddenly, find ourselves standing on a strip of land where the sea, for a moment, has held its breath and receded. We face, quietly, the scene about us. The automated parts, the floating cogs that make up a consuming listlessness, we face it; we have seen what is, and it is not as it should be, and we cannot, in good conscience (or in any capacity at all, at this point), return to what was and live as if it were standard and acceptable fare, as if we'd never seen what the banal cacophony hides beneath its frothing tips. The tide recedes for few; where the world is glimpsed and the things in it are forgotten, and what lies before is being affording itself.

Anxiously, constantly, ashing your cigarette; embers, then fragile soot of quickly spent memory. Dwell on a wet ash tray. Dwell on that thing from earlier today. Dwellings of the un-dealt-with: the ancient oak bar, the coarse jokes, the deafening laughter; home away from a home that we refuse to make. At the end of it is an aching question, best avoided, and let to linger till our next visit.

Ah, what was that? A piece, a fragment, where the wind blew just right, just now, and the way the light is playing on that willow's branches, the way it dances, and through my eyes and throat and lungs it pools, just for a moment. And this brief tick (tock) is felt, an object, where all the things that are right now, the things that grip at the fabric of this second, flow through its prism and separate and throw scenes (their smells, feelings), long forgotten, onto the canyon wall, over the vast divide that keeps sweet memory blurred. Look! The way this autumn air crisps, there I am when I was young, when my father was strong and took me on walks through New England's ancient maple and ash. The light, it flits and beckons, and that is my first love, when I was afraid of the thing. And the blue sky, its soft wind, I am small and cradled in the sleeping lap of my mother. It leaves me, and I'm left short of breath, working quickly to dig a wider moat.

There are straps that snake around our curves and constrict. Well worn things, flaking and ancient, but no less capable. Easily loosed, should we so choose, the sinewy thing no longer distinguishable from our limp frames. Once, a chance was seized before it passed, and it was as it should when one grasps such a thing. Once, I saw tree that had swallowed the balustrade about it, but it's us, now, who've been hedged in by the palisade that commands, "only this, and nothing more, nothing more." How feeble does one grow, useless limbs despoiled even of its muscle's memory. Hope, dream, and other such mighty trope, once vital and now vestigial, even they've forgotten their legs. Could it be that but one heave of the chest, one deep breath, would be enough to slip the weight of this restraint? But it is more common, and much simpler, to pinch one's bated breath.

Sylvia Plath saw a fig tree stretched out in front and above her, laden with fruit, her possible lives, her choices to make. It's an interesting thing, really, and if it were so simple! Each fig was this, or that; really, though, each fig, each choice, would bear another thousand, thousand trees. Choices to make, yes, and innumerable, but also innumerable the choices to never possibly be made; the choice in not choosing one thing in choosing another. She wrote of how the figs withered when she, faced with an untold harvest of ripe 'to be', could not pick but one, her arms laden with possibility, and all she could do was watch. We are placed in a world of possibility, endless, and possibility wanting nothing but to be grasped. Where Plath grasps authenticity, perhaps, is that she was able to comprehend the tree in the first place, to watch the fruit wither. An inauthentic life floats imbued with life, though quite lifelessly, and without seeing. Should you see a tree burdened with possibility, take, if you wish. Should you not take, then you did not take, and took something else in not taking, but you chose to do so.

Then again, this could all just be very, very wrong.

A fleeing dream on the vestiges of sleep will infect and compose an entire day. The odd tints and angles, mismatched persons and actions, these things may color our gaze and break old trains of thought. And now this is connected to that, sometimes for the day, and sometimes never the same. Once fallow thought is now rich and green, and another, weighty and always pregnant with meaning, concedes its loving breath and lies still.

And who is it that wields this strange power? And why? Is it that sleep provides a secure venue for the secret, subdued things skittering (or sleeping) about during waking hours? How do they move on their own? When they are brought to light, during the day (should one be so brave), how is it that they cannot be expelled (that is, should one desire their expulsion)?

Loathe to bear witness on the heels of man, a wretched body and salty lips poured forth air and life. From a stubborn trumpet did La Vi En Rose issue with bright timbre amidst its sullen ilk, SS, GI. Lightly, the somber melody hovered as god above the void, between sea and surf, and there was death surrounding her. And she said "Let darkness be separate from light," and darkness and light did not comply, and turmoil was unfettered. And the trumpeter saw this, and he was grim.

The sands off Normandy will never polish a reflection and now weakly sputter through hour-glass and the riddled bodies of crude's allure. Germanic for Arabic, but things have changed and things are more sinister. A slick chokes the life from ancient seas and from the sands it's dwelt for centuries, the honor from a uniform, and from a race of men a tepid peace.

It seems queer that an artist should move to squelch, rather than nurture, the waylay flashes of joy that, on occasion, shoot up from the stony soil of one's melancholy. "Surely, this sliver of silver cannot compliment my brooding landscape, not if I should be considered seriously." Always on the cusp of a freshly bled heart, youthful rendezvous with a flickering muse have suggested that inspiration and "true art" is only successfully tapped within the deepest reaches of the deepest self-scrutiny of the deepest pain. But this is as convincing as the divining dowser, oneself, and their witching rod with which one marks a spot to plunge. Hark! Yonder! A surface stream! Dam it, and damn the dark, and cup your hands in a pool in which there is no heartache, at least not today, for only the fool will scoff.

It dances on and in your features, and a sentence - a word - that you held just below your lip peeks over and out at me. "I never said that." So you didn't, and in that you said something.

A curious thing, dark and never admitted. The passing Spring breeze, and the joyous things it carries (new love, celebration, jubilation) provokes thing's bristles. Good tidings often greet cynicism, or for thing. Thing retreats, smokes, broods. Often only within a dizzying inebriation that thing will shuck its guards, darkness tips and pouring from its mouth the inadmissible things once held fast in sobriety.

Dangerous momentum on a wave of spirits; the secret thoughts have manifested - no longer aether - they parade in the spaces between our faces and the lulls in pleasant conversation! Ah! Trite they may be! But thing, is there nothing that escapes your unforgiving gaze? A cold scrutiny. And ah! God! The shock when it turned on yourself!

Now it's thing that lies helpless in Athena's temple, cast in salt gazing upon Sodom. Cry not, Lot.

I was speaking to someone about children. He'd gone on about how children are not but a blank slate, clean parchment waiting for the swirling stains of paternal, or some other, knowledge. My wife disagreed, mentioning something about how there is "a spark" within a child, that they are more than simple, or poorly, worded copies, of copies, of copies, etc.

I'm not sure where I sit on this debate, though it's certainly not with the former.

Somehow this reminded me of a discussion I had with a different friend, I believe about Lacan. Though I've never read Lacan, and whether the ideas I have of Lacanian thought are even remotely on point, that conversation has gone to seed. The notion that it is not within us but, rather, lies intertwined in all of our actions, our interactions, a sunset, our favorite chair, the way the air smells, a breeze - that we are not it, but that we are nothing without it, has blown my short and curlies back.

That was poorly written.

Just a beautiful thought. I imagine strings, or veins (synapses?), shooting out from each of us in every direction, and from every thing, and as I walk, or sit, or breathe, I am constantly brushing into another set of strings from an innumerable amount of things that make that moment, and that moment is me...

...ah fuck it. This all to say, "We're not blank slates." Time to go read some Lacan.

How quick your weight presses forcefully.
The heaviness of mediocrity.
Or is it lightness with which you dress your plea?
To draw me and to stem my flee?

And greatness is a dull heart ache.
And great the steps too afraid to take.
But such a throbbing will not abate.
Anyone whom their lives they stake.

For the trees where underneath respite.
Limbs in winds will bend and sigh.
And at once the cicadas come alive.
To pry the crust from your foggy eyes.

And greatness is a dull heart ache.
And great the steps too afraid to take.
But such a throbbing will not abate.
Anyone whom their lives they stake.

But a quick too many years have passed.
Having been caught in the looking glass.
Our gaze has laid not but on the past.
These thoughts for naught we see at last.

And greatness is a dull heart ache.
And great the steps too afraid to take.
And blasé is the breath that waits.
And meanders in each moments wake.

Having just finished reading Steinbeck's East of Eden my thoughts seem to meander on the character “Tom Hamilton.” More or less, Tom is portrayed as one who struggles with and within himself; he teeters on the edge of greatness and of great mediocrity, either of which frightens and shoos him into a hiding place within himself. What I enjoy about Tom is Steinbeck’s portrayal of how one may be ‘great’, how one can grasp that potential, but how one is often too afraid to; whether it’s the work that goes into greatness, or the greatness itself, most of us will abscond the pursuit for fear of it. Halfway through the novel Tom ends up killing himself. Timshel. I often find myself questioning what it means to be great. I find that that is often all I do, question. I imagine there’s an almost inherent odium for mediocrity, yet we’re so easily beguiled by it and this is an enormously frightening thing; we carelessly spend our precious time. Though not quite squandering, it’s as if we eat and neglect to taste, or just fuck to placate a base sense. Creature comforts, a cerebral anesthetic? Ah, timshel, may I? Will I?