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I have a mother aloe plant I saved from a Lowe’s clearance shelf, bought for $4. It was a tiny thing back then, maybe 12 years ago, now it has a foot long, forearm sized stalk with alien-like tendrils forming its rosette. It enjoyed its summer outside & when I repotted it, I ripped off about 27 babies from its main root and repotted those. If I could I would give each of you one until I ran out, starting with you, my favorite reader.

I drink a mug of cayenne pepper tea before I leave in the morning. At work I cut foam insulation panels & from a lift, attach them to the side of the house we’re building. I tell my work/lift-mate about our crew breakfast last week, & wondered if he noticed that out of the four of us, El Jefe left the least amount to cover the check, that he didn’t even leave enough to cover his share of the tip. As I say all of this, a tiny piece of floating toxic foam flies into my eye.

At first it’s nothing, but after 3 hours, it drives me mad, every time my eyeball tries to move, this little particle doles out excruciating pain, irritating itchiness, it waters & reddens my eye, & come coffee break, I tell everyone I’m going home.

The drive home is difficult, but I manage. Nobody is home, & nobody will be home until late that night, a rare chance at solitude. Earlier that morning, another work-mate had given me some purple homegrown cannabis he had just grown in his yard, harvested, and cured. The scent was so strong I wrapped the plastic baggy inside a brown paper bag & kept it in the bed of the truck.

I don’t flirt with cannabis much these days, but it seems fortuitous to have just received some that morning & figure it would help remedy the eye irritations. I pack my kiseru with a little purple green flower and blow some prayers toward the mountain & now since this has become a self-care day, I hit the top shelf of the secret bar in the basement & drink minuscule sips, dropper dosages, from 3 separate bottles, each containing their own green quintessences, the first an alcohol containing 130 plants & flowers, made by French monks using a secret recipe hundreds of years old, another a gift from a friend, a tincture tonic with no label, just a white silhouette of a foxes face, not for the uninitiated & should be handled with extreme care, and the last is an elixir of mine own hand & doing.

I draw a hot bath with salts, boil water on the gas stove & prep tea, dandelion root, mullein leaf, rosemary sprigs, loose Rooibos, with rosehip, almond, apple, hibiscus, cinnamon, & one lone blue lotus flower. As the tea steeps, so do I.

I use a silver spoon I liberated from a collection to mix in local honey, & naked, I take the tea to bed. Under the covers, soon surrounded by purring felidae familiars on three sides, I finish my tea, roll on my side, close my eyes & forget the world & my place in it & travel inward, immediately holographic quantum options arise, like flipping through avatars, as if the option to jump realms is possible at anytime, just means leaving behind this one.

A woodpecker knocking on the other side of the house brings me out of it. I stop the mind jumping, re-enter my body and feel an aching pulse in my lower spine, forever sore from the work I do, & the work I don’t do. I roll on my stomach to work out the setting concrete residing in my lower lumbar & hips, moving, stretching my body in natural ways, attempting to regain the full range off motion possible with my hips & spine, like a huge bear shaking off a long winter’s nap, a lone catamount sun stretching on a warm boulder, ripping the fascia cobwebs, cleaning the dust from an ancient altar to some forgotten forest god, feeling the satisfying self-induced fissures & vertebrae cracks, remembering the power & strength of a well-honed, finely-tuned body. Our siamese jumps on my lower spine, knowing her task, as I continue moving & her purrs are, I’m sure doing their job. The other two purr on either side.

We will never know what it is to inhabit another’s body. I love my body & could not imagine existing in another, the memory stored in these muscles, the weight & stress these bones have endured would be unimaginable to most. It is built & tested for serious work. Changing a body is no quick task, but thousands of small daily decisions. I’m slowly course correcting & taking care of it again.

The next day I’m called to a house we finished over a year ago to fix a few punch list items, adjust a double hung window, a sliding door, tighten a screw, half of the list of problems are caused by her own hand. The young owner designed this small house, a house I loved being a part of building & she is a first time home-owner. She & El Jefe had a sort of falling out at the end of the build, so he prefers not to interact with her, & I think the feeling is mutual on her end. I don’t know the whole story, but she & I have always got along well. We have similar interests, we both love & cultivate mushrooms.

I’m not really there to fix the problems in the house as much as I’m there to teach her how, without mansplaining, sometimes not an easy task. She has a bit of the OCD, & messed up the way a double hung window hangs when she was washing them spotless. I did find myself mansplaining how it works, and apologized, she was funny about it. I’m there for 2.5 hrs, & together we fix everything on her punch list. I teach her about adjusting the sliding glass door & let her do it.

She’s alone on a mountain, and loves it. She has feline house mates so she’s good. We hug & she leaves me with a bunch of mushrooms with the caveat that I report back about the experiences. She cautions me about one strain, & I thank her, but know that my body will not have an issue with any of them.

I’m long overdue to rearrange the mental furniture & will soon have an appointment with the mountain, it’s streams, rock, trees & wildlife.

PS: I’m a ridiculous person who sometimes finds it hard to exist within the systems we find ourselves. I occasionally self-medicate & communicate with our underground network. Thanks for reading.

It was an incredible amount of work. My brother was living with us at the time, and he signed on to help with everything. The two of us together can do the work of 4-6 regular dudes. I’ve written about my brother a few times on here & no amount of writing will get to who he is or our shared experience together, but I try.

He was driving a Jeepster that summer, and the following Fall he eventually followed us back to Europe, using us as a home base, traveling around, living the vagabond life of a writer, professional gambler, exploring psychotropics while trying to write his first novel.

This barn was huge, 40’x60’ & probably 125+ yrs old, mostly old growth hemlock. It had salvaged timbers from another barn in its frame. I don’t know why, but I had always wanted to salvage a barn, & now that I have, I never want to do it again. It almost killed us, physically, mentally, and halfway through, I began to think that I might’ve overpaid, or that maybe the owner should be paying me.

Wearing respirators we cleaned out 100 yr old fecal matter, & reclaimed everything we could, the frame, sheathing & some ancestral history. I know my brother didn’t look at it this way, but I did, the quality & level of external physical work mirrors the inner & vice versa. Ora et labora. We’d come home filthy & spent. Wood like this just doesn’t exist anymore unless you spend a shit ton of money for it or do the work we were doing to get it.

There is a reason for its expense. It’s labor intensive, like taking apart a puzzle, de-nailing boards, moving heavy timbers, organizing lumber, and transporting it off-site. We rented a u-haul box truck, loaded down so heavy with timbers the metal mud flaps sparked as they dragged on the concrete, losing a few inches when we returned it.

I had an opportunity to build our home mortgage free using this frame, but eventually decided against it. I did not have the experience or time to accomplish it, esp. with a third & eventually a fourth kid on the way. I transported all of the wood to our recently cleared site, stacked it on stickers, covered it with a metal roof, & left it largely untouched until the other day when I was on my hands & knees rummaging around for 8 timbers for our wood-shed.

When I told my brother this, he laughed that I was going to timber-frame our wood-shed with that wood. With the size of the barn, there is plenty of timber to build other structures. I do have plans, and I did select the more challenging pieces to work with, stuff suited for a shed.

I did use a decent amount of the barn wood in our home, using it for our living space floors, walls, & accent trim pieces. It adds warmth & the floors feel ancient, with imperfections, circular saw marks, nail holes & other evidences of its history.

I did suffer burn-out building our home, but over the years I’ve leveled up, gaining experience & skills. I’m looking forward to slowly getting this place to how I’ve envisioned it when I first started out. There is still a shit ton of work left & I hope to use most of that barn before I leave this plane.

There is so much that gets left out when I try to write about this time of our life. I even find, sometimes, that I do not even have the energy to get into the gritty unreal details of it all.

For those 15 of you who have gotten this far, I found some things I wrote at the time. It’s more than I care to throw into one of these, but fuckit, this one will be longer for the adventurous reader. I think I need to start excavating my archives.

What follows below was written by a much younger, rambunctious, & industrious man-child who was so fucking alive.

Breaking Ground

Saturday, May 23, 2009
I’ve been living outside for 10 days, and other than the infrequency of showers, I’m an extremely happy man. Last night I made a fire in the grill using cherry wood, and grilled a discount $5 strip steak and a halved vidalia onion, both with salt and pepper. Total meal cost; $6. Total cook time; 6 minutes. Probably took me 6 minutes to eat everything too. It was insanely delicious. Also had 2 PBR’s.

We’re laying out the building tomorrow morning. There is a beast of a machine up there ready to dig the hole. The concrete quote with 8’ 10” walls came in well under my budget, which will help me cover this monster excavator. The money you save just gets thrown at other things, so it goes. I just want to get this thing going. Let’s break fucking ground already.

Tires need rubber, a story.

Friday, May 22, 2009|
I have a 1994 Saab with 138,000 miles on it and balding tires, total worth about $600. It sat in storage for 9 months and when I return it has a dead battery (forgot to disconnect it) and 3 flat tires. I have it towed to Ted’s, a trusted mechanic in town, to get a new battery and the cheapest tires he could find on it. It also needs to be inspected. His daughter calls, who works the front desk, and she says the cheapest good tires she could find were $75 each and that it wouldn’t pass inspection without the tires (I know this). I tell her the car is barely worth that, and that I’d drive illegally until I found another option.

The next week, I’m driving off the mountain into town and pass a yard sale with a stack of tires that says free on them. They look big and I drive past, but figure they’re worth a look so I turn around. When I pull in to look at them, the older woman on the porch screams,

“Take them, they’re yours”.

I say, “They’re the wrong size.”

She says, “We have another set of tires in the shed.” I look up at the shed and she notices I’m checking out the ladder with a For Sale sign hanging on the side. “Brand new ladder, 32’, selling it for $150.”

I’d been looking for ladders since I got up here. I need a 32’ and a 40’. I walk up to the shed with an older gentlemen. He pulls the tires out, they’re in great shape, almost new but they’re snow tires, and the size is slightly off. I tell them both I’ll check and come back.

I call a tire company in town, and give the guy the information. He says, “You allowed a 3% size difference in tires, and it says here that you’d have a 3.09% inscrease in size, which means your speedometer will read 58 when you’re going 60. It’s only a .09% more so I say, go ahead, do it.”

I drive back up there with $150 in one pocket and some more in the other. The old man originally wanted $10/tire, and the ladder was $150. I ask the lady what they’d want for both. She looks in the air and says, $150. The old man grimaces. I say, “I was hoping you’d say that.” I hand over the cash, throw the tires in, and the old man gets me some old rope and an old table cloth to strap the ladder on the roof. He says, “Don’t mind bringing the rope back.”

Now I’m driving on snows in the summer.

thoughts a week out

Monday, April 20, 2009
Cracked my neck bout six times today, hip is killing, jambed my thumb, and the back of my knee is funktified. The first game of the play-offs is in 3 days. I can think and feel like I’m getting too old for this shit, or just say fuck it and do what I’ve always done. And it’s not that I’m getting too old, this happens every season, has happened every season, it’s just that I’m weary from it. And in my head always as with everything; Fuck it…and so it goes.

I’ve got back taxes on the brain, a so far unapproved building loan lined up, and the house is looming, a constant presence, along with the simple fact I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. And again; fuck it…so it goes.

Onwards always forward. It all needs to be done because that’s what you do. The paths are lined up in front of you always, the decisions make themselves, just a medium for everything that happens.

Building your ideal house from scrap is a very surreal experience. My entire life, I’ve molded my living to space not designed for me, and now everything I’ve ever thought, dreamt can be possible. I read somewhere, some eastern text, that simplicity is the greatest expression of personal power, at least that’s how I remember it. All of the decisions that are going into this house have come outside of myself, from people I’ve met and talked too, from making the braces out of cherry, to the stair treads. open.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Technically I have another 4 months of walking this Earth before that’s true. Time to take stock. The world is in a shambles, the curtain pulled back on the con-men, revealing what I always instinctively knew was true, that society as it exists today is a pile of horseshit, and my gut telling me to run for the hills was always right. It told me to sell everything and get it cracking before everything crashed. I wasn’t ready for it. I made half of the steps, but didn’t follow through completely. A moment of weakness, or however you want to look at it, some might call it strength, whatever it was I definitely had the family in mind. A very rational decision to come back over here. And in hindsight, there are things I would do differently, but not much. Chasing the dream, always chasing the dream, and always wondering if maybe I didn’t dream big enough, is that even fucking possible? When and how these dreams manifest themselves and take root is a mystery, but I’ve tracked mine to a childhood version of the perfect life, back to the days of a misanthropic self-searching, back when I didn’t know who I was or who I wanted to be. I dreamt of a space away, in the woods, of living in a colorful, well-lighted, well-oiled, wooden space, of half-wild natural beauties running around naked or clothed in handmade natural weaves. I longed for the rhythm of the lost pagans.

So at this stage, the looking back, the evaluation of a life that has already been lived, staring at the encroaching mid-life future where men freak, running towards everything they never tried, attempting to turn their past regrets into pathetic possibility, there you ask the god-awful inevitable question; Are you where you wanted to be? It doesn’t take me long to come to the very obvious answer of, “Fucking right.”

Life has always handed me these situations, where the dream is right there, completely attainable, just out of reach, but you sure as hell can bet it ain’t gonna be easy, you’re gonna have to work your ass off, take huge fucking balls out risks. The timing is never right, and it’s always right. You can take your Crisis of Confidence, your Costco card and move to the suburbs. My primordial self sits there laughing it’s ass off at my desires, “Well, what the fuck you gonna do now? you gonna chase it, or are you gonna be like them?” It’s a rhetorical question. I’m where I’m supposed to be, no need for this anymore.

Thanks for being a reader & witnessing whatever this is.

We drive far North up past an abandoned mine, next to another mountain, next to another beautiful stream, to a trailer in a field, with an old stone well & a craft Winebago permanently parked under a roofed structure in the front yard. Inamorata is in the wedding party, she dons a green robe, hair pulled back into three braids, face painted a soft gold, with elf ears painted gold, walking with a staff. She is Yogurt. We’re attending a cosplay Spaceballs themed wedding. I’m wearing a three piece suit, & when we park the car in the field, using the rearview mirror, I draw on two little mustache lines with my daughter’s eyeliner. I’m President Skroob & also, as my gift to Lonestar & Princess Vespa, the unofficial wedding photographer.

As soon as we get out of the car I hear, “You’re an asshole too? I knew it, I’m surrounded by assholes.” It’s nice to be among people who appreciate & go all out for Mel Brooks, the essential ones, the overworked, the underpaid, the overlooked sacred salts of the earth, a tight-knit collection of eccentric mechanicals, with a few faeries & athenians sprinkled in, & even though technically I’m Inamorata’s “extra”, I am one of them, a misfit on the fringe.

There is a pop-up tent housing fold-out tables, holding a popcorn popping machine, two coolers with draft beer taps, & all of the potluck wares, apple turnovers, deviled eggs sprinkled with bacon bits, four different crock-pots, each containing their own slow-cooked concoctions of chicken or beef, individually saran-wrapped blocks of rice-krispy treats, & multiple versions of mac&cheese.

After the ceremony, I park in front of the Sands of Vega with my camera, a huge hair pick made from plywood is sitting in some play sand, & I spend an hour snapping photos of the wedding party, & whoever else wants their photo taken, also making sure everyone is included, at one point it seems we’re adding every costumed asshole to the group, & it gets to the point where they want to include me, President Skroob, in the photo, so I take my position on the edge, next to a bubble helmeted asshole & throw the asshole salute. It’s the only photo of me taken.

I don’t want to write too much about the nuptials (they are scripted, hilarious, & masterfully cosplayed, including catching the bride & groom’s stunt doubles) or share too many photos of the event, even though I’m sitting on about 500 amazing photos that I need to edit and throw on a thumb drive. I’m dying to share some of the photos because they’re beautiful, all of the hand-made well thought out costumes, the love and laughter shared between everyone in attendance. It is a private affair though, one I want to respect, a beautiful afternoon to witness between two beautiful people in Love (do you think I can use the word “beautiful” one more time?).

We leave reminded that each of us has a small part to play in bending this surreal malleable show we call reality forever surrounded by assholes.

We are our spirit, you & I, & our Daimon, the whispering spirits, Muse(s), Fae, Ancestors, need us all to step it the fuck up. Inamorata went up the mountain with our Husky to visit Ubasti. She asked me to make her extra coffee, which she rarely does, so I took extra care, became hyper-present & aware, laser focused to make the best fucking coffee I will ever make in my life this morning, which I did, & am enjoying right now. She’s going to love it. I’m easy, I love anything that is dark & tastes like earth.

My favorite part of these letters is I have no fucking idea what I’m going to write. I imagine it’s why you enjoy reading them, you beautiful 15 souls. I know who you are, you know who you are, Platonic Love (the black heart, the genie, the old smiling sun & thumbs up are my most used emojis). I’ve earned you beautiful 15, & you 15 did the work & I Love & appreciate you for it. I don’t think I’m easy to read.

If someone said your writing is easy to read, is that an insult or a compliment?

The Daimon are chained in the darkest & dampest parts of the cellar, they’re loud & demanding, want to be fed, & they can be mean. They call me a bitch, shit like wage slave, glæswlita, scēawere. They say, “Look at this body we gave you, your Devlish good looks, all of these abilities? You’re fucking wasting them.”

Sometimes they’re breezy, cooling you on the roof, a dragon fly drying its wings, a pileated woodpecker laughing at your thoughts, they take the wheel so you can ride shotgun for a while & sometimes, it’s coming soon, they want you to take a day & lose your shit on the mountain, so they can have you to themselves in their domain & vice versa.

They understand the attempt at anonymity though.

It’s Fall & from morning to noon the temperature swings 30 degrees, colors are beginning to pop, I’m building a woodshed before it snows & questioning, like I was earlier, watching/listening to that perfect coffee drip, what/how am I doing right now?

The forest is still & from where I sit I can see & sense it in all directions. We live in a house of glass, sunlit (sinlit), I wrote sinlit first, accidentally, meaning to write sunlit, & now realize that this new made-up word, sinlit, is equally suiting.

The word “sin” is misunderstood, abused, misshapen. It’s a sin, what happened to sin. A sinlit person is aura’d, casting a negligible shadow below them, individuated in the Jungian sense, reflecting & reflected in physical reality. It could also mean literature about missing the mark & the search for truth.

I get depressed that nobody on Substack appreciated the three word Wordle poem that just happened through me one day, this powerful medium, the Daimon just playing games with me on a daily basis & when I posted it as a note, it was just ignored, bunch of degenerates. If people don’t start paying attention, the Daimon are just going to flat out leave. wtf Swinestack?

This isn’t even me writing anymore. This is me below, a blonde bowl cut child wearing mud covered overalls, with muddy hands & face, & sad serious eyes & you’re making him cry.

There are things I don’t want to write about but probably should. I’ll get to it all, eventually. Inamorata just walked in, back from the mountain, she’ll probably go shower & then enjoy a cup of blissful sinlit coffee. I’m going to don a pair of overalls & go get dirty, that woodshed ain’t going to build itself.

May cats purr on you,
(one is doing that for me right now, making it hard to move & go get work done.)

Ok, I’m going now.

Our host has a house on campus, we all arrive at the same time, take our rooms, some go out to walk around & find a witchy thrift store. I take a power nap, having just driven the 4 hours, & knowing it’s going to be a long active evening. I wake & shower, pizza arrives, people are drinking & pulling spirit animal cards. Our host starts it & pulls an owl, “Abundance, with the owl’s wisdom as your guide, you’ll understand how to use this gift wisely, trusting that the source of treasures never runs dry.” Inamorata pulls a dolphin, jumping up and down, she loves dolphins & swims out to them when we’re at the beach she sees them bound by. The host reads the description & it’s accurate, we all agree with it, something about underestimating their impact in the world, but knowing a dolphin is the highest blessing & will transform your life’s direction (damn straight). I pull a dragonfly, “an ancient ethereal being that awakens a sense of wonder and represents the master of light, illusions, and mind.”

Everyone has brought special clothes, even purchasing special items for this evening. One friend has an orange cummerbund over her skirt and tank top with a clip-on hot pink bow tie, another has fluorescent Cheshire Cat themed hot pants, another has a sequined lightning bolt tank top. Inamorata has a hot pink & orange short dress on, with slouch boots, and hot pink socks peeking out of them. She crimps her hair, so she has a wild mane, and looks slightly (good) crazy. I do not have dress up clothes. I do not need to draw any more attention to myself than I already do. I wear pants & a nondescript t-shirt in the colors of the night.

At these events, I’m the water bearer & the protector of space. I have a wad of cash in my pocket from working a Saturday (if you work weekend time you get cash). I break a $100 bill at the bar, but not before asking the bartender if it’s ok, for two bottled waters, & I tip him generously for doing it. I have the two bottles in my back pockets, and a sweatshirt around my waist covering them.

We dance all night, & in the liminal time between opener and headline our group befriends all the people surrounding our space, handing out little florescent orange deli “SPICY” stickers to neighbors, which is something a few matriarchs in our circle started to break the ice in crowds, so that we are now 20 likeminded SPICY people dancing together. People light up when they get a SPICY sticker put on their chest or arm.

Dancing this way with intimate friends every few months is what we all need to recharge the batteries. My t-shirt is soaked in sweat & after the show, we meet new friends at an Irish Pub they knew & Inamorata & I share a Guinness & we sit outside on the picnic benches with tired smiles & satisfied sighs.

On the twenty minute walk home through the active nightlife part of town, we pass a lot of people experiencing homelessness. It’s a strange eclectic mix of a young lively night life interspersed with transient street people. I’m terrible in cities & should not have a pocket full of folding money. City people are calloused to this & ignore the downtrodden, acknowledging them would ruin the ecstatic high of a night out dancing.

The first gentleman is older with gray beard, sitting on his walker with wheels, minding his own business, whatever it may be, staring blankly off past the people walking by, not asking anything of the night. I pause long enough to knock him out of his stupor, make eye contact & shake his hand with a twenty dollar bill. The shift in his eyes, demeanor, and slight curl of a smile, his surprise is well worth the price of admission. “Thanks brother.”

Slim is in a wheelchair camping out under a bus stop shelter, seems a little drugged out, probably in his thirties, reminds me of a former team-mate of mine. I stop to talk to him, he got hit by a car, doesn’t have insurance, I ask if he has family or someone he could call. “Yeah, I got people. I just don’t. Why do you care?” I say “If you were my brother, I wouldn’t want to see you like this spending the night in a bus stop shelter.” I leave him with a handful of cash & tell him to reach out to whoever.

The last encounter is almost an out of body experience, as if I was no longer in control of what was happening. We all are walking through a cobblestoned courtyard with a huge orange steel corporate sculpture adorning the center of it & I’m bringing up the rear as I tend to always do. I pause to take a photo of Inamorata and gang, the only photo I take the whole night, & just before I exit the courtyard I look left & under a small sheltered corridor there are five people sleeping on the ground where the courtyard meets the building. One barefoot person wearing shorts is awake and searching for something in a rucksack. With no conscious decision, I make a sharp left turn to hand this person the remainder of my cash and be gone only to find that this guy is a young hispanic woman not much older than my daughters. It is 2:00am at this point in the night, & neither of us is fully where we should be, both of us surprised by this encounter, & as we make eye contact & communicate softly within the confines of second languages, I with my limited Spanish, she with her limited English, we get by enough to understand each other, but mostly the communication is with eyes & facial cues. I gesture if she wants a hug, she nods, and we hold each other, & I can feel her body convulse, she’s crying into my chest, releasing a little bit of what she’s dealing with. I give her the rest of my bills in my pocket, like I would if she were my own daughter. She thanks me & I say “Si se peuda.”

Not one of these people asked me for money, it was the middle of the night & they were minding their own business. In this horrid system we all find ourselves living under, money can represent energy & can be swapped for goods & services. I worked a Saturday for cash & gave it away to these three people. I don’t know if any of these encounters helped them all that much. Inamorata asked me the next day what I do when I interact with people on the street. I tell her about an Instagram account I used to follow called invisible people, & that seeing people struggling, living on the street makes me deeply uncomfortable, that I don’t want to ignore them, I want to make eye contact, have a genuine interaction, maybe learn a little bit about them. I don’t plan it, whatever happens happens, the money might get wasted, spent on cigarettes, drugs, booze, whatever, who cares, it is just a way to show them some stranger cares about them, or maybe it’s more about making me feel better. I don’t know. It’s like trying to fill a lake with a handful of pebbles.

It’s not an easy thing to encounter or write about. Even when I get home, there is part of me that questions what I did in the span of a twenty minute walk home. We have 2 kids in college, one graduated, one at home, I need to build a wood shed before winter, a hefty property tax is coming up the first week of October. We are by no means crushing it financially, but we have a beautiful home in the NEQ, we are both employed & in good situations, & we have the privilege & safety nets to know we will always have enough & be ok.

It’s an epidemic spreading through the country, enough so that I’ve seen more & more of it seeping into the NEQ, but we have long cold winters so they never stay. It’s a cultural problem & if I think too much about the system we find ourselves under, I get filled with rage, & begin to feel a bit hopeless myself, because what can you do about a corrupt government & money system that spends money on violence instead of care. I apologize for this one, sometimes existence is hard.

I tell Inamorata I try to give them hope, perspective, some of my energy & strength, warmth & love, that the cash is just an easy & useful tool to help ease whatever struggle they’re facing. I ask if she has a problem with me doing it, & she says no, it’s good.

I don’t know.

You are my fellow moss-watchers though, & I mean that in the highest form of compliment. I’ve hermitted for a long time, focusing on family, changing myself & I struggle with the part of me that wants to be seen, understood, appreciated, even admired. I’ve always felt the part of me that needs attention is my weakest. But art & writing does not exist or thrive in a vacuum. So here we are.

Fuck it we ball.

While sailing last week, Inamorata was up on the bow sunning with a close friend, & I hung back with our other close friend, the captain. We had two sails up, sailing with the wind, keeping a steady 7 knots. It was a beautiful day. The captain & I have been friends for about 15 years, & we’ve been to some Wyrd places, & comfortably exist in the realm of the Wyrd. I was perched on one of the high seats in the corner stern, he had a hand on the leather wrapped stainless wheel, leaning in, & we were talking about consciousness, how each of us is a different aspect learning about itself & adding to it. Not a new concept, definitely not new territory.

I’ve traveled far, inner & outer, and I voiced my doubts about whether either of us have uncovered or brought anything new to the game. But that is not right & he reminded me. There will never be another me, another Inamorata, & the four magical young beings we created, guided, & tossed to the world. Our bubble of influence, the reality we help create in the NEQ is more beautiful because we exist.

The captain himself is a fluid being, & like myself could be a plural pronoun, but is more accurately a vibrating verb, buzzing with activity. We have lots of friends flying lots of colors, & have come to the conclusion that defining a person as a this or a that, a gender or a sexual preference limits & who wants to limit? the purpose of this unique & wild life, of consciousness, is to expand.

The captain shared a hypothesis that the Big Bang was not a singular event, but a constant one, that it is always happening, that it is always banging. We enjoyed the thought of it as we effortlessly sliced through the lake.

To describe the captain of this ship is difficult for me, their mind & being is vast, unfathomable, complex, engaging, intricate, delicate, strong, sensitive, intelligent & is one of the few people I’ve come across in my own life who can run the gamut of the whole spectrum of the feminine & the masculine. They are Queer & Wyrd & Beautiful & Strange at times can be too much for people. They have never been too much for me, nor I for them. When I speak of my friend, I’m speaking of myself as well.

To describe myself is even more difficult for me. I’m a moss-watcher, an interrobang‽ I’ve embraced & felt the raw & frightening power of the wild man of the woods & understand my immense responsibility to help take care of the world around me. I’ve doula’d four births & helped pull four beings into the world, taking the easier role of the event. I’ve built 6 homes, one barn. I’ve salvaged one 100+ yr old barn. I’ve won championships that ultimately mean very little & experienced a high enough level of fame to know it’s not what I want. My body contains the otherworldly power & strength of thousands of rugged Nordic & Celtic ancestors & it can be frightening to some & I enjoy that ability, but mostly I’m a gentle giant. For five years I walked this earth missing one of my front teeth, & I miss that version of me. I live with 30,000 acres of a preserved sacred mountain space behind me & need it there to feel myself. I’ve been with Inamorata for 30 years, & have lived without the worries of Love & it being requited, with the reality of Love & not the fantasy. It is just there, as a soft & cozy comfortable home safe to explore & work from. My garden aspires to Zen, full of erratic glacial boulders & pieces of mountain, parts moss covered, orchard containing varieties of fruit, apple trees I’ve grown from seed, there is peach, cherry, plum, pear, persimmon, blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, aronia berry, sea berry, strawberry, there is chestnut, hazelnut, hardy almond, shaggy hickory, all on the younger end of their lives, all planted with these hands. It is an eclectic mix of wild & cultivated, mostly leaning towards wild because of neglect. I want to be known & left alone. I’m Wyrd and Bell Hooks Queer & the NEQ is my place.

We’re road tripping today with friends for a show & a night of sweaty dancing. It’s been longer than I’d like since I last danced & I apologize in advance to the people in the crowd around me, but not really, ∞ & I are our own atmosphere, along with our traveling dance squad, & it gets hot, loose, ecstatic & free. I kinda wish some of you would be there, & I’m sure you know who you are ;)

Dancing‽ (as I wrote that, a pileated woodpecker laughed from the woods‽ as if that isn’t a divine nod) I’m not dead yet.

I found myself on a friend’s sailboat last weekend, there is a letter in the drafts about it that will get scrapped. I’ll Wreck&$alvage some of it, definitely some takeaways that need to be saved, a day so nice, relaxing, beautiful, shared with 3 great friends, Inamorata being one of them, that you almost want to just leave it as a memory to visit in your head, instead of trying to get it down into words.

I don’t like this word, but it suits my current state, ennui (/ŏn-wē′, ŏn′wē/)

on we

• Listlessness and dissatisfaction resulting from lack of interest; boredom.

• A feeling of weariness and disgust; dullness and languor of spirits, arising from satiety or want of interest; tedium.

• A gripping listlessness or melancholia caused by boredom; depression.

I go with the seasons & as the leaves begin to shift making their vibrant last stand before the wind blows them to ground, left to dry, fade, decompose into another layer of humus, to eventually feed all the following springs, so go I.

You have no idea how prolific I’ve been, as an artist, in this one lifetime. Everything I’ve ever created has once been a vibrant leaf turned to compost.

Art is necessary, but like time, is fleeting. Beware the root word of Culture.

Why are we drawn to create something that will outlast us?

This home we built, all the trees & everything I’ve planted, & our 4 kids will (hopefully) outlast me.

My art? or writing? Ephemera, leaves tossed in the fall fueling the next season of creation. This is where I am now.

I’m including a video I made during COVID quarantine times, when I had an active trail camera taking photos and videos of the woods, and our gardens, to catch nocturnal visitors, & see our wild neighbors. Sometimes the wind would trigger it by moving the trees, and by stringing it all together, you could feel the forest breathe, the passing of time on a mountain, enough to shake you outside of time.

My trail camera got wet and shorted out, & I’ve been without one for a few years. Rewatching this video made me miss it, so I purchased one and will continue this.

Hope you’re all faring autumn well.

I do love it, all of it.

JSB (NEQ)

& because of this, my side of the family has gone down memory lane and started spamming old photos to our group chat from that time in our lives, when Inamorata and I were living in Europe (we lived there for 10 years).

There was an early photo of Inamorata and I on a beach, the first time she joined our family for a vacation, we’re both probably 21, baby faced, tan, big fucking grins on our face, still relatively early in our relationship, everything is new, we’re still learning a lot about each other. It’s an awkward photo, taken with a film camera, my arm is hovering just above her shoulder, like I was just about to hold her & pose for a photo, my hand is blurred, in movement, with space between it & her shoulder. She is standing there with her arms at her side, a moment captured before we actually posed.

This is before digital photos, so you only snapped one photo, a roll of film having either 24 or 36 exposures. You would snap the photo, it would sit exposed on film, inside the camera, inside a little plastic roll, until you dropped it off at a camera store to get developed/printed, & only then would you be able to see the final result, this awkward beautiful moment.

You Millennial babies have no idea the magical world we lived in & I’m afraid there is no going back & no way to fully understand what it was like. No endless camera roll, no cloud, no surplus of selfies, no social media, no performative anything.

My son, who we just dropped off for his first year of school, texted the photo to me privately a little bit later, and just wrote, “Rizz”.

I haven’t heard from him since we dropped him off, and that one text made me laugh out loud, like I haven’t laughed in a while. I’m still sorta chuckling about it. I showed it to ∞, and we laughed together.

At the moment of writing this, I’ve inserted the photo with our faces redacted, and I’m wondering if I should keep it or not.

I think I write the NEQ because I’m deeply aware of what we’ve lost, & what we gave up for what we got. I know I live a somewhat isolated, intentionally simple family life on a mountain in the woods, but my perspective & life experience has been unique & valuable in ways a lot of people wouldn’t suspect. I think I’m attempting to retain that memory, to remind you of the life away from the digital internetted world.

Imagine a world without glossy screens, & remove everything in your consciousness that goes with it. Exist without texting, scrolling, or whatever the fuck else you do on these little attention grabbers. It’s a slowed down peaceful place if you can allow it, where you’re free to feel your self, pursue your own interests, but most importantly, a place where you can almost cease to exist.

I think I’m talking about stillness, even as I write this to you, on my laptop, I’m having a moment of it. Peace. Grace, whatever name you give it.

I don’t get it all of the time, but I do dip in and out of it on a daily basis. I do know that I never experience it when the phone is around.

I have a full hour where nothing is expected of me. I have nowhere I need to be, nothing I need to do. Time. What a gift to be allowed to exist outside of time.

I’m a timeless being experiencing time.

Monetizing time is the greatest weapon of the modern world.

I’m going outside. We have thousands of crickets and grasshoppers jumping around right now, with the occasional frog or toad.

Thanks for reading, esp. you quiet lurkers ;)

We dropped off our oldest son for his first year of college yesterday. It was me, Inamorata, and his two older sisters. They wanted to come and experience it with him. They both leave for Europe within the week.

Our youngest son, who just turned 16 & gets his drivers license soon, stayed home to work his first day at his first job, in the dish pit with Cliff, at a very high end local restaurant. He drove himself, illegally, to a safe parking space, and walked into town. We live on the edge of police range (which is why we live here), and once you cross the river, you enter their domain, so he parked on the other side of the bridge and parked the car. That place is our park and ride/meeting space in town, “at the bridge” is in our family lexicon.

Our children are growing up, creating, & navigating their own lives, & our responsibilities as parents are slowly becoming less and less. After 22 years of full-on parenting 4 kids, have to say it feels nice. It’s bittersweet, for sure, but god it feels great to have raised four amazing beautiful people.

I can’t talk about my daughters without bragging. They’re everything you want your daughters to be. They love their younger brother so much, when we got to his dorm, they unpacked his stuff for him, taking clothes out of his duffel bag & hanging the nice clothes on hangers for him, and placing the other stuff in drawers, while I was busy raising his bed to maximize storage space beneath it.

He has known his dorm-mate since they were babies. I said this to Inamorata, about how awesome it is, & she said she first met his mom at a local children’s space in town when they were both in their third trimester, & these two boys were both in utero. They were instant friends and would belly bump when they saw each other. We’ve been sharing photos of the two boys when they were kids all weekend.

I love thinking about pregnant Inamorata, what a fucking experience, talk about a woman who was born to do it, someone who made it look easy. I witnessed her body do incredible magical things. She was pregnant and/or breastfeeding for at least 8 years straight, that’s insane. The kids used to play with the stretched out skin of her belly & with two hands bring it all together, call it her “bagel” with the belly button making the hole.

If you saw her now standing next to her four kids, who are all over 6’, (even the girls, ∞ is 5’4”), at first you would not believe she created & birthed them, and then, once you realized the truth behind it, the immensity of the task, the innate radiance & ease beaming from this woman, you would begin to recognize that you are in the presence of divinity, & the adept would, in reverence, silently bow in their mind’s eye to this Goddess in the flesh & like us all, become a devotee.

I do not put her on a pedestal. I do, on occasion, place myself at her feet.

She is not perfect. She chews with her mouth open. Whenever we broach uncomfortable subjects, she’ll go silent. She is often late & snores when she sleeps on her back. She’ll rarely make it through a movie without falling asleep.

This is really the extent of her imperfections though, it’s a short list.

I’m very aware of my own short-comings and flaws, and I know she has to deal with a helluva lot more annoyances than I do. I have ongoing projects and experiments everywhere, you have no idea, it would drive any normal person mad. I occasionally push my edges and get to some strange places. I make crazy life decisions and she trusts them. I collect tools and materials, and the basement/studio/workshop is filled with them. I have stared long & hard into the abyss, may have even taken a few years doing it, am aware of the darkest dark, & there exists within me a melancholic core I try to keep hidden & she puts up with it all, has loved me the same through it all. I’m also being kind to myself with this list.

We’re best friends & we’ve been through some shit together. Our shared perception of the world & our place in it is beautiful. Our love, commitment & fierce devotion to our four children is otherworldly. We are vigilant about protecting our tight circle & the sanctuary we’ve built, & continue to build, for our kids & potential grandkids. We intentionally isolate ourselves because most of the world is mad, but we participate & do our part inside our local community. We protect each other’s time & solitude. We are both wild beasts playing house.

I’m always reluctant to share these things, but I want to remind everyone that true love exists & it’s a lot of work, & it’s not even about you & what you want or need. I think that is a very young version of Love. I’m barely the person I used to be, thank goddess. I’m barely a person these days.

Fuckit, lobbing this one out there & onto the pile.

Grateful.

The first year inamorata and I began to orbit each other, her parents bought this beach house, a place with history and magic, a triple water view, small pond, to a larger pond, to the largest (salt water pond), & somehow, in the back yard, there stands a 100 yr old Dawn Redwood. The main house itself is over 100 years old, but has about 2-3 funky different additions to it, added throughout the years, nothing is straight, the ceilings are low, and the doorways are even lower. I bump my head at least twice a visit.

This is a tight old modest beach community, no place left to build, & no houses on the market. Houses tend to stay inside the families & have been in the families for generations. You might think old money, but that’s not correct with this place. It’s soulful people with vision who bought there early & knew the value of the place, kept it humble. It’s the beach version of the NEQ, maybe the SEQ.

So for 30 years, we’ve been coming here, visiting her parents.

Nothing has changed and everything has changed, the gravel driveway, since they cannot drive anymore, is overgrown with grass, which I like, but they cannot stand. The two of them, ∞’s parents, my in-laws, have changed quite a bit & are so old & frail now it’s as if they're under house arrest.

They are not beach people. But they bought the beach house so that their kids and grandkids would visit. It was a good plan and it has worked. It’s sad, but I don’t think we would visit them nearly as much if they lived in Kansas.

Amfortas woke this morning fully dressed, as if he were heading into the office, button down shirt tucked into creased khakis, with a braided leather belt and his boat shoes laced up. He is a very strange man & now with aphasia/dementia is incapable of speaking & sometimes (most of the time) stares off into space with an innocent look of confusion on his face.

The Amfortas I knew from ten years ago would detest this version of himself.

He is the reason I started drinking spirits. He is from that generation who has cocktail hour every day, a controlled alcoholic, nothing all day, but once 5:00 PM rolls around the bar is open, 2-6 drinks, depending on how the evening goes. He’s a pusher too, always opening bottles of wine, always making sure your glass is full. I’ve seen Inamorata put her hand over her wine glass numerous times with her father getting visibly annoyed that she’s done drinking for the night. He’ll do the same to me when I’ve had enough.

Cocktail hour was a whole show for him too and he had fun with it, sometimes wearing a red velvet dinner jacket, serving drinks on a ceramic tray with depictions of lemons & sterling silver edging. He’d ask for orders, make the drinks and serve them to his guests. He loved when people imbibed & I’ll admit, it was fun for a while.

There was a liquor store halfway between our places and I’d buy a different Scotch every time we came down to visit. We’d try it together and play cribbage. Alcohol allowed us to reach common ground quickly, otherwise there’d be a huge awkward wall between us. He and I are polar opposites, which is probably why Inamorata is with me. He is cold, unaffectionate (king of the awkward hug until around COVID when he stopped hugging everyone altogether, everyone except Inamorata), he talks slow, loves to be the center of attention & command the room/conversation, but is an absolute bore who thinks he’s the shit.

Our relationship really shifted when I stopped drinking & stopped playing the drinking game with him. I had taken a deep dive into spirits, distilling them at home, learning more about it, even working in a distillery for 5 years, & just being around that atmosphere, I came out of it all disillusioned, changed. Alcohol has it’s place and use for sure, but mostly it’s just abused. It’s pretty much poison, and I’m sure it’s a huge contributing factor to Amfortas’ current state.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe the woman I love so much came from these two toxic people. We haven’t even mentioned her mother. When you’re not part of the family, they’re great & a lot of fun, but when you actually have to develop a relationship with them, you realize how hurt, damaged, and toxic they are.

It’s a shame really, Love is easy & shouldn’t be so much work, but you know that saying, and I’ve found it extremely true existing with this family for 30 years, that the ones who are hardest to Love are the ones who need it the most.

I’ve done my best & changed in uncomfortable ways towards them, & have learned to love them in my own way, but some people are just calcified & incapable of changing, stuck in their own fragile worlds.

Stuff.

She is more nostalgic with stuff than he, but she has lived an insane life, almost a few more lives than he has. Hers is an insane story, we shared a lot of it with her, having raised our four kids alongside her fours kids. There aren’t a whole lot of people having four kids these days.

Her oldest died in a tragic accident, her then husband never recovered, spiraling into a drunken, drugged, transient existence, they divorced, he struggled to live, it was hard to witness, she remarried and then in her late forties decided to have another child (her fifth) with her new husband, who we loved immediately.

I don’t take sharing this bit of their lives lightly. It’s heavy shit and I’m intentionally not dipping into it. I think part of this history is why they’re packing up and traveling about as far physically as you could possibly go while still living in the US.

I help move two of the heaviest pieces of furniture I’ve ever lifted. I could feel my spine compress and after we get it to the back of the box truck, I realize I’m moving physical metaphors, these bits of symbolic stuff we keep and carry with us. Imagine the weight of a piece of furniture that contains the loss of a child.

I love these two like a brother & sister. I feel this way about almost everyone or at least try to approach my relationships in this way, everyone as extended family. It’s not always easy to do, but it helps me exist. We do keep the circle tight though, you have to.

At the end of the long day of moving, a violent thunderstorm rolls in over the mountain, we sit on their porch drinking light beers and watch it until we move inside to eat dinner, which is a mishmash of fresh veggies from the garden to whatever was left in their freezer, Dino-nuggets and tater-tots.

The storm blows over fast and after dinner we move to the fire pit to burn a few remaining items, one is a little rocking chair that belonged to her oldest, the one who died in the accident. This is a closing ceremony, but also a new beginning.

Monday at work is tough for me, low energy, a struggle. I think I’m still carrying some of that weight. I’m excited for them, and we talk about visiting them in their new place, but honestly don’t know when or how we’re going to make it out there.

This is more brief than it should’ve been and I’m sharing it quicker than I should, just getting it down and out so I too can release it.

We’re going to miss them.

Love, Love, Love,

Jack

my days are filled with a fragile magic I keep secret
today I summit the mountain barefoot
this is not something you just do
but something you work towards
slowly seasoning your feet to handle it
a half million nerves feeding me
myriads of changing textures & temperatures
one step to the next
toes gripping gneiss & schist, pinching ferns
through streams, puddles, mud & moss
arches fully engaged supporting the load
of this magnificent frame
walking mostly on the balls with little heel
realigning vertebrae, waking new muscles
new nerve endings feeding new neurons
but really its not new
your body just remembers your childhood form
back to when you played hard all day
foot pads and tendons built for
running hard on hard ground
crossing streams, cold water relief
the rubber soled will never feel
i find a small sharp edged piece of quartz
put it in my mouth & suck on it
trying to only nose breath
for a while, but can only do short spurts

on the trail, at the crowded summit
naked feet draw more attention than I care for
the ranger monitoring behavior at the top
says, “bare feet, wicked”
not going to act like it is easy
or for everyone, it’s not
the last mile is tough
my feet need a break from the little stones
a muscle in my quads, near my knees
is screaming at me, on the edge of cramping
my left arch is bruised a little from a misstep

words will never touch the intimacy
between me and this mountain

Our oldest set-up our family tent on the front deck, moved a futon mattress inside, and made her own guest cottage. Respect.

It has been hectic here. Inamorata and I raided our friend’s garden, the ones who sold their house and are moving to the other coast. I had a five gallon bucket, a spade and a hand trowel, dug up thyme, sage, oregano, garlic chives, a few irises. I made a mess of the thyme because it was so woody, it was hard to separate, and it looked like a chunk was missing instead of its usual rounded bush. I think this made our friend a little sad. I felt bad and apologized, she hugged me and said it’s fine, that it doesn’t matter and that she was happy that some of her garden will continue in ours.

∞ dug up some beats, cut some salad greens, grabbed a few zucchini, pulled a few carrots. Our friend is going to have a party before they leave, where everyone has to go to her garden, grab whatever they can, go back to the house and fix something with it.

She gave us her ex-husband’s (he passed recently, and she has remarried) Les Paul guitar and Fender amp, for safe-keeping, we’re care-takers of it until her oldest son is ready for it. He is still on the east coast but doesn’t have room for it, and she doesn’t want to lug it across the country.

When we left the house, and were a little ways down the road, she texted us back to have a drink on her front porch. We sat, shared stories, and watched hummingbirds get territorial taking turns on the one feeder.

A tripod hug and forehead kisses goodbye until the party. We promised to make a care package for their classic camper they’re taking on their cross country voyage. Some items we’re thinking about; a dashboard talisman (one you give offerings to), a small attachable stained glass window, a flask of our moonshine, a jar of our raspberry/blueberry jam, and a lighter (one of the human-kind’s greatest inventions).

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

I sometimes feel like a beautiful fool.

Last night, our whole family went to a local art show I’ve participated in that happens around this time every year. It’s in a huge old local barn and is for locals of all ages, the art is an eclectic mishmash of all mediums, shapes, and sizes. At times it can feel like a high school art show, but there are lots of gems scattered throughout. I put in two of my paintings.

There were two fires burning in the outside fires pits, woodsmoke in the air, the sun was setting behind the mountain, the invisible curator was showing off again, and I snapped a photo of our kids together on the deck before we circled around the dying fire, almost like we were holding vigil. I didn’t think that at the time, but now that I’m writing about it, we all just stood around the fire, staring into its embers, enjoying its warmth, avoiding its smoke, not much was said, “caveman tv”.

I have to keep these short, because I really only write early in the morning before work, even now, the minutes are dwindling.

When we returned from the art show, we talked briefly about our experience of the Eclipse a few years ago, how the totality just happened to be where we live, in our backyard, how we sat on our deck and watched it, trying to describe the feeling of it. One of our daughters was playing music, she cued Billy Idol’s Eyes Without a Face during the total eclipse, forever altering my relationship with that song, it’s beautiful. Inamorata said it was one of the more memorable and magical experiences of her life, mine as well, (not including the birth of our 4 kids). I tried to describe the sense of time during it, how you knew it was limited, how you only had one chance to experience it, perceive it, take it all in, just a little of 3 minutes, and then it’s over, and the sun returns.

This is how life is.

We try our best.

I’m with four young men (boys) in the South, two are high school graduates heading to college in the fall, one is 16 going to be a senior in high school, and the other one is 15 heading into his junior year. Two of them are my sons.

Thunderstorms mess with the schedule of things, so on the last day down here, we find ourselves with a full day of leisure. I take them to the pool for a bit to cool off and so they can use their vouchers for lunch. Each kid received $60 worth of vouchers to use at this high end resort, basically each business card is worth $20. They each order chicken fingers with fries and a coke.

I throw out the possibility of seeing a matinee of Nolan’s Odyssey, and they’re aware of it because of the star-studded cast, but ask me what it’s about. I give them the gist. I get two questions, “Is it rated R?” & “Is it an action movie?” I say yes to both, and leave them to decide, thinking they don’t want to go.

I did read the Odyssey to my kids when they were younger, the girls were older and benefitted more from it than the boys did. I did it as an experiment to see if they could visualize the poetry and keep up with the story-telling. On my own end, I was surprised to feel the immense difference between speaking the story into existence versus reading it silently in my head. And I know the girls loved when I read it to them, the boys usually just fell asleep.

We end up going and it’s a nice theater down here, the ones with movable chairs, footrests, and the surround sound is almost overwhelming, which works extremely well with the soundtrack and sound design of the film.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

It’s two days later. I drove the 900 miles. I’m awake before the sun, still tired, need to head to work here soon. Our oldest is home, all of our kids are at home now, at least for a few weeks. It’s nice.

Last night we pulled out old albums and we all looked at baby photos of our two girls, then we celebrated our oldest daughter’s birthday. It’s nice to have her home again, for however long she might be here.

Being a father of four is a strange experience, especially as 3 of them are transitioning into independence and adulthood, whatever the fuck that means? figuring out & living their own stories.

Back to the Odyssey.

I read the Robert Fagle translation to the kids. I just ordered Emily Wilson’s and will soon read hers, which from the sounds of it, excites me.

I really enjoyed the film as did the four boys, one of them said, ““when odysseus strings his bow and plucks it at the end, that’s aura.” Another argued that the last scene was unrealistic, no way one man could take on and survive that many men. I attempted to explain the difference in men. One war veteran with training, experience, tested in battle, tested by the gods, surviving the Trojan war, all the trials and tribulations of his odyssey home, in the end fighting for and protecting everything he loves versus 30 soft scheming, cheating leeches. Odysseus with a bow every time. This is beside the point.

As soon as Odysseus leaves home (Penelope) he has lost his way.

This song is what? 5000 years old?

The gist? Fuck war, & focus on Love.

I am Odysseus deciding to chase the sun with Penelope.

Inamorata forever.

Two of these young men are my sons, the other two I’ve known since they were little. They’ve had two practice days in the heat, the tournament starts tomorrow. Competition is a transformative mirror.

I went shopping tonight and bought eggs, butter, bacon, sausage, English muffins, and orange juice, letting them sleep in and going to make them a huge breakfast.

I’ve been out in the hot wind, the 102 heat, soaking my shirt with sweat, skin glistening in the shade standing still, on my feet for 4 hours, to finally sit down, feeling like drugs, a spirit rising from my body, sweat vaporizing, an offering to the crows perched in the loblolly pine canopies.

I’m good, only slightly delirious, existing this week as a man in service, wondering while I walk, reflecting on the reflection I’m projecting, all too aware of the humbling experiences waiting for my imagined greatness to shine forth.

A recurring conversation with multiple people, about losing all of your possessions…if unseen, no problem, to the wind, but if you encounter that sentimental value, the facing of it makes it harder to let go.

Deep down I’m vapor, stuck in a very large solid body, who owns a lot of tools, books, materials, an artist needs shit at hand, to keep his/her head and hands busy. Stillness is nice and has its uses, but ora et labora.

I met a man yesterday who has a phobia of bridges. We were talking about road trips and he has a problem driving because he cannot drive across bridges where he can see the water. “It’s a thing, really. I either have a desire to drive off the bridge or a fear of doing it.” When he drives, his wife stays alert enough for bridges and then he pulls over so she can drive across for him. There is a metaphor in there for their relationship I’m sure. Just met him though.

The South is not for me. Fuck air conditioning, wallow in your humid heat, build to deal with it. At the grocery store you can buy 45 plastic bottles of water for $5.45, wrapped in plastic, and these are flying off the shelves. I try to stay positive, but at the pace we’re going, we’re fucked. The animated intelligence of Earth will navigate this nonsense, and it’ll be us who’ll have to navigate it’s balancing solutions, harsh though they may be.

I’m on my third cup of coffee, brewed from coffee already sealed in a filter pack which was sealed in a plastic foil pack. It was already in this condo. In another hour I have to cook up a huge breakfast for these guys before they face the oppressive midday heat and each play their own games.

I’ve been a player of games my whole life, made a great living off of it for a while, and I need to start leaning more that way, sorta strayed from that path for a bit, or more aptly put, focused more on teaching kids how to play. What I’m doing here is play.

My mother called me yesterday, a close friend of hers had passed away. She is now entering that stage of life where people start physically disappearing. I just read her friend’s obituary, and without sharing too much, fuck, what a life she lived. I knew her growing up but sadly never knew her as an adult.

Death is a friend, always present, each day a gift, trample your troubles, your trials and tribulations, show up and play to the best of your ability.

Time to cook some eggs and bacon for these young men.

In a life as busy as mine, I write when I have the time.

This substack is just an experimental playground. I do not take it or myself too seriously, I do not have a plan, I do not expect any paid subs, I do not expect anyone to read.

You are the void I throw these letters to.

We go to an intimate party this weekend with about 10 friends who we’ve known a long time, people we’ve shared extreme wyrd with. I arrive in my board shorts and jump in the pool immediately. The host is 12 feet underwater, attached with a twenty foot hose to an air compressor on the edge of the pool. He had rigged this compressor with an attachment, and another friend is sitting on the edge next to the compressor with a DMT vape pen, discharging it into his air line.

Anyone else have a friend who is constantly chasing the dragon?

When he comes up for air, he hugs me in the shallow end and adorns me with the weight belt, the vest with filter and mouthpiece, face mask, and gives me a quick lesson with the scuba gear. I drop below the waterline in the salt water pool and against instinct take my first inhale underwater, exhaling bubbles to the surface.

I stay underwater for about ten minutes, inhaling oxygen only. Inamorata dives underwater a few times to give me high tens, eyes goggled, a pleasure to watch her tanned bikini’d body swim and move in the sun streaked crystal blue pool.

She tries it when I’m done. I help her with the belt but it’s too big for her, so it droops around her waist. I dive to give her a few underwater high tens, but mostly hang out where the deep end meets the shallow with my head above water.

The sun begins to dip, the pool party moves inside, and after hot dog dinners, some dancing and karaoke, I notice the DMT vape pen just sitting there on the counter. Having always been curious, and never having the opportunity, I ask the host if I could try. He sits me in a comfy chair for the first pull, but immediately I want to go outside, away from the party, so I walk the path through the wildflowers, past their backyard gardens, and enter the woods on the edge of their property.

I find an old maple to lean on hanging at the edge of a drop-off standing in a mossy grove of hemlocks, maple, and birch. I’m barefoot, with sweats and a comfortable hoody on, because mosquitoes are out and about. I do not know what to expect, but I engage and enjoy the experience, the trees dance in a bright hued psychedelic miasma, and the bark & moss elves beckon.

Holding the pen in the woods, with the sound of the party in the distance I begin to feel like a rat in one of those push button brain stimulation reward experiments, hitting the button, chasing the dragon, and with my first experiments with Dimethyltryptamine, the spirit molecule, concluded I exit the woods and rejoin the party. I’m reluctant to write too much about it, am even trepidatious about writing as much as I have about it.

I’m not done with my explorations with it. I’ll revisit in my own time, when I have it. This party is not the time or place for it.

The next day, Inamorata and I meet another couple on a put-in at the river, friends we’ve known a long time, friends who have sold their house and are moving across the country. Our time together is limited. We have our tubes, and we’re floating a stretch of beautiful water, hidden from most who live here, known to a few. The four of us, at the pace of the river, spend 3 hours floating in conversation, silence, reverence, and love, for our friendship, and our time together, slightly sad that in a months time the physical distance between us will have grown by the whole country.

They invite us to visit their garden and dig up perennials and flowers, whatever we wish. She insists on it, and wants part of her garden to become part of ours.

Our life is unique, beautiful and full of love. Do not take that I share it lightly. My chest is full of light that escapes through my eyes, sometime I feel projecting the reality I see dance in front of me. My heart pounds with love, pumping life through these limbs until the moment it decides not to. I still have a lot of work to do, so I imagine it’s a ways off.

In an attempt to protect this sanctuary we’ve built on a side of the mountain in the Queendom, I feign anonymity, but I feel you few who have read these letters long enough, know me well as anyone. I do enjoy the dance.

What is a name anyway? We’re each a fiction we continually create anew.

I’m road-tripping today, away from the NEQ for at least a week. I doubt I’ll write about it. We’ll see.

Garden to garden. Bird to bird.

Love, love, love,

J

My youngest son is still sleeping in the hotel room and I want to let him get rest. We drove down here yesterday for a golf tournament. You need to qualify to play in this tournament, they set up 3 separate tournaments throughout the state, and made cuts in each to reach the current field playing in this tournament, 110 of the best golfers in the state, with my son being one of the youngest, he’s 15 years young and competing with grown-ass men who have been playing their whole lives.

After the 1st day, he’s middle of the pack, dancing on the cut line. I’m proud of him. It is a silly absurd game, but it’s more. I’m not going to take this time to write in defense of golf. I understand why people hate it. But there are plenty of reasons to love it, the Scots inventing it being one.

There was construction on the way down, which made us slightly later than I would’ve like, so I found some time portals.

It’s a helluvanexperience to parent a child. He is our 4th and last. Three of our other kids will have flown the nest, off exploring and creating their own lives.

People think we’re insane for having 4 kids. They’re not wrong. It’s a lot of thankless invisible work, a true labor of unconditional love, wouldn’t change a thing, and neither would Inamorata.

I’m a tool for my ancestors, a tool for the animating force of la madre naturaleza, all of it beyond my control, just a floating bit of flotsam dancing, spinning in the swirls and vortices on the eddies edge of a generational river.

We are breeders, Inamorata and I, a unique electro-magnetic field that exists between us only, drawing us together to create these 4 magical beings, & continues to draw us together, an unspoken, coded ancestral responsibility for survival, genetics too beautiful and unique to allow to die off, helpless to do anything but its will.

I remember when our 4th was born. We were in the middle of building our house, I was at the library grabbing some internet when I got a message from Inamorata that her water broke. I rushed home, rushed her to the hospital, the midwives got her ready & on the bed, I was in position prepared to catch/pull, a midwife and a nurse over each of my shoulders looking on, the first contraction came, Inamorata pushed, the first contraction ended, Inamorata asked the midwife, “Can I keep pushing?” She looked puzzled, “Uh, sure.” Inamorata took a deep breath, held it, made some grunting noises, & pushed the kid out so quickly, he came out with yonic canal skid marks on his forehead (conehead). I grabbed a shoulder to help guide and catch, but with minimal force. The midwife turned to the nurse and said, “That’s how you do it.”

We have two years left with him at home, our last kid. He’s unique to say the very least. We’re going to make the most of our time with him.

Having/raising kids comes from a love greater than a love for yourself, but that’s not even right. They are a magical mix of yourself and your mate. It’s a wild experience, something that has taught me more about myself than I think any other experience would have.

I need to end this. There is plenty more to say on the subject, endless really.

I’m not one for celebrating nationalism or patriotism in this way or at all. I have conflicted feelings for this American experiment, and definitely feel we’ve lost our way, if we honestly ever had it. We lived the ex-pat life for a decade before moving back to this mountain to raise our kids, and I sometimes wonder if raising them under a different culture would’ve been better.

We have no real plans today, which is why I’m starting this letter, just documenting what will actually happen for us on this momentous day.

Pausing here to start my day, please enjoy a line of Infiniti symbols to mark it.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

One of the first things I do is cut a handful of lupine stalks. I walk down the driveway tossing them like candy from a parade equally to both sides.

I don’t really know how it starts but Inamorata and I clean house. It’s the deep cleansing kind, neglected corners, under furniture that hasn’t moved in years, plants move outside and are replanted, contractor bag in the middle of the space accepting all garbage, a cardboard box accepts no longer wanted books. We’re brutal with the purge and organizing. We both have our own spray bottles and paper towels, we take turns using the shop vac.

Inside one box under the desk, I find two gallon jars filled with ice cider from 2022, where one winter I waited for a thaw, picked the apples still hanging on the trees, little hermetically skin sealed fermented juice bombs. I did it with an older friend who planted his paradise orchard in the 70s. I should write about him and that place.

I grab a stainless straw and taste the ice cider. It’s bone dry and mildly mineral sweet, hard to describe, very drinkable which surprises me. I bring up a few bottles to bottle it, but it never gets done, instead it all heads downstairs to the lab for another time.

Another gallon jar hanging out was a special collection of coffee grounds and eggshells, which was a forgotten experiment, and turned into a slimy, smelly, anaerobic mess. I take this outside, empty it all into a five gallon bucket using a broken stick, add lots of water from the hose, and dump the whole thing into the new compost experiment. I also add a few old SCOBYs from spent Kombucha cultures to the mix.

I take the olive tree outside, remove the old soil and wood sorrel growing in its top layer, clean out its root ball and place it back into the pot with new compost. I put all of the indoor trees outside on the deck, and dream of a greenhouse. There is a neglected glass jar with glass lid filled with soil and aquarium rocks, a former terrarium I gifted one of my daughters when she was younger, now dead and dirty. I clean it out, add some soil to the mix, pick some Irish moss, creeping thyme and other mosses from the moss garden and add them carefully. We’ll see how this one goes, when I added the extra soil I noticed a small earthworm among the mix and a few other bugs, so we have inhabitants in this little self-contained ecosystem.

My daughter wakes, we light a candle for the bear and do tarot readings to mark the 250 yr occasion. Mine is below, if any of you readers have insights on this, would love to hear thoughts in the comments. Inamorata gets her own later.

I have a succulent growing in a temporary pot, grown from a cutting I took at the coffee cafe my daughter baristas. I do this frequently. I usually always carry a Swiss army knife and just make cuttings casually and slip them into my pocket. This never really harms the mother plant, and it’s an easy way to grow your own indoor garden.

This one has been growing for half a year, and has outgrown its current situation, so I break it up more and repot it in the shape of a pentagram with the main bit in the middle and add little bits of Irish moss. I don’t know why, it seems appropriate. I’m looking forward to seeing how this grows. If you haven’t guessed it by now, I’m constantly running experiments, time marking projects everywhere, playing with plants, liquids, materials, creating gardens, shrines, objects, painting, drawings, photographs, all which help me exist.

Check out the little white Irish moss flowers.

My first floor desk accumulates all of the stacks of books from the floor and I realize I need to create another shelf, and start moving towards altering the current space more. Our youngest son (he’s 15) needs a ride so we pick him up and drop him off to his next thing, and we’re about to head to the distillery to meet some friends and listen to some live music, then head to a bbq party with some other friends, when our daughter who is home for the summer calls from the other side of the mountain. She has been day drinking at the parade, hung out at a pool in the sun all afternoon, sounds tuckered out and needs a ride home, so we turn around and go pick her up. We’re a little disappointed to miss our time together, and time with friends, but this is who we are, this is what we signed up for, and honestly neither of us minds that much. We pick her up, grab some take out and enjoy the rest of the evening together in a very clean house.

Thanks for reading.

Enjoy this fortune.

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