My sister called me from JFK airport today. She was waiting for her flight to leave for Ireland, which was supposed to leave from O'hare, which was where she was going to meet my Mom, and they were going to fly together for their horse riding trip. She wanted to tell me that she loved me, because she was about to get on a fourteen hour international flight.

_

I sat on the bed and sat on the bed. A little heavy from the frozen pizza I had eaten for dinner, I thought about what I could be doing, something active like shooting baskets or going for a bike ride. I continued to sit and my thoughts drifted to teaching, and the chapbook I have been working to assemble. I got up and smoked a cigarette and sat back down on the bed with Brian's "Before Starting Over", taking particular interest in his writing about Silliman's blog.

_

Adam had brought up the issue, seemingly in passing, that I "wanted to be a poet", during whatever conversation what were having. Which strikes a nerve in the sense that if this is my ambition, I'm sorry that my ambition is so naked. The assertion implying that I'm not one already, that I'm trying to become.

_

It strikes the same kind of nerve as the nerve that gets struck when the issue of "working hard" comes up amongst my old group of friends. Inductively, again, the insecurity leads me to conclude that I'm not working hard enough. Jake had told me that I was the slowest and laziest painter he had ever worked with. I responded that that was

impossible.

i'm not kidding: here's an article by Frank Herbert, author of Dune, published in 1980: http://www.dunenovels.com/news/genesis.html

_

these blog things are great, you can post whatever you want. here's a picture of a

_

i waste no time

to kick my line

i said how you doing she said

hey i'm doing fine

steady as she goes who goes amy goes out of town i'm about to start back up teaching for the summer one creative writing class and then esl support for a screen writing class and then there are speaking and writing lab appointments but that's my summer who knows how it will be busy i hope and lucrative so that i can afford to move amongst the upper echelon of people's and place funny faces and dogs and cats and mice and men but wednesdays are off right now now work and its possible that i'll go crawling back to the buddha museum where i spent so many days writing the copy in my earlier east bay days but we'll see i need to talk to john in addition to calling kelly the therapist who i think i'm going to break ties off with i kind of feel drained after i leave like i'm the one who actually helping him and that's amore when the moon hits your eye and then there are the decisions should i stay or should i go right now i'm not particularly happy kind of lonely actually too much time off and not enough peeps to spend time with at least the cat is happy and aggressively so sitting in my lap with her paws on the computer its all very cute but there's more to life than being cute isn't there maybe clever maybe its time to go back to my studies preparing the syllabus and meditating on my first impressions this weekend i'm going canoe-ing up north with old friends and am very much looking forward to it nothing smells better than memory a ten foot man feeding me lunch

We found a place to drink, a small German themed pub not too far from the Shinjuku station, and sat at the bar. It was empty asides from a middle aged couple sitting at the corner table, and a gray haired man sitting at the bar. We each had a couple of beers and ate bar snacks out of the little glass dishes placed on the bar. We talked to the gray haired man, an architect, about cardboard houses. After not too long we decided to go and the bill came, something like one hundred twenty thousand yen, which was something like one hundred dollars at that time, and I said what? and the bartender explained she had to charge us extra for sitting at the bar and eating snacks.

_

This morning in the Travel section of the New York Times there is an article about the tiny, back alley bars becoming increasingly popular in Japan. The article quotes a bar owner in Japan named Mark Dykman: "If you are intruding on a close-knit scene, the proprietor will ignore you and maybe over charge you. You won't be asked to leave, but you will want to leave."

In my middle teens I asked my father, kind of tongue in cheek but interested in the answer: "what did you want to be when you grew up?", and he answered that he still didn't know what he wanted to be. One morning, post-college, when I came to stay at the farm to help Susantake care of him, he borrowed my truck to drive down to the mechanic and check on the status of his vehicle. It was early and I kept sleeping until the phone rang, the mechanic asking me to bring the fire chief's truck back. I said huh? and looked out the window to see my dad pulling up in tan ford truck. After returning the truck and bringing back my own, I scolded him and barred him from driving my truck again.

There is a trail of events within the dream, passing through many friends and places, uniforms and roles, but these didn’t stick in my mind. Instead it’s the falling through the sky, away from everyone, into a canyon; quarry like and filled with water so clear it did not distort the odd, almost fluorescent light that filled the canyon. I had no problems breathing, and in looking around I saw jagged rock outcroppings ascending high up the sides, in addition to smaller, six to eight foot high boulders. There were aquarium like plants, floaty leafy greens swaying, and I was standing on the white sandy bottom. Amazed that I was still upright after the fall I looked around and felt fear. Not at the rocks but what was behind them.

The most significant part of the dream was my reaction to the fear. I simply decided to wake up. In recognizing that my vision was completely unclouded in this place, I got the feeling I would see things I was not ready to see. Not because they would be horrible, but because seeing these things would bring a forced responsibility, one that I would have to take ownership for. To avoid this, I woke myself up, a knowing return to the comfortable muddle.

Recently I’ve been reading a kind of autobiography by Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections), and in it he goes into intense depths of analysis within his own dreams, his interpretations almost acting as plot points within his story. In the prologue he writes:

“Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience. Therefore my life has been singularly poor in outward happenings. I cannot tell much about them, for it would strike me as hollow and insubstantial. I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals.”

My parents were divorced when I was four, and the arrangement made between them was to split the time, so that my sister, brother, and I would spend our weekends and summers with my father in Mineral Point, and the rest of the time we would go to school in Madison. Completely out of my control, it made it difficult to see school friends on the weekends, or develop relationships with small town friends without being in school with them. On the upside it enabled me to take credit for importing big city fashions into the small town, and get out of doing things I didn’t want to do with the city kids.
_
One Sunday before Sunday school, I decided to wear one of my black Reebok high tops along with a white Reebok high top; a style that I had seen some kids wearing at Lincoln (Elementary School) around the time when Criss-Cross, the twin kid-rappers were popular, wearing their clothes backwards and all that. So I wore them and we sang, bided our time until we were let out. No one had said a word to me about the shoes, but that was not unusual as most Sundays I passed through as quietly as possible.
_
Last fall I attended the wedding of an old friend from Mineral Point. At the wedding I talked to Troy, an acquaintance while growing up, about our shared experiences, and he mentioned the mismatched shoes as something that he had always wondered about. I explained myself in the same way that I had been prepared to explain myself back then, that I couldn’t find the other shoe. In writing this I realize I haven’t really earned much perspective on this phenomenon.

By neither acting nor choosing not to act, that knowing a situation is often enough and this process is action. How can I answer the question? Speaking what I know to be true, a meeting between the known and what is shown to be otherwise. Not to set up a dialectic, not to simplify things into two categories as inner and outer, but to use conflict as a stepping stone. That by standing up my lap vanishes.
_
And I would be wrong if I thought this were true, these words. Surely someone or something disagrees, and even if they are not here to dispute it, consider it done. A cat snores. The question of meaning is the answer leading by example, by risking one’s own conventions. By risking more. There are many ways to fail and be unsure but pushing forward regardless is conviction, an acceptance of the inevitable uncertainties and the limits of dualism: that one or the other or the distance in-between; the location, is just a mark on a map, a bird’s eye view. Those eyes, the small ones, and why courage fails us to stay with ourselves.

Earlier this week I went swimming in a fifty meter pool in Pasadena California. The water was not warm but refractions of the sun covered the floor in flakes of light. Though originally a ball of burning gas, a man sings along to the radio and a dog barks. These kinds of energies. I got out of the pool and sat down on the concrete to stretch, touching my toes and flexing my groin. A tick bit into my arm and I spent the next forty five minutes dealing with the repercussions: why me?