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Everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else.
--Yamamoto Tsunetomo, The Hagakure |
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Smell of wet concrete
Pretty girls with wavy hair
Wind-hiss through bare trees
Streetlights bright on grey puddles
Floating World, this rain, this town |
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Spring returns to us,
As if angered by delay,
With furious storm. |
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The dead trees whisper
As winter filters through them
In perfect stillness. |
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Japan
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Jan. 21st, 2009 @ 02:53 pm
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Someone might want to tell these fine people that despite overwhelming popular wisdom regarding the man's ability, virility, and/or general bad-assness, Obama is in point of fact actually not Hawk from Spenser for Hire. |
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Taxi got hung up in my driveway.
Had to push him out.
15 minutes frying tire and going nowhere = 20 dollar fare at the destination.
And then the car caught fire.
Jan. 20th, 2009 @ 10:56 am
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| » Again the Eve |
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I haven't done this in awhile. And this is not exactly the best of circumstances.
I sit down at my desk-- at work, because I had a wild hair that I'd do this outside the house and be less distracted, except that I forgot to bring my laptop (for music) which leaves me sitting in front of a computer anyway, and at a desk with considerably less space than home. The alternative is to go in the conference room as originally planned, and sit in total silence. Which is very Zen but also intensely nerve-wracking in a building like this which is constantly shifting and bumping.
Things do not go off to an auspicious start. My wrist twitches; and the brush is incredibly unruly to start with. I trim out a number of wayward bristles, warm my wrist against a hot cup of tea. Gradually, my wrist loosens. ("Pomegranate" green tea, by the way, looks like a big old cup of head injury.)
The brush reminds me I've been slacking; it soaks up water like a sieve and refuses to glide without being so loaded with ink that it almost drips. It refuses a hard hand, skidding; the ink refuses anything but. Weak strokes waver across the practice paper. I ruin the first card after inking a six-stroke character and then muffing the three-stroke kana beneath it. I swear a lot.
The brush rewards only two things: Repetition and perseverance. The brush will let you walk away. I am not about to submit; it's thundering out, on Christmas eve, and I'm so pissed off that it's springtime right now that I will not accept a defeat on the gift front. Repetition is simple. There are only a few basic strokes; the key is not their execution so much as their proportion to one another. This is something you must develop an eye for, and that is something that only persevering through a number of abominations on the page and constantly eyeing that reference can really help you practice. So much of this art is feel; a feel for the brush in hand, a feel for the body of the character itself.
Three practice sheets in I finally have the breakthrough; I'm able to see the whole character again. I am rusty and I know it. I brush another card; this one is a keeper. The first one comes easily because I know the character I've had in mind for my mother for a month ahead of time. I remind myself that if I'd been practicing it since then I'd be done by now.
It's well for now. I ink three; I can touch them up at home. For now... time to go. And next time, not to wait so long.
Dec. 24th, 2008 @ 11:40 pm
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| » November sky |
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A field of unbroken snowcloud
Mirrors a field of untrodden snow--
Below a saffron sunset, the oncoming night:
A ribbon of blue against the horizon--
As above, so below.
Nov. 24th, 2008 @ 11:39 pm
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| » Evidence |
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Yesterday morning, lying in bed because I can't sleep anymore and waking up is like trying to bench press a tractor, I received a phone call from what I thought was another telemarketer. I get a lot of calls here for people calling for my grandparents, or my uncle who lived here once; usually I just hang up. Sometimes I ask if I can take a message, or say they're not here. Sometimes I just say that I'm "Mr. Johnson." Sometimes I tell them the truth and that all of those people are dead and gone.
I answered this time. They were looking for my uncle. My uncles are both dead on that side; the one the caller wanted has been dead for about twelve years. They were looking for him, they said, because they were an investigator, looking for someone else-- a name I can't recall now and had never heard before. Someone he'd known. Wouldn't say what for. I told them I'd never heard the name. Told them my mom was his only living relative; that's not actually true but one of his sons is in Iraq now and I don't know where the other is, there is a third before them whom I only slightly know, and his ex-wife I try to forget I know. Wouldn't take my mom's number, said she probably wouldn't know the guy. That was all. Reverse lookup showed the number came from somewhere in Georgia. I didn't try to look any harder than that.
One time, after my uncle had died, while I was living with my grandmother, a young man came to the house in the late afternoon and spent hours talking to my grandmother. He claimed he was my uncle's son. None of us had ever heard of him. After he left, we never saw him again.
I remember that my uncle had a too-quick temper, and intelligence beyond his context. I remember him reading Gore Vidal in the armchair in the living room of my grandmother's house. I remember him being taken away by state cops on my sixteenth birthday because his ex-wife had told them about the pot growing on the property. I remembered a story he told me once as a kid about an Army base hidden under a mountain that I used to chalk up to him bullshitting me; it was years before I realized he was talking about Cheyenne Mountain. He had striking silver hair, and had always had it for as long as I'd ever remembered. There was a tattoo of an ankh on his shoulderblade that was green with age. He liked to wear old Hawaiian shirts. I still wear a couple of them.
I found letters tossed aside in a bookcase from jilted women. Found a crumbling half-smoked roach in a drawer. So many concrete recollections... artifacts. But I'll never know if that stranger was really his boy; I'll never know who it was that he'd known or why an investigator from Georgia was looking for them. There are people whose lives will always transpire in some shadow-place; someplace coterminous but never really connected with your own, who pass through in intersection at times, when the stars are right, and back out again.
What happens before then, and after, is not given to us to know.
Nov. 7th, 2008 @ 04:01 am
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| » For Today |
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I posted this once before, around this time last year, but in the context of the day, I think it bears reposting and remembering, whatever your affiliations. At no point do anger, malice or bile serve the process, the country, or your fellow-citizens.
A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.
--L. Annaeus Seneca
Nov. 4th, 2008 @ 02:08 pm
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| » Righteous Statement, Emphasis Mine |
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"Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools — intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it — this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life."
-W.E.B. DuBois
Sep. 30th, 2008 @ 04:05 pm
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| » Righteous Statement ex Mortis |
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I wish I had a happier motivation for posting this one, but so it goes.
"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."
--David Foster Wallace
Sep. 15th, 2008 @ 02:18 pm
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| » Streetlamp in a Front Yard |
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Bright frozen sliver
Hangs above sleeping flowers;
But I miss the dark.
Sep. 4th, 2008 @ 01:47 pm
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| » To the Sandpaper -- |
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Heavy Metal - Obviously.
Haiku - More obviously.
Hypertext - Keeps me in a job.
Hashish - And why not?
Habaneros - Almost lived on them in college.
Hydrogen Oxide - IUPAC name Oxidane.
Hellblazer - Because Constantine's got the wrong consonant, kupo.
Hellboy - At the risk of an emergent theme.
Hanami - Because everybody needs some time outside.
High Guard - Because they were nice enough not to jump me out when I left.
See? I didn't forget.
Aug. 28th, 2008 @ 01:18 am
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| » 3 |
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Better to hold fast?
Or to close the wounded heart?
Where is true wisdom?
To hold it open, and bleed?
Or to hold it closed and still?
#
Silence in the space
Between you and beloved
Encloses the heart.
#
Half-moon, oboro,
Your face veiled in summer haze,
Smiling in silence.
Unrelated works; just making up for lost time.
Aug. 8th, 2008 @ 12:25 am
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| » Stormhead |
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Whither the sunset?
In heat-haze, in roiling cloud
Sinks the afternoon.
Jul. 8th, 2008 @ 08:20 pm
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| » Moment, evening |
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The rain rings hollow
Against the roof of this place
That is not your home.
Jun. 28th, 2008 @ 11:58 pm
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| » Retro |
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There is something very Doc Savage about a man in dress clothing up to his elbow in a computer with a screwdriver, particularly if that computer is near his own height.
Jun. 18th, 2008 @ 03:47 pm
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| » List Traffic |
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Local group mailing regarding Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons and WTF the eight of us are supposed to do with this uncharted territory:
Me: For some reason, three fiendish brothers strikes me as either comedy gold or a recipe for interparty bloodshed.
Nick: I don't see why the two have to be mutually exclusive.
Me: I'm totally not saying we shouldn't do it.
Jun. 3rd, 2008 @ 11:11 am
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| » Keeping balanced |
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You know it's going to be a long day when you wake up after three and a half hours, and feel so bad that despite how tired you are, you think, "Maybe I'll feel better if I get up and move around."
On the other hand, I made a little baby laugh on the way to work this morning. So whatever else happens today, I reckon I'm all right.
Jun. 2nd, 2008 @ 10:10 am
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