mad red clouds

If I knew why I wrote about all of this, I probably wouldn’t have written it. I’d be there already

If I could return to the womb I would.

The world started with a heart and a mountain and in that first beat time stopped. It was the closest we got to heaven.

Some mornings when I wake up and get out of bed I can feel the ghost of it on my back and it makes me feel like Atlas struggling under the weight of the sky. If we are all Titans, who did we fight? What did we lose? Is life our punishment? Is our self awareness?

I carry my mountain with me, imagining the peaks and caverns and little streams that run down my back. No one can see me carrying my mountain. It is my life. It is everything and nothing.

Jack Kerouac said that we are everything and nothing. That we are the golden eternity. One of my teachers told me I was the “golden eternity” a couple of weeks ago.

You said that Jack Kerouac was an asshole. I didn’t talk to you for three days. The weight lessened.

If anybody could tell me about the Golden Eternity it would have been my uncle. My Grandma carries his ashes around in a teddy bear. I’m not certain, but I think she knows too.

I never really knew my uncle, but I’d like to think he’d believe in spirit animals. He wouldn’t be the asshole my mom says he was. He’d say, “I don’t pretend to know anything about nothing,” and chuckle. 

He’d tell me that in the beginning we were all animals but different than the animals of today. That we were dire wolves and short faced bears before there were knives and guns, before there was war. There were chorus frogs, whistling hares, and coydogs. We were coydogs. 

“We were golden bears,” he’d say.

We would explore the world together.

I know a bear, a fox, and a wolf, and they are all my friends.

When I dream of animals, I dream that they are attacking me.

I dream of wolves and of cats. I dream of cats mostly. I dream of bobcats and of mountain lions. A mountain lion is supposed to represent danger, aggression and raw emotions.

When I go hiking with my parents in the Appalachians we always joke about mountain lions. My dad will chuckle and explain how they track people and strike, even though we already know. I will carry a walking stick just in case.

In my dreams I always break their jaws with my hands. In my dreams I always kill them. The bobcat I killed, I had to kill twice. 

I have a tattoo of a deer skull with roses on my right arm. It is now my favorite part of my body.

When I was younger, my spirit animal was a mountain lion. It meant that I was stubborn and would stand behind my beliefs no matter what and that I was happy.

The Zunis charged the mountain lion with the duty of carrying messages from humans to the higher spirits because of his power. He was the link to Mother Earth and Father Sky. He was happiness. He was strength. 

He knew about the mountains on our backs.

When I first started college, my spirit animal changed to a sparrow and then to a deer. The power of deer is supposed to be in love.  It’s in gentleness, grace, and appreciation for nature and for balance. 

This past December I saw four bald eagles. One flew right over me at a big intersection back home. I started to doubt the power of the deer.

I like to pretend that the four bald eagles I saw were a present from Saint Therese, a little acknowledgement of her eternal love.

Saint Therese, above us all, showers us with roses from her gardens in the sky. She pours them on all, from the beggar and the bum to me in my humble apartment to you, whoever you are. I don’t pretend to know anything about nothing.

She loved us all.

My favorite thing about Buddhism is all the pretty words: samsara, nirvana, satori, sandhyabasha.

I believe in karma and I believe in knocking on wood. I believe in finding lucky pennies. 

In New York they have something called “sidewalk diamonds” because of all the cars that get broken into. When the sun rises and the light catches the broken glass it shines like diamonds on the pavement. 

My old roommate got her car broken into twice, because she was careless. She lost 500 bucks once that way. They took her purse. She deserved it. 

I had the toughest year of my life last year. I spent most of it wondering what I had done to earn me such bad karma. I narrowed it down to two possibilities.

It was either because of my habit of turning found pennies from tails to heads, that way somebody else would get the good luck and I would absorb the bad. 

Or because I was such a heartbreaker in middle school.

When I grow up I want to be a mountain man.

And live in an A-frame house in the middle of the woods.

I will no longer be afraid or feel heavy. I will find a home for my mountain.

I will spend my time drinking tea and making friends with the animals.

I will find satori.

The Last Real Cute Thing That Happened to Me

Chest pressed to chest, coarse hairs tickling my cheek. The soft rhythmic voice of his heart. Thump. Thump. Thump. Head rising and lowering with inhale and exhale. A sigh and I roll over into the sheets, my back cushioned by his small twin-sized mattress.

“No - stay here” he says, pulling me back onto him.

“James,” I sigh, inklings of frustration appearing in my voice. “I have homework to do. And so do you. We’ll be up all night if we don’t start soon.”

“stay here - just for a little longer. Pretend I’m an island, a small island, and you can’t swim, so you have to hold on tightly. You’re scared because you can’t see the shore, you can’t, so you stay out of fear of not making it, with your legs hanging off the edge into the water.”

“So I’m scared of the big bad homework sharks, huh?”

“Not just the homework sharks, all of the sharks of life.”

“But that’s such a terrible reason to stay.”

I feel the pressure rise in his chest as he cranes his head up to look down at me.

“Out of fear of not making it to the shore? I know - that’s chapter one. Chapter two: you fall for the island,” I hear the smile in his voice say.

Another long sigh, we both know he’s won. I let myself go and feel the warmth between us, aligning my arms with his, allowing my head to fall back down on his chest. Cool blue sheets entangle my legs, caressing them. A rise and fall of his chest and the water is lapping at my bare legs, at my feet. The water ebbs and flows to a light thump, thump, thump.

Ohio, I hate you.

The best kind of love can be found in Ohio. Midwestern love in the little midwestern towns hidden off of one way roads nestled between rolling fields of corn, wheat, and soybeans. The long drive from Virginia to Ohio will always be worth it - once I hit the mountains in West Virginia and round one of the many mountain bends past the capitol building in Charleston with it’s golden dome, I know the homeland is coming with it’s cheese coneys and those hugs from my grandparents. Time slows down on that side of the Appalachians and the people age well like wine outside of dirty, grimy, alive Cincinatti with its one way streets and abandoned brick buildings that roll up and down with the hills like nowhere else in my mind. Those ancient apartment buildings on the real side of town where people live hard and live true because it’s all they know, they spring up above you into the sky with their quaintness. I remember visiting my Uncle Donnie - Betty Rambo, the dragqueen of town, holed up in his own little brick apartment; I’d walk across his back with my little child’s feet and sit on my grandma’s lap watching his performances - waiting, yearning impatiently in the shadows of the gay bar until the moment I could run up into the light and put a dollar bill in the fishbowl of a tip jar years before he died of AIDS. I remember him in the ivy, the broken doors and windows, the old fashioned gas stations, and those railroad tracks I’ve stumbled down daydrunk with friends, down to the creek and the Mountain Laurel the American Beech the Sugar Maple sundrenched and satisfied in the slow songs of small town life where there’s nothing to do but make trouble.