Bits

Doing everything by halves... got a real flare with excuses.
Meeting someone at the bar... where loose ends still have uses.

It's miles upon miles and I've a familiar refrain for so many of them, words which first were yours. They've stuck all the more for it, perhaps, as these things are wont to do: the past is the past is the past. So the phrase has lingered as have all these images I'm working through these first days back in town; I refer both to the images physically before me and those remembered, from past lives. Try as I might I won't make sense of it, words forever the puzzle's key but the sentences continually jumbling themselves atop each other like Ms Frankweiler's files. The years behind are such poor place markers for working through the mysteries locked in the hallways of my head. I'd make myself a map if only I knew how to draw it; cartography, I told her, does sound rather fascinating, though topography - mountains! - will forever be the stronger magnet, much like the pull of the moon.

You have eyes like mine
Are we strangers or am I you are I

The days in Minneapolis dwindled all too quickly to nothing, I realize, and we never did get in our afternoon of daydrinking and writing. I more than owe you too for this, yet another shortcoming in this brotherhood we've yet to get right. Call it another failing, even, but that too - just another label for just another action - seems trite given the list of labels I've in the past years accumulated. It's all stuff I've no need of, given the faults in which I lose them; another chasm and the self divides again. We are our own meiosis, past lives meshed in blurry Punnet squares, this faulty biology that could leave us any one of a number of freaks, depending on the day. At any rate, another discovery: 'home' is a four-letter word. Of course, given how poor I sometimes am at remembering which things to count and which to forget, so too might be 'space.' Seems I'm always losing the seas or c's or something or another, and so it is I find myself wishing to Saturday afternoon daydrink (I shouldn't, won't, being responsible, at least in this particular moment). So it is that I'm pondering astronauts and hunger and the loneliness of miles and miles. All these soundtracks you've left me aren't helping me miss you less, brother - but we're each too stubborn to move, equally adept at losing our way, and so it'll likely remain mostly as is for a while yet. There's no blame in that hat, at least.

It's complicated... this time, I think it could be.
Triangulated, it could be just what we need...
So what you say... we give it up and walk away?
We're overrated, anyway.

But, photos. Back to the story at hand. All these pictures through which I'm sorting, dashboard shot after bug gut obscured dashboard shot. There's a truth in one of these lines, I'm sure, but I haven't quite a found a way to clean it up, write it out. In any case, so much traveling there was: a solid six days of car by the time we'd reached Wenatchee, and no wonder that if I'd hundreds of photos I'd at least as many memories to resort and re-file - back to the dusty corners from which they spilt will they return. The realization comes anew that I may be better at solitude than most, that these miles lost in peddling may forever be easier on my bones than those spent sitting, that I've even less will to work through some walls - or with another - than even I might have imagined. I'm tired or lazy or neither or perhaps both. Maybe none of this surprises you; I remember even as children I was the far more socially miserly of our then dissimilar pair.

You have eyes like mine
Are we strangers or am I you are I

There are some companies I'm glad to keep, though, even still. All recluse tendencies aside, I miss you, that small family we're each a part of in those cities of lakes. I've a few other kindred spirits scattered across these mountain states and the pacific northwest. I've this sister here, with her knack for understanding the parts of me I've perhaps the least desire to explain and most desire to hide. 'That's quite the contrast,' she says, 'from everyday all day alone to everyday all day with another person.' Understatement is sort of her specialty.

There's a ghost above my door
Still, can you hear
There's a high lonesome call
But I'll forget you

All other dichotomies aside, puzzles left untouched, it's the places of the past I'm most easily lost in. So much thinking it all again, through and through, these past days of travel, and it seems to me it's a matter of walls. When we've most confidence in those structures we've erected, are most sure we've sealed away a particular past - well may it just so be that that's precisely when we're most likely to find a crack. Memories, I've decided, are like water in their own inherent property: always they'll find an escape, a route to seep through and to the fore. Time knows her own peculiar gravity, against which there is no science; inevitably, we all fall back into time, that which was before. These, I've decided, maybe well be the simplest rules of living, that time will be contained only when she damn well pleases.

What you feel makes part of what they'll feel
It's a chain reaction

It's about slopes, at least for me. All these slopes beside me these days of traveling, slopes that'll transport me back, some further and deeper and faster than others. In one of the breweries - Sun Valley, to be precise - we sat and she asked me about what it was to fall apart, and I remembered when Jon first took me there and I remembered those runs that longest March and April and I remembered the autumn that somehow in my mind linked all those stories, the miles that ran all through, one story into another. And there in the valley of the sun near enough the peaks that have perhaps forever been a part of my life - since even before I knew mountains held names, since even before I'd found this nomadic spirit - I thought and thought on her question and still had no answer, at least not in words. Perhaps I might have had any answer in body, the physical discomfort of testing limits and defining the self both by what it could do and could not do - but that's not a thing translated except by the experience itself. Quentin Cassidy'd understand; so too, I think, would you.

Put out fear and they'll feel fear
It's a chain reaction

No answer did I give, not having words. Instead, I decided later, the better question'd be what it'd look like to be together, junk show scarecrow made real boy, at least as far as the Pinocchio fantasy goes. But as I'm quite sure I've no longer much of a notion of what that'd be like either, and as such, no actual answer, I kept my comfortable silence. Silence, I think, I'll someday learn to wear as a cape.

Put out love and they'll feel love
It's a chain reaction

I talk plenty, she tells me. This too I realize is true, especially with all the socializing this strangest of summers has brought about. I've a gift perchance for saying exactly nothing of actual consequence, and it's precisely this I'm thinking of - head both blank and busily whirring - when she pauses the music (Margot And The Nuclear So And So's - you'd like them, I think) to speak. 'I don't communicate through what's playing,' she says.

What you feel makes part of what they'll feel
It's a chain reaction

A thought just later, again left largely unexpressed: given this density, the head of granite I carry (so easily does it sink, and only with great difficulty might I carve a lesson into it) - all the better this is. I'm not much good at games, unless it involves numbers or breaking something, and the puzzles I prefer are much the same, not having the patience requisite for solving people.

You have eyes like mine
Are we strangers or am I you are I

Another item left unmentioned: neither will I use music so, except of course with the notable exception of all those times I do, and it reminds me of our 'Minnesota nice' demonstration. But, anyways, what fun would words be if I couldn't keep even myself guessing? A friend's text from long ago even now still lingers: when you say something you mean you couch it or back away. Maybe this just means I'm getting better at keeping secrets even from myself?

Well those days have all but gone
And still I'm listening in
To that old long-distance call
But I'll forget you

Another sometimes friend - last summer's disaster, that - comes to mind, the way music was our forever veiled conduit. It's no wonder I can't hear half these songs without all the tie-ins any longer, without remembering a wholly different backstory. So it is, music and memory and all these histories forever like tangled sheets, and there's a quiet beauty in the breakdown between past and present, sure, but we've each the need to build up some towers or we'll all too easily find ourselves out of things left to destroy. A million monuments in a million songs, testaments to youth in verse (etc, etc), to lacking insight and the forever thematic I do what I want. I'm looking altogether far too often back, given that the season's still summer, but the bulk of these last nights spent camping hinted precisely at the changing seasons ahead. Nights cooler and morning fogs just a bit thicker on the waking sunrise-shadowed lakes; the season for remembering's just about upon us. No wonder I'm back to losing myself in lyrics and this continual wish for liner notes that likely don't exist, that I've no idea how to track down.

Well the fields are turning gold
As the winter moves in
There's a love I used to know
But I'll forget you

One more note from the past week springs to mind, another one of those texts sent in slim service windows. The more things change, the more they remain constant... wishes are fickle-winged creatures in the dusk of our dusty days. I'm not sure what it is I'm wishing for these days - though, to be fair, do I ever? - much less what I'd wish on. 'Want' is another four-letter word, besides. Still: do you know what you want? Does anyone? I can't shake the feeling that at least one of us in this lost brotherhood ought to, and I'm quite certain I don't - but if we're all lost, then it can't much matter. Right? Maybe?

You have eyes like mine
Are we strangers or am I you are I

I'll keep telling myself that if you will, anyways.