mind spooge
My mind is abuzz with things I want to say and things that may need to be said but I can’t seem to find any logical way to piece them together that would make sense to anyone else.
Sometimes I really am concerned about how I let things affect me emotionally. I was watching television just a little while ago and saw a segment of a show on food network talking about a peach farm somewhere in Texas. The clip depicted a bunch of families picking and eating peaches in an orchard and I saw a little girl of no more than three or four being hoisted upwards into the branches to reach out and pick a peach from the vine. I was overcome at how sweet and tender an image it was.
My childhood was filled with peach trees, plum trees, apple trees, blackberry bushes and honeysuckle vines all bearing nature’s sweet fragrant fruits that I would pluck and eat as if go had made them grow there just for me to enjoy. I can recall the satisfaction of finding the biggest blackberry on the bush and popping it, unwashed right into my mouth and crushing its dark juicy cluster between my tongue and the roof of my mouth and letting the dark purple love spill over my tongue and tingle the sides of my mouth with its gorgeous sweet and sour ballet. Occasionally I’d pick a green blackberry and bite in to it just to feel my whole face draw up in a wonderful pucker.
I’d stand for hours by the sweet growth of honeysuckle near the eastern fence along our yard at our old country home and gently pluck the blossoms, being sure to leave the little green bud on the end so I could break it with my thumbnail and pull the stamen out ever so carefully and catch the tiny transparent drop of nectar on my tongue.
Honeysuckle and magnolias are what heaven must smell like. I think that’s why death means so much to southerners. Why would you want to leave some place that is so much like heaven already?
There is something truly magical about the south. It is a land of extremes, of intensity, of passion, and of pride. Nowhere else is a land and a people more teaming with dichotomy and contradiction than the south. Nowhere else do the tunes of sorrow, heartache, suffering, and pain blend to weave the peculiar optimistic harmony that resonates in the hearts of its children and dances on the lips of those who have been there, who have seen it, and who have lived long enough to tell the tale.
All my ambitions point towards being able to relive those days of innocence and wonder through the eyes of my own children when God blesses me with them. I dream about teaching my children the important things that babes of the south should know; teaching them about tadpoles and crawdads, whittling and whistling, about being polite and how to act in church, how to bait a hook, shoot a bow, how to be quiet and still and feel the presence of God in seeing a deer walking in the morning mists or listening to the joyful chorus of tree frogs and crickets by the lakeside at dusk.
Of all the things that I cherish, it is the dream that those visions may come to pass that mean more to me than any other. My life has lead me here, to this time and place, and has made me who I am to see the challenges that the roles of husband and father will present me with. It is for these things that I would sacrifice all. It is for these things alone that I harbor a secret zeal. It is for these things alone that I look for as the truth of what joys existence holds.
My loneliness is profound and I have come to know the missing element of myself is a woman to adore and be my helpmate and children to love and be my legacy. And though I am sad now, my faith comforts me that all things happen according to God’s plan and that my suffering now will help me to know patience and make me a better man.
There is something wonderful about the quiet. As I pause to think of what to write next and how to say it I can clearly hear my wristwatch ticking as it sits on the table beside me. Its steady crisp tic tic tic drumming on as if to say time stands still only in your mind and the rest of the world keeps spinning while you ponder. Its light soft clicks layered over the low steady thump of my heart beating in my chest provide the rhythm section for a delightful simmering jazz beat that my mind solos over like Charlie Parker wailing and moaning as he redefines the rules and leaves the blues scale in the box and plays what the mood tells him to play.
My chest hurts. It could be my posture as I sit at my keyboard like an oaf at the dinner table showing no manners with my elbows planted atop the desk in front of me, hunched over staring at my keys to betray my lack of typing skills. Every few words I look up at the screen to fix a misspelled word or forgotten punctuation. The rest of the time I watch the little white letters on black keys in front of me play peek-a-boo as the words stream out of my mind and down to my fingertips. I have been accused of writing like Faulkner. Not necessarily with his skill for painting a mental picture, but surely for echoing his disdain for over punctuation. I think the run on sentence and the fragment are proselytized as evil by academics too concise and unimaginative to appreciate their ability to transport the written word back into the realm of conversation, which is where all great ideas and poetic sentiments are shared. Proper writing isn’t nearly always good writing because it is so over processed and too thoroughly thought out to be authentic and truly representative of the author’s train of thought. Writing should speak as much about the author as it does about the subject about which they choose to write.
When I write, I usually put words on paper or screen as stream of consciousness and my revisions rarely include more than grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and the occasional rewording of something when I find I’ve overused an adjective. My writing is my mind at work and is always a genuine picture of my thoughts and how they flow from one to the next. It is not unlike works of art that Dali referred to as spontaneous drawings. These were works of art without planning or censorship that stream from the artists thoughts of the moment on to a medium for permanent archival preservation of the images born from the instance of inspiration. Real genius can never be planned. It must boil forth from the soul like a geyser bursting forth from the earth. Creativity must spurt out from our minds as mental semen ejaculated in moments of quaking revelation in to the womb of reality, desperately gushing forward to seek out the confines our existence, penetrate them, and impregnate them with our unique perspectives and give birth to new creation as if we were striving to mimic God’s genesis in our own limited way.
I have to pee…
And my chest still hurts.
I think that’s enough skimming off the top of my consciousness for now.
Ciao, true believers!
Sometimes I really am concerned about how I let things affect me emotionally. I was watching television just a little while ago and saw a segment of a show on food network talking about a peach farm somewhere in Texas. The clip depicted a bunch of families picking and eating peaches in an orchard and I saw a little girl of no more than three or four being hoisted upwards into the branches to reach out and pick a peach from the vine. I was overcome at how sweet and tender an image it was.
My childhood was filled with peach trees, plum trees, apple trees, blackberry bushes and honeysuckle vines all bearing nature’s sweet fragrant fruits that I would pluck and eat as if go had made them grow there just for me to enjoy. I can recall the satisfaction of finding the biggest blackberry on the bush and popping it, unwashed right into my mouth and crushing its dark juicy cluster between my tongue and the roof of my mouth and letting the dark purple love spill over my tongue and tingle the sides of my mouth with its gorgeous sweet and sour ballet. Occasionally I’d pick a green blackberry and bite in to it just to feel my whole face draw up in a wonderful pucker.
I’d stand for hours by the sweet growth of honeysuckle near the eastern fence along our yard at our old country home and gently pluck the blossoms, being sure to leave the little green bud on the end so I could break it with my thumbnail and pull the stamen out ever so carefully and catch the tiny transparent drop of nectar on my tongue.
Honeysuckle and magnolias are what heaven must smell like. I think that’s why death means so much to southerners. Why would you want to leave some place that is so much like heaven already?
There is something truly magical about the south. It is a land of extremes, of intensity, of passion, and of pride. Nowhere else is a land and a people more teaming with dichotomy and contradiction than the south. Nowhere else do the tunes of sorrow, heartache, suffering, and pain blend to weave the peculiar optimistic harmony that resonates in the hearts of its children and dances on the lips of those who have been there, who have seen it, and who have lived long enough to tell the tale.
All my ambitions point towards being able to relive those days of innocence and wonder through the eyes of my own children when God blesses me with them. I dream about teaching my children the important things that babes of the south should know; teaching them about tadpoles and crawdads, whittling and whistling, about being polite and how to act in church, how to bait a hook, shoot a bow, how to be quiet and still and feel the presence of God in seeing a deer walking in the morning mists or listening to the joyful chorus of tree frogs and crickets by the lakeside at dusk.
Of all the things that I cherish, it is the dream that those visions may come to pass that mean more to me than any other. My life has lead me here, to this time and place, and has made me who I am to see the challenges that the roles of husband and father will present me with. It is for these things that I would sacrifice all. It is for these things alone that I harbor a secret zeal. It is for these things alone that I look for as the truth of what joys existence holds.
My loneliness is profound and I have come to know the missing element of myself is a woman to adore and be my helpmate and children to love and be my legacy. And though I am sad now, my faith comforts me that all things happen according to God’s plan and that my suffering now will help me to know patience and make me a better man.
There is something wonderful about the quiet. As I pause to think of what to write next and how to say it I can clearly hear my wristwatch ticking as it sits on the table beside me. Its steady crisp tic tic tic drumming on as if to say time stands still only in your mind and the rest of the world keeps spinning while you ponder. Its light soft clicks layered over the low steady thump of my heart beating in my chest provide the rhythm section for a delightful simmering jazz beat that my mind solos over like Charlie Parker wailing and moaning as he redefines the rules and leaves the blues scale in the box and plays what the mood tells him to play.
My chest hurts. It could be my posture as I sit at my keyboard like an oaf at the dinner table showing no manners with my elbows planted atop the desk in front of me, hunched over staring at my keys to betray my lack of typing skills. Every few words I look up at the screen to fix a misspelled word or forgotten punctuation. The rest of the time I watch the little white letters on black keys in front of me play peek-a-boo as the words stream out of my mind and down to my fingertips. I have been accused of writing like Faulkner. Not necessarily with his skill for painting a mental picture, but surely for echoing his disdain for over punctuation. I think the run on sentence and the fragment are proselytized as evil by academics too concise and unimaginative to appreciate their ability to transport the written word back into the realm of conversation, which is where all great ideas and poetic sentiments are shared. Proper writing isn’t nearly always good writing because it is so over processed and too thoroughly thought out to be authentic and truly representative of the author’s train of thought. Writing should speak as much about the author as it does about the subject about which they choose to write.
When I write, I usually put words on paper or screen as stream of consciousness and my revisions rarely include more than grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and the occasional rewording of something when I find I’ve overused an adjective. My writing is my mind at work and is always a genuine picture of my thoughts and how they flow from one to the next. It is not unlike works of art that Dali referred to as spontaneous drawings. These were works of art without planning or censorship that stream from the artists thoughts of the moment on to a medium for permanent archival preservation of the images born from the instance of inspiration. Real genius can never be planned. It must boil forth from the soul like a geyser bursting forth from the earth. Creativity must spurt out from our minds as mental semen ejaculated in moments of quaking revelation in to the womb of reality, desperately gushing forward to seek out the confines our existence, penetrate them, and impregnate them with our unique perspectives and give birth to new creation as if we were striving to mimic God’s genesis in our own limited way.
I have to pee…
And my chest still hurts.
I think that’s enough skimming off the top of my consciousness for now.
Ciao, true believers!