New post
it's been a while and I'm remembering I would like to document my life (for my own already-shoddy memory's sake) and for just venting and for connection, maybe, even to a future self... sometimes I go back to these streams of consciousness and I am overwhelmed by the past me in front of me, usually a bit embarrassing and always self important just because that's what the medium asks for, but also usually finding versions of me who are inspired and full of ideas and yearning and hopeless and heartbroken and trying. Just like the current me, writing this, thoughts always bouncing around!! So many topics to rant and rave about, which one first...?
Craigslist rants and raves / missed connections... being allowed to be messy (who gets to do it?), something about family and ancestors and struggle and having to be strong and seen as good for them...not wasting the luck I've got... about humility and not always being right and how generational curses keep being unraveled and re-wrapped again just for us to parse through and detangle the mess... I gotta write about that singular tree I saw on the side of the highway, impossibly round and all alone on a sloped hill like a soup bowl... it's on that section of the 5 coming off the grapevine, the section where the scooping shape of the freeway could actually be considered quite graceful.. the little tree is like an awkward guest at a houseparty (usually me), waiting for it's turn to speak, or maybe it's trying to be apart from the hill but it's trapped by the freeway-barrier and all it's noise? I imagine flames licking up the hillside and casting the little round tree-shadow in flickering red light as the car headlights beam past.
I am thinking an now writing about my sisters and my love for them and how our voices interject over each other, constant interrupting as a result of impassioned conversations and the freckles on their hands, about mountains and birds and orange trees and how universal symbols are universal for a reason, about freedom and how we keep restricting our bodies our minds and each other. I'm thinking about my father's stubbornness and how it's hard to let things go and watch it change. My sister reminds me that he lost his mom at 28, an age that seemed so far away when I first heard this but is only 2 years from me now.
I am thinking about Luis Valdez and his talk on art being the great awakening agent of the social consciousness, the great connector for the severed stories of our ancestors, the truth teller and culture preserver and straight up human nature of art and artistry. I am thinking of the pure distilled magic in the art and just plain living that my friends and family make and how I want to reach out and touch it for just a moment. Thinking and writing about every friend I've known and loved and how the feelings I had for that time will never change no matter how far they are from me now, if we speak or do not speak. the arguments and their reasons and my reasons are so stupid in the grand context and that's what kills me, but I guess space is what everyone needs to grow. I am remembering again and again and again how I have a choice and I should reignite my choice to spend my time wisely... time, time, so against me and always anxiety inducing. at the end of the day I will keep listening to big thief and I will keep trying to be better, for what it's worth, I will keep writing unsent letters and try to remember to take my vitamins and my coffee cups in to the sink, I will keep painting in my brain and sometimes in life. I will keep imagining and writing and wronging and then cringing at those writings months later. for now I will go sit under the little round freeway-tree in my mind and breathe in cool crisp winds from the rushing cars that pass me by.