Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-Bill Shakes-

Reasons I am excited about spring...

A few ideas about who to befriend and what to do with them...

1. Never apologize for who you are. Trite? Yes. But if you're hanging around people who make you feel like you need to pretend to be someone else, you're hanging out with the wrong people.
2. Never make someone else apologize for who they are. Save yourself the trouble. If you constantly find yourself picking someone apart; if they drive you crazy, don't torture them or yourself. Spend time with people who you can celebrate!
3. Don't act or speak if you feel jealous. Good people do horrendous things when they feel the heat of envy. Envy destroys rationality, good manners and, inevitably, friendships.
4. Don't suffer fools. Period. There is nothing admirable about tolerating someone who offends any of your true senses: justice or right and wrong. Stand up for the things that are worth fighting for, and don't waste time on people who make you fight about the asinine.
5. Don't pick friends who are just like you. One of you is enough! People who compliment us are often the people who do what we cannot, or who cannot do what we can. That way, they lift us up and we lift them up; we teach and are taught; we grow in ways we wouldn't if they were not in our lives. 
6. Love hard. Don't be distant for the sake of being cool. Love true and hard. The people who matter won't push you away. They'll be glad to have you.
7. Don't play games. If you're mad, say it. Say it when it happens. Get it out. Emotions grow exponentially when you suppress them. And suddenly, something as simple as "you hurt my feelings" becomes "you always hurt my feelings because you're selfish and vapid and I hate you." Seriously.

I miss Montana...

Glacier National Park...

Just a river, cutting through the forest... As if anything were "just" anything in Montana.

Swimming in the purest water I've ever seen...

This field was full of glacier lillies. Their leaves are edible, and delicious. They taste like a sweeter (and spicier) spinach. They were my lunch every day...

As we blazed trail that few people have traveled, our paths were often flooded by the running streams of snowmelt flowing down the mountain.

The mountain goats in Glacier National Park were strangley acclamated to the presence of human beings. After spending most of our trip west in the wild and untamed Bob Marshall Wilderness, where animals kept their safe distance from us, we found the close proximity of these gorgeous animals to be strange... and a bit disturbing.

...I've always felt like the trade that we made for getting these big brains of ours has been a costly one: We are forever seperated from the animal kingdom. While I wish it wasn't so, I know that maintaining that distance is the only way of being good stewards on this planet.

Why I love Kurt Vonnegut

This is his gloriously simple drawing of an asshole. A sense of humor is more potent to me than any sense of style.

Below is his drawing of a tree, which will soon be a tattoo on my body.

Some midday poetry

The drip and dribble of midday urination

Are punctuated by a sudden discovery:

The tag in my thong

Says MADE IN BANGLADESH.

As I sit and I stare

At the tiny white ribbon,

Marked with an "S"

(Skeptics, tread lightly)

Drips and dribbles become the whirring of needles

Sewing and surging.

A girl,

Much and not at all like me,

Holds my underwear,

Her callussed hands caressing

Cotton and polyester blends.

As she connects my g string

To the triangular bit of fabric that holds

My fleshy flower.

I can almost mistake the ammonia aroma rising from the water

For sweet patchouli;
Can almost see her in my minds eye,

Dangling the thong from a graceful brown finger,

A dark eyebrow raised 

at what she can only dubiously call

"almost underwear."

 

-3/9/09

An old relic...

Her pain is black and white.

She is the mountain and the stream.

She tries to scream out the hurt,

But the louder she cries

The more silent and cold it grows.

She shakes her head in disgust.

Disgusted at her own reflection.

Her hair falls down like rain,

A hot fury of tears.

She wouldn't say she's torn:

There's nothing tangible to tear.

The mountain crumbles.

The stream dries up. 

She swallows her pain

And chokes.