Complicated

And so she left out. Her things in one small pack. She was never one to carry much around.

It’s hard, you know, when they step out on you, but it has its own special attraction. It’s like having your back to a dungeon and making that one last step off the gangway. It hurts. While you have nothing left behind, you have your heart pulling you back to the raging main. But you still step off. You have to.

And I love you. You know this.

But she left without much ado. I could tell she had to leave right then. I have experience with volatiles. She was about to fall apart and explode and melt down in some sort of feminine thermite amazing destruction. She was a mag flare in a rain storm. She was a proprietary mix of Al and Fe oxides alight. But she held it inside and ran out. One kiss on the cheek. One breath and one word and she was gone.

Don’t get me wrong, I love you. But this is about her.

And so that was how she walked out, as one final burning implosion of white hot something. I knew she was not going to hold on any longer. She couldn’t. I was what she will want someday. I know how she feels, there’s a few girls that I’m sure I’ll regret letting go someday. So what can you do? It would be unfair to pull the capital I have with her and lay it down to purchase a few more days, hours, months with her. So I eat the loss. And throw it away.

But don’t trust me. I am volatile. I burn down myself and when I go, I take it all. I take down the world in one white hot inexplicable reaction. I will burn you down.

Or you may run.

And you know I love you. But she left. And now I don’t know who to talk to about it.

So I burn myself down. Into the ground, through the ground and unto the end, the center of the Earth where time stops because it speeds asymptotically toward the infinite. Right there there in the blanket of volatiles and radioactive rare earth element enriched mantle. It’s a heady drunk she’s got tied on. I shouldn’t let her leave, but I’m not keeping her around. Story of my life, kitten.

She’s smoking and bubbling and turning white inside. It will make its way out of her in steam and power and exploding solar flares at midnight. But it isn’t my problem. Let her roll. Fuck it. I told her once I never kept anything around too long that didn’t have smooth action or synchro tremolo. Because I like my metaphor like I like my women. Overt, horny, and covered in booze.

But I know you love me. And so this one I have to just breathe into myself. Metabolize her, and her leaving, into something new. Something less volatile. Because I’m in a new environment and all I can do is survive. I worry that that survival may destroy everything around me, but all I know to do is keep on. And maybe that volatile metabolized mess will give rise to a whole new age in something beautiful.

And I told that one girl I was a tactile learner. Who knows what my adaptation may reap.

Suddenly, I understand how the stromatolites felt.

Guitar/T-Shirt Friday

Note strategic flash.  And shittiness of camera phone pictures.

Rock and roll bitches.

Excuses

Most of my posting lately has been shit sitting in que, but you may have already realized that.  I have had a metric shit ton of family drama lately.  Details will not be shared, but I will say that it has effected my free time and GPA.  So, if you think I just quit liking you recently, and you are NOT Dexter Colt, then you are wrong.  I haven’t commented anywhere.  I don’t have the nerve energy right now for it.

The thing is, I still read a lot.  More than I should with how much I have going on.  I don’t think you would know that, though, since I use Google Reader.

In short, thanks for doing what some of you do. The people who have been emailing are all awarded 1200 awesome bucks (1453, Canadian), with an extra couple for anyone who I have totally forgot to write back.  I am a jerk that way.

In other news, I read part of He’s Just Not That Into You.

I’m going to write a book for women called Bitch, Please.

Chromatic Basslines Are My Thing

The phone rings and we both talk about nothing and non-notables until she gets to the point.  We both knew what this was about when the phone rang.  From the first buzz and her name creeping across the display we knew.  She got the devil in her.

The devil is a Spring afternoon or one of those sweaty summer time nights with the windows open.  It’s those storms that come over the desert and blow into and over the stacked superstructure of the Bookcliffs.  She feels it in her skin and under her fingernails.  She’s got it growing out of her and that guy she’s sometimes with don’t know it.  He’s not a bad guy, not like me.  He doesn’t pick up on it like chum over a reef.  That woman he pretends to have is not a girlfriend, she’s a force of nature.  She’s the reason that life survived the Pleistocene and such.  She’s all kinds of nature.  It’s like watching a rip tide when she moves. It’s the devil making her do it.  She holds the whole sacred survival of our species in that burning place deep inside her.  Not the heart that loves the kids or the brain leads her in the way she should go.  This is deeper, in the gut.  That’s where I attract her.

Up in that high performance calculating brain of hers, she knows I’m bad news.  In her blood pumping upper reaches, her heart knows I’m death incarnate.  But down there where we’re all still animals, I got a draw on her.

The Colorado is one of the most heavily regulated rivers on Earth.  That’s ironic, since it’s one of the least studied.  Hydrological data on the Colorado goes back about a hundred years, and that’s only the Lee’s Ferry check.  Most of the River is wild and unknowable.  But it is owned.  In a treaty among almost every Western state and Mexico, water rights are enumerated.  If you got an older water right, you can put a call on the river.  If you have seniority, then you are allowed, though the gentlemanly nature of water rights would frown upon it, to draw water away from anyone younger than you.

The call I got on her predates families and kids and civilization.  The call I put on her is older than humanity.  It’s the call of life on her lower body.  It’s not about procreation, but it isn’t about recreation, either.  It’s all the dark power of this biological universe burning a hole in her fingers because they been a while without me under them.

Life is beautiful.

And when she lays back, nothing but alive and lithe and running her engines of creation, that is life most abundant.

Would I answer that phone call? Probably.

I got the devil in me.  I don’t want it any other way.

Rise Above

Rise Above

Rise Against

Hold Fast

Forever

That’s what the guy wrote in my cruise book.  He died last month.  That is more friends that I can count without spiraling into drunken rage like you would not believe. Two were guys from my boot division.  A couple were friends from later on in the character arc of that guy I used to be.

That was one of the things he used to say when we’d sit back with our authority and our guns and our honor and such.  I was in and out of trouble all the time when I held that job.  I’m not the kind of person who would willingly shoot a person.  I’m not the kind of person who easily gives up my will to an organization.  I chafe and knuckle up.  I get in trouble.  But us thick necked guys with a chip on our shoulder always do alright.

And when it got too much and he could see me balling up, ready to throw away everything, he would calm me down.  He introduced me to Buddhism.  He introduced my to a lot.  When he could see my resolve failing, he would tell me, Hold Fast.

It’s one of those esoteric nautical terms you learn.  Hold fast means stop and hold the line. Halt.

When I would be turning red and breathing hard and clenching jaw and fist and ready to Holy God annihilate a motherfucker, he would tell me, Rise Above, Rise Against.  In that order.

And now when I find myself in some fray or another and I hate and I burn and I feel the bile of wrath right at the base of my person, I remember.  I rise above, rise against.  You don’t have to fight it all overtly, you just have to find your high ground.  Then you hold fast.  You grab onto that line and you don’t let it budge, and you don’t let it pull you.

And now, two weeks fresh and sober, I walk into some godawful den of noise and whorish behavior and I feel lost.  I feel rage at People.  We’re all horrible.  I hate.  I hate myself for ever playing the games I see.  I hate others for not being the Promethean souls we are called to be.  They turn into simian aliens and I feel dirty for being there.  And I want to fight it off.  I want bloody knuckles and another broken nose.  I don’t even feel it anymore when it breaks again.  Black eyes look good on me, at least they used to.  And then I remember, Rise Above, Rise Against.  Hold fast.  I don’t need to resist the people around me.  I need to rise above that fray.

So, you sheathe your angry antipathy one more time.  It’s all the same.  A fight here would be exactly what they expect from you.

Another friend, one who is alive, said about a girlfriend who had come and gone, “Man, being a whore is so unoriginal.”

He was right.  But he didn’t fight her.  He didn’t resist her.

That’s all I try to do now, in his dead, blown apart honor.  In my living honor.  Rise above, Rise against. Hold fast.

Psychotic Girl

Ahead, through the night dark corridor, I can hear the tell-tales of people working and socializing and some even trying to improve themselves. The girls on the elipticals and the men trying to lift more than they should. And the kids running back and forth, texting and socializing. The typical college gym. On the way down the corrido, there’s the dance studio. From the inside, I can catch glimpes of flying and stretching and spinning. Some sort of Wagnerian mucous coughed thick and disgusting from the speakers.

I work hard in the gym. Sometimes the college kids irritate me and sometimes the proximal nature of physical training in this environment gets to me. But I work through it. And when I have reached the fullness of my goals, I back off and cool down and take a drink and pack up my things to leave. And back through the same corridor. Ahead the doors and the orange sodium lights of the parking lot and a crockpot with roast bubbling when I get home. The dancers have all went home, now. But for the one.

I stop for a minute and kneel down off center of the hall and pull my unsecured shoestring tight. The Wagner is gone. It’s just her stretching. Then she pushes the hair off her shoulder and grabs a slim remote and points it into some space I’m not offered through the narrow door. A deep rumble comes from the room, liquid languid pentatonic runs on a four-string. It’s a stripped down bassline and it’s all on its own. She reaches up with one hand and pushes her curls back and lets the hand trace down her neck. In a few minutes, her class will start and she’ll be back to swan-like gesticulation to dead men’s music. But for now, its just her and this very living R&B rumble. She pushes her shoulders to the side and the rest of her trunk follows, a bull whip moving through honey, and the muscles of her legs ripple out in some sort of astronomical protest. Then her hands run up her sides to the music and push into the air and cant away and down and her belly, bigger than most dancers and healthy and feminine and I believe in God and she pushes her hips forward thrusting away. And she opens her eyes from the mystic and sees me there a little frozen half way through tying my shoe.

Sorry, I say, I just really like that song.

She smiles and turns the thrusting into a stretching and she’s just a young girl again. It’s cool, isn’t it? she says. I use it to warm up.

I finish the tying and tell her, Yeah. Me too.

This is the song.