dust hangs, it’s hot but there isn’t that moisture
but the cliche’ doesn’t fit here, it’s not so much dry as it is
heavy, with a weight that could suffocate and outside of the city
i know it does.
you can see it in the eyes of drivers of one pick-em-up truck
after the other. dead smothered, but so self-important
don’t mess with texas, we can handle it all by ourselves.
trying to simplify is complex but i continue to work on it.
i like the idea of celebrating the dead instead of mourning for them. although, i, personally, don’t know how to do that since my grieving process isn’t that sophisticated. it seems in parts of Mexican culture, it is believed that death is not the final stage in one’s life but rather a step forward into a higher level of conscience. as i daily age a bit more and grind towards that inevitable, i’d like to think that higher level of consciousness awaits…and that there’s good tunes and some of the fine Mexican folks there have brought some homemade tortillas.
Can’t be what you outta be
Gotta be what you wanna be
Take it with pride and
Like a dragonfly
Dragonfly wants a piece of pie
But he is so strung out
Shake me off the knife because I want to go home
from Dragonfly Pie, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
i spent some time writing a eulogy for someone i cared about and it hurt in a way that is hard to describe. trying to explain a life and what that life meant to the ones who loved and cared for that person left me wondering about the explanation of my own existence. my life and what it means, if anything, to anybody that i love and care for. they assure me it does, this isn’t a pity rant but it does give me pause and it reminds me to do and be better, that time is limited and i’ve wasted far too much of it for far too long. so here’s a promise to me, for me and from me to create, care and constantly do things that might better this place we stand on for the one’s that mean something to me.
i bet being airborne as you die
is a weird sensation for the
MIND to process.
don’t they always say that you feel like your
SPIRIT is floating above your
BODY?
if you are already floating and then your spirit is floating above
your suspended body there must be
some sort of SPIRITUAL chuckle as your
BRAIN processes the
DUALITY of it all.
born in america, as close to the south as you can get before entering dixie, gives you a deep understanding of “just the way things are.” people hunt, people fish around here. but they don’t do it for their groceries, they do it for furniture, for wall hangings, decor. they do it to put on the walls to show their prowess at taking the life of something. rooted, i assume, in they way we had to do it as we cleared the land, survived and built these societies, cities and burgs. men my age were spoon-fed cowboy movies, western-tomes where heroes wore white hats, shot to kill savages, food and those in black hats. guns and killing were a way of life. for food, for protection and for power. guns were part of the fabric of life in these movies, just as they were in households. we had a couple shotguns, even a couple pistols, my dad and my granddad were both veterans. my dad, a occasional rabbit hunter and all of us fishermen, for a few years i would say that i was a real angler, boats, expensive gear, the whole she-bang. there were no politics to these things. my family, if anything were hyper-liberals. that’s all i really knew. but i got older, i discovered things that opened my mind; art, visual and aural. punk rock and the ethos behind it led me to question some of these deep rooted notions of white and black hats, of killing things just for the “sport” of it and ultimately i questioned killing things to stock the shelves of the food markets.
i am now going on 33 years without meat. i don’t preach to others about much of this stuff. alas everything is now political, to each his own, but when the debate about freedoms involves old and tired arguments like, “that’s why cows were put on this earth” or “guns don’t kill, people do” i grow a bit antsy and begin to stand up a little straighter. when people tell me they love beef, the love pork, they love chicken, i can understand that, they don’t need a justification beyond that with me, same with those fried fish–same with their guns. hell, loving something is something.
but the gun lobby isn’t really honest, they don’t say they love their guns, they give you a bunch of horse shit about safety and protection and THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS! it isn’t about any of that, let’s talk the truth about guns. no one is coming to get yours, no one is saying you can’t have one, but your dishonesty about why you have them is what is bothersome. you love them, the same way you love brisket and bar-b-q and that 7 lb. bass on the wall. you don’t need any of that, you just love it. and that’s really america. we make things we love, a “right” and we use a bunch of fear and hyperbole to justify getting more of what we love. so when you say that having the same weapons that the military or the police have is your “right” we know it really isn’t and you really don’t believe it is. you want them for the status, that weird male itch of collecting something and the gun manufacturers figured that out and they marketed that notion to you and they used fear with a dash of “own the same killing machines and the good guys” and you fell, it wasn’t your fault. you love guns.
this mish-mash of triple exposure was snapped about a week before the boy went to college. sounds weird, college, this boy. the other boy already out of college and doing growed-up work but this boy, the baby boy at college…so yeah, here’s 3 clicks before that.
i looked up and realized that it had been about 9 months since i had posted a photo, a word, a thought or even a burp around these parts. post-election, post-Trump blues? probably. anyhow, here i am back. so maybe a few lines of a poem, unfinished but there…
if the light you like is like warm, red with warmth, yellow, too,
like socks on feet under blanket in the Fall, almost too warm to take, then
snap, not mentally, but the shutter, camera-kind, snap, put it in a box with glass on.
and you will have captured it. it? the light you like.
betty on the porch. in the light i like.