Brandon

In the fall of 2002 this was what my life looked like. I was 25 and about to be two years sober. It was mid-October. I was four months a college grad, my mom was in the process of selling the house I grew up in from 12 on and my dad had just quit his corporate-American lifestyle, sold his condo in Ruston "Sillicon Valley of the East" Virginia and moved back to the beach, prompted all at once by the slow, then final loss of one of two of his best friends to cancer. Dad stood by, and took care of his friend Richard who he'd known from Brooklyn, Bmore, since they were in their twenties, every day those last months until August when they said goodbye. Richard died right about the time that it became clear that Chuck, Dad and Rich's other best friend from that same early-twenties hellion-time, was also going to die. Cancer took to him with a vengeance, too. A week after Richard died my dad completely left his own life. He went to the beach so he could, for a while, hide. And heal.

It was the most courageous thing I'd ever seen him do.

I mention this because I was there, at the beach, for part of that time. I was confused, caught in that horrible juxtaposition of blindness: complete inexperience at adulthood coupled with vague awareness of my glorious, terrifying Independence. It was far too real, and raw and wide-open, to really see! It took me 7 years to get through college and during that time I think my total monthly bills were, maybe, $400. Maybe. Suddenly I was a college grad, with a writing fricken degree?? Paying rent to a lovely girl in Chestertown for a room in her sweet Victorian house, and my student loans no longer covered my monthly needs. In fact, in addition to rent I now had to start to pay back my student loans! So I was barista-ing at the local coffee shop, waitering in a tux-button down at the local white linen, and the other three days a week I pulled double-shifts at a high-volume seafood joint on the Northern-most edge of Ocean City. And I watched my dad, during that time, emotionally fall down.

It sucked. For all of us, my mom selling our home, my lost and desolate dad who up til then had physically been absent for most of my "adult" life, and my brother Sean, who also had just graduated and who also was living at the beach waitering at the same seafood joint(which, during a lot of those day-shifts during that slow and sunny September meant keeping his eye on the fishing rod propped off the back deck of the restaurant and in to the Bay), it sucked. I think we were all in that place that us humans hate to be in: the in-between place. Or better, how I like to call it: Through. As in the only way out....

So yeah, I was working weekend days at the coffee shop, weekend nights at the Hotel in my button-down, and then driving to the beach to stay with dad, immobile on the couch, and go pull doubles in town. I had very little sense of what I wanted my future to be like. I knew one thing for sure, had decided it, just as sure as if I decided to drive to the post office or to make my bed, I was going to be a writer. I was on my bed in the lovely girl in Chestertown's Victorian home, the bed had high cold metal posts that were meant to look brass but the paint was thin and instead they were chipped white so they just looked old and even black in some places too, and I had scarves tied around them and blankets over the ornate curled cold metal at the foot and the head. And I was on the bed and I was writing in a journal and it was this very week six years ago because I was writing about my baby Amy who was just about to turn, back then, one-sober-year-old. (Happy 7 years Amy!) And the writing about/to her became very poetic and the candles and the incense that had prompted the boyfriend of the lovely girl in Chestertown in whose home I was living to think I was a witch were burning with the warm orange light and the warm orange smells and I all of a sudden, just like that, understood deep and real: I am going to be a writer. And I understood: this means nothing, nothing at all other than the commitment, unabashed and unafraid, to follow the inner impulse. To follow it, whenever, and to wherever, it meant to take me.

Oh, I was sad. I was sad, for my dad, my mom and her empty-nest, for my life that had no semblance or order to it, for my old life of partying that no more offered solace or an answer. The friends I had lost to all that. I was confused, disoriented, working like a dog, and, like I said, I was pretty damn sad. But mostly, cuz it was the best I could do, I was numb to all that sadness. And so I began to write. To write my way through....

And then not a week later, in he came. This young guy with these big, I mean big brown eyes. With these lashes that reminded me of honey. And this river, this river that he did to my heart.

Brandon worked at the coffee shop with me and I always used to flirt with him. Tell him if only he were old enough, how I'd rock his world. He was 20. A baby to me then! And so, so cute.

The lovely girl with the Victorian house also worked with me, she set us up after getting tired of seeing us swoon. She invited him over, made us dinner, her boyfriend built a fire, rented us a movie, and then together they quietly and with sneaky smiles and smarmy charm left us alone for the rest of the night...After that first night it felt like a linebacker socked in to my heart: I never knew it could open, and take flight, like that before. It's like I never even knew that love existed. And then, after just one moment, I suddenly did.

It is six years since, this week. We are, so to speak, going "through" some things right now. I know how now, I've learned better how to do it, the making your way through thing. But it's hard, it's not easy, it plain sucks. Especially cuz I still so love those precious honey eyes.

Season of change

The corn is down--as of Sunday--and the first frost came today.

And the farm's for sale. The agent was showing around an out-of-towner this morning.

With all this cold and early darkness I am falling to sleep at like 9 at night.

Lately I've been thinking about that old saying, how there is a season for everything.

And how when a season is upon you, you simply can't stop the change it brings.

The way you cant stop the river from flowing, or the dry earth from having cracks.

ahhh, so the season of quiet

and change

quiet change?

is here....

love

ZERO
By Diane diPrima

a blessing on your velvet shoes
and on your hair so free
and may the wind that bore you here
soon take you away from me

for you are the Fool, the holy man
who wanders ceaselessly
and the star you follow does not stop
for my door and my company

a blessing on your coat so green
all worked with magic signs
and on the light in your bright eyes
unlike the light in mine

for joy is calling in the wind
and the white sun beats down
and at the end of your long, bright path
Puck polishes your crown

he holds it out on the Ace of Swords
no easy gift gives he
and the Fool becomes the Hanged Man
for that bright company

so may your wallet e’er be full
with goodly bread and meat
and the white dog who follows you
dance lightly at your feet

and may you mate with faerie girls
all in their robes of white
your long hands pluck anemones
late in the purple night

you shall drink wine form the jeweled Cup
and be drunk eternally
and wash your face in the silver foam
thrown by the pale grey sea

and the crown you gather will not fade
though my tears will drop like leaves
and the wine you drink shall keep you warm
while all the northland grieves

for you are the Fool, and the Hanged Man
whose light shines endlessly
and that cruel wind that bore you here

bears you on eternally

"god bless you

real good "

The sky was so big the night you flew

So I struggle w my experience and how it relates to what goes on here. And by here I mean the Internet, and by the Internet I mean that pinhead of the pinnacle experience of what it means to be human: where culture-readily-creates-art and vice-versa, where art-creates-culture.

I've always hearkened more towards the art-creating-culture side. This is the rebel artist in me, the antic spirit that craves and comes alive at underground movements, at the change on the periphery edge that minutely, than wholly, affects society. The post punk-rock riot-grrrl in the eighties that preempted the nineties Decade of the Woman when I came of age; the Diane diPrima pre-beat fifties near the village and suffering outside San Francisco that grew Kerouac's poetic-expressive-BOOM; the black folks in country churches and a thousand nameless preachers who finally found their name in King and the movement of all movements that continues to this day; this experience, this movement through our words and our voices which is the force of Triumph, and all of the work that comes before the momentum is finally built and the people, thus Society, finally tips....The Underground stuff. The reason we keep the journey...

But I LOVE in a neurotic obsession kinda way the culture-creating-art thing, too. I mean let's be honest here and look at the art that we as dominant Western Society most venerate. It's easy found on TV--Access Hollywood, TMZ, Entertainment Tonight. I voyeur with my tongue hanging out, or contrastingly with my tongue tsking in judgment, but either way I cling on pop-culture's "edge" to the extreme. I may not go so far as to emulate superstars in my lifestyle choices, like who and how they vote or what their "crib" or "ride" looks like or if they are going green or whatnot but let me just tell you, my fashion-diva, that secret-hidden loud-car-singing inner-pop-superstar trapped inside me absolutely goes wild over the sexy fashions, the highlegged boots or lowback spaghetti straps that I see on TV or in the pages of the magazine...And I'm allright with this, I've learned how, in my adult life, to be loving of Kelly in all the different, if not funny and seemingly at times conflicting parts, that make me go....

What all this comes to is the fact that I want to be edgy here. On the Internet where I, like trillions, have something to say I want to be cool and looked at on this blog w the same eyes that look so lustily, either in judgment or covetousness, at pop-drama. I want you to come here and for me me to have the latest scoop on the flyest site for vintage fall mini-dresses and brand new wayout leather boots and I want to cue you in first cuz I'm the hippest to the best underground house that's on at all the Baltimore parties and throw a thing or two in there about how the same stuff is being touted right now in the lounges of Berlin where, by the way, suchandsuch is the best tapas food that they are currently eating... And Politics! I want to be smart and funny and savvy and one step ahead of the latest convictions to subscribe to and showing off what an activist's heart and intellectual mind I've got and also I want to be able to name drop and lead the way among the who's who with the what what from within the scene. I want my sassy redhot spirit seen and to be known!

But ahhh, I the Fool. I have to remind myself that the edgy choice I can make HERE is to be honest from the truest parts of me, and write about my Truth, about what I believe matters. And trust in my voice both gaining and giving strength to the Authentic Function of Things as we go on....

All that said, my friend Charlie died last night. I loved him. And he is done suffering now. Five years ago in the middle of a doghot summer I was all fucked-up one night cuz my holmes Mike had just committed suicide. This guy, Mike, he used to tell a story so good that it made you laugh out loud again later when you were looking back on and recapping the night. And his stories were always full with lies. So how could any of us have known that it was true what he said that he was facing real prison time for violating probation the second time he supposedly got caught w lots of drugs...Hell we thought the first time he supposedly got caught coming "through from Eugene with all those dirty hippy heads" was nothing but a juiced-up story anyhow! So Mike killed himself instead of prison. It took me years to get through that, survivor's guilt. By the time Mike died I'd been clean three years and was trying to learn the boundaries of good friendship while being protective of my sobriety, too. With him and I, at the time of his death, it wasn't going so well. So he died and I tortured myself and ran from that torture and hurt a whole lot. That same week as his suicide, this man Charlie who, while I was getting clean, had become like a grandfather-mentor to me, saw me out one night and took me aside and said here, I got this for you. Charlie didn't know about Mike's death but for some reason he called me over and tucked in my hand a little metal token that had an angel on one side and the following on the other: Guardian Angel Protect us all, Giving Strength When we might fall, Watching, guiding, Lighting the way, Thru the night, and every day. I couldn't cry yet when Charlie gave that to me cuz Mike's death was super fresh and I was still stunned and with shock and partly with the anger but later when I cried a ton I put that token in a medicine bag and hung it around the rearview mirror of Bran's truck and that's what guided our way when we went travelling, and I running, in 2004.

About a month ago, a little more, I found that token again when I was insanely cleaning my house and sweeping cobwebs with kittyfur from the hardwood floors and out of the corners under the beds in all our upstairs rooms. The token was under my bed. It was the same week that I had to accept that cancer was going to take Charlie, my wise and more, my wisecracking mentor and stable guide and friend.

I don't understand Life and what works and how it all goes and how life is life but life dies but also how Nature shows that all that dies, grows. What I do know is that grief breaks your heart but only so that your heart can grow even bigger where the hurt broke out. It's how we flesh out and become even more whole, even fuller versions of our self. My experience in this life is it's not what we say, or what we like, or even what we claim. It's how we be. And also, that there is this big force, not apart from me but of me and I of it, this force which is steady there and which also creates me and I it. Life. I believe in this force. I found some good words for it just today:

For moments I belong
to the pure and poison ocean;

I am powerful, and helpless….

by Kathryn Lomer from the poem The way the world sleeps

I love life. I love this sacred mundane experience, love it so much that I love it on TV, I love it in my friends, in hot fall boots that I shake and get all inside lusty over, I love it in working too many hours in a new job that never seems to end. I love it in the corn getting cut down and the music on the radio and the obscure music and shows I find on the web. I love it sobbing on the backroads of the deep shore of Maryland with dark trees and an orange sky. I love it. I love that I get to live it. I love that I get to write about it and that writing about it makes me love my love even more.

Here is what Charlie asked me to read when his life is honored and remembered and he is officially laid to rest on Monday. It is called the Prayer of St. Francis.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy;
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

God bless you my friend! You did so good. Travel well my angel. I love you. Amen amen amen.

Retrogrades @ Harvest Time

I am still in my pajamas. I am still in my pajamas and my breath is the breath of someone who spent a day long laid-out on the earth in the sun. That sun is going down now--I am blissed and calm and mellowed beyond words.

This is good, that love affair with self I am so committed to. Not the selfish kind, but the courageous kind, embolden by solitude and knowing when to listen to your own cry. The Elizabeth Gilbert When you fill up your own skin with yourself that alone becomes your offering kind.

I sat long outdoors today, under my favorite trees. Brandon in the hammock part of that time, me chest opened to the sky and also at times chest folded over my knees. I sunk in deep to me and let the feelings of inadequacy from my new job, the fears and insecurities prisoned-up in my heart rise and pass. I read poetry til the song moved in me and tears wet-up my eyes. Seriously, for a day of doing Nothing, I got a lot done.

It is harvest time, the geese are arriving back from their summer stops. All the greens from the summer garden were today brought in--and new-bloomed fall crops, too: turnips and radishes and the last of the apples from the highest branches in the tree. Tonight we are having our friends over to feast on the season and sit by the bonfire in the cooling Autumn night.




It is also Mercury Retro right now. In her book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For Alice Walker talks about the periodic times in life that call for a natural pause. She uses the time right after college as specific example, but goes on with her own poetry to exemplify the richness in spirit, the natural ebbs and flows of the human-spirit experience as the essence of, and at once the reason for this nessecary phenom. Here is what I know: Mercury Retro comes four times a year, once always during Harvest time. This is the time to do Nothing, Nothing w the capitol letter N kind. To take, in Walker's words, the great Pause. Time to give yourself, to your Soul or your subconscious or your physical health or your mental machine or however you see you in your finer undefined essence, time to Breathe. To just stop. And watch. Maybe to gather, or to reckon. To go within.

If your running around crazy that's because your fighting your self and the cosmos and the earth's right now natural flow. Get outside. Eat a late bloom apple, drink some harvest wine. The earth in her infinite changing expressions of oneness is teaching: Your Nature is Her Nature. This I know. So get your toes and heels down on her and watch your mind go and go until it realizes you see it and it has nothing more to do. Unwind. Real-ize. That flow is of you and you are it and now it offers you a real chance to witness, and to grow.

So love a little. For us super-scared humans taking time to learn to love the passings is the least (if not the best) work we can do.....

Smile Kel, it's almost 6pm and you're still in your pj's!

Warty and Peanut Punkins & Harvest Corn Dollies