Observation #17, 11/27: So it is in the Marathon

(Theme: Almost)

Your muscles strain against frigid November, winter come early, this is the last hill, the last climb your calves are burning hot against your skin you feel the rope of your hamstrings taut in their sheath of muscles your quads quiver and shake, a threat of failure, you feel your bodyheat fly out the crown of your exposed head and there, at the apex, your greatest desire – the finish line – freedom – and the distance grows greater between you and it, here and there, but you push, you push, you push to reach it, even though you know you will only trip on the other side.

Creative Project Entry #3: Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

My idea with this one is to try and replicate what Junior's journal would actually look like if he carried it around with him everywhere. When I carry my journals around, they usually end up looking something like this, minus the award, of course.

Public Service Announcement!

I apologize for the randomized links and advertisements which are appearing on this blog. (For example, last time I looked "creative commons" appeared as a hyperlink in my Feed post. This is unintentional.) I have no idea how they got there and I will look into fixing them soon.

In the meanwhile, thank you for your patience and thanks for stopping by!

-MW

Creative Project Entry #2: Feed

Still playing with vectors, this time in the hopes of imitating an x-ray. Internet was consulted for anatomy, color scheme and a creative commons photo of a computer board. 

Creative Project Entry #1: Daughter of Smoke and Bone

For my Young Adult Literature class, we were all assigned creative projects. I decided to design new book covers for (almost) every novel we've read thus far. Here's the first version of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone cover for your perusal.

I wanted to work in something reminiscent of vector because I've never used it before. Might make some adjustments for the final version.

Observation #16, 11/20: The Brave Young Seed Who Waited

(Theme: family)

Once upon a time, there was a seed. It fell in witch country and was carried on a wind of blood and superstition deep into the Old South. There it landed in a desperate time, when the regiment was failing so miserably it turned to sixteen year old boys. It found itself on a farm, but the seed did not put down root. The war carried it into dark days and when they were done, it rode in the pocket of a soldier into the West. It watched the soldier’s family of ten children grow out of the Texas dust, but the seed did not put down root. One of the soldier’s sons, then grown, stormed away north with the seed in his luggage. He set down his load to live like a hermit in the Arizona desert, but still the seed did not put down root. A young girl came on troubled times in her home and went South to sand, cacti, tarantulas and tortoises. She stayed for a year and when it was up, the seed found its way into her shoe where it bothered her all the way home. She finally knocked it out on her front stoop. It was a grey, rainy day, but not too cold. The seed found a small patch of earth and finally put down root. First it was one, soon it was two. With all its strength the seed drew its long lost brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and cousins and nephews and nieces from all over the country and soon they stood side by side, a regiment in the Northwest, all connected with their roots woven together.

Observation #15, 11/15

(Theme: finding the danger in the ordinary)

                                                                                      

Sleeping:

Sleep looks at you from across the apartment. You can feel him sitting on the edge of your bed, his eyes burning through layers of plaster and drywall, matchsticks waiting to be blown down. He looks and looks at you and you feel the tingle at the skin of your neck, your temple.

No. You work. The screen of your laptop vomits technicolor noise onto the plane of your face and the sting of it keeps you awake. Still that tingling. A crawling. Something desperate to find a way into your eyes, into your brain.

He says your name.

Your forehead droops dangerously close to your keyboard, you jolt upright. Bidden, you go to your bedroom door, your feet dragging molasses-slow across cheap, coarse carpet. The knuckles of your toes are rubbed raw by the time you arrive.

Yes, he is sitting there. Tonight he looks like Hypnos, the way the Greeks saw him, nearly naked but comfortably so, sun-kissed and strong from some gymnasium or other exercise in the Elysian Fields. His hair is dark, curly, and entangled with the feathers of the white wings rising from behind his ears like a strange crown.

“Come,” he says, his eyes so dark there is no difference between pupil and iris, so dark you can see most of the room and all of yourself in them. Lost. “You must rest.”

Your stomach clenches, you clutch at the door frame for support, the bed is calling you to it, with him still sitting there, persuasive. No, no, you can’t and you won’t.

“You haven’t slept for four days, an eternity,” he shakes his head and his curls sway but his eyes do not move, do not blink. Dead eyes. “Mortals are not meant to wake so long.”

You know it can be done, it has been done. To never sleep again. To blot out all the dreams. All the dreams and every time you’ve woken up screaming. Screaming and bruised from remembered violence. Paul Kern did it in the Great War, you can do it now, with or without the bullet that left him forever wakeful.

He knows what you are thinking, can see it in the defiant definition of the muscles of your arms. “No. He nearly died for that exception and even then sometimes he slept with his eyes open and mind awake. One way or another, you will sleep the years away with me.”

In those dark reflections you see the door frame splinter under your hands as exhaustion comes on like riptide, a great current pulling you toward your sheets, toward his eyes, toward oblivion and into your suffocating, brutal, ripping, bleeding dreams and

He blinks.

Waking:

You are awake. You are fully aware, every synapse singing, every nerve ending searing into your muscles, but aching with the weight. The weight of the hours lost, the weight of the comforter, the weight of the day. You want to suck in a breath, to feel your ribcage expand, but the weight is too much. It is crushing. It takes all of your strength to even open your eyes.

You knew he would be there. He’s always there. Every time you wake.

A tall figure – he must be – insect thin and dressed in black, hunched tightly and face overshadowed by the darkness of the corner made by two of your bedroom walls and the ceiling. For his thinness you call him the Straw Man, and he is watching you. You can’t see any of his features, save for the glint of eyes from the occasional passing car outside. He never moves or speaks, just holds himself there on the ceiling and watches.

He doesn’t need to make a sound. The room is full of whispers. Though you can see him there the lingering sense of terror that accompanies him is all around the room, especially everywhere that your periphery cannot reach. Sometimes you think you hear the grate of metal or the sick slick sound of serpent skin on carpet, magnified hugely, coiling somewhere nearby.

These noises, the terror, slowly pass and fade. But no matter where you are, outside of this room, outside of this town, he is always in some corner. Sometimes you think the heaviness is a thing he carries with him, presses down on you so hard that you are drowning in the soupy air, but you know it is just the weight of your life, trailing after you, growing ever shorter, ever more frail; you know it somewhere in the back of your mind.

So today, like every day, you force your leaden limbs out from under the covers, strain against your own weight to sit upright. It takes an hour to stand. You turn toward the door, you can see into your bathroom. 

As soon as you focus on the sink the carpet extends out between you and the faucet, stretching impossibly, it’s miles away, you’ll never reach it, but you heave yourself forward, thirsty, reaching.

And the Straw Man watches you go.

Observation #14, 11/13 (for reals this time)

(Theme: finding the drama in....pancakes?)

We've wanted them for days, keep talking about breakfast for dinner or breakfast for breakfast, but we've always got an excuse: we slept in too late, we don't have syrup, we ran out of mix, making the batter by hand is too much work.

Until one roommate finds us a new recipe: peanut butter pancakes.

"I'll make the batter if you cook them."

Sure. Why not?

But by the time the batter is done the oven is not set to warm, so we wait. And by the time the oven is heated the batter is thicker because it's been sitting in its bowl on the counter uncovered.

I could blame all three of us for not thinking of putting it in the fridge. I could blame the peanut butter for thickening the mix. I could blame our shitty pans, our apartment stovetop, my mood that night, the brand of no-stick spray.

In the end, there is no one to blame for the batter-y centers and scorched exteriors of our experiment  No one but our cravings, because there is no such thing as the perfect pancake.

Observation #14, 11/8

Theme: I don't have class today, therefore a quick haiku:

I attended school
to better my craft and skill
oh god NaNo why

Observation #13, 11/6: Home

(Theme: Loss & Gain)

It’s the little things, maybe even the littlest things. The songs that make me think of the movies that make me think of you. The smell of a certain something cooking. A casual mention of one of your favorite books in an overheard conversation. Cutting open a pomegranate and remembering that time when the juice turned my fingers black under the fluorescents and we stood there in Rite-Aid, puzzling over what could have turned my cuticles so dark, laughing aloud with the joy of recognition when I realized. Hearing the words I most needed to hear and getting weepy, even though we were in the car.

I might have lost everything at the time, but I gained you back.

Observation #12.2, 11/2: I use my adrenaline to clean up my own mess, fix computers, and write poetry

I was woken from a dream

of pilot whales so large

they could be seen from the highway

great humps the shape of the hills

around them, clusters of barnacles

the size of cities, and on one

a huge, gleaming eye –

luminous, glass-smooth

globe amidst the turbulence of water,

the landscape roiling with the plunge and gyrate

of hulking bodies –

by an unprovoked Heraclean nosebleed

that spattered the bathroom sink

brighter than stills in horror films as I scrabbled for tissue

which I would promptly bleed through:

on its end, a cherry of clotted blood

round and bright, gleaming

like the whale’s eye looking

at me from across the orchards and farm lands

he had wrecked.

Observation 12.1, 11/1: Saruman of Many Colors

(Theme: Gain, Plagiarism edition)

But oh! The things we could accomplish together! For are we not of a high and ancient order, most excellent in the Earth? Are we not young in our wisdom and strong in our seniority? Are we not the conquerors and scholars, having eyes that see both far and deep? Are we not young Gods in old bodies, sent to shepherd the sheep and conduct the song the world sings? Are we not invincible, perfect, immortal?

The guest who has escaped from the roof thinks twice before he comes back in by the door.

Observation #12, 11/1

(Theme: Gain)

The things I vow to take from this day:

1. The warmth of the sun on my face as it passes through glass, how it arcs over my forehead and cheekbones, igniting my hair, plunging my philtrum into shadow.

2. Every shifting shade of blue that crosses the sky between varying grades of cloud.

3. The green of the pine branches behind the red blush of deciduous behind the white froth of fall flowers behind the course grey rust-streaked face of dry stone.

4. The stark, clean white of birch bark.

5. The shiver of the canopy.

6. Meandering trails no one is meant to walk between fallen trunks and peaty wetlands, the light on the surface of the lake.

7. The lift of leaves in small circles, stirring, settling – the wind is dancing.

8. The promise of words and quiet and the steam rising in curls: herbal smoke from sacred spells and mugs of tea.

9. The warmth of a hand in mine.

Observation #11, 11/1

(Theme: Loss)

We are always writing about loss.

I am withering, I am vanishing, I lost my voice when I was twenty, I lost my hearing when I was five, I lost my sight when I was seventeen, I lost my leg in the war, I lost my arm in the accident, I lost my dog, my parents, my brother, my lover, the family inheritance.

We have lost everything.

I lose things.

I lose things in the way that you do, sudden, without warning and I am pursued by that abruptness, that paralytic shock that somehow, something is missing. I am haunted by how smooth and silent loss creeps in. I fear it.

I fear that one day it will find my parents and they will be a hole in my heart I fear that my lover will die far, far from me too far for me to see or hear or hold her hand and I fear that it will come and render me useless, finally immobile, unable to give anything to a dying world from a perpetually dying hand

too soon, too soon

Survey Now Officially CLOSED!

Thank you so much to those who chose to participate in the Music in your Experience survey, which is no longer taking official submissions. However, if it opens up a forum of discussion or you want to answer some of the questions for the sake of it, please feel free. I would love to talk to everybody about music all the time. :)

Cheers!