Whiskey Prayers

Hill Country Summer

Red — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:04:32 +0000

Now it is 3am, and two dog sized armadillos are making their noisy way towards my tent. I am under siege by the damned june bugs. I really should take a citronella candle from the kitchen.
Quiet Valley Ranch is an odd place during the off season. Those who go to the Kerrville Folk Festival often have funny ideas about how wonderful it must be to live here year round, because surely the Woodstock fantasy played out during Festival keeps going long past the last keg being tapped.
There is here a collection of vintage hippies who seem to have come here to die. There are the men ranging in age from 25 to 39 and single. A few couples, who act as codependent units. And then there is myself, a single female in her late twenties who makes occasional vague references to working on her book or writing project and cooks all day in the kitchen.
The june bugs are launching an attack, aiming either for my head or the computer screen, it’s hard to tell with a creature this stupid. Most multi-celled lifeforms can differentiate between solid and empty spaces. Of course, my bright fluourescent light is now on, so that I can see if the armadillos get too close to the edge of my shelter and I can scare them off if need be. They’re rather loud and my stoned brain keeps thinking in terms like, “What if it’s actually a werewolf? What then? Do I die, or become a werewolf? Would a werewolf be more or less likely to kill a female human if biting her would make her into a werewolf? Christ, I hate june bugs.”
I can hear the redneck who looks like a muppet, Spyder, just now driving off in his beaten blue suburban. Not too long ago I saw him sleeping in the front seat, parked by the kitchen, the door swung wide upon and his legs stretching his naked feet out through the rolled down window. Spyder swore some sort of oath at dinner to be on the ranch at dawn to get on the roof of the barn and cutting steel with a roaring loud saw hours before the rest of the ranch would get up. Spyder showed up for dinner tonight with steel game cages to catch one of the kitten litters in and take back to his property to be mouser cats. Everyone thinks this is proper and right.
Moisture from the river chills the air as it rolls up the hillside. Dew is being born right now out of the very womb of the air.
I wonder how many of the nights I woke up to sounds of rustling in the brush were because of these same armadillos. They look like bunny-turtles. During the last Ice Age armadillos were bigger than pit bulls, prehistoric giant bunny-turtles.
My calves are covered in chigger bites, the awful, hived, allergic reaction sort of bite marks. Sensitive skin doesn’t mix well with microscopic things tunneling through the epidermis in search of an appropriate place to lay eggs. It’s a common problem this time of year in Texas. “We’re covered in nail polish and chigger bites,” J. gestured broadly down her side, bare breasts swaying in the sunlight. I invited her and C. to come across the ranch and see the lovely quanza hut that S. put together for me out of pvc pipe and tarps. The three of us all squinted against six oclock sunlight burning down the hill top.

Vegetarian Confessional, May 5, 2010

Red — Thu, 06 May 2010 03:16:30 +0000

I had a bad day, and my protein cravings have been getting more intense. Trapped on the university campus during the hottest part of the day, seeking the strength to battle beauracracy and get back into a school I hate in pursuit of a degree I really don’t care too much about, aware of my limited funds and impending journey, I bought a cheap turkey sandwich. I doused it in mustard. I inhaled the thing.

I haven’t even had fish in months. I can’t tell if it’s the meat or the coffee playing my intestines like a set of bagpipes.

I am leaving the flatlands on Sunday for the hill country to live on the ranch and pitch in on festival preparations. My best friend is getting married there just before the festival and I am officiating the ceremony.

I am surrounded by blooming wildflowers and singing green trees, yet the major elements of my life are trapped in Autumn, crumbling back down into the earth. I realize that room is being made for some new phase, but the awareness does not ease the pain.

I might go back to college. I might go back to Alaska. I might damn the whole mess and hitch hike to the Rainbow Gathering, which I hear is back east this year.

I can see flashes of lightning in the darkened west, and the wind smells like cow shit and despair. And I am fantasizing about medium rare beef steak, and the addictively sharp taste of blood.

On the nature of love

Red — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:30:02 +0000

I have been trapped in a strange and frightening sort of maze, where the darkest monsters of my soul slip through the shadows in pursuit of everything I love about myself. Beyond the boundaries of the maze wait the monsters of other souls, thirsty to lap up the blood of all my joys and dreams.

Sometimes love is about basking in the glow of another person’s light. For myself, however, real love has always been a matter of finding those who share my monsters, that we may struggle together against the most base parts of our souls. But sometimes it is a very long wait until our comrades are ready for the battle.

So I stand here, waiting, while my monsters, bit by bit, strip away my clothing and my purity, flay away my pale skin, and suck the marrow from my bones until nothing remains but the flame of my Will to exist. And I wait for those other flames to join with my flame, until our great raging fire rips open the shadows and our monsters lay exposed before our wrath, writhing and weak as they had us in the darkness.

I wait, wandering through this maze, wondering, do my comrades hear the sound of my screaming? Do you understand, that I can not save you, unless you save me?

Return

Red — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 21:59:26 +0000

It is has been raining nonstop for several days now. My little cave is flooded and cold, surrounded by little backyard rivers just too deep for tennis shoes. Everything smells like pot smoke and angry cats. I am tired of the morning after taste of rum and coke. I am not the girl I was and the woman who stares at me out of that mirror, with her short wild red hair and pretty thin face whose Will burns in other hearts, she is a character in a story I was too afraid to write.

The Revolution was a scam.

He was drunk and more lost than I’d ever seen when he confessed unaware to the speculations of just where did Che go when he died? Then I knew I still loved him and all our dreams were doomed.

It is the middle of April and after six months of resistance, I have decided to come home to West Texas. But I have come here to reclaim my home, to midwife into the world the fantasies of these lost people searching in the darkness for an end to the hunt for Utopia. And if it is that time in history now, soon they will see that Utopia exists only in the act of the Quest itself.

And that truth is only available to those destined to become new gods.

Red — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:03:55 +0000

Still in Texas. Finally got a job. Also found a cause.

So, I’ll soon be waiting tables and working to organize a benefit for one of the charities working in Haiti to help with the aftermath of the earthquake. I want to turn the experience into a little zine on how to put together something of this scale, since I’m learning as I go along.

For example, found out today we might have to go with a different charity than Doctors Without Borders because of the venue we’re using. It’s been interesting so far, and I hope it turns into something big, but not too big.

While the weather outside is frightful

Red — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:57:03 +0000

Elric of Melnibone is often cited as a classic of the era and genre, 70′s sf&f pulp, but it’s not something I would gush over long about. I appreciate the trope, conflicted warrior would-be-scholar prince must rescue his love from his nemesis and needs a magical object to do it. But I’m in no hurry to finish the series, and the next time I pick up anything by Moorcock I think I should be stoned.

I knocked it out between last night and this afternoon, during the commercials while watching Jackson’s Lord of the Rings on my mom’s cable. Reading about the surreal nation of Melnibone and its race of jaded, heavily drugged sorcerers felt appropriate as I avoided the cold while watching this early snow that has hit the Texas panhandle.

And it is amusing that Elric was mostly a distraction during the commercials of a movie based on Tolkien’s trilogy. Moorcock apparently held Tolkien in serious contempt, making all sorts of weird assertions about Tolkien avoiding serious questions, that he failed to make readers tackle heavier issues while promoting a middle class English bourgeois sentimentality. But Elric had only one character in the entire book who was less than royalty, and he was a traitor who earned a pretty horrific death.

Anyways, I’m back in West Texas and it’s snowing.

Cherry whiskey moon (draft)

Red — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 04:47:30 +0000

Along the Spit road towards the pink sunset I walked
north and westwards
as the light dripped down
behind dark hills winking with village night lights.

About a mile I walked until the road was dark.

Halfway through whiskey and cherry soda
in my green nalgene,
I turned back towards black mountain shadows cutting into midnight
blue starless night as the red Moon eased herself up
just above one peak, only
to slide back behind the next westward point, as though
afraid of the dark ocean waters though waxing into her strength.
I wove around crumbled brown
bits of kale and skeletal driftwood mounds
until she was gone and the whiskey was gone and the darkness
was just enough for sleep in the Alaskan summer night.

An epiphany by the sea

Red — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 23:49:34 +0000

I have spent the last several days alternating between hiding from cold, unceasing, heavy rain and combing out my dreadlocks. Between the cold nights, the fact that a shower costs at least seven dollars out on the Spit, the truck not starting for a couple of days, a certain health issue of mine flaring up, still broke and lacking adequate employment after being here a month, I’ve come to a few conclusions.

This sucks.

Next time I run off on an adventure like this, I either need to have an adequate sum of money saved up that can sustain me for a few months, or have a job with enough hours lined up before I get to said place.

I only learn things the hard way, and Jesus Christ do I pay for that.

Now I am facing a handful of options and I have to make a decision quick. I’m waiting to hear back from the University of Fairbanks about the fall semester, and I just filled out a couple of applications online for some crap jobs up there. Preferably, I would get hired at the Barnes & Noble. I could go ahead and stay in Homer until September 20th, working as much on the dock during the week as I can, and with any luck have a measly $1500 saved up to leave AK on. I have decided against blowing it on a trip down the west coast; I wouldn’t get very far and winter will be coming. I could go back to Texas, get an apartment, find a job for a bit. I don’t really want to spend the winter in Homer, but if I could just get a job in town and a place to stay it could still be a possibility.

Wherever I end up, I need to get back on my feet, work for a while and put some money back.

School is more of an occupational habit of mine these days than anything else; the only point in getting my degree would be to lock myself into a career in academia; if I am getting my bachelors, I am getting my Phd. But academia disgusts me, and there is nothing actually preventing me from learning ancient Sumerian and jumping on the translation project now that it has been moved out of that basement in England onto the internet. Or anything else I want to do, for that matter.

I am absolutely terrified of succeeding at anything.

A decade and a half of unfinished projects, dreams set on fire, and a pattern of self destructive behavior that raises its head at any point at which I might actually see something through. I’m sorry, Shmoo. It’s why I don’t write for a living, it’s why I left town last winter instead of digging in and putting up with the rest of the semester, it’s why I never fought hard enough to maintain control of old activism projects. It’s tied into a twisted need to be perfect at everything instantly; if I am anything less, obviously I should not be doing it. It’s psychotic and unrealistic, and I can blame my parents all I want for screwing me up, but no one can clean up the mess they made but me.

I’m only happy when I have some sort of cause to stand behind, something that can get me stirred up enough to hold onto the passion and drive I need to stay afloat emotionally.

That’s what I’m trying to figure out now. I need to be an activist. I need to be driven by outrage over social justice issues, chaining myself to trees, something. Part of the twisted up bits of my personality necessitate that I be devoted to something outside myself, and I have been hoping (recently, searching) for years to find something worth that depth of passion and devotion.

The first time I left my hometown, I was tired of waiting for an intangible something to happen, so I made something happen. While away the first time, I realized I was looking for that very something, but I still didn’t know what it was. Now, on my second time in Alaska, after hours of communing with the cold ocean, lonely and fed up, I’ve finally figured out what I’m looking for. I still haven’t found it, but it’s certainly a step.

So, what I’m facing now decision-wise is how best to go about getting back on my feet and making myself useful to the world, and then to figure out to what cause and task I may do the most good in the world.

It may not seem like much, but I feel far less lost than I have in years.

Wintry Summers of the North

Red — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:03:03 +0000

It rings a strange note in my psyche to observe that today, the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, one of the major headline repetitions concerns a flooded toilet on the space station.

The stars have begun to appear again in the brief hours of darkness, burning through the thick summer fog that silences the beach and feels in the surreality of extreme low tide to surely be hiding some terrible creature wakened in the warming Arctic waters and searching madly along ancient migration routes for remnants of a long-vanished world, driven to blood-lusting insanity by the slow realization of the depths of its loss.

The ravens refuse to deny these musings.

Today at my job I had to tell a pair of honey mooners that they could not go on the bear viewing flight tomorrow because the husband was too fat at 320 lbs. It was the black cowboy hat, rather than the girth of his gut, that kept me from blushing over clasped hands as I calmly apologized and told them talk to their travel agent about getting back the $635 a piece that had been spent on the excursion.

Yesterday I got my Alaska food stamps card in, and now there is good cheese in my cooler, and salsa to put on my rice. I’ve lost another pants size since landing in Anchorage last month. But Food Bank Monday is no longer a priority.

The water in Kachemak Bay averages about 38 degrees, and wind gusts up off of it with enough force to send tents tumbling from the beach up the berm to the road. Sometimes there is someone around who is not too drunk to do something about that.

I want to go to California for a bit, and perhaps go see the pyramids in Mexico. It bothers me that my passport still has no stamps in it.

The Summer Solstice in Alaska

Red — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:34:54 +0000

Time does not move in a straight line here. It flows, eddies, gathers in pools, sprays up in a briny froth, breaks in a repetitive whoosh again, again, again upon black rock beaches, the chill of space seeping past the thin atmoshpere down into quietly threatening Artic depths.

Midnight, noon, dusk and dawn, these words are abandoned far to the south, replace dby long hours of sunlight broken in brief reprieve by the twilight.

The invisible Moon wrenches the sea away from dark stretches of sand and this is morning beaauce it is cold and the fires have died out and the sky is blue and brilliant. Cold winds then race across the bay, skipping carelessly over our thin needle of land towards the mountains and glaciers in the east, and this is mid day beacuse the clouds have returned and the sand is a thinning strip. The wind stops as the clouds drip down and break up, revealing blue sky agan and this is late afternoon because we go to the fish tables to watch tourists carve fillets out of salmon and halibut then push aside exposed bones and red or white flesh still full of that good fat which makes warm stew and the tastiest burgers. Then the ocean is raging upon the rocks, flung back by the unseen Moon in a mess off roth and spray, the sun finally dipping behind the western mountains with a flourish of crimson and gold that never quite fades along the crest of the northern hills, the camp fires blaze while fish is fried and washed down with beer or whiskey until the twilight brightens and that is all of night once the tide starts to pull back again.