There may or may not be a phrase in the bible about a potter having the privilege of using some pots for noble purposes and others for base or common purposes. And it utterly ruined christianity for my young world-saving self. Cause we are equal, dammit. And there's a bit of a memory I have wherein a very young version of myself is writing out a sort of personal constitution and the one thing I knew for sure was that we all start out on a level playing field. And my mom chimed in with 'well, we don't really though do we?' Stuck with me for some reason. And I guess the conflict may have had something to do with confusing purpose with value. The pot may be an oil lamp or a bedpan.  And their respective value is a very separate thing from their intended purposes.

I feel, considering the aforementioned stuff and some other possible bible verse about man being in God's image and Bjork's comment about having a universe inside her (which I love although I cannot stand her music), that I might be an ear in this incarnation. Maybe. And maybe listening is my intended purpose, base or noble or otherwise.

Negative Space

Negative space
Is a term that always sounds pretentious,
Much like the word "pretentious"
And people who use it,
Especially in writing
Where you can't dumb it down as easily
With a "ya know?" Or a "or whatever the word is."

But what I wanted to say was something about a place
Being so familiar that it blends into the background
Like Compton sirens,
So that you no longer search for the feeling
You had as a child when you crossed the street
At that one certain spot on your way to get a slurpee,
But instead you search for a feeling of the time
When you still could remember that feeling,
Seeing if there's still an echo of the echo, or something like that

And then feeling guilty for searching at all in the dusty past,
When maybe, just maybe, you can still make new echoes
Now,
Small ones yes, but for starters you realize you've been bicycling
Surrounded by migrating monarch butterflies,
Which seems like it should be worth remembering

 I had had the answer and it had made people mad
 So I started walking west.

And when I got out west I met a Presbyterian boy
Jaded since age 8

We made love, and the answer lost its crispness.

Later, I was run over

By a born again Christian who would leave her cell phone at home
When we spent time together.

And it was barely visible,

I shook hands with a bright-eyed Pakistani man and
Questions overshadowed

And I wondered

What story to start now that
My old thread was spent.

An alien who both forgot his mission

and

Burned his means of return.

I think maybe it's not just that meaning is relative but that relative meaning can be ascribed in any amount at whatever level of life's magnification you're zoomed in on. So if it's a child's birth or the opening of a can of soda, a feeling of value can be experienced, savored, noted, soliloquized, whatever, if conditions are right for that. This impression was strong under psychedelics, if not very admirable, when I would say, believe sincerely that the opening screen of Zelda where you name your character, was some sort of universal cipher, or when I was worse than absent from a baby shower for my son, because I was engrossed in the idea of emotions being a physical thing... I could go on... So the sensitivity to meaning was maybe turned up a bit high, but still I find it comforting when struggling to feel much of anything, that those impressions can indeed be felt within any moment, any object, any incident. And the non-specificity of the catalysts, rather than leading me to nihilism, suggests to me that the universe can in fact be the scent of bitter almonds, or whatever poetic/mundane/astronomical thing.

My sister and I have bonded over running. She's a real runner and I'm someone in his thirties who is acknowledging that he's been overweight for a decade and needs to move more. She asks me often if I like running, I think hoping that my answer will change. This morning, the answer was something like 'I'm starting to, yeah'

She got a look that was far more wistful than she usually allows herself, and said 'I've always liked it. Do you ever feel like running really really far? Like, running while the sky changes over you, day to night?'

I don't believe in records any more. The vinyl, music-playing variety. I can see that they work, and I have read the explanations of why they work, but I do not believe that they should work. And probably I'd feel the same way about electricity or most things that Edison dabbled in, but I'm more comfortable expressing heresy in the audio realm. I don't care how elaborate those squiggles are on that live Don McLean album, they should not be able to make a sound wave at all recognizable as originating from lungs, a mouth, a wood guitar, a harmonica. And having decided this, I wonder what else we have agreed to overlook and accept as real, in this group hallucination. And do I care? Should I care? Should I tell someone? Do they already know?