Jason's poetry

dear, dear husband of mine. It's already a life-long pursuit to ask yourself, "Who am I?" but marriage is watching another human being live that question. Sometimes you feel like you could answer it better than them. Tonight as we lay in the heat of a Montana evening for a few minutes before Jason had to fall asleep, he talked about realizing how much he is not a poet. He just doesn't appreciate poetry, or even most books, and wishes that the writer's main point would be out quickly. He appreciates beauty, but you can't convince him that writing is a dance. People don't just get out there on the dance floor and go into a 30-second convulsion, dust off their britches, and take a bow. No. There is sense to it, depth, meaning, coordination, build-up, the taking in and considering of seemingly incongruous parts of reality, resolution. But he won't have it. Instead, within a few minutes, the topic was Luke's fish. Here's what Jason said:


they're not pets,
they're not.
they are captive.
they are masses of nerve
and, and
and muscle.
they go left
right
left
right
right
up
down
and left again.
otherwise they just swim around.

barcode life

A person's life could be visualized as one long, long barcode. And no two are exactly alike, see, just like the purported snowflake (although I think we have all concluded that that's a bunch of hogwash). Anyway, the thin lines of the barcode represent normal events, and the thicker lines represent defining moments that further make us who we are. So, unbeknownst to us, a thicker line somewhere would suddenly have bearing on which of the following lines were thick and which were thin. Follow me? Because if you had a defining moment in which you understood something like, "Eating grass really sucks" and then another day, "World poverty exists," then a thick line on your barcode might be the moment you put those together and realized that some people have to eat the equivalent of grass to survive.

Now then, there's probably one real and true barcode version of a person's life, although it's not possible in a scientific sort of way to know what it looks like. But if I were to draw my own perceived barcode and make thick lines at the moments I think were defining, and then lay it over the real and true barcode (if they were both on transparency film), I wonder how they'd line up.

This is the thought I fell asleep to last night and wished to heaven I wouldn't forget by morning. As you can see, it's a good thing I didn't, because we may be on to something here.

Dreaded Dave

David, my youngest brother, is leaving for college in two days. This is utterly depressing for Jason and me. Living in the same house with him for this past two months has been so great, a hearkening back to childhood but replace the little kid who threw a bouncy ball at the wall for hours with a hilarious, perceptive, handsome young man who cuts me breaks in Halo. Fortunately, the stories that will inevitably make their way to us from school are our redemption. He's off to a good start so far - a newly dreaded kid showing up at a rather conservative school with the plan to live in his pickup and topper, in protest to the fact that they make you buy an expensive meal plan (for questionable food) if you live in the dorms.

shots from our garage sale in the smoke and bees

brown sweatshirt

So there are roughly 5 billion things I've been wanting to blog about, but somehow I've had blogger's block whenever I sit down at the computer. Maybe I'm still feeling self-conscious about it, or I want to attach pictures and they're still on the camera, or maybe I don't know which things are blog-worthy (??). It's tough being a new blogger, let me tell you. But I decided that I feel so nice about this day that I had better tell it, despite.

It has been sunny, hot, and dry all summer here in the Flathead Valley, and recently it has been all of that plus smokey. The last rain storm was several weeks ago. We want rain. The forests need rain. The survival of neighborhoods depends on rain. Well, no rain yet, but it's cloudy today. Cloudy as opposed to smokey. Delicious, thick clouds in varying shades of white and light blue. Which make it cooler. And which make it necessary for me to get out and wear for the first time....my brown sweatshirt from the Salty Dawn Saloon in Homer that I have been longing for. Neil brought it back from his recent trip to Alaska, just the size and color I asked for.

And those things, my friends, make for a nice day.

There is no guarantee of your safety.

This is part of a sign at the start of a hiking trail in Glacier National Park , where Jason works this summer.

I like the sign. I saw it a few weeks ago when I started up the trail, waiting for Jason to get off work. It goes on to state all kinds of things you may encounter should you choose to embark upon this immensely dangerous journey: bears, ice, glaciers, falling off cliffs, nose bleeds, aneurisms, hot air balloon accidents, swallowing your popcicle stick, etc. I like the sign because it is true - on trails and in life. There is absolutely no one saying with a straight face, "It's okay - you're gonna get out of this thing alive and whole and without heartache or broken bones." Nope. The fact is that you're gonna bleed, sweat, be abandoned or neglected once or twice, chip your tooth, and lose your keys innumerable times. And anytime there's raw honesty in a statement, I can get behind it.

What this statement does is free me up, man. Let's live! Go ahead and brace yourself for the fact that this life is ever-changing, and you'll be ever-losing and ever-winning. There is no guarantee of your safety. Maybe this is part of the reason I am never unbearably sad when I hear of someone's death while they're out adventuring. Climbers of trees and mountains, sea-farers, travellers of the world - these people, I say, die if you must. Because you're living! Of course, I feel the same way about other liv-ers: thinkers and drawers and talkers. If I get the impression someone has really embraced life and wonder and beauty, no matter their personal adventure level, I am saddened by their death, but not the kind of hopeless, bottomless sadness that engulfs you otherwise.

Take for example the Florida small plane crash of yesterday, where 5 people perished - two pilots and three people in the homes that the plane hit. For some darn reason, I am "so-so" saddened by the pilots' deaths, because they were intentionally doing something inherently dangerous: flying in a small metal tube high above the earth, choosing to make enemies with the very powerful force known as gravity. They took on a risk, and they lost. But the people at home - aagh! That breaks my heart, especially the mum and little baby. I think, "Boooo for death!" and wish like crazy it wasn't so. Of course, they could have just gotten home from an all-night canoe trip into alligator-infested waters and were sitting there reminiscing, mum talking on the phone and baby making jaw-like gestures with his arms. Because we can't all die actually in the act of doing something life-full.

So, anyway, thoughts of death like this make me want to live my life living.

testing testing

In this, the most astounding of blogs ever posted, I am going to reveal to my friends and countrymen, and yay, even to the world my innermost secrets, the very things I have worked my whole life to secretize. And those things are:




TESTING TESTING TESTING. How does this look?

What about this?

And this?