I continue to be amazed that I exist. Or that I seem to; the question is not settled to my satisfaction. It seems highly unlikely that what asks the question is made of matter, grey or not. The very fact our matter thinks makes its credentials as matter suspect. Maybe, like Samuel Johnson, I need to kick something to prove it exists. The problem is that what I am trying to kick is my own kicking foot. The hard and durable thing (Johnson’s rock) seems to set and satisfy its own criteria for existence. You could almost say my criterion for existence is otherness: if it does not think or feel, but is the object of thought and feeling, it exists. Fortunately, existence rubs off. I feel more real when I bump up against things and in this way become a thing for those things–the world’s world, another’s other. But this requires a bizarre imaginative excursion: myself as mud might see me, or water, or ink.

words by shelley jackson.
from http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/mainpages/new/july06/jackson.html

A herder holds freshly baked bread outside his wagon. The sheepwagon is a camp on wheels with beds, a table, and a wood stove. It was pulled in the early days by a team of horses and later by a pickup.
Courtesy Basque Library at the University of Nevada, Reno
photo by Richard Lane, 1969

listen: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90893167

 
i want to live thoughtfully and carelessly.
i don’t want to question my purpose.
i don’t want to trust in christ when i can trust in the world around me. (i am trying not to escape but escape may keep me from going insane.)
i want to change.
i want to be the same.
i don’t want guilt trips.
i want others to be satisfied with who i am.
i want to own nothing and share everything.
i want to tell you the meaning of life because i figured out it has so much to do with you.
and you.
and you.
and you, too.
 
i want to sleep next to a woman who makes me cry at the very thought of her.
i want food clean and fresh.
i want animals free like humans are supposed to be.
i want cars recycled and turned into art.
i want to trade and barter.
i want tea and not coffee.
i want books and not tv.
i want to rid myself of distractions.
i don’t want to yell at my cat for not using the litter box.
i don’t want to get angry when i can’t find the clear tape.
i wish my room were organized.
i wish i possessed 1/16 of what i have now.
i want calm.
i want peace.
i am riddled with confusion.
i am overcome with anxiety.
i wish this were easy.
i look forward to another day, but i have to find comfort in today.
 
*     *     *
i look back at what i wrote and think
ultimately, this shouldn’t be about me.
{02 may 2004} ~9am.
 
[last page of a sketchbook journal]

i apologize, mostly to myself, for being a little self-centered on my ponderings of home (read the prior journal entry). i know it’s ok for me to go through what i’m going through, and to journal about it and work it through like anyone struggling with personal life questions. but i feel like i’m taking my home (borders drawn by the united states) for granted and not being thankful enough for what i have here as a citizen in the richest country. please read up on the following issue…i feel like we all have much to do change the laws and give rights to undocumented migrants. this continent, after all, did not belong to european immigrants 200-300 years ago, and still does not in my opinion…

In 2003 the ICE launched Operation End Game, the largest police operation in US history, to remove all undocumented migrants from the US by the year 2012. The project’s predecessor, Operation Wetback(!) in - 1954, removed 1.2 million Mexicans from the American Southwest.

ICE does not need warrants to make arrests or to conduct raids. Since July 2007, raids have increased the number of detained migrants from 18,000 to 26,000 nationwide. Homeland Security relocates 700 detainees a week in the United States.
 
(http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/04/374998.shtml)

 
read up:
- Repressive ICE Raids create fear in immigrant communities; civil and human rights violations growing
- Smash ICE Northwest Detention Center - docushort
- The Real Political Purpose of the ICE Raids
- US Citizens, Lawful Residents Sue Government for Illegal Detention in LA Immigration Raid
- US Supreme Court Affirms Rights of Foreign Detainees

♫ press play: (1, 2)

for all the reasons that i love being in new orleans, being a part of new orleans, i can’t quite understand why i so often want to run away from new orleans.

i think i had earlier been attempting to push myself away from this place because of my responsibilities doing relief work…dealing with other’s trauma and all the leftover bullshit from managing a relief organization. volunteers leave their baggage behind, both physical and emotional–i’m left cleaning up the mess; people make donations: vehicles, tools, shoes, clothing, money–managing this can be full time. and then what happens when the relief organization shrinks to two people and we don’t want to be a relief organization anymore? we just want to be ourselves working in the community? and be ourselves irrespective of disaster relief. i guess pushing myself to leave new orleans was like forcing myself to conclude all matters…close bank accounts, pay off debt, fix broken vehicles, finish the final building projects. but its not that simple, or it hasn’t proven to be. and then my gut starts telling me maybe new orleans is home. so then where should i live: nola or violet? what work do i do? who am i?? for two years, i’ve identified as an outsider who came into a disaster site to bring resources to residents who wanted to rebuild. i was not a new orleanian or wishing to become one. i was not here to stay.

i don’t know why it is so hard to just stay. to make a home. to fall in love for real. maybe it’s because my saturn is approaching. maybe it’s because i have too many day dreams. when once i got indecisive and excited about change every six months, now i can’t remember what i was daydreaming about yesterday. its like i am off into a new idea every new day…it’s wearing me out. i have aspirations, but complete lack of decisiveness. everything appeals. nothing repels. i’m stuck.
 
stuck in new orleans. i think i’m ok with that.
 
*   *   *

The Saturn return is a regular astronomical occurrence relevant to the practice of astrology which occurs in a person’s life at approximately 27–30 years of age…. The planet Saturn takes approximately 29.5 years to orbit the Sun; when it returns to the exact degree along the ecliptic it occupied at the time of a person’s birth this is referred to as their “Saturn Return”.

Saturn is symbolically/astrologically associated with time, challenge, fear, doubt, confusion, difficulty, seriousness, heaviness, unwanted burdens and hard lessons…

*
    when my plane landed in new orleans last night at 11:30, i had been wrapped up in conversation with the passenger sitting next to me: a disgruntled cattle farmer from maryland who recently sold all his cattle in protest of a new maryland law requiring livestock farmers with 8 or more animals to pay more fees and have a elaborate farm plan submitted to uncle sam detailing every aspect of the farm operation. his frustration was understandable, but not the irrational blame he kept placing on illegal immigrants in the united states. everything he talked about somehow lead back to how illegal immigrants are to blame. interesting man, but he wore me out.

so anyway, when we landed he pointed at the condensation coating the outside of the little oval airplane windows and asked, “so it’s pretty humid here, huh?”
“oh, you just don’t know, mister. you just don’t know.”
 

* *
    i am back in the south. i wanted to let you all know that i am safe and sound and so grateful for your hospitality and accommodations while i took a month-long vacation this may. the vacation was for my physical & mental health and it worked. i have all you to thank.

when i stepped into my house in new orleans and put my backpack down, the feeling of ‘home’ crept up into my body and filled me up. i hugged my roommates and two best friends in the living room. i looked at the 7 month-old baby sleeping in their room and i paused to take in his presence. he’s so tall now, but still so fat. i laid in my bed and read a letter i had received from an old friend. i sat on the porch while my roommates smoked cigarettes and i took in the neighborhood again.

i’m just writing to let y’all know i miss you and love you. i’ll be seeing some of you again soon. but thanks. it was a great trip.
heart.

i forgot what i was going to write about…
…oh, yeah. impermanence.

i am at my pop’s house tackling the daunting task of transferring my relatively large cd collection (is 200 huge?) into mp3 files. i’ve succumb to the fear that the metal coating on the discs in my 7-15 year-old cd collection is slowly deteriorating and will leave my music to die forever and my wallet to groan at the thought of the money i spent collecting the albums that characterize my adolescence and entry into adulthood (i’m laughing at myself as i write this overly sentimental statement). i remember going through my father’s vinyl when i was a kid, putting some dusty grooves onto the old technics phono and hearing for the first time herbie mann, bob dylan, joni mitchell, chuck mangione, john coltrane. if i were to ever have kids or simply a place where friends could share all the junk i’ve collected over the years–sometimes called a “home”–i’d want my music to be accessible, not obsolete as cds will eventually be. vinyl is supposedly the only media the library of congress uses to archive their music collection. i feel gypped.

i’m not doing much for the cause by purchasing an mp3 player (albeit an open-share piece of equipment that doesn’t require me to use itunes and allows me to share my music with whomever i please. sorry, apple.). a flash memory card probably won’t outlast a plastic cd, but at least it allows me to carry eight boxes of compact discs in my pocket. i feel bad buying another lithium-ion battery, another gadget that will die in a few years time. i’ve been thinking this choice over for many years now, ever since ipods became the as fashionably cliché as converse shoes. a compact ‘walkman’ (sorry, i grew up in the eighties) that can carry over a thousand songs? what a miracle. i grew up using computers, so the technology wasn’t foreign to me. but the dependence on yet another battery-powered circuit board made me hesitate. so i waited. and waited. and kept making mix tapes and lugging my cds around with me wherever i moved.

i am excited though…music is a part of me that my luddite side cannot beat in an arm wrestling contest. the music always wins, and since we don’t all play live music on our back porch (fortunately, there’s often bluegrass musicians on my father’s back porch), we record it on albums and listen to it on speakers. and we share our music and it brings us a certain joy that is hard to get any other way. i love music. it keeps me in rhythm to life.