Four posts in two days.

This indicates that I am bored and sick.

gah.

This has been haunting my imagination for the last two days. I have to admit it is one of the most evocative short bits I've ever seen written by any of my friends:

"It was a still night in winter near the limits of a small town in northern Italy, during the later part of the Second World War. A scrawny adolescent girl was sitting in the snow by herself, leaning casually against a battered brick wall. A sleepy, thoughtful look hung about her half-closed, dark-rimmed eyes. Bundled close about her small body, held in place by obviously chilled fingers was a worn-out wool overcoat, all rumpled and smudged with age. She wore a tired but faintly contented smile and looked rather comfortable despite the harsh night air.

"'S cold," I commented, lighting a Camel. I wondered if she spoke English. She looked vaguely Slavic. She didn't answer right away and I took my first drag.

"Do you have a place to get warm?" I asked. I bent toward her, to hear her reply.

There were holes in her coat. Little tears or rips here and there, filled with rich red-brown syrup, frozen to ice in the bitter night.

Slipping from my fingers, my cigarette went out in the snow beside me as I gently touched her face. She was dead.

Toque (crashboxing.blogspot.com)

Original post may be found here

At the bottom of the grade, I coasted carefully to a stop, so carefully I overshot my intended parking target and we stopped beyond the corner by Boccali's Pizza. I tipped the bike onto its sidestand and cut the motor. She slid down onto the pavement and stood there, flexing one leg and then the next, propping up the smoked visor. Her long brown hair lay tangled down the back of the armored vest. “Oh, you're so lucky. It's so gorgeous, the fields with the horses in them, it's like flying. It's so beautiful. You're so lucky.”

You are lucky, too, you know. Because you weren't afraid of motorcycles you got to be First to Fly. “Oh, I know. It really is like flying, flying along the ground. I really love it, you know.”

And I stare off into the citrus grove. I can't tell you this, but I'm so glad you're with me here so you can know it too. I don't know how to tell you how much I appreciate sharing this with you, to look into your eyes and know the beauty you see is somehow the exact same beauty I see. I'm always alone when I see beauty from my motorcycle, and I hate that. I hate just seeing it alone, for then something's wasted, some facet goes unseen and unappreciated and beauty doesn't deserve that. It's a crime to waste beauty. Maybe when the tree falls in the forest with no one to hear, it doesn't make a sound. But somehow when the horses in the meadow go unseen, it's different. There should be someone to see the horses. It seems a waste of something good.

So I'm very glad you're with me now. I know that I will never see you again. You will go back to your busy life and busy job and two cell phones and boys and online computer games and Florence, Italy, and you will forget about flying on the motorcycle. But even if you forget, I will remember. I will remember the awe and wonder in your brown eyes, your arms trusting me in the curves, your head turned to the side, that we saw the same thing together, and that beauty wasn't wasted that time. I will remember, and who knows, maybe, just maybe, you will remember too.

“Well, it's getting late, I guess. We should probably start getting back to campus now....you ready to head back now?”

“Yes. Oh gosh, my hair is a mess”.

(Yes, your hair is a mess, for God's sake...deal with it)

I twisted the throttle down slowly and carefully, catching a stomach full of 60 mph air. The road lay straight, a ribbon stretched and glistening in the hazy afternoon sun. Fences flew by quietly on either side and serried rows of nut trees unfolded. Her arms and body relaxed and I felt her head turn to one side. We flew along, wind blasting my face under the open visor, flew along for miles until the ribbon showed a twist far ahead.

I slowed down well before the first curve channeling us toward the valley. Her arms tightened around my waist as we banked through the initial curves, back and forth , back and forth. This was the preamble to the famed Dennison Grade, an asphalt snake clinging to the mountainside, easing the passengers on its back down into the sheltered Ojai Valley.

We approached the first wall, and as it slid back to reveal hazy emptiness, I tapped the motorcycle down into second gear and banked into the first curve. Her body slid up against mine. I caught a glimpse of our shadow as it swung by, a pair of shoulders and helmets and long hair blowing back in the wind.

We leaned and shifted, back and forth, back and forth, swallowing curve after curve. I kept it revved in second, nursing the grip to minimize bucking. The big 4-cyl shouted harshly into the wind, holding its cargo back against the incline. Her arms lay lightly around my waist as we swung down low into a hairpin corner.

(you should be grabbing me for dear life, but you like it, don't you)

We swung up and out, then down low into the next. Up and down, up and down. The rhythm is soothing, mesmerizing, we descend like a seagull circling and tacking, back and forth, back and forth...

give me the wind /
and a wide open road /
curves and leather /
three pedals and a shifter /

Blah blah blah.

blah blah.

Blah blah blah blah.

I'm not sure if I missed her or she missed me, or we both missed each other, but in any case I made a choice and it was the wrong choice. I slipped and stumbled yet again. Now there is the same sinking sight of quiet irony in the dark blue hoodie and brown skirt that I remember from so long ago. Yet the pain is diminished somewhat by a layer of acrylic cynicism accumulated over a summer of listening to the silence and a year of listening to even emptier noise. Oh, don't let it be this way, I beg myself, and the cynicism only folds in on itself quenching all rebellion.

In response to the entirely founded but entirely confused rumors blowing about campus at the moment, I am not engaged to be married. I AM NOT ENGAGED!

My namesake the woodworker is. That he has my name is the sole foundation for this pernicious rumor.

If anyone gives me another congratulatory hug, I will...

...never mind. I'll do nothing. Nothing....

Art is an imitation, as Aristotle says in the Poetics, but an imitation of what? One might think that a drawing or a painting is an imitation of what we see.

And that is true, but what we see is not just what registers on our retina. There is an experience connected with seeing, without which "seeing" means nothing to us. The experience of "seeing" is drawn from the collective sense, from smell and touch, from all the senses operating under a certain condition at a certain time.

I can draw a picture of a house, but unless I can hint at the experience of standing there in the pouring rain staring despondently at a locked gate, I have not produced art. The cold wind, the dampness of the air, and the sinking feeling of mistakenness (or of the victim) are all present in the experience and somehow have to be expressed by pencil or brush strokes.

An atmosphere can be created by using emphasis and texture to provoke memories of certain experiences. Bold, contrasting strokes and washed out colors often evoke the feeling of hard light and heat at high noon. Smudges and pastels evoke the feeling of staring down a valley in a drifting mist.

These are the kind of things that go to make art. It's an imitation of what the whole man sees, not just the eye, and sticks in your memory like an experience does.

Art is such a necessary thing for those of us who need to encapsulate the lessons we have learned, for future reference, lessons that for the sake of propriety or privacy cannot be stated in blunt terms. Yet art is only for artists, and is not always at the beck and call of convenience or mood.

(the orange eyes are drilling hotly into my back, I can feel breath panting behind me, it closes the narrow gap one pair of drumming feet desperate to escape and two pairs desperate to capture. One pair vault duck and slide spitting gravel clawing aside two pairs swinging wide and regaining the chase. The only thing keeping them behind is my will, only my will to stay ahead to stay above not to let it take over my life...)

You might like the gypsy life
You judge your progress by the phases of the moon
Get your compass and your sharpest knife
People love you when they know you're leaving soon ...

- John Gorka

I have nothing to say, really. My thoughts run in circles and I watch them run, lazily, knowing that they don't really matter...like children before they grow up...

The graduates that I used to know, who helped me through a rough childhood and mentored my struggles, are here for a visit. I look into their faces and try to see who they used to be, I remember the good times I had with them, the good times that are irrevocably part of my past and whose import I have not yet realized.

I smile and hug them and say hello how are you and listen patiently as they tell me. About their jobs, their homes, their wives or husbands and their lives.

And they look at me curiously, wondering who I am. And we both know that we may as well be strangers now, for what we shared then we share no longer. It's back there in the rearview mirror, a pleasant memory, but no more than that...I am sad, somehow, sad that the feelings I felt about them then can never come back. I'm standing on my own two feet now, I'm independent, and I have my own life in my own two clumsy hands. I now realize what my dad meant when he said not to worry about making friends in college, because I would never keep in touch anyway. There would be no reason to.

I have failed them, those "seniors", those friendly people who took me under their wing, an awkwardly old and ignorantly wise freshman. I have not passed on the gift of friendship they have given me, I have betrayed their kindness. I have not passed on the tradition of caring tacitly intended to be handed down from one class to the next. I did not have it in me. I did not have the moral strength to extend the same welcoming hand to my younger brothers and sisters. And I am ashamed, but unrepentant, for I cannot be other than who or what I am.

"changing it rests" as the fire and love and strife dude used to say, what was his name - Heraclitus? Heraclitus knew how to put it. The sand dunes blow into each other, shift and slide, but the desert stays the same, always changing and forever the same.

(wow. This was a long post, for a bitchy one.)

(Oh, and vacations really suck. I hate vacations. I intend to avoid vacations in the future. I simply don't know what to do with myself. Half of my two life activities, reading and working, are gone. It's awful!)

Suzi was undamaged except cosmetically. A long strip of road-rash on the right pipe, and a slightly abraded crankcase cover. No levers, fins or anything else was bent or broken. I was lucky.

I still feel like crap, like incompetent, like stupid, and the second helmet and dreams of riding friends places is now pushed far into the background. At least until my knee heals up and I forget the vertical horizon and the cliff gaping under the rear wheel. Never ever ever take a street bike on a dirt road. They ain't like cars. Maybe you can offroad in a Crown Vic but you sure as hell can't offroad in a Suzuki GS1100.

The Air Force Thunderbirds are flying out at Point Mugu this afternoon; I'm going to try and make the show after Linux class (if there is Linux class)

I dumped Suzi into the gravel yesterday. Braked into a turn on a gravel road, hit a bump, the throttle jiggled, and suddenly the back tire was in front of the front tire and the horizon was vertical instead of horizontal and gas was spilling out of the tank and my knees hurt. Prodigious swearing and rapid examination of all body and motorcycle parts ensued while I tried to think what to do.

I don't have time right now to tell the rest of the story.

I'm sitting here in Jobu's apartment listening to the cheery patter of old friends known for four years. The newly-24 is chortling over her beer at the half-intentional antics of our gracious host.

Iron and Wine slides coolly along in the background; wafts of cinnamon float from the oven. Jelen is busy over the apple slices.

It's been a long, long time since I've been to such a chill party.

I love my friends, all of them, but especially the ones right here with me....

I have mixed feelings about motorcycle maintenance. I'm probably not really the person who ought to own a tired old motorcycle with lots of, well, needs. I own a screwdriver, a small vice-grips, a 10mm wrench and a 12mm wrench. While it is amazing how much mileage I can get out of these four tools, it is also amazing how fragile 25-year-old bits of metal are, and how easily their threads are stripped. I have to retrain my automobile-clumsy 15-lb-foot hands to a kinder, gentler, 5-lb-foot touch. I have to think, -Japanese- , and act accordingly.

25-year-old bits of metal are one thing, but 25-year-old bits of WIRE and PLASTIC are an entirely different thing. One can easily replace a nut by a trip to the hardware store; one does not so easily replace a crumbled lightbulb socket. Or disassemble said lightbulb socket without crumbling everything else in the vicinity.

The only reason I survive is the fact that I have access to a tolerably-well-equipped maintenance shop with a good array of tools, place for disposing oil, and availability of D whom I can ask annoying questions.

So, till August, I should be set, but before I leave I better think about investing in some tools...

Why does function follow form whenever I'm trying to figure out the function?

(there's got to be a basis function to start from; why-ever can't I get rid of the importunacy of the form. it blots out the function like a mercury-vapor light.)

the disorganism of which statement demonstrates my point. Disorganism is not a word, which further demonstrates my point.

clearly. Anyway.

Today, I finish organizing literature for my research project, named Anthony. Named after the Wonder-Worker of Padua in hopes that I find what I'm looking for....heh, real simple.

I am convinced that there are some unclear things that ought not to be unclear, and the teachings of the Catholic Church on its own teaching "magisterium" ought not to be unclear. But they are. I love Germans. They invent new languages and hence new heresies.

So it's back to the last point at which they were clear, which I'm judging was probably about 1870 or so, or whenever the first Vatican Council was paused (indefinitely). Here's to hoping I can actually arrive at clarity, and that I will finally conquer form in favor of function.

minutes slide by like years
magnetic fields stretch and grate
intertwining kissing folds
tapping a beer bottle against my knee
staccato touch of toe to toe
minutes buzzing by like insects
chair frames creak in patterned silence
drawling voices merging braking
red light green light changing lanes
shifting dripping steaming cold
minutes dripping on the pavement

It's a lazy spring day and I'm wondering what the clover looks like in the field at home. Probably a lot like the bush mallow looks like in the wastewater disposal field here at school. I feel the sun blanket me in warmth. It's a lot colder at home. But at home there's a smell in the air, a smell of spring - here spring doesn't smell...

Dr. McLean shouts to be heard over the roar of the mill. "Attention please!"
Silence settles over the packed room.

"All theses of the class of 2007 have been turned in to the Dean!"

YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!

"Whatever happened to that Tasik dude? He used to publish on this thing every other day. Has he found something better to do, or what?"

"No way man. He's just not the kind of guy to find something better to do. Chances are there just isn't anything bloggable happening in his life, you know, and he's said before that he really hates publishing filler posts."

"Yeah, I don't know, dude. Seems weird."

"Seems weird. Hey did you hear Lonnie bowled a 200 last night?"