Drumnotes, dreamnotes:

When you let go, let go, like a sleepy kitten
When you hold on, hold on like a fucking bear trap, like a fucking bear that escaped the trap
one more time ...

LOOK FOR THE THINGS YOU DENY ARE IMPORTANT — THEY’RE PROBABLY THE IMPORTANT THINGS

Look for the weak-ass retroactive rationalizations — they have their own kind of wisdom too.

Yet I suppose I think it’s the stupid choices that are the important ones. And I suppose I think the standard for art is that it doesn’t just play the game, but invents it.

(who wrote that?)

Metaphors are not explanatory nor are they accelerators of understanding. They’re more like a post-mortem. Once we have reliable metaphors “for” something, it’s already too late. We make sometimes dangerous or (unintentionally) violent assumptions when we live in the antique map of the current city.

Life outside the phone is like the blasted planet outside the dome. Inside, it’s “safer” but people have weird proportions & fake cheer & you can’t tell what’s real.

Metaphors are exhausted by your hypervigilance. Dude, chill. Give them some space.

James Reeves said “At some point the screen became the world, and now we’re haunting it.” That sounds about right. We’re the heartaching ghosts, out here walking around in the dead world, peering thru these tiny windows into what we’re missing, what we think we long for.

What if we could build some kind of world out here, in the afterlife?

Yes, build, not rebuild.

What will we build it out of? Who will it be for? How will we treat each other? How will we trust each other? What resources do we need? Do we have everything we need out here, or will we have to steal some of what we need from that other world, the escaped one, the having-fled one, the appropriated, taken-over one, the one imprisoned behind a billion fragments of glass?

Chalkdust and appleseed.

When you realize your teachers are just people, doing a job, helping you do a job, and so are you —

Have a good laff & then get on with it.

pigeon

Rill

Rill (disambiguation)

A rill is a very small brook; a streamlet.

Rill may also refer to:

• (rille) One of certain narrow, crooked valleys seen, by aid of the telescope, on the surface of the moon
• One of my characters in Elfquest, a GURPS-like role-playing game gm’d by my brother when we were in high school
• What I assume I was thinking of when I tagged this pigeon

I already mentioned the pagan festivals. Before Glim and I went to our first one, the “Balefires of Beltane,” we had sent in a registration form. Like, actually sent in, via the postal service. It had asked what names we wanted to go by; apparently in addition to going skyclad, you could go clad in a pseudonym too, to accentuate the weeklong distance from mundanity. I picked a word that was like “river” but less generic, more sensitive, secretive, willowy, unassuming: Rill. Glim went back and forth on a number of different candidates. One night we were high as fuck and saturated with sex and I said, you know, you could go by Pussy. It was not meant to be (nor, I’m pretty sure, unless she was better at hiding reactions from me and herself than I realized at the time, did she take it as) demeaning or degrading. It was meant to be celebratory, sensual; I don’t know if “sex positive” was a common term then, but that’s what it was. I was so smitten by her almost aggressive sex-positivity at the time, in fact, I think it’s fair to say that particular element of her personality blinded me, sun-like, to many of the less obvious celestial bodies orbiting our relationship. Pussy. A beautiful name.

We got to the festival grounds — found the little road that split off from the highway, then the littler road that forked off of that, then the rutted track that climbed the hill to the grassy field used as a parking lot, then walked the rest of the way with our bags and drums and hats and sticks and whatever other nonsense we’d brought with us to help materialize the magic that was about to transpire — and approached the fold-out table where a couple of volunteers were checking people in. It was like when you go to vote — they asked your name, then ran a finger down the page looking for it, to verify you were supposed to be there (and had paid your fee, presumably).

When it was my turn, I said “Rill,” and, just as they had done without exception for each one of the several people before us in line, they repeated it back while checking it off the list. “Rill, OK great to meet you, welcome!”

When it was Glim’s turn, bless her, she said, with only the faintest trace of defiance in her voice, “Pussy.”

And they didn’t repeat it back to her.

This may have been my first whiff of disillusionment with the pagans, actually. The ones we had met in the days and weeks leading up to this big hootenany had given the impression of being so, I don’t know, earthy, primordial, carnal, the constantly-espoused opposite of prudish, and yet here we were, looking forward to getting skyclad, gearing up to celebrate the goddess of fertility and fecundity or whatever the fuck — for fuck’s sake there was even a “sensual feast” on the agenda, an animalistic potluck in which a big cluster of people, friends and strangers alike, would feed each other all manner of soft foods and spreads, using no utensils other than any body part except your hands (I did not participate in that event, because, frankly, ew) — and yet they couldn’t look a pert young woman in the face at the sign-in table and with a straight face address her by her perfectly natural, wholesome name: Pussy.

What’s wrong with Pussy? (Coincidentally, that exact phrase is another pigeon! I wonder when it will come up in the shuffle.)

Well, I felt a little bit responsible and ever so lightly remorseful because I had kind of talked her into using that name. When we had initially discussed it, it had seemed poetically perfect; here, in the blazing sunshine at the outset of a prolonged interaction with a bunch of people we either barely knew or were just about to meet, it seemed ... kind of like how something perfectly poetic tends to become, shall we say, less perfect when you’re not stoned anymore.

My name was safe, cute, oh! a little river! how enchanting! Hers was, even in those proto-enlightened days of the early 1990s (lol), a little bit dangerous. People were just people, still quick to become uncomfortable at the slightest deviation from expectation, even if said people had plastered themselves with a sexy coating of counter-religious religion.

The rest of the week was fun though, intense, pulsing. If I recall correctly, Glim went by Pussy with a few people, kind of as a joke, but not with everyone. I had bouts of belonging, jealousy, arousal, exhaustion, sublime relaxation, disaffection. We made some friends — most notably Cael, as previously recounted. We danced in a thunderstorm and didn’t die.

Sometime later, I wrote some poem-like things about it all, including the following two selections (lightly edited here because why not):

shower warm remembering

a sacred bath outdoors at festival
guitar spirit laughing rusty tones upon our heads
two dogs amok with elves and children trolls and crows alike
the spirit effervescent tangible between two mouths that talk and walk
down rutted road past campfire snapping in the bacon coffee tangerine
sun hiking walking preying mantis thorn foot liquid noon slide by no hesitation
swimming down the holler fishy wormy bramble dark with trees and stumps of trees left over from before this was the way it was

the music loud unceasing do you copy do you read me yes i hear you come inside the sweat the pit the too-intimate cleft of angled logs and fire bigger in than outer
space betweening jangle jingle eyes the black flies quiet lies the cool slow patch of interstellar knowitall the one note wonder
singing whip poor will
whip poor will
whip poor will

the sinew muscle cross the barbed wire fence the golden fizz of make-your-legs-walk up the hill
to swish aside the leaves and rocks indent your waking sole
as turgid butterflies alight on three-shaped leaves
and irridescent goon-bugs waver in the jello light of towering afternoon
we dusty sigh and sadly smile; the ghost of oaks we hope is watching
sycamore and sassafrass to come down in our circle; oak’s a lonely watchman

Oh lord i gotta get me

Oh lord i gotta get me a sweet fat girl
to love and whose car parked outside my house
will remind me of good love and love to
come
who loves dogs
has beautiful black round blue eyes
and will sink into the bathtub with me as easily as
feet
into feet of warm, oozing mud.

Oh and while i’m at it i would like to get me
a lagoon for me & her (& whoever else wanted to
come along, on some
days at least) to swim in, and
maybe some cigars
and a porch with a nice white bench or maybe a swing
wide enough for more
than one
and the sound of a banjo tickling the tops of the
weeds out back by the
field and coming to us over easy
breezes
and
also could you please throw in the sun.

Glim, whatever your name is now, I hope you’re doing all right.