11/24/16

Thanksgiving 2016

Pam
Doug
me

That was it. The firehall thanksgiving is officially dead.

I woke up early this morning to catch the sunrise at Oak Openings in the silence, alone.

It was completely cloudy, not a sign of the sun, but the morning was perfect

Northwest Ohio

my birthplace.

I'm writing right now because I just finished having a stupidly heated conversation with my mom. My dad on the couch in the room but completely silent, never joining in always just silent until he finally stood up and went to bed.

Couch to bed

that's how I will forever remember my dad
Doug was my boss at Carter Lumber, Dad was the man exhausted and silent on the couch until he walked up stairs to go to sleep.

My family, they don't understand me.
I'm raising my voice, I'm arguing, I'm yelling

I feel unheard
I feel misunderstood
I feel insane

Brittany
Pam
Tyler
Doug

Adam

Self sufficiency, money, political views
that's what's most important in this family.

My mom and dad tell me I don't understand how much money things cost
My mom and dad tell me I don't understand the world
They look at me with their eyes through a lens they handed me but I threw away years ago.

I know how they see me, I know how they see the world, I was raised by them, but how can I get them to see what I see? How can I get them to understand I'm different

My dad stands in silence as he turns back before heading down the hall he says, "if you need any money you can always ask us"

Need any money...

money

I want a hug
I want my parents to share a bedroom
I want my family together at the Lyons fire hall
I want my parents to give me an example of intimacy
I want my parents to show me a marriage I want to have
I want them to giggle
I want them to kiss
I want my family to touch
To talk
not about politics, the news, the local church gossip, the reality show
To talk about feelings
dreams

I want a family
not a fiscally responsible group of business partners.

Doug must have been out all night last night
this morning while I was making the coffee to catch the sunrise my mom didn't know when he got home of course they sleep in different rooms, they live different lives and I hear her harsh voice of reproach and I hear his meek low mumble of an apology, then silence, the most emotional interaction I'll witness between the two.

After my shouting match with my mother as she talked down to me on the near eve of my 29th birthday,
My parents both shuffle up to their separate bedrooms, the same ones I've seen them go to separately for the past 23 years of my life in this house.

I look at my phone
texts from several different women
A date with one schedules for tomorrow now
a date with another scheduled for Saturday
risky pics sent from other women through snapchat and text

I finally see it.
The contrast of my families lack of intimacy and my phone filled with hallow surface intimacy and I sit her at my parents' computer putting it all together.

I don't know how to be intimate, vulnerable. The closest I came was with Kelly but it proved to be fickle on her end.
I'm incapable of intimacy.
I'll be 29 next Friday
Not a girlfriend in sight with a date with a different girl lines up every weekend for months now.

I feed myself these fake interactions of intimacy because I've never experienced the real thing.

Maybe the real thing doesn't exist.
My brother's wife tells me she wants to sell their other car rather than hold it in case mine breaks while I'm unemployed during student teaching.
I must be self-sufficient
My mom can't understand why I think people should care about other humans simply because they exist.
How much more should we as family care about each other?
Offering hospitality, generosity, affection, support, and kindness

But I get political debates
I get talked down to
I get lectures about how the world is all about money
I just want to get in my car and drive, Drive past the forests of the midwest, through the great plains, over the mountains drive, keep driving until I reach the ocean and I just want to scream.

I want to throw my money over the edge, I want to push my car off a cliff I don't want stuff, I don't want to see the world that way
I want to grab a woman pull her close, I want to feel how she grabs my arms, she can't resist kissing me, I want to hear her words how she enjoys my body as her foreign hands feel my chest and abs I want her fingers through my hair I just want intimacy, vulnerability

I don't know maybe God isn't real.
If God isn't real love certainly isn't.
If love isn't real then my parents are right about everything
Donald Trump will be a great president
and my nights with strangers are as real as it gets
marriage is a religious sham

FFFFFFUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCKKKKKKK
From the edge of the west coast all the way until the sound waves of my voice either curve with the earth or press past the atmosphere and float out into the infinite nothingness of space

All I want is a community of people, I don't care black, red, white, yellow, brown, straight, gay, non-binary, atheist, Muslim I just want a community of people who love and care about each of us because we exist. That's it, not because we are self sufficient, not because we are profitable, not because we are beautiful, because we...are.

I want a woman to give myself to, all of me, and I want all of her, the ugly stuff, the unimportant stuff, and I want to share life together

I want children, I want to teach them fly fishing in Montana, I want to work beside them in our garden, I want to hold them every night, I want to read to them, teach them words, and trees. I want to pick them up when they fall and I want them to know that they have a right to a place in this planet simply because they are.

I want all of these things
but I don't have any of it.
I have a family that is silent and self sufficient.
I have a Thanksgiving apart
I have dozens of women in my unread texts

This morning as I stood in the middle of those pines stretched up towards the sky, before any of this arguing and family stuff happened

I thought to myself, why is this so comfortable? Why am I ok to be in this moment without someone else. I want to share my life with someone then why do I love this solitude. I want to be uncomfortable alone. I want to want community. I want to need to share and bump elbows with others around me. I want a wife. But I don't think I truly do. Because here I am in these trees sipping my coffee and I realize my best memories in my life were adventures I took alone.

I hate that.

I want to need someone. I want to need friends around me to share places of beauty or pieces of poetry or songs that strike something within me.

But I keep it all in.
I only let it out weekly in this blog and even this blog is completely hidden from everyone who knows me and even from strangers on the internet.

I keep it all in.

vulnerability, intimacy, community

My heart deeply, deeply wants all of these things
but I don't know anything about them. I don't even know how to hug my parents comfortably.
I don't even know my parents.
My parents don't know me.

I don't want my parents' marriage
I don't want my brother's marriage
I don't want their lives
I don't want their lens

but how do I do it my own way?
What the fuck am I doing?
I'm almost 30.
I'm 1/3 the way done with my life and that's if cancer, car crash, or murder don't steal more of my time.
what am I doing?
I feel like I've been in my cocoon too long
But I don't see being a butterfly happening anytime soon
Is it okay to spend life as a cocoon?
I feel so lost.
God, are You real?

Radical Face - Always Gold

11/20/16

I don't have any thoughts right now. I'm exhausted.
2016 the year of grad school.
I haven't read a book in over a year now.
I haven't had a homework free week in a year also.
This week I earned my 13th A in the program. Two more classes this semester and all that's left is student teaching in the Spring.
45 graduate level credit hours in 4 straight semesters while working 40 hours a week.
4.0
This has been such a brutal year.
I have written so many papers so many lesson plans and so many reflections I don't even want to write on here right now.

Christmas break will be spend studying for the OAE assessment of professional knowledge and the content knowledge assessment to obtain my licensure. I still will not be able to rest until May of 2017. July 2015 to May 2017, nonstop.

I can do this.
Just a little bit longer.
I just need to make it to May.

The Avett Brothers - Head Full Of Doubt/Road Full Of Promise

11/13/16

One of the peculiarities of the white race's presence in America is how little intention has been
applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The
continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest
explorers were looking for gold, which was, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always
somewhere farther on. Conquests and foundings were incidental to this search—which did not,
and could not, end until the continent was finally laid open in an orgy of gold seeking in the
middle of the last century. Once the unknown of geography was mapped, the industrial
marketplace became the new frontier, and we continued, with largely the same motives and with
increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves—no longer with unity of direction, like a
migrant flock, but like the refugees from a broken ant hill. In our own time we have invaded
foreign lands and the moon with the high-toned patriotism of the conquistadors, and with the
same mixture of fantasy and avarice.

That is too simply put. It is substantially true, however, as a description of the dominant
tendency in American history. The temptation, once that has been said, is to ascend altogether
into rhetoric and inveigh equally against all our forebears and all present holders of office. To be
just, however, it is necessary to remember that there has been another tendency: the tendency to
stay put, to say, "No farther. This is the place." So far, this has been the weaker tendency, less
glamorous, certainly less successful. It is also the older of these tendencies, having been the
dominant one among the Indians.

The Indians did, of course, experience movements of population, but in general their relation to
place was based upon old usage and association, upon inherited memory, tradition, veneration.
The land was their homeland. The first and greatest American revolution, which has never been
superseded, was the coming of people who did not look upon the land as a homeland. But there
were always those among the newcomers who saw that they had come to a good place and who
saw its domestic possibilities. Very early, for instance, there were men who wished to establish
agricultural settlements rather than quest for gold or exploit the Indian trade. Later, we know that
every advance of the frontier left behind families and communities who intended to remain and
prosper where they were.

But we know also that these intentions have been almost systematically overthrown. Generation
after generation, those who intended to remain and prosper where they were have been
dispossessed and driven out, or subverted and exploited where they were, by those who were
carrying out some version of the search for El Dorado. Time after time, in place after place, these
conquerors have fragmented and demolished traditional communities, the beginnings of
domestic cultures. They have always said that what they destroyed was outdated, provincial, and
contemptible. And with alarming frequency they have been believed and trusted by their victims,
especially when their victims were other white people.

...Today, the most numerous heirs of the farmers of Lexington and Concord are
the little groups scattered all over the country whose names begin with "Save": Save Our Land,
Save the Valley, Save Our Mountains, Save Our Streams, Save Our Farmland. As so often before,
these are designated victims—people without official sanction, often without official
friends, who are struggling to preserve their places, their values, and their lives as they know
them and prefer to live them against the agencies of their own government which are using their
own tax moneys against them.

...I am talking about the idea that as many as possible should share in the ownership of the land and thus be bound to it by economic interest, by the investment of love and work, by family loyalty, by memory and tradition.

The old idea is still full of promise. It is potent with healing and with health. It has the power to turn each person away from the bigtime promising and planning of the government, to confront in himself, in the immediacy of his own circumstances and whereabouts, the question of what methods and ways are best. It proposes an economy of necessities rather than an economy based upon anxiety, fantasy, luxury, and idle wishing. It proposes the independent, free-standing citizenry that Jefferson thought to be the surest safeguard of democratic liberty. And perhaps most important of all, it proposes an agriculture based upon intensive work, local energies, care, and long-living communities—that is, to state the matter from a consumer's point of view: a dependable, long-term food supply.

-The Unsettling of America

To the white man America has only ever been viewed as resources. I keep watching what is happening in Dakota. I keep thinking about the natives, the nations who have never seen this land as anything but home. I want to fight for that. I want to protect that. How rare and how valuable a perspective in this world especially in this country. How I want to get in my car for another road trip across the country grab my sleeping bag and sand beside these people.

"The first and greatest American revolution, which has never been superseded, was the coming of people who did not look upon the land as a homeland." This revolution is still being fought today. We are exactly as our ancestors.

We will never be able to see the land the way indigenous people groups see the land so long as we see no value in rooting ourselves in our place our community.

I keep thinking what makes this land, this water so important to the Native Americas? Why can't we as a nation and our government see what they see.

"the tendency to stay put, to say, "No farther. This is the place."" Americans never stay put. We never invest. We move, we move where their might be gold. We move where their might be fur trading, we move where there might be jobs, we move to the hip sexy city of the moment. We don't give a fuck about a place. Land isn't hope its a resource it's something to be used for luxury, recreation, and entertainment.

Let's flood the beach front property, lets crowd and pollute the oceans but look how tan we are look how we spend our weekends at the beach relaxing.

Let's flood the mountain towns, lets level the hills to make room for more parking, more campsites. Let's destroy the wildlife pushing it back but look how interesting our instagrams are look how we send our weekends in the wilderness free.

What cost are we paying for our selfish desires for our one life. We live in a yolo culture thinking only of our own comfort our own pleasures, yes we may have to level another forest but more people want to uproot leave their land for a more sexy zip code.

What would it be like to stay placed? To invest in a land?

Homeland is where our fathers are buried.
It's where our parents sheltered us.
It's where we learned to respect the very land we need so that both can continue to exist.

This land, this river has been sacred and important to this people group LONG before Europeans knew this part of the world even existed. This land and this river could very well have been worshiped and respected longer than the Pyramids have stood. Longer than the Jews celebrating Passover. Longer than American celebrate the 4th of July.

How ancient, how precious this place is to these people.
How terrible a thought it could be destroyed in the name of progress and comfort.
So that we could have cheap transportation out to these vacation wilderness areas we are destroying to visit.

Ohio is home. I know it isn't where my ancestors are originally from. I know the original nations of this land have been pushed off long ago. But this is where I was born. It's where my grandfather is buried. To move to another place, to again continue the cycle of uprooting would be to press reset on the opportunity to love and worship a place, land the way these protesters do. To one day worship and fight for a piece of earth how beautiful and how valuable a cause. What would our planet, our culture look like if we were all as placed, as dependent on our land as these people?

It's worth fighting for and it's worth deepening my roots for.
Ohio is home.

Everything - Ben Howard

11/06/16

Daylight Saving Time ended last night.
We are now beginning the hardest time of the year for me.
I think Seasonal affective disorder is a very real thing.
I need the sun, it does something to me.
If that means my life is impacted by that star in space, then so be it
astrology has a leg to stand on I suppose.

There was a moment last week where I thought I had lost my wallet. I've only lost my wallet once in my life that was my senior year of college drunk after the mirror lake jump.

This time when I realized it, I called the bars I had been to. I checked all the pants and places in my house. I started to think about the things in my wallet, how would I replace them? How do I cancel all my cards? Do I ever remember half the stuff in my wallet?

I'd have to buy a new wallet, I think this is the only wallet I've ever owned...

Then I found it in my car right before I started to drive downtown.

I literally picked it up and kissed my wallet.
I was so happy to have it.

Then I started thinking how strange that feeling was.

For the past 10 years and more I've woken up with my wallet but I never even consider to kiss it.

And logically the same thing happened this day. My wallet was safely in my car where I sometimes keep it.

But why was I happier to see it this time? Why did I kiss my wallet? I never do that.

I thought it was lost but now it was found.

My mind can't help but think about the parable of the prodigal father.

That moment running to his son and kissing him throwing rings and robes on the guy.

Why not throw a party for the older brother who was never lost?
Why not wake up every morning and kiss my wallet for still being there?

The value and importance of my wallet didn't change. There wasn't anything more important in it when it wasn't around. But it's value that has always existed was brought to my consciousness it was in the forefront of my mind.

and I kissed it.
and it turned my day into a very good one.

How many things in my life right now do I have that if I lost them I would be devastated
and I don't kiss them every day.

My friends,
My job,
My sight,
My health

I have so many things that are so much more important than a replaceable wallet filled with material stuff.
No kiss, no sigh of relief when it is still there, no celebration, no fatted calf.

How strange.
Yes I am thankful to be alive, yes it is rare and all that but it isn't until I total my car and walk away from it that I even actually consider the fucking gift of being alive one more day truly is.

I don't like that.
How do I live with gratitude.
Real gratitude.
How do I keep the feeling when I find my little wallet alive day in and day out?

This is why people look back on their lives and have so much regret and wasted time.
Why did I watch every episode of that show on netflix?
Why did I go to bed early?
Why did I stay at that job?
Why did I not take that risk?

How do we live with the awareness that we are each minute closer to the end of our lives?
Everyone I know will die, and I don't know when.

Anyway, I'm glad I found my wallet.

Bon Iver - 33 "GOD"