I never thought I'd realize how much I could miss the sun. No fan of hot weather desert parties, beaches, or anything much above 80 degrees. Tonight is Solstice, the darkest night of the year. We've made it this far and it's not been to bad. It snowed all day. For a moment the skies and earth all turned a spring pale pink like rose'd flush skin. That was the last minute of day light.

Are we too afraid to do anything?

Or are they not afraid to do anything?

Midnight Sessions

There are those moments where you realize where you are. The oil paintings are released from their prisons and surround around us. The mountains aren’t so far away anymore. We feel not so far away from each other, despite the the tress encompassed in every direction before the nearest town. We entertain ourselves. Things to take up the time. Charades until sometime in the morning. No sleeping just because it’s cold. There are the large rivers that winter can’t stop. No matter the river it’s never stronger than the salmon on its way home.

One of our new favorite songs plays in the background. You are living in the middle of Alaska during winter. It doesn’t feel as vacant as it appears before true sight. Only far away lessons of gold mines lost in inversiouness sight. The pits of the caves reach too deep beyond sight. A reflection of a show-side gimmick resort nestles at the very end of a long windy road. The fact that even wifi exists here at all is an anomaly to few. This anomaly is often not thought or or taken advantage of by most of the paying crew. But that wifi is what we all rely on to maintain our connections with all the places except here. The rest of Alaska seems far from here. Alaska seems far from the country it belongs to. Far from the whole world. It’s a place where winter shuts you in. The mind becomes a telescope as distant between here and there grows as wide as can be; hoping that continents might crack.

Summer rages in summer knowing no bounds. But we should only sleep when the day is done. Then so it does up here. The light falls and everything besides the land has to continue on. The light of the moon shines bright again from early in the four o’clock nightfall, then again in the late ten o’clock morning dawn. Time balances itself. Always.

Then finally I see it is time to die down. Lets the winter fall in. The sun always rises again.

When the Levee Breaks

It’s 1:40am in the morning the night that Donald Trump won the election. The presidential candidate that spewed nothing but historical hate speech and bigoted hate speech through his entire presidential campaign.
“It’s a joke,” they said.
Unless you’re gay.
Unless you’re Muslim.
Unless you' have a real  issue of where we're headed and contemplating it just gives you a heart ache and a head ache to think of it.
Unless you’re Latino.
“I just got out of this prison cell,” Mercury said, we’re all singing now.
Meet somebody to love.
Meet somebody to love. 

It’s hard when you grew up on love and compassion for the conditions for others.
Is it?
What a time to be American, they all said.
What a day to get fired from your shit seasonal job.
Unless you couldn’t handle it.
David Bowie knew the pressure. 

It’s a terror knowing what this world is about. 

Will tomorrow give us a clue what this world is about?

No.
There’s better things out there than this. There has to be.
Watching good friends scream “let me out.” How many do you know, do you listen?

Not enough. 

There is never enough.
It’s hard being told that the world is rainbows and compromises, and butterflies, and that’s all. Sadly millions and missed targets will come into play.
What has happened in the last twenty four hours?
Beer and pretending that what we’ve let happened isn’t happening happen.
The mother is crying.
You have the power.

What power?

The power of voodoo.
Who do?

You do?

You do.

Back to the Magic Tree House

I remember riding on the backs of beautifully spirited boys motor bicycles. It was India, it was Rishikesh. The banks of the River Ganga to our right, the highway soared up high into the vibrantly green mountainside.

I remember seeing temples both below us and up above. On our way 20 miles north for a few bottles of that Old Monk, the finest of Indian rums to make the dry holy city of Rishikesh a little wet for the evening.
Popped off the back of his bike and all the town boys starred like the the town boys did no matter where I was.
On our way back with the booze I remember the motor bike boy yelling as we turned the corner before Rishikesh, “Hide the bottles, no fines for me today.” We spent the rest of the evening in the magical tree house laid next to the river. We drank till the sound of the monkey’s didn’t spook us anymore. We drank till we dipped in the beloved river of Ganga under the moonlight on that warm summer night and become old monks ourselves losing count of how many times we submerged under the cool flowing waters.

I remember it like was a dream from yesterday. Was it? No, I have the scars and glowing memory of being there.

Now I’m awake and worn in the ends of some middle of nowhere in Alaska. The days are blurred but now with less hash and less Old Monk. Beer turns bitter and the whiskey makes you angry. From up here you see all the things come and go everywhere else. Impermanence use to feel so much more uplifting. Yet still there is no where else I’d rather be. Everywhere else down there in the ‘lower’ states seems rotten, crude, and withered beyond its stretching capacity.

Still there is no where I’d rather be than here just trying to get back there. To my land of milk and honey and beautiful things. Of bright glowing wander and mystery.
Still there is no where I’d rather be than here. Just wanting to get back to there. 

AK 2

Sometimes you’re wake up and you’re 23 years old. How many of those 23 year olds wake up middle of fucking no where Alaska. Literally, most people have never heard of where you are and if they have it’s because they want to fuck under the ‘aurora’ northern lights to produce the most intelligent son. And this in only the 2nd time you've woken in the middle of nowhere Alaska, just more north this time.
It’s 6 degrees on the reg, 35 is a treat in disguise. Everything re-awakens as if it were Spring, but Winter hasn’t even begun. The fresh snow melts like the ravens are returning in mass.
This is why we’re all so confused here. Stuck between hibernation and rutting season. +2 Alaskan points if you know what rutting season even means. You’re guess it bout right. The fiddle feels your frustration. 35 isn’t even the beginning of what’s grown before in these dead months, or what’s to come. Hallelujah bye and bye you won’t be able to fly away. Just let the next one buy you a brew to see how far down they have to wait for the next, you don’t even ask them to fall in line.
That touch on every girls waist, the unwanted one but not nudged away one, that each has felt and known, but who doesn’t like a free beer kind. The ones who offer, ‘I just want to buy you a beer’ is the first line but the true intentions are hidden under that newly frozen snow line.
First time I met you it wounded my heart. 
The banjo is the only thing that makes us feel the valued few much of anything.
Look at these nails I carry on my hand. Kept up with intention.
Gospel sounds more real in the dead degrees. Like sick loving lines.
I was serious before your attention and intentions broke and became clear. Like ice with all the fish trapped under there. 

Smalls

I bet when I was around three the word ‘small’ comprehended in my small unscathed brain to be ‘not big.’ That dog is small. That other dog is big. The big kids meal? Who would want a small kids meal when at the age of three you’re being sold on the idea that growing up, being bigger, brings you better outsourced manufactured goods …

At five velociraptors were small, triceratops were medium, and tyrannosaurus rex… well, he was a big fuckin’ dinosaur. You don't realize the downfall of his arms until Jurassic Park 3 came out, but eventually he still wins because the original always wins. I recognized that not all small dinosaurs were the same kind of small, but they were certainly smaller than the medium dinosaurs. The largest dinosaurs were all their own kind of large; take a look at the brachiosaurus compared TyRone.

From ages five and onward to the later part of elementary school the use of the word small, and its other sizing labeled adjectives, continued to be just that: adjectives. Words established by other humans long ago to help with more than just communication amongst individuals. To define boys, girls, and drive-thru menus. 

to be continued…

Asshole

I would rather be an honest asshole than an unscrupulous saint.