The reflex to cling to fear and apprehension outlasts not just the injuries, but the fear as well. I gave the barrier a nudge with my foot and kept walking.

Before he took the nap during which I had to leave, he asked rhetorically “What if I die today?” I could only remind him that had asked himself that question for as long as I’d known him, and that he had come up with some good answers.

Among Brian’s many excellences and virtue, he was the best storyteller I’ve known. The last story he told me was about a woman he watched on flight. At take off she rubbed her face with lotion. She put on dark sunglasses and headphones. She wrapped much of her face in scarves and then sat motionless. She must have made prior arrangements. Brian imagined, because the stewardess left her completely alone until just before strapping for landing. The traveler unwrapped. She took off her sunglasses and headphones. When she got up to leave, she was the picture of vibrant beauty. That’s the only way to fly, Brian said as he buzzed for the nurse.

Through the fog, confusion and crying of the last week, the memory of a bold and beautiful man emerges. He was complicated and troubled, particularly at the end, but through to the end, he remained the Brian Walker I will always know.

We broke even in March financially, and in its first week, April looks good. I’ve got a part-time job with customerforce along with a few new gigs, and some huge possibilities.

After being in such an ill place professionally, I wish it didn’t take global financial strife to get me to a better place, but it seems that it did. Yay!

Added “Create A Decent WordPress them for your own blog” to the todo list.

This made me aware that my website and resume still suck, even though I’ve been leaning on both rather heavily. So here it is: my new home page and resume.

Spread them around!

I’m out for a walk and noticing something in the gutter. I reach for the camera and I can feel the arches of my feet on the front rung of a chair. I’m pulling on the loose thread of a sweatshirt and listening to someone talk about Aquinas. I forgot my pen but have nothing to write anyway.

I’m brushing my teeth after flossing and then runningrunningrunning down a grassy hill. I’ve just decided that I’m not able to stop and the only way to avoid hitting the pavement at the bottom is to fall now–to make myself hit the ground hard and flat–and I’m laughing about that but only briefly.

I turn from the keyboard and there’s the card table at my old apartment. I’m kneading sourdough and it doesn’t stink enough. It probably won’t make a full rise today and I’ll probably be up all night anyway. Tom Waits is singing and I’m crying about that.

Quick bursts that don’t feel like they stop. I’m there. I never left though there’s nothing much to keep me there.

Though I have no job, I’ve never worked harder, never done more. I’m taking on projects and making connection. I’m becoming expert in things that only months ago were opaque boundaries.

Will used to be for me an independent force, something that drove towards roads yet to be built trailing hope. Intent, I felt, lead to power. Now it seems that intent belongs to power. We build the roads we want, perhaps first by wanting, but mostly by bending to the path.

Still, a large number of bad photos is appropriate to now. I’ve been trying to imagine myself as so many things lately that I’ve neglected a bit of who I am. My goals need settling before they can be seen.

I walk around on tippy toes, trying to find a foot size spot of earth for the first step.

In other news, I completed a twitter bot for nshrine. Twitter users can place candles by messaging @nshrine. See the twitter bot help page for more information. Enjoy.

I mean really, really, know, for certain, in a shut-up-you-can’t-tell-me-otherwise. Because it’s important to feel this way about something, and dangerous to feel this way about the wrong things, I revisit the List of Things I Believe often. This time, I made a dramatic addition to the list while my son fell asleep on me. I’d like to make this into a “you know, my son taught me something today” type of tear-jerker, but it can’t be. My son was falling asleep on me, in the same rocking chair in which my mother rocked me to sleep, and I was thinking about cold certainty.

The list used to be:

1. I am.
2. I sense.
3. I want.
4. I don’t always sense what I want.

I’ve always been uneasy about that last one. It assumes something, and perhaps a great deal, about time. The last bit doesn’t count at all when I’m completely satisfied. But HA!, I don’t care about the list when I’m completely satisfied anyway, so it doesn’t matter. I’ve come up with other cheap tricks to get around that uneasiness, but nothing’s stuck for long. Here’s the next trick.

1. I am.
2. I sense.
3. I want.
4. Now is a moment different from others I can remember or imagine.
5. At different moments my sensations correlate with my desires to different degrees.

I need to work on the wording quite a bit, but that’s the list for now. In the end, this list gets me to a point where I can guess that other things exist. Why I would bother with this while a warm bundle is spreading a drool spot on my shoulder is another issue entirely.

]]> http://blog.artwells.com/2008/11/i-now-know-five-things/feed/ 0 http://blog.artwells.com/2008/11/nshrinecom-sees-a-milestone/ http://blog.artwells.com/2008/11/nshrinecom-sees-a-milestone/#comments Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:58:17 +0000 artwells http://blog.artwells.com/?p=117 Over 25,000 candles have been placed in public shrines (and now private shrines) on nshrine.com. Though it was a public candle in a well-traffic shrine, I don’t feel quite okay about linking directly to it here, as it was a candle of mourning.

So I have mixed feelings about the milestone. Though if you browse a few shrines, you’ll see that there are many playful and even goofy shrines, most shrines and candles are for people to mark or share the sorrows and losses they’ve experienced. So I can’t really jump up and down–”Yay! Another moment of mourning!”–I can be pleased that there’s one more moment where someone expressed something probably best not left unexpressed.

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