handle

No one knows your name. You aren't sure of what to call yourself, either. If a question mark had legs and moped around the living room alone, it would be you. So maybe your name is Question? It's not. That's ridiculous. Only a drunk would name a newborn Question, but maybe the epidural clouded your judgment. When all is said and done, your name is most likely Cloud. We all come from clouds, so we might as well answer to our place of origin. We might as well call to each other to come home, come home, your dinner's getting cold.

You don't own what you don't know, so how can you stop these sentences? You stop them with either a phase or a phrase. You stop them with your false name. You stop them when you are ready to start. If modern studies reveal several mysteries, then you must be ancient. You must be a hot and bright star in the center of a nebula. You must lose first in order to be observed.

I'm wrestling with the pseudonyms. I'm waiting for the alias. I'm watching a cloud float by, creating meaning out of what is suspended. I will be observed, I will not be classified, I will rise.

offshore

I speak Writerese like a native Writerese. I say I am working on my novel and that I have writer's block and that I can't work at night because I get too depressed and would you mind reading over my manuscript? And can we sit quietly, broodingly in a cafe together with our Moleskines and Precise V5 extra fine rolling ball pens? And how is the weather today. Am I going insane. What's the point of the period if it doesn't end this life sentence of being a word slinger.

So I guess there's culture shock. The self and the words are intertwined, inseparable. To the unsuspecting eye, I pass myself off as a native. But in my eyes, the written, printed, and published page is foreign. We are apart -- seas apart -- continents drifting, but never touching. I sail around in this literary canoe with a leak. I send a few distress signals, halfheartedly, but instead decide to sit outside of the boat and float in the abstract.

All I want is to bite into a peach and let it leave nectar on my lips. All I want is for my words to be peaches, not flotation devices. But where can I buy a peach in a country like this? The exchange rate is so poor. I may speak your language, but I'll never eat your fruit.

cord

Lying on my back, the sky looks like a habitat for seahorses. Lying on my stomach, the grass grows galaxies. Lying to myself, I say I don't need either. The truth, however, is that if I don't swim in this space, I will drown daily. If I don't have dirt under my nails by the time I crawl into my own flower bed, then I have failed.

I have plans to seduce you. First I'll take your celestial body out to dinner. If all goes well with our feast of moon cheese and moon Merlot, I'll invite you down to my place while I slip into something more comfortable. But I know I know I know, you go ahead and stay up there. You are solitary by nature and I am, too. We'll keep our dark sides hidden. Your returning glow is good enough for me.

So I stay here. This is my place. I sink into the sky and rise through the soil, all the while remaining attached to an umbilical cord of stories and myths I've been knitting throughout my life. My connection could hold up mountains.

Let my hands continually listen to the heartbeat of the land.

thread

Trapped in the amber is proof that spider webs have existed for at least 100 million years. 36,500,000,000 days of spinning silk and building traps and healing wounds. Each spider should have a diploma on the wall of their office in an architectural firm. I can't even assemble a coffee maker. And if I don't have my coffee, how am I supposed to clear out my morning cobwebs?

Their silk protects their bodies. Their silk protects their eggs. Their silk serves as a signal, as a guide. I envy the threads that sustain them and lead them back home. I search for my own line, but get trapped in the blank spaces I know I am supposed to fill, but don't have the material. Sometimes I scribble in a panic just to prove an existence. Sometimes I erase to evoke a mood. Sometimes I sit out the game and let the others hit home runs.

They will use their own body for measurements while creating their web. The gaps between objects cannot be crossed by crawling. They overcome this by producing a thin adhesive thread which drifts on a breeze across the gap. They will feel the change in the vibration when the thread sticks to the far end. Reeling in and tightening this delicate line, they can walk along it and strengthen it with a second thread.

I can't convince myself to stay in a web that is not my own. I will wander around until I feel the pull of my own home. I will cross that gap when my bridge has been built. I don't need instructions for the assembly, I only need the vibrations.

construction

Life is too short for me to waste it on the superficial.

I want to become intimate with the natural world. I never want to be boxed in or trapped in my own neuroses and selfishness. I want to experience the land and the soil, the skin of the earth and the birds perched beyond reach. I want to know the beasts and the insects' wings. I want to fly without leaving the ground. The eyes can soar with the right perspective.

May the red sand and limestone purify my soul. And it will, and it will.

I have been stuck for far too long. Maybe this limbo period is preparing me for what's next. Maybe everything in me needed to hibernate in preparation for some "great awakening." Lord, let's hope so.

I have confidence in the Universe, but I also must do my own part. It begins with me being fearless and leaping and trusting and all of those other cliche, self-helpy words. But it's true!

Fear fear fear and doubt doubt doubt have stopped me my whole life from doing anything and everything that I have wanted. It seems as though I have 100% of the time chosen the safe, practical way. The way that won't rock any kind of boat on any body of water. I don't even get close to the water, you know? And it achieves nothing except for a boatload of regret.

So I guess I do sometimes love the superficial. I love the REI, the Subarus, the flannel. I love the big dogs and organic gardens and smell of summer skin. I love the freckles and the meals over camping stoves. I love the wildflowers that tattoo the desert floor.

I want time to name the mountains (but the names will remain sacred, a secret kept between me and the rocks). I want to sleep, again, on a sand dune in June. I want to read the canyons like a book, but from bottom to top, not left to right. I want to be left to write about what's left of what's right.

And what's right to me is the crooked trunk of the juniper tree. The sand that sinks into the wrinkles of my knees as I kneel to pray to the spider web that just trapped the fly. The silk that weaves seamlessly through this moment and through this lifetime. Let it not be ignored or hidden by various screens and distractions.

The strands can shine in the sun brilliantly once we remove the clouds.

ready

I am ready to start living a boring life.

To paraphrase both the book by Chuck Klosterman and the song by Black Sabbath, I've been killing myself to live. I don't know if it has been out of ignorance, self-loathing, or denial, but whatever it is kinda sorta totally has to stop. But where do I start?

I have to be vague on this blog. I don't want to cause worry in the hearts of some of you tenderhearted readers. I should start a secret blog! Should I start a secret blog? Have I already? Guess I could just go old school and write in a diary. Like, an actual, physical diary with pages and a lock and I'll hide the key inside of my womb. I mean, my room. Under my uterus. I mean, under my mattress.

But okay, anyway, where do I start? I start by giving up certain substances, or at least putting them on pause, and taking up other substances, such as multivitamins that don't turn my pee neon yellow. I start by being honest with myself and others and refusing to apologize for the honesty. I start by slowing down my day-to-day, which I hope will trickle into my life. I am meant for a slow life, one where I can wear overalls and chew on wheat and tell travelers that this here town don't care too much for city folk. I want a dog, too. Just a dog and a yurt and some books and overalls with a 3-button flap on the rear so I don't have to unbuckle the suckers every single time I need to do what girls NEVER do... But I'm no girl! I'm a lady! A lady with a butt flap and a hankerin' for some desert sunsets from the comfort of my back porch. Yurts have porches, right?

So maybe one day I'll stumble upon the root cause of my boo hoos. It's probably fairly important that I do. I don't want to stumble into my hippie dippie life with a bunch of demons tied to my back. I've been stumbling for years now and am ready to shake my feet awake. I have paths to walk, crooked as they may be, and I could use all the arch support I can get. Speaking of arches, I'm placing my yurt directly underneath a red arch. Come find me if you want.

brick

The worst illness is being sick for a home you've never had. Okay, it's not the worst. There are at least 14,776 worse illnesses out there, but homesickness is at least in the top one thousand.

So I've got the whole homesickness thing going for me. I also have the whole writer's block shtick. According to someone somewhere who I trust, having writer's block just means you are lazy. Fine, so maybe I am lazy. What's it to ya, Person I Trust? I might be lazy and I might be a fake, but I will never be a blockhead. Never say never -- my brain lately seems to be nothing but a failed Tetris game. Nothing fits quite right and it's Game Over.

I could write about my dreams of being on Broadway? No. No, because I don't dream that. I wouldn't be writing the truth. I dream more of being an Off-Broadway star. And I don't even have to be the star all of the time. Being a participant would suit me just fine. I kind of dream of being an Off-Broadway participant. But even then, that's not my truth.

Still searching. Searching for a home and a truth and suspicious that they might be the same thing.

Can I live inside of a truth? Can I have a breakfast nook and a dinner party and a welcome mat at the front door of a truth? I have a sinking feeling that truth doesn't use front doors. Truth breaks through windows with bricks. Truth might be the brick.

There are at least 14,776 worse illnesses. There are at least 14,775 unlocked doors. Find the key for the one that's locked.