until again

there are many things that come to mind, many things that seem to be, and the seeming is the arrival, and the arrival is the impetus behind other thoughts. there are days like this one, and in it, the seemings, disarranged, facilitate the extravagance of all that waits to be known.

i try (and the attempts are trials), to maintain composure, but sometimes, the way in which life coalesces merely compounds the idiosyncratic tendencies of everyone around me (or at least my perception of them) and every plan, every expectation, every hope, turn into something other than what we supposed it would be—what we had dared to dream.

fragments of other people’s songs, their lyrics, their own communion with the world: these things i use, to trace my life throughout the confluences of existence, and even to define my interrelation with the world. there was a time when those were my songs, my lyrics. for a while after the spirit died within me, i was bitter, but the music never really left me. it lingers yet.

waiting.

waiting, like so many other days in my life.

but this waiting, this moment, this churning, has a glimmer: a spark.

a recalescence.

there is something about this time, this moment, that shines. the waiting, this once, is a good thing, for i wait here, willingly, at the end of the all which never was, and the dawn of the all which might now become.

(earlier this week, I took an old draft and turned it into this. something significant had happened the previous night, which i’m not going to explain it here, but it was a good thing: one which changed the entire tenor of the original draft from July 8, which was a much darker time. i am driven by rainstorms of late, and they drive me towards a glistening light.)

i sit beneath the rain again. it pages down, an unwritten book that so many have read since time forgotten.

on nights like this, it hollows crevices in my mind, and slowly fills them with melancholy, nostalgia, and stupidly even hope.

i am of that nature, possessed of the ability to dream, but not only to dream, to segment the dreams from the reformulated memories, the fears of what remains unknown, and the brief foreshadowing of insights i will later fail to recognize.

i don’t see everything, but what i do see, i see quite well.

which is not to say i always glean the right impression. especially when the rain comes, and then with it, the thunder and the lightning redefine every thought before i ever have a chance to set them down.

i breathe an air that is flavored with, colored by, comprised of this rain, and i remember all the things i wanted long ago, and none of them stand in my future. and no matter how deeply this rain saturates this moment and me, i come no closer to bringing them back to life.

and everyone else, having read these pages since time began, probably knows them for exactly what they are.

Sometimes, I wonder why I do the things I do. I don’t refer to myself in the third person very much at all, but I do quite often stand outside myself and become at a loss for what’s going on inside. Perhaps my communicative problems from the past really are grounded within me. I think I sometimes fail at giving myself the fuller insight as to what’s going on internally.

As a result of that, when people ask me what something I’ve published up here means, I don’t necessarily have an answer. While I’m not saying that not asking is the better course, just be advised I may not have what fits your definition of “clear answer.” I work a lot from the subconscious; it’s nothing mystical, it’s just unplanned. I feel no real need when it comes to the creative process (and my life definitely fits under that order of precedence) to direct every action, every movement, every response.

Only this, perhaps: The majority of my life is spent in waiting for things to come. And the waiting for it bleeds. I am somehow both too active to wait indefinitely, and too pensive to force my own hand.

Time is the sort of thing that can beat you coming and going. I try not to chase it too hard, but that rarely means I’m doing it right. Peace and closure are unattainables: meaningful ideals that have little true function in the world.

I’m alone right now for a reason. I only hope it’s a good one.

things like dreams and dreams like days and days like things i’ve never known. there are no in-betweens when everything keeps to the edges. and there are no divisions when everything subverts everything else.

but there are no dreams, not truly. there are memories and a confluence of biochemical processes. there are phrases turned in wistfulness and the desire for pain to subside. and yet, a life without pain is hardly one worth living. and so the dreams, the memories, the processes all bring a pain that is both a comfort and a lie.

it’s raining again, like it always does.

not really, of course. no, never quite really, but it’s raining again, like it does, like it has, like it will.

i can see it: a small storm, far off, looking like some sort of soft, harmless little thing….a thing i would like to be in, despite the chill.

but the rain: always at times like this, it is the rain that pulls me back, even when it is somewhere else.

just: the rain.

just that, and only that.

i don’t know, in the deepest sense, what the rain truly means to me. it has always been with me, always a part of me, always around me, even on the driest of days. the internal meanings change as i age, and as experience dictates.

there are days like this.

and sometimes there are lifetimes.

and sometimes, i don’t know which are the longer.

part of my self-definition after i left home involved mnemonic devices in my writing: word-symbols which correlated to certain thought-forms more fluidly than i could say outright in English. one of these devices was the black moon.

over time, the black moon came to mean several things to me, but it started as being directly representative of an eclipse, and therefore for eclipsed thoughts: forms of creation which existed internally but never made it to the light of day. had blogging been around (read: common) back then (the mid-to-late 1980′s), i’d have been one of the most prolific bloggers on the planet, but even then, there still would have been creations that fell beneath the black moon. poems in particular had a peculiar tendency to creep up on me when i had no way to write them down, and songs seemed to always wait until i was either out of music paper or far away from any musical instrument.

but, at least those melodies would often stay in that mental playlist of mine, and would often be rendered sometime in the future, at least in some way. and especially after i enlisted in the Army, the most common way for a song to be written down was as a “poem”. these poems were actually mnemonic sequences, crafted for the sole purpose of capturing the song they actually represented. call me crazy, but the methodology works. i can still hear the song represented by the poem below (the title of which was an intentional double-entendre), despite a series of edits which, for me at least, lifted it from its role as mnemonic device and into something which might just stand on its own.

i’ll have to record the song itself someday. it is the melody that underlies the entire process of my departure from my unrevivable marriage.

this was written at a time when i still considered the possibility of reincarnation, multiple lifetimes, and all that other tomfoolery which is ultimately just as unprovable as religious dogma. for that, i must beg your indulgence.

within the realm of the black moon rising
~ October 2, 1989 in Lubbock, TX

called in and deeply hidden:
something more grand on this large scale
than wisdom;
and the changing patterns on the ceiling
mark the windfall
of the endless colors on the Wheel;
and for all that it seems,
something deeper hidden than the nightfall
is colored by the days it has failed to express.
so much, then ~
so futile ~ is the star-gazing wonder
of a few pale expressions of our doom.

so lying alone, i remain in wonder,
pondering for a while
the termination of the colder hand;
and gazing now beyond these wayward turmoils,
i symbolize the Law of Universal Doom.
it all shall end.
it shall.
and creaking like the back door of our memories,
slowly it opens,
and slowly, i begin to understand.
there is something more here than what is waiting ~
something more full of despair
and empty sadness;
and i search again the long streets of our wanderings,
and my memories fly the pathways
of so many lifetimes.
and so my question, unanswered still,
begs unasked upon my lips:
“when shall i be with you again?”

within the realm of the black moon rising
(and the planets all are melting),
i turn to see the stars,
and you are there again.
i lay my eyes upon thee, my love,
and thou art full of light.

days
pass by:
“cover me:
let me hide.”
fade away
into the world
~ it shall be this way
(somewhere).
and there:
there is someone
who loves me
~ i don’t know how.
tell me,
what can i do?
(this need for love….)
i have fallen
in this sway
~ someway.
and days
pass by:
the world
and all within it….
(and i cry)
there is hope.
there is fear.
there is sorrow.
there is cheer….
stand away, now.
let me part.
(i know what it is
that i remember)
for, it is over.
it is gone.
and it cannot hold me
any longer.

…September 2, 1985 in San Antonio, TX

this popped into my head this morning. i don’t know why, but i figured, why the hell not. those of you who tend to psycho-analyze me may at least enjoy it.

Of all the unknown things, unbidden yet undenied, there there is a hidden sentience to the way that life comes among us here between the cold stones. We are simpler here, and thus more complicated and complex. But, unknown to us, all the things we dreamed of, have relevance only within the dreams which contain them.

And life comes among us. It comes between us and rides the waves of seeming, which we say nothing should have a right to ride, since we, continually within our constancy, refuse those waves a life of their own. We demand a precedence undeserved: to be ridden by us, as if the riding would be a gift. And we call ourselves, Sacred.

Our dreams collide like the greyest swells beneath the midnight moon, arching over each other in intricate tangles of common essences and mutual desires. And we, wetly waiting upon the shore, shrouded in the fog of our presumptions, can only yearn to ride those swells.

The stones are cold, not warming beneath our misted hands, but numbing us all the more as we are supported by them, not of them (not yet!), but less somehow without them. For they live where we come to watch, and from where, as the cold sun faintly rises, we must ultimately depart.

And in the meanwhile, life comes among us, between us, through us, and over us, surrounding us with the mysteries of never, always, and now. We live between its gusts, among the shadows of the cold stones, much as we live within the wind, the mist, and the rain. It is less frightening here, less immediate, less uncertain. It is dream-stuff, but its pertinence is without dimension, and thus a part of all.

And of all the unknown things, that hidden sentience by which we define ourselves moves on slowly inland, free of us, leaving us staring at the sea, and yearning to ride the swells.

The way things come and go, and the changes these things bring with themselves: They eventually wear thin in a way that makes far more sense than the misunderstandings arising from them predicates. For desire has nothing to do with it: neither for what we want, nor where we want to be. And the mystery behind it all is nothing more than the half-seen reflections of all the things to which we once aspired.

We talk in circles that are squared: irresolute and unresolved, diminished by the need to face the continuum with a prescience factored and distilled, rounded at the edges of our competencies. We are surrounded by rhetorical reminiscences that no longer have any meaning in the grand scheme of things, for no misery abounds quite as repetitious as the constancy of our daily lives. And still, we find hidden meanings in everything from the formation of the clouds to the numbers of things that slip through our fingers and smash upon the floor.

We dream. And in the dreaming, we come alive. Our days pass incuriously, so we fill the nights with falsified wonder, resentment, and the searching for higher forms of relevance which we fail to understand only exist in theory. Our ignorance is duplicitous, our continuance foreshortened, our magnificence sullied by our self-predicted failures.

And yet still, at least for a time, we are the golden ones.

We dream excessively, deluded by the facility to envision alternatives, and mistaking the commonality of that for sentience, spirit, and grandeur. We live, in truth, at the mercy of the nearly unpredictable collisions between the confluences in our thoughts and the myriad of ways we fail to enact their visions. And there is more to all this, so much more, than all the dreams and vision-quests might ever hope to conjure. But we know only what we think we know, and believing we know only a portion of the sum, our boundlessness is both defined and limited by our lifespans.

In the reverse, as limitless as they are, we reduce our own complexities to facile, digestible pieces and term the recognition of these near-infinite portions as insight, making of them the elements of the crimes we perpetuate against ourselves. And seeing these things for anything but what they truly are, we make of them our punishment, our purgatory, and our parole.

Our convictions and our revelations are the same.

And only the smallest fractions of our existences fit the definition of “real,” and absolutely none of it is “sacred.”

today is catch-up day. not that there’s much time for it with two podcasts today, and we lost an hour, to boot. but that’s the general idea. i’ve got an indoor soccer game coming up soon, and time with the kids right after that before the first radio show. shit. we just did the time-change thingy. i wonder if i have to tweak the radio show time. i didn’t think of that! dammit….

yup, i had to change it. what a dork. at least i caught it in time.

my son has been listening to the radio shows and has come to understand that i actually do think of him and his sister quite often. it’s a funny way for us to connect, or so it seems to me, but i’ll take it. he already knew i was a foul-mouthed bastard, so the tone of the radio show content was by no means surprising to him. luckily, he knows how to think for himself.

there’s a lot of content from previous incarnations of this website, the old otherwhirled.com, unenslaved.com, and even synthaetica.com that i’m working on bringing over here. some of it’s kinda good stuff (at least i think so). since they’re all dated in the past, the conundrum is whether to leave their original timestamps on them or not. i probably will, just because i’m anal-retentive that way. because it matters SO much when republishing oneself.

no doubt.

anyway, things continue. two shows tonight:

ThinkAtheist Show Early Edition:

Should just be me hosting. Topic for the evening is the new public education standard so lovingly provided for us by the State of TexAssikstan.

Time: 1800 EDT (6pm Eastern), 2200 GMT (10pm Greenwich Mean Time)
Info: Event Page
Show: Talkshoe

ThinkAtheist Show Late Edition:

Myself and DrFrink will be hosting. Special guest is Paul Fidalgo from the Secular Coalition of America. We can’t get into specifics about what exactly the White House said during its meetings with secular organizations, but he’ll tell us about the trip and share some general impressions.

Time: 2200 EDT (10pm Eastern), 0400 GMT (4am Greenwith Mean Time)
Info: Event Page
Show: Talkshoe

I hope to see you there.