Author: sat

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throat-clearings

we recite from memory when testing the mike– engage in a wholly self-conscious moment. I typically resort to the prologue of the canterbury tales, whan that aprille with his showres soote etcetera. sometimes you’re phlegmatic from too much butter on your morning toast. you take scalding baths as often as you brave freezing rain, are alternately more and less gentle with yourself in process, dissect progress compulsively, claw chapped lips, slough away the carapace under cover of bathwater, chafe skin pink with towel’s nap, attempt to reveal yourself more vividly in a hundred different ways. your efforts, for awhile at least, are minor and halting. there may or may not be an aria in the offing.

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the work I do

tonight my heart is an immense well of peace, nourished by quiet and color, shadow and shape.
the shushing breath beside me in bed is lulling, train’s rumble soft past night-draped front windows.

after sleeping odd hours, I’m awake with my own interior music singing down the bones.


nighttime is lush and dense with quiet, all the clocks wound down and drowsing.
hope slipped in at my eyes now sails full-bellied on my bloodstream.

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just B

I don’t know why it should be so hard. why the thrash, why the flail– even with virtually all external expectation removed.

accidentally, initiated by misreading an oblique reference, I start reading about samsara, about the persistent cycle of world-building– and consequent world-destroying– and associated suffering.

up with the growling radiators and belly cramps, I ponder the various ways in which I’m complicit in this cycle of suffering. the compulsion to disclaim here is strong, to unwrite myself even in the process of attempting to write– codas ad infinitum– a little knowledge is a glancing and misapprehending thing– and yet I must begin someplace. indeed I must make peace with both beginning and continuing. having had a bellyful of ending for some little while. that, at least.

chris, shape maven, in the course of a lifetime culling industrial and popular culture ephemera has collected a number of large signage letters. he has, for instance, the most elegant aluminum Y– emblematic of the eternal question. last night, in the spirit of a letter he used to own, he was urging me to let loose my internal tyranny of self doubt and recrimination and just be.

it should be simple, right? implicitly. and yet ironically difficult. “to what end?” the monkey mind immediately demands, leaping about, scratching its pits. service? industry? communication? lord help me, art?

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days these days

here’s how it starts: I’ll flail around wasting time for awhile– seemingly intentionally, as flagrantly wasteful as I can imagine being– for the emptier the pursuits, the sooner I grow bored with my own stink of purposelessness and take up beginning something (beginning being fraught with possibility and dread).

maybe start small with getting dressed. I can handle getting up to go play with wardrobe, putting on this and that, guided by texture and color, delicate details, minor outrageousness. then move on to doing things to hair and face. make myself my own bygod barbie head. practice seeing reflected the artist I want to be. what color would she wear today? lately she likes teals and slate blue with brown or grey defined by black, pima cotton, buttons and small gathers.

eventually I’ll veer off into taking snapshots with my iphone. lazy girl’s photography. rearrange cutups in a cigar box stage, suspend leaf patterns from pieces of wire and copper nails, dab on paint and stray bits of language. lazy girl’s art. blog a bit with an exaggerated air of carelessness and lack of capitalization. o, the everlasting creative twostep of approach/retreat.

yesterday I set up the alt.computer to amend the artplay table into digital hybridity with the addition of a wedged-in cabinet lifted up on blocks (in the end the tire jack didn’t work) and now have a prime windowseat command center for a range of creative endeavors.
floyd so enjoyed the view that I made him his own little window perch.

in the process of getting the workstation setup, I semi-ceremoniously shoved over the uppershelf flotsam to make way for printer/scanner, and consequently have some rearranging leftover for someday– my grownup’s dollhouse area of objects.

this afternoon I donned a farmwife white apron with blue embroidered swallows and relished the slip of pepitas clicking into a bowl. concocted a rich autumn soup from winter squash and eggplant with goat cheese for zing.

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season changing

overlong falsely inflated, the thermometer at last takes a seasonal plunge. that fickle friend the tshirt sun that’s lingered, luring us to display ourselves to a wide-open sky, beats a sudden exit in a shower of red and gold. last luminous leaves shudder thinly, pinned to black branches, etched vivid against a slate sky. both the dog with his trivial fur even I with my excess girth grown round my middle through months of dolor, learn to bundle ourselves better for morning walks through a landscape that could pass for postapocalyptic. the time of year when raising the shades renders little shine, only grey light cast overall. we turn to yellow lamps and fleecy throws, huddle ourselves around cups of tea, run endless streams of steam to soak in, and nurse the potted greenery with draughts of tapwater against the want.

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quiet work

I’m good at going underground– somnolent and meditative for stretches at a time, drawn to quiet compellingly, as to water for solving itchiness, to bed when harried and jagged, to soothing smoothnesses for the relief of wear of ordinarily days. adrift and too often spinning in my well of leaves and assorted meandering flotsam, odd considerations float to the surface and grow momentarily compulsive– mainly thoughts of people I have known and loved, now distant in various ways, for different reasons. e.m. forster is reminded to me by a facebook acquaintance (the term “friend” exhausted by overuse in this medium):

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

I believe the work I do in this well of quiet consists in stitching up dispersed fragments of self into a more coherent whole, or at least a larger and more consonant piece– structuring alterations to the suit of self, tucking it here, letting it out there, adjusting so the skin of identity, outgrown or stretched, fits right once more. necessary, centering work. and yet there is an implicit irony in the disconnection seemingly requistite to the process– a pattern that traverses the ground back and forth between states of ragged psychic dispersal on the one hand and on the other isolation and disconnect from the warp and weft of social fabric.

a-spin and muddling, I find generous occasion for nostalgia– that golden retrospect that paints memory the fleeting luminance of dawns and dusks, a gilding inherent to transitional instants but lengthened and rendered more apparently permanent in the construction of the internal narrator. and so I relive momentary occasions of comradeship (themselves, to be sure, tiny islands in the slosh of reality once upon) and imagine almost that I’ve lost or forfeited or mislaid or otherwise squandered some more enduring state of connection. when in fact, perhaps, it is all episodic, inconsistent, occasional, and prone to stretches of drag punctuated by shining, resonant bursts of clear being.

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things that get stuck in the "drafts" folder

past birthday plan coordination; defaulted exchanges with spatio-temporally unavailable friends; partial apologies and limping pleas; notes to self; to-do optimism persistently listed; stalled-out gossip; collections of particularized references, filed for later; entirely empty messages somehow saved; whiny-ass complaints; lost and found messages for missing cardigan sweaters; mouth-drooling real estate and ebay listings, now closed.