To what and which, or where else?

Awoke at the end of a troubling dream, saving myself from a part of it.

No one has seen my mother in dreams or otherwise since her passing twenty years now. On odd occasion, she is there as she was, carrying her southern accent and odd intensity. Mother was a bit crazed in the Virginia way, though not unpleasant in either fashion or manner. She had unique charms, all her own, and found few adopters. Her etiquette expected little from others. It was an orchestration of genteel effort, addressed always outwards in an effort to save time, as so often it did. Though it did not save enough.

As a child, as a normal course of our experience together, I saw many bewildered at what had just happened, the sheer dynamic of the exchange. She skirted the fences between brevity and terseness, though knew just when to cut a smile.

Towards the end of my dream I was sitting on the couch. She descended unexpectedly, as dream apparitions often do. She brought the news of my father's death. She leaned forward, over the sofa to deliver the trouble with as much discretion and privacy as possible, though quite unneeded in a dream. I do not blame her for this. It was as if she had spread wings when speaking. 

I might have been at an afterparty, in the dream, so the shock of her being there was already much for me. 

Mothers exist in two places: where you expect them to be, and where they are not expected to be. Though, they are everywhere amidst the heart, deft as phantasms. 

She told it as if it was news, arriving for the first time, using an odd choice of words to relay the simple fact to me: "I'm sorry son, your daddy's dead."

Something about her using the word daddy to describe my father, an odd man who had already passed away, and was so much older at the time, as was I.  I suppose.

Eternally separated from her, to speak this news.

A dad, at best, but one who had long since ceased being a daddy. 

Son? Me?

I remember crying in the dream, convulsing with the imaginary news. Feeling it afresh, the sting of an always expected loss. 

I emerged from sleep, upset, thinking of my own son, of course; the only person I know who uses the word "daddy." 

Thinking of my mother, and the tremendous pieces of time, so many parts that have now passed between us. 

The tremendous particles of time, now lost, amidst the.

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My freely roaming uterus

(north of Big Sur)

It must be the early onset of pre-menopausal stages. I've been having hot flashes all morning. There are medications out there that will reduce the effects, though I am opposed to them on religious grounds. It's my lot in life to suffer this way. It is all spelled out in detail as part of the great early scientific chapters of the bible. I blame the serpent that has been loosed upon the garden, the slithering tempter, and of course I blame Eve because I also dutifully fear God.

I met up with a few friends who were in town last night and one confided in me that they have read all of my blog posts. So, here I am, re-invigorated by the knowledge of a dedicated distant reader. 

I don't know how I used to do it... to work out at the gym most mornings and then write a blog post while excelling at work and also being a full-time father. I've dropped half of that routine and am still struggling most mornings just to make coffee. It makes no sense but I know it to be true, that the less you do the less time you have to do it. Routine creates time rather than destroys it. I need to get back into the gym just to get some of my life back.

Everyone agrees on this simple point: that I need to return to the gym. I have exhausted the reservoir of excuses and no new ones seem to be hinting at arrival on the horizon. 

Habits are a such burden, especially the bad ones.

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Recordando la tierra juntos

The leaves are changing, as are the winds. 

This morning, the boy and his mother departed for a city in the desert. I've never understood Phoenix, nor the people who would wish to live there. It is a hellish place, populated with the culturally indifferent. Everything there is a single unappealing color, a beige phlegm which has dried and hardened. It is where the old and infirm move to celebrate the unveiling of shopping malls or car dealerships.

To breathe the warm air, to become dust, one with the dust of one more sunset.

This weekend Cato and I will go camping in Big Sur. There is a music festival there, a songwriter whose work I have just begun to become familiar with. I wish to get away. Idle hands, devil's workshop, etc.

It is pleasant to see the leaves changing across the hills, like a shadow of color moving slowly across the land in all directions.

I thought that I would miss writing here more than I have. Perhaps it is complete, whatever it was I had hoped to do is done, to prove to myself that I could stick with something if I so chose. 

What does it all mean. I do not know.

I did not "miss" it. Something felt incomplete about not writing, though I could think of very little to say, nothing some days, and have nothing much to say today. Or write, to be more exact.

Love hinders the impulses that do not directly serve it. There is nothing to blame. Happiness is not very interesting. The search for it is; its absence says far more than its presence. 

I am happy. 

See? It doesn't do very much on the page. 

Anguish has a way of adorning itself with language.

I started to write a poem, in Spanish. Or rather, I was writing individual lines in English and translating them into Spanish, hoping to complete a poem in another language. It was more difficult than I first thought and I ended up with only suggestive fragments. I was not able to complete it. Have not been able to yet, anyway.

The woman in whom I am in love, pictured above, understood that it concerned the act of sex. She was quite right. It was scribbled for her.

Me, of course, wanting to offer her something about myself that I can, or thought that I could. She and I, remembering the land together.

Reclinada, 

Empujando hacia adelante y hacia atrás suavemente, juntos, 

Entonces aparte 

Tú y yo, 

recordando la tierra juntos

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