14.6.11

Needs - Sleep

You know one thing I hate? One thing I hate more than any other single discrete thingum of slime in this whirling world (for the moment)?


Need.

I find it is so weak to need. But what good is my opinion? The needs I grapple with most (sleep, food, ego-stroking, rest) think my opinions are largely irrelevant. Our needs affect us regardless of our other urges. The needs fight the wants. Sometimes they grow weary from fighting, battle starved for love, and fall together. They confuse each other, want dresses up as need, addiction gestates as their inbred child, obsession his twin brother, dedication the ugly duckling triplet. Dedication, a beauteous white eagle, shrieks at me to write every day.

How I owe the idea of need then, when it gave birth to my quest to write. Be it that way, let me lay tribute to these needs of mine, the best way I can: writing each one a profile.

>> Need Profile- Sleep

Sleep is a particularly maddening thing. When I'm in the middle of work, or more likely in the midst of fancy, the shutdown starts. Eyes become steel garage doors, their motors constantly drawing them down. This particularly happens to me after work is over, when my frail body feels need the most.

Sleep is like fat lover to a cold sailor, comforting, lulling hedonism. To its credit, it is one of the most peaceful escapes I know. But life continues beyond sleep. People who aren't sleeping still want to do things, want experience. I cannot provide it such services when I sleep. To compound the woes, I can't provide those same services as well as I could either if I don’t take these regular, tick-tock scheduled breaks. I can't sleep-write.

Sleep taunts, dragging me softly into my murky pool, to its rawest nucleus, churning with radioactive ideas glowing disorganized. I see such things that are so cool, so enlivening to my spirit that I try to grab them and put them in jars. But they slip through the fingers, the cracks, out of the vacuum lines; no matter what I do to sequester them. Sometimes I can't write them down quick enough before they are gone, like airs of perfume on the wind.

Sleep is a dangerous recreational drug for me. Yet what haze comes from the days that I wake in a storm brewing over the pool? What to think of those days of morning glory nectar where breakfast lays cold?

I'll probably be too busy writing to appreciate them. I give my thanks to those sunshiny days, in advance. Today was one such morning, ironically enough. Maybe I’ll get enough sleep to silence all arguments. Sleep does that well.

2.6.11

Freezing

I present you a frostily embellished record of a cracklingly cold day, to cool your heart in the torrid times before us.

From Thursday, February 03, 2011, 12:22pm CT

It is freezing outside right now. Every water molecule that falls from the sky will find the temperature suitable to roll itself onto its ears and bind to its neighbors, creating polyhedral structures over the ground, more than strong enough, more than smooth enough to support even the heaviest 18 wheeler.

As such beasts race down the road, or crawl over the bridges, the ice will weep just underneath their tires. The water will not yield to their weight, but support them, staying them from the frustration of friction. Sparing friction, cars will dance a dangerous waltz.

As such beasts race down the road, or crawl over the bridges, the ice will weep just underneath their tires. The water will not yield to their weight, but support them, staying them from the frustration of friction. Sparing friction, cars will dance a dangerous waltz.

This is why I hear a buzzing behind me, as people talk of the weather. So much in tune they all are in winter time, to the rustlings and turnings of the outside world, for now at least.

Weather has always been that primordial link between us humans and them, the powers that be. We speak of it as if it is an inconvenience, or a rush, or expanding foam for a drafty conversation. It is no wonder we attribute such events to gods.

The gulf, she breathes towards us, the foggy dragon breath racing across Houston, Texas and its villages and hamlets. Every bit of that salty kiss will make slick the roads of the southeast, will layer molten glass over the leaves and branches and twigs of the trees that can somehow still stand in such weather. Mind you, if she breathes too hard, some trees may not carry the burden well, but even still will carry it better than a homoeothermic hominid. Today hoar-frost is death traveling at a blizzard’s pace. That frost used to cover the beards of our boreal progenitors and it bore them less ache. Maybe some honey-mead blood still oozes through the veins of more northern democrats and republicans. Maybe they drink just enough coffee to keep them mobile.

My wife is out in this weather, somewhere near the Attoyac river basin, off a bridge on state highway 21. I pray that she is doing well, and that she is safe. Her professor took the class out there to measure the speed at which the cold river moved. Perhaps he did not make her go in the water, I can only hope so. Her hate of the cold is deep.

One day I hope I can give my winter and summer goddess all the warmth she will ever need. May my heart be furnace enough.

24.5.11

Parsely likes it in the shade, my love.

Flash Fiction - Industrial Fantasy
By Fisher

Jack dragged the corrugated sheet metal over the lean-to, for armor against the sun.

This attracted game, a young girl from the city ruins.

Amora's eyes didn't beg for life when he leveled the rusty spiked pole to them.

"Plant these herbs here."She whispered. "They trade well with the gangs. At the drip line of the roof." Jack bent. "Show me."

Gangers could smell the flowers. Shacks grew with green garlands. Guns metamorphed into tools. Trees manifested; sudden sawlogs.

The old Jacks' pass the founder’s monument of they and their child, borne on wood grown between their home and their graves.