Frost tells my story in six stanzas

There is some strange mystical connection that we have with our true selves, though we know them not.  We meet them mostly through proxy.  Wisdom and genius are attractive because they have put to the outer what we intuitively know, but remains inner and undisclosed.  We, naturally drawn by some subconscious self-awareness to them that share some mote of our essential being, someone who can tell us of ourselves, feel on the conscious level only awe of someone putting to word or song or art a thing we would say if we but knew that we were trying to say it, written on the script of us, but we've yet to read that far ahead.  We are, I am, on a journey.  What a fictious folly to think that journey is one of self-definition.  Self-creation is the only thing ever to be punished.  We desire to be naked and unashamed again, unclothed from the thing we "sinned into existence."  You, real boy, never made yourself anything whatever but wooden.  We can only journey toward self-discovery or away from it, playing with paper mache or cutting eye holes in paper bags.  Whatever help we find in self-elucidation from the wise and ingenius shines to us as ever polished gold, impossible to miss as we pass it on the road, a curl of lying wood falling off at the sight of it.  Robert Frost does this for me.  I read a poem of his a couple weeks after I got to my current residence which effectively defined the entire feeling I was, am wrapped up in, a commentary of this leg of my wandering framed long before I began wandering.  Maybe you'd enjoy hearing it.  I, at least, always like saying it:

Away

Now I out walking
The world desert,
And my shoe and my stocking
Do me no hurt.

I leave behind
Good friends in town.
Let them get well-wined
And go lie down.

Don't think I leave
For the outer dark
Like Adam and Eve
Put out of the Park.

Forget the myth.
There is no one I
Am put out with
Or put out by.

Unless I'm wrong
I but obey
The urge of a song:
I'm—bound—away!

And I may return
If dissatisfied
With what I learn
From having died.

"From having died"???  God, I read it and knew immediately he knew better what I was doing out here than I did.  That is precisely what this is.  Death, as all progress entails.  Seed dying in order to live.  And yet in saying the word he taught me what I was trying to find in groping through unlit caves, drawn there by a mere instinct I could not dream of understanding, any more than a Monarch butterfly knows Mexico is its Promise Land. 

For an update, things are really well.  Living like a hobo is where it's at for me.  It's rad to see things grow, also.  Eating the stuff that's growing on the arms that grew out of an insignificant shell I threw into dirt months ago.  The kids, er, twenty somethings I work with call me city boy cause I can't get over how cool the tiny peppers are as they’re starting to grow.  They're the cutest, craziest things you've ever seen.  Bell peppers in miniature, or the cukes that were tiny fuzz beans two weeks ago and are now big, edible cudgels of victory.  Kohlrabi is my new favorite veggie to eat.  Also, I made a giant leap in the musical arena.  The blockage of expression has ruptured and been flushed.  Quishhhhhhhaaaaa (like a toilet noise.  Work with me here).  This alone is worth the trip.  I’ve been performing at open mics every week for the last three months, not in terror but eating it up.  Night and day difference.  It’s the highlight of my week now.  One lady at a coffee shop said if I wanted she would book me for a gig sometime.  I told her maybe after I’ve adjusted to the water a little.  A pass the hat gig, but it was confirmation of the transformation, cause back home when I tried to do open mics I was more the guy who you feel bad or embarrassed for because of the extreme self-consciousness.  In all, so far a good ride, totally the right thing for me to be doing what I’m doing.  Hope stuff is good for y’all.  Also, people in upstate NY have weird accents.  It’s like Ohio or something.  Not quite, but it makes me think of the Midwest.  Cheers

I'm getting away for a while...

I felt it an obligation to update, as there are significant life changes in development for me.  I don't apologize for feeling this an obligation, and neither should you feel offense to-ward, as there are certain things we ought to feel obliged to do, being mild and tenative of will though I am toward it, some announcement, as announcement has been made so easy by technology, (much to much for my taste) is owed to those who know me.  I am sorry, that is the greatest degree of conscious effort I can muster for posting- a begrudged duty.  (propriety and formality is something I am losing palate and patience for, and I found Thomas Merton's words, read a few days ago, to say very well how it feels to me: that it "imprisons you in demonstration")  I am also sorry for running-on and excessive parenthesis and clause, and general garrulity which this current mood of mine requests to be layed down.  It is my begrudgment talking.  MOVING ON->

hmm, also, I picked up this Django Reinhardt CD at the library, and it is much too carefree and pre-Depression for me at this moment, and must be switched off.  It's like they didn't have anything to do but dance the night away.  A few years hence would teach them.  Or, well, at least teach someone.  Maybe famous jazz musicians were insulated from the Depression.  Doubt it.  They probably took some time off to learn the blues.  Trying to listen to Django is probably a bit pretentious for me anyways.  Me trying to put on a little sophistication, but the dress don't fit.  Never has, and I don't mind it staying on the rack, or in the box.  Give me folk, you take the jazz.  I'll be barefoot in dirt. 

So I am moving to upstate NY next weekend through the fall and into November to work on an organic farm for the season.  Work looks to be slow and not getting better here for a while, so I'm taking advantage of the excuse to get away.  Away from suburbs and cities and excessive noise.  I will probably occassionally drop online to check email and stuff, but no tv or computer. I will be living in a tent on the farmer's property, making fires, taking a lot of alone time, trying to play a lot of music and read a lot, and get all these voices from dancing over gray matter to sitting on blue lines.  I hope to put a lot of discursive thoughts down on paper and see what they say to each other, what I say to me.  In an absurd fantasy, I have thought of several book titles.  It is only occassional folly for me to entertain this notion.  After all, I also have several song titles which sit well behaved on browning pages.  But I suppose to sum up what I hope to get out of the time is my voice a little less encumbered, a little expression pushing up through a distracted self-consciousness.  It's like this quote of Thomas Carlyle, speaking of Luther choosing the priesthood over his father's strong desire for him to pursue law and make something of himself: "...his purer will now first decisively uttering itself."  I am quite certain that in my very nearly 30 years my purer will has of yet not decisively uttered itself, and if it doesn't, it's real likely something will become dislodged in my mind.  I only felt really free to go any way I wished once, right after Bible school, and it was the most intoxicating week or so of my life, but I quickly got my head on straight and found a place to make myself necessary.  It's what I do.  Find guilt aplenty for not finding missing supporting collumns somewhere and making myself straight and tall as I could so as not to let anything fall, being it my responsibility to make sure nothing ever falls.  But this also has kept me from ever having done anything with focus or attention, nothing done wholeheartedly.  I've done the feasible, the practical, the pragmatic, the dependent.  Kept busy without movement.  I don't regret anything I've done, but neither do I relish any of it.  It was just done.  Like taking out the garbage.  Someone has to do it, so I do. 

Truth is I have never found the line between duty to others and to myself.  My past sense would say duty to yourself should be made so pure as to make itself unnoticable.  Kantian discipline to disinterest of the self.  But we are unable to look at others but through ourselves, just as an economy should be based on altruism rather selfishness, except there's no such thing.  There is nothing to base human or economic relations on but balanced selfishness.  It's the only thing that drives anything.  I'm not sure this is a mistake or could be otherwise even in Eden, but it certainly is not otherwise here.  Trying to do it the other way round makes you disinterested of everything, and interested and invested in nothing.  A practical deist, as I like to call myself.  This would explain my personal philosophy, and correspondingly my religious one, or maybe the other way around.  Things are headed in a certain direction, history is written, even the history of the future, and so you find a place with a view.  It's a Calvinism without the self-righteousness.  And so I am stepping outside the circle of responsibility to find my center, find myself.  I'm doing what most people do before they reach 20.  I'm in all things a late and calculated bloomer.  But I couldn't narrate this up coming story so well any younger than now, so I'm not unhappy at the timing.  This makes a way better story.  Restlessness of youth with some sense.  It'll be a good read.

I have been reading (er, listening) to the book (on which the movie is based) "Into The Wild" about every week, and if 'tis true "We read to know we're not alone", I found a comrade in Chris McCandless, and I can't understand how anyone can not see the merit in his pursuit.  Maybe in the end those of us who have to leave to get perpective come to find that it is in all the things everyone takes for granted: family, relationships, making a goddamn living and enjoying a surfeit of conveniences and comforts, but to me it doesn't seem to make a difference when you jump on the wagon.  It's always moving with or without you, why not tramp as long as you can before instinct forces you to pay your dues to your species.  I would say the fewer people who ride it the better.  'Way I see it, if we would all, for one generation, ignore biological and social demands, we could end this whole story without the blood and guts and piss.  The world would end asleep in bed, not choking on its own lifeblood among the smoke and fire.  People say we're not properly integrated, but I don't believe that exists, I don't think the world ever makes sense.  People who think they figured it out haven't found balance or integration, they've found an angle on the world, a way  to get what you wanted out of it, and they won't know till years in whether it was, in fact, what they wanted.  It might have been at the expense of their higher faculties, their wonder.  I doubt anyone would regret any years taken out of the game.  Or maybe this is the youth in me talking.

Hope you had a Merry Christmas