Oh Honey Remember

Remember when all we used the internet for after he was born was sending pictures via email to all our friends and family? Remember how in that upward moving house, three stores stacked tightly on top of eachother, we would lay in bed with that bundle between us and watch Bollywood flick after Bollywood flick and eat cartons of Kosher Chinese? Sometimes replies to our internet birth announcement would come: "Congratulations! He is perfect" "Oh...you two look great! What a cute baby!" "What a perfect new family...Congrats!" When you went back to work I sat with the baby next to me on the bed sipping strawberry milkshakes (too many it turned out) and surfing the net for baby clothes and toys we couldn't afford. Remember how after we moved to that little farmhouse on Livingston Ave. we would all cuddle down on the rug and take more pictures of him beginning to roll and sit up and crawl. We would send them out via email to friends and family. They would write back: "He's getting so big!" He looks just like his mama!" "Can't wait to see you all at Christmas!" Remember how I would lock myself in that little sun room and you would play with him all day. I would write, and write, and write, and finally use the internet to send a draft to a colleague, and come out to fresh cornbread and beans and we would bundle up in the van and go on long brisk walks along the canal. We would take his first pictures in his snowsuit and pretend we were in Colorado. Then, we would send them out to our friends and family via the internet, and they would write back... Oh honey, remember? So how is it that now I hear you raise from bed too early in the morning. I find you on the couch with the glow of the computer outlining the back of your head like a halo. Facebook again, or maybe a blog, or perhaps a quick glance at twitter, or one of 3 email accounts. How is it that you were faced with a steely gaze all winter when all my warmth went into a computer screen, where the intimate space of the home echoed hollowly in a cold cybereffect detachment. I scan your page for pictures of me--looking for some material presence of our familialness in this other reality that you occupy. I find myself waking early, earlier than you, and getting there first...my face glued to my own alternate realities. The children, both of them, are there too...only when people comment on them they comment to you or to me...not to us. Oh honey remember those few years, too few, we didn't even know how few they were before all of that overwhlemed all of this? When our lives were defined more by our home than our computers?

Pandora's Box

You have heard the saying "Pandora's Box" before? The archetypal origin of that story i.e.: where the phrasing developed--what Pandora is--where the image of the box came from is something I do not know. But the essence of the saying is that within the box there are a series of forces that if unleashed would disrupt the order of things irreparably. Am I right? When I was a debater , within a disadvantage (a position ran on the negative to prove that by affirming the resolution in the way the opponent does you enable severe consequences--usually culminating in nuclear annihilation) one used the phrase Pandora's Box to describe the opening into the impact--the act that led to the consequence. I have heard it used in other settings of course--it has an element of descriptiveness that keeps it useful. It is especially interesting when it is used unexpectedly--when the use of it indicates a depth of focus that seems dramatic and mysterious. What exactly is in that Pandora's Box that we can't open? Lately--instead of wishing I could see inside this package, Thinking of it as contained in this box of consequence, I try to think of it more like Pangea. The origins of this earth in general. Separations and faults pulling connectedness apart, stretching it out and transforming the ties. Pangea is already outside the box, it was the material origin of our inhabited space that has been reordered it is also the box--the line comes from a limited view of the circle. I think of water splashing over shores, I think of mountains rising high, blue sky and white clouds and cities faraway, I think of all the things that could be in that box.

I have this dream I have been following--like a castle in the mist it sits above me and around me. There are cliff tops and forests lining the rocks and I can see the water from here. I think maybe I should go--drive through that Canyon and up the River to where I really am at home. So marked it is now by adult existences, breakfast and layers, sunscreen and repellent. So little do I sit solitary in the woods at the base of a majestic Ponderosa Pine. I want to watch the Tamaracks turn and how is it that I let another season of yellowed needles go by without even paying witness. In the dream there is concrete too and faraway cities like Portland and others up North. I am afoot of something great but veiled and I am searching for meaning. Sometimes I realize in wonderment that I am likely too broke to fix, I travel down trailways that lead nowhere--like that time in the jungle in Costa Rica where I kneeled to the ground and spread my tears among the ants. There is the part wit the train and then dust and the ring and marching--the part of holograms and wild beasts al lrevolving--somehow in dreamland in the same space--interacting. It is then that i feel the loneliness--the utter ceaselessness of my own echo knowing, somehow the hollowness of my own heart.

Consciousness Raised--Draft 1

Someone told me that it takes at least 1 hour for the body to come down from the "charge" it gets either watching t.v. or writing on the computer.  I wonder at the effect of writing on this machine so much.  I rely on it as my primary medium, but the consequences of the electrical interaction are certainly real for my embodied self.

Still, here I am sleepless, writing.  I think it is simply synthesizing.  Sinking in , or some other such way for saying--my consciousness is catching up with reality.

We have our President Obama, after a long exploration of democratic manifestations we chose.