Fleakins' Journal
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Fleakins' LiveJournal:
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| Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 | | 5:07 pm |
i feel inspired and rich. i was just walking down the Broadway in just south of downtown denver and there was so much activity, so many stories moving parallel on the faces of passersby, in the dimples of the smiling friends eating ice cream in the streetside ice cream parlor, in the slump of the smoking bartender on a break outside the bar, in the honk and fuzz of the traffic cars and chalk full buses, in the weighted shoulders of the man on the corner requesting change. life in an industrialized human world is slanted unfairly towards the mundane. shoe boutique shops, adult video clinics, the very many signs and lights and hard directive stares of forced instruction. people for the most part take offense to unsolicited advice from other humans, but we're made numb by cement commands. the trees in cities are almost always implants. they thrive though because they were put there to thrive. the honey locust with its efficient photosynthesis does well beneath the sidewalk. it lives well among exhaust and cut-off fragments of debate... laughter, curses, silent awkward gaits. i like our urban centers. my roommate K in Arizona used to tell me i had a demon inside myself. her friend and my acquaintance S agreed. i had a demon inside. i don't now disagree. i would have liked a more Jungian vocabulary... complex perhaps. but somehow now as i write this in the Denver public library i feel the demon has been excorcised, the complex plucked from its cage and shown, on the demon's own terms, the technicalities of its torment. i felt thirsty and didn't process the reason for the thirst. now and here i feel quenched and weighted evenly.... like my own inner scales have been recalibrated. | | Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 | | 11:22 am |
On the bus, sunlight fucks the pages of the big fat book on my lap. I am looking at the letters, not connecting them to words, so darling as the rumble hum of bus puts past this soft blue space of South Seattle. The corners of my eyes exact images of passing trees and flowers. I am not afraid of death. I am not afraid of seeing you naked, angry again in the pretty prism of your skin, old thoughts the stale bread suicides, brittle and pink. I don't want to pick at roadkill like an ugly bird--- these excitations we contain that are not, have never been ours. You poke fun at my constant referencing of Jung and it's deserved, I admit right here with egg on my face I search for distance, safety cones erect against the roar and trouble of the heart. I am not a winged creature. I cannot, will not fly. Still the vapor from the sidewalk incandesces where the sprinkler water hits. | | Saturday, July 25th, 2009 | | 6:42 pm |
Uncertain but excited about the future
So, here I am. I've been roughing it in Seattle now for a few months and I've been getting by, plus or minus a couple late late paychecks and a handful of friends who have helped me out when I really needed help. I'm currently working a job that makes me feel 100% totally fulfilled but whose administration is messy and unorganized. Another paradox. I think I do want to continue to work in a mentorship aspect with high school aged kids, and ideally the context would be outdoors. Right now my priorities are: make enough money to live, work outside ideally in conservation, manifest more opportunities for effective direct activism and nurture as many friendships, past and present, as possible. I'm about to turn 27 and I feel like I'd like to feel a bit more grounded, less chaotic especially as regards to where every paycheck is coming from. But the thing is, I don't want to enter into a long-term contract or commitment with a cause my heart's not completely inspired by, or a culture where I feel stifled and frustrated. It's also important to me to have autonomy in the workplace. Nothing is more annoying and spirit-needling than a shitty and overbearing boss. This job I'm working right now, doing restoration work with under-resourced young adults, ends August 21. I love the migrant rights work so fucking much so I am going back to S. Arizona (somehow) to continue that battle until mid-Octoberish. That much I know and not much else. Should i return afterwards to Seattle? I want to. Seattle is a topographically stunning city space in the throes of a covert identity war --- can it maintain its critical mass creatively dismissive, affable hyper-aware, refreshingly diverse ambience or will the young and on their way to wealthy brand new condo lords overwhelm it? What's the problem with a brand new condo lord you ask? The brand new condo lord (for the very most part, in my experience) could give two shits about investing 7 dollars in a galvanic local punk show (or a psychedelic experiment, or locally-caught seafood, or People for Puget Sound, or Art Walks, or farmer's markets, or free street festivals) and thus erodes the cohesive network of internal support systems that allow a metropolis like Seattle to flourish within it's own homegrown alternative human culture and not just hang on to a few isolated pockets of underground movements (hi Chicago). I dunno. I know these thoughts are not at all revelatory but I am caught thinking on em just the same. Or should I make an effort to put down roots in Tucson and be closer to the struggle I care most about: the struggle to obliterate unjust physical and psychic borders. I feel scared, but confident that these questions will be answered in a sweet and awesome way. Go Universe go. | | Monday, July 20th, 2009 | | 8:50 pm |
hello world it's been awhile and i am feelin fine i like oysters that are raw from the ocean flow motion and the rascals that be found takin cloysters from the rich and famous are the same. as you and me and we be re- developing our theories and see, this is angle of the furies and i. i stay remain afraid to not too think. and we begin, to ascertain the nature of the thing, that makes our Universe. | | Friday, May 22nd, 2009 | | 9:53 am |
Hey there LiveJournal world, as regards to the previous post.... it's true i get a little militant on whiskey.... still tho when you're drinking whiskey you're not in the mood to censor! =) also seriously Portland you are the sexiest city of all time. So sexy. | | 1:22 am |
Darwinist Club
Welcome to Darwinist Club Darwinist Club believes in contraband billy clubs and stolen tasers. And cudgels, lots of cudgels. Darwinist Club rejects the bullshit education we were fed like bad dry yellow cake at forced awkward birthday parties. I never wanted to be there. D.C. believes in booze. D.C. believes in illegal drugs. D.C. believes in sub-basements. D.C. believes in youtube, twitter and wikipedia. Free and quick information is useful, monitored or not. Darwinist Club is a social experiment grounded in purposeful recklessness. I don't know about you but I'm disturbed that people I know as friends are getting square and lame and boring. I'm upset about fucking Afghanistan. VERY FUCKING UPSET. I am goddamn tired of strangers on buses talking about race and not including me because i am goddamn mother fucking white. I am a human being asshole. I was born because. I am not responsible for why I was born. Sorry. We are all human beings, asshole. It's 2009 not Oregon Trail on a green-screen archaic P.C. Eat shit and grow the fuck up. Darwinist Club is a self-centered assertion of my own rage and no, but thanks for the invite Barrington I won't actually feel guilty about self-expression at this time. But thanks. You know what really makes my clock stop? Orcas washed up in the Puget Sound get treated as toxic waste, because so many industrial and non-point toxins get stored in their beautiful whale fat. Also our lipids. This makes me want to cry 24/7. I always want to cry because of this. I don't. I go to work. I don't want to re-do Christmas and Thanksgiving at 8. Why should I love it now? Well, I don't. I never was very sentimental and now I just don't. Sorry. | | Friday, April 17th, 2009 | | 2:12 am |
long overdo life update
i am the bad boy at church that snickered at the sermon. i thought it was all a bunch of bullshit. i felt guilty. then the storms came and along came pixies climbing on the walls of some fever-heavy walls. i don't get sick anymore i've discovered my ally garlic. my ally doesn't give a fuck what you think. you can glorify a famous golfer. because i don't care. hello Pope. hello. hello. hello. (hello.) ripples are like waves and waves kill tourists. Be Gone Pope. get gone fake symmetrics. i don't like the shape your paper makes inside your walls. | | Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 | | 10:09 pm |
Fuck Facebook. You can call me on my phone and I aint tryin to bu-phone I'm bein truthful, mathematical and fruitful because it's lies that you put down that I find radical and sooth-ful i'm not be tryin to hate i just be tryin to relate and i am sick of the fools and don't see fate cuz i am living my life and i am feelin my strife and see this life is nothing more than a game let's us behave like citizens, and preachin what we get upon and i don't wanna hear no assholes doin Richard Gere i'm just here tryin to be, and that's the way that I see, and you all people gotta ride up on board cuz this the shee--- | | Friday, March 6th, 2009 | | 8:41 pm |
Another Poem about Seattle
Ever heard of pyroclastic flow? Me neither, til just now I looked in up on Wikipedia. I love my techno-friends, Pandora and kexp.org Music is the glue that binds our hides together, my furry hide is bound in great and leaping bounds around the Universal tango ---- not a beautiful thing, necessarily to behold. But dammit it gets me around and it doesn't need insurance. It's bills don't glide around and smash windows. Thank you poetry, Seattle for your space and I can think here too, that's awesome. | | 6:23 pm |
long-overdo livejournal update
hello world! hope all is well. here's what's new with me: i'm living in seattle and loving it. i really like this city. i like the snow-capped mountains a lot. alot alot. so i feel at home here, and i feel like i'm going to stay a while. this is all subject to change of course, but for now this feels good. working in a neighborhood called beacon hill doing urban forestry projects ---- extremely happily simple. you pull invasives. you plant trees. you shovel mulch. yay. you keep overflowing psyche subdued through creative monotony, at least for a time. and then you go out and have fun. life is good. | | Sunday, February 15th, 2009 | | 9:09 pm |
| | Sunday, December 21st, 2008 | | 9:09 am |
the state
is altered, on the sidewalk with the walking people and the night, soft night and flip-flops on my mind wearing hoodies and talking to the strangers on the bus, what's the fuss about anyway the things we say to others. my shield is the propane tarmac sky; my eyes are jelly on the bread and butter wind of time and moving, moving wolves in the great north woods. good wolves they fight without a sound and everybody knows about the ambulance, an ambience of mixed drink cocktail sink and drowning in abundance. among us even now the ambidextrous, the moral acrobats of street without a home, sleet without a dome and counting numbers one by one da dum dum. | | Thursday, December 18th, 2008 | | 10:22 pm |
| | Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | | 11:48 pm |
i am so pissed
at live journal; microchosm of the world. deny, deny, and i voted for Obama to kill more innocent Afghans. Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Afghanistan. learn history; cry. i am so sad. but i will continue to exist on this Earth, because i live and i love and my hope is not patented: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRn2D1YNjbs | | 9:22 pm |
| | Thursday, August 21st, 2008 | | 10:55 am |
This is the short reflection piece I wrote for my AmeriCorps graduation last night: One year in Phoenix The first thing I remember was the dryness. It felt like the inside of my nose was being hair-dried every time I breathed in. I remember Elisha telling me in October that this was cool for Phoenix, that I’ll know what hot is when I need to use my shirt to open up a car door. I remember feeling very lost every time I drove, very unsure about where I was at, and pushing away the doubts that kept popping up like little prairie dogs inside my mind, reminding me that this was not my city, that I moved here for a girl, that it wasn’t working out, that I had taken a wrong turn and that now I had to live with it. I’m the first one to say: "Oh, that always happens when you move to a new place. It’s hard before it’s easy, it’s harrowing before it’s simple." I’m always the first one to say that. But it is weird and different when it’s you that’s reminding your self, when it’s your own head feeding its own experience, like a snake devouring its tail. So I slept, ate, and swam in pools. I got orientated into AmeriCorps; I got orientated at my new job. Slowly and almost without notice I started getting lost less often, I started agonizing over my life path less frequently, and I stopped worrying about that mythical Dante-esque time everyone kept referring to as “the summer.” “Have you been through a summer here yet? “No.” “Oooooooooooh.” Well guess what everybody? I have now! And you know what, I enjoy it. My surprising appreciation of the Phoenix summer echoes my overall sentiment about this sprawling Sonoran metropolis, this enigma of a city built upon the Valley that the Navajos named: This Place is Hot. Phoenix is a place where the unexpected happens. It is a place where mysteries rule over the cold hard facts, where perceptions mislead and where topical impressions veil stories, big and deep and dusty and tough. It is a place to face your self head on, and it provides a living landscape to realize goals and actualize ambitions. You either do or you don’t in Phoenix, I have yet to discover the in-between. Like the stark jagged landscapes of South Mountain and Papago Park, like the tenacious roots and leathery leaves of Chaparral, the desert for me is defined by the extreme. It is a place to see things directly or fade your self away, to live on or dry up, to grow higher or to dissolve back into the air. My year in Phoenix has demanded many things from me; most predominantly a marked refinement of my own individuality. Like an herbal tincture it has extracted my constituents and presented them to me, raw, isolated, and potent. I will leave this place after living here for one year, but experiencing what felt like many. Thank you all for sharing in my journey. | | Monday, August 11th, 2008 | | 9:10 pm |
Architecture in Helsinki on a sleepy Monday night at work .....
The moon is half-full and bright half-covered in iridescent clouds on this hot Phoenix early August night.
There will always be a place in my heart for this strange, sprawling city. It's true
and I am so unspeakably excited for Burning Man!!!
i've been prepping..... =) | | Thursday, August 7th, 2008 | | 8:02 pm |
I just signed up for dance lessons here: http://www.arthurmurrayphoenix.com/Default.aspxI am excited! I was reading Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, and there's this point where he is so close to suicide that he can't even return to his home, and he meets this perky young girl who dosn't take life so damn serious all the time. And she is like: You need to learn to dance. And I started thinking, man, she's right. Because I do dance, like in shamanic alco-smoke trances at blues clubs and house parties, so why not actually learn to dance an actual dance dance??? Like Merengue, the sexiest sounding word this side of ubiquitous? | | Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 | | 2:07 pm |
"The purpose of these sacraments is to purify, and to open the road. When it opens,
it's as clear as the blue sky, and the stars at night are as bright as suns."
—Aurelia Aurora Catarino (Mazatec shaman) | | 8:53 am |
Journeying with Salvia
Last night my new roommate offered me salvia. I hadn't smoked it for years, since my senior year in College Park to be exact. That time I smoked the 10x extract from a bong. This time I smoked 40x extract from a bong. The last time I smoked Salvia, I had the initial experience of being paralyzed within myself, and then as I opened up physically I experienced an ascension to a quintessential, eternal realm where my being was being celebrated by trillions of fellow spirits. During this trip I remember repeatedly thinking: "I can't believe it! I can't believe there are THIS many beings celebrating life with me!" And the response was, over and over: "Believe it, beloved. Believe it." So. Last night I returned to the Salvia realm. I sat on the floor to smoke, facing towards the door, while my roommates sat at the kitchen table and talked. Amazingly, it was almost a continuation of my previous journey. Funnily, when I first took the (big) hit of smoke, I thought for a brief moment, "Huh, it is not affecting me so deeply this time." Then I placed the bong down, and the trip commenced. I was, again, initially frozen within myself. It was scary, as I felt that I was eternally frozen in this space, that this was somehow my eternal and quintessential fate. Additionally, the paralysis was accompanied by the feeling of having done something wrong, and of being judged by omniscient preternatural beings who were a part of my spiritual heritage. It was a very strong, disorienting and frightening feeling. My roommates were acting as the localized symbols of these great beings, my true community. They were talking about something, I'm not sure what, but at one point one of them said: "It's always the Americans!" And somehow I interpreted myself to be the American, and that I was very slow to the dance, so to speak. It was almost unbelievale that it had taken me THIS long to REALIZE that I had been ignoring or flouting my spiritual duties and destiny. I was overwhelmed by the feeling of being somehow deeply inadequate, wrong, and an outcast. That I was a very low, flawed being who was being thrust suddenly to a very high spiritual level, where all of my life's short-comings, flaws and failings were clear as day for all to see, including myself. I also felt strongly that I was in a hut in the jungles of South America, and that my female roommate was an Ayahuasca priestess. I wanted to turn around and engage in a dialogue with these spiritual beings who seemed to know everything about me. They were not exactly mocking me, but the message was something like: "Do you FINALLY, FINALLY get it? You slow, dense man! Do you FINALLY understand?" The message felt akin to a wretched, low-life plebeian (but also prodigal son) crashing a party of kings and queens. So. I just really wanted to turn around, to face these beings (symbolized by my roommates), so that I could ask questions and better understand what was going on, and also what exactly I had done that was so "wrong." I could not, however, turn around. I was still paralyzed within the blindingly elucidating awareness of my self. Then, slowly, gradually, indescribably BLISSFULLY, I was able to move my physical self and begin to turn around. The process was SO intense, SO laborious. Each milimeter that I turned, I realized, TRILLIONS of beings were turning with me, through me, in me. It was like this: Imagine you are looking at a computer monitor, except that the monitor is your entire direct experience of the world (i.e. what you see, what you hear, what you taste). And imagine that, just as a monitor's image is made up of pixels, so this world is made up of little tiny bits that create the whole of what you experience. Then imagine that each little tiny bit is a being, a soul, a spirit. When I looked at my feet, my feet were not just "my feet." The image I saw of my feet was comprised of an infinite number of beings, of living bits, or spirits and souls. The foot was illusory. The tapestry of living spiritual bits that formed the image was real. This is what I experienced as I began to turn around. I was the Universe turning itself around, to engage in dialogue with itself, in the form of the Great Beings symbolized by my roommates. I had fallen, but I was in the process of turning around, of being redeemed. I cannot describe the sense of bliss, joy, triumph and understanding that accompanied this process. My female roommate was talking to me about something, and I was so immersed in the experience of "turning the Universe around" that I finally yelled out: "No More Questions!" Apparently I was also exclaiming repeatedly: "I understand everything! I understand! I see how it is!" There is a lot more to write, about how it felt to speak, how it felt when I turned enough to see my roommates again, what happened after that, and about the next trip when I took 3 more bong hits a few minutes later. But I have written what I need to for now. |
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