Playing with the haze
Memory, reflection, and making it all a bit messy to make it a bit more meaningful
Have you ever noticed how hard it is
To know the weather after it has happened?
Minute by minute cast
But when the minutes pass
It all still lies ahead.
And you are left to face and be made from whatever the prediction had in store
True or not.
We are here now
Making sense of whatever we walked / sat / drove / flew through.
-
This is Thanksgiving week.
A client slept in a bush for 8 days. She is 69. I can’t look up what the temperature was. You know, the weather thing. But I’m guessing it was cold. I was sitting on my couch most of those nights. The furnace on, alongside the electric heater. Toes still chilled more than my liking.
But yeah, she slept in a bush. She was there for 8 days. And she is 69. And she said after the fourth day, she couldn’t even stand up. And she said she was resolved to die there.
From 9-5 while this was happening, I was calling around trying to find her. Police reports, tracking medical records, the morgue, her sister. All the calls I’m trained to make.
I did not have the bushes phone number.
The family sits around the living room. They are discussing the kidney and who will give it. Well, not exactly. They haven’t gotten that far. A kidney will be needed. And no one wants to feel weird about it. No one wants to feel weird about the fact that the fog of mortality has entered the conversation. And sure, not so grandiose is it's haze as the word “terminal” might make such things. This is fixable, this is treatable. But all the same, the fog plays around a bit and flows through each lung as it is inhaled. And it does not exit with exhale. And no one exits the conversation. And it might be their best moment together on the trip.
Hurricane force winds pummel the Salish sea. Some slip up onto land and at 2:37am, the lights that are already out would not turn on if you wanted them to. But then at 2:56am they would again. Sleeping through the inability, waking up not knowing any different.
I once taught a 7 year old how to pay attention to a butterfly. He was a little shit the whole rest of the time. Pushing kids over as we traipsed down trails to writing spots. A stain on the idyllic Young Authors Day Camp. But he stopped for the butterfly because I stopped for the butterfly and for a moment I was met with the possibility that I could impart something. And I try and remind myself of that. But these are private acts, mostly. And how do you make the wonder and longing you so quietly feel, public? When it is silent and nourishing and sometimes sorrowful in the most magical way and not funny. How could you not possibly be funny? How could you do anything but ease the tension? How could you not make a joke? How could you expose the fact that every day and in so many moments you want to burst because of the emotion pushing up against the internal border of your skin? Ha.
A bug, somehow in this cold, crawls across her face. She doesn’t mind. It is a reminder that there is life outside the bush.
I am awkwardly dancing in the living room of my sister-in-laws apartment. Not knowing what else to do. She, my wife, and their father's girlfriend are talking about the most challenging memories of their lives. My father-in-law suddenly starts subtly dancing, too.
The golf ball went into the last hole of the round being played at the downtown bar / mini golf facility will not be held in someones palm again for 8 days. There are roughly 327 golf balls at the establishment. There used to be 500 but people take them. No more than 50 can be used at a time. They will order more soon. There are about 30-40 that regularly get used. This one that was just putted in by the college aged kid visiting his brother and sister in law is not part of that rotation. But last night was busy so it has worked its way up the pile. This golf ball has contributed to 43 hole-in-ones since the bar opened 5 or so years ago. The leading golf ball in this category — obviously one of the top 30-40 — has contributed to 527 hole-in-ones. This golf ball will never have as many hole-in-ones as that golf ball. But this golf ball is a golf ball. So this golf ball does not know this, will never know this, couldn’t possibly know this, and will continue being a golf ball for as long as these things take.
A photo is being taken in Zion that will become a puzzle that will be passively put together on a countertop but not completed over the course of a Thanksgiving convergence of a family. A convergence that will last roughly 4 days. The photographer does not think to think of this one image becoming 1000 smaller images. But everything we see could become 1000 smaller pieces, could it not? And every moment could be struggled to be put together for days, could it not? And an instant could remain incomplete, could it not?
During the awkward dancing in the apartment, someone who has not seen their mother in 11 years decides to take a screwdriver and poke two holes into the gas tank of a Mitsubishi Outlander belonging to the younger of the two dancing men and his wife. Gas is expensive and the poker does not know exactly what he will do with the gas the poked holes will leak but the fact that gas is expensive seems reason enough to collect some and to poke the holes in a strangers gas tank in order to do so. This particular tank has much more gas than he anticipated. He fills the plastic tub he placed under the car with gas but the gas keeps coming. He pulls the tub out from under the car, spilling almost half of it in the process onto his pants. He scurries away, cursing to himself. More gas spills as he scurries. When he finally pauses to catch his breath, he inhales a deep whiff of the stuff and immediately hears his mother screaming at him. He is 9 and has just spilled the gas can in the garage set aside for the lawn mower. He sees her slap his face, he sees how the gas is all over the new tennis shoes she brought home for him. She tells him how clumsy and careless he is, why can’t he just do something right for once, she asks, why is he so careless, she asks, why can’t he get his act together, she asks, why the fuck did I steal this gas, he asks as he kicks the tub over forcefully, yelling curses to the moon.
She no longer feels the bush. It is as if she and the bush are not separate any longer. We are bush and body at once, she thinks. She cannot feel her feet. Have they become bush? Snowflakes are falling on her face. She can’t feel them. It is cold.
There is a tooth that is above my first and second molar on the left side. Number 9 and 10 for tooth nerds out there. Its roots part in such a way as to create a dramatically wide Y stretching up near my sinus. Sometimes, when I am trying to meditate, I feel it. Pushing both up and down, seemingly. I almost always feel it when the Capitals are caught up in a close game. I wonder which way it will erupt, up or down? Up into my sinus or pushing the other two molars down and out of the way? Or will it always stay caught in the middle? Stasis while I’m sentient? Buried so deep in me, it might be the last part to decompose. The lasting remnant something I have never seen but tend to feel. Is that poetic or something I should consult my oral surgeon about?
99% of Americans don’t know a single thing about their turkey prior to its death.
97% of Americans don’t care.
These facts are made up but I’m 93% sure they are accurate.
The light slipping through the leaves of the bush feels like ascension. But a gloved hand pushes through, and then another, and a man is picking me up out of the bush. As I stand I realize I could not stand had it not been for the hands of this man helping me stand. A quick thank you and a bus ride to the shelter. I’ll call my sister. I’ll start again, I suppose.
-
We don’t know what the weather will bring, but we predict it with such earnest desire for clarity. When we finally see what the weather was, we don’t think to look back on it.
A lot has been said about expectation, sister reflection.
Clarity is not necessarily potency.
Clarity is not necessarily potency.
Maybe we give way a bit
To the haze.
An exercise if you feel inclined…
Respond to five of the below and stack them into a poem esque form, one line on top of the next:
Write about the second memory that comes to your mind regarding holiday season.
What is one lesson a pet of yours wanted to impart? If you have never had a pet, a lesson another friend or family members pet wanted to impart.
Write out your immediate response to the question, “what happened?” not related to any of the other prompts.
Write out a memory from a childhood house.
Write something you read or learned about in the last week.
Make up a fact you wanted to be true when you were a teenager.
What person / place / or thing do you most see the possibility of Divinity within right now?
Write something from the perspective of an inanimate object in this room as it relates to the emotion you are currently feeling.
Describe something that has happened to you from the perception of someone else.
Write out a song lyric you heard in the past month. It doesn’t have to be right.
Make up a flamboyantly outrageous definition of hope.
Meaning is a smattering of observation and experience fitting together to make some form of light. Every system of belief is observation, turned to meaning making, turned to some form of transmission.
The results of this exercise might not make concrete sense, but let it be a haze you return to.
The patten of snowflakes falling is insane, but it makes a peaceful and beautiful landscape.
We do not need to fully make sense of things for them to guide us.
koan: a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.
A piece of writing that was read years ago that, somehow, probably, informed this whole process — A Mickey Mantle Koan by David James Duncan - HERE
Music that inspired this week for mysterious and no particular reasons — the record ILYSM by Wild Pink HERE
Art by Tabitha Soren that seems to hint at what might be going on here — HERE