All posts in Life

Forward

by Drey on May 13, 2005 in Life, Reft with No comments

Today a friend complained that I don’t post often enough, so I’ll make more of an effort. 😉 Actually, it seems like when I am focusing on one certain activity in my life, I experience a kind of time distortion with everything else. If I get busy with work, I’ll look up and it will have been a week since I made a post in Frayed, the email interactive fiction project I’m running. Or I’ll spend what seems like a few hours on MySpace, and then suddenly the movies I rented are overdue. I lose track of what is going on in the books I’m reading because I’ve been more interested in working in the yard.

But it feels fantastic! I feel like there are so many possibilities for each day and I have so many interests I wish to pursue. I just kind of chuckle at myself when a deadline suddenly looms or it is Sunday again already and I need to set things up for the weekly Doctor Who showing.

I think what I’m saying is that I’m comfortable with the flow of time again. It doesn’t seem like sand spilling away into oblivion. Nothing grows in stasis. If time stood still and I could “hold this moment a little bit longer,” nothing would ever actually happen to me.

Journey Through a Needle

by Drey on April 29, 2005 in Reft with No comments

As I sat down to write this post, I realized that it could easily be misconstrued as a reference to intravenous drugs. Acupuncture is like the antithesis of that: using needles to heal, sending lines of energy through the body rather than heroin.

Points around my body lit up like nodes on an etheric power grid. Darkness. Then glimmering light at the periphery of my vision, sunlight on waves. The feeling of my whole being rippling in a heat haze. Scene of a woman putting up wallpaper in her living room, turns her head over her shoulder to speak to someone out of frame. Then down, down, down a tunnel. Everything behind a dark scrim. A cavern with a stone bridge, leading through arches. Everything is illuminated with inverted light, like a photo of microscopic organisms. I am flying along the path of the bridge, more of a raised highway running over a dark chasm. Doors of strange material sphincter open to reveal diamond-shaped openings that I fly through. Then it is revealed to me: I am under the Tower, coming in through a secret entrance. Of course, of course, of course… never thought about trying to get in from underneath.

First Time Flowing

by Drey on April 24, 2005 in Avatar, Writing with No comments

The airplane is the epitome of safety, order and restraint.
Everything designed to induce calm and minimize contact.
Other passengers apologize for touching me, ashamed of the slightest nudge that briefly bridges a gap.
But I want to be jostled; I want their fingerprints on me.
I look out the window and all the clouds are fucking.
Couples glomming together,
Threesomes tumbling through the atmosphere,
Some of them on dragons.
And I want out of the capsule.
I want to go where it is wet and uncertain.
Inside the window, we are rows of silent worlds, arranged like eggs.
We acknowledge each other like the blurred faces in the periphery of dreams.
We are in transition.
We are being taken.
No one mentions our mutual fate, as though words would cause the worlds to crack and burst, blending together like the clouds outside.
We have nothing to hold but our breath.

I am gripped by a spiritual shuddering, caught inside my own wake.
If I would resist less, make my soul an aetheric arrow, flow upstream,
I would find Me.
A Me surfing the crest of Time.
A Me moving so fast it strips the paint off stars.
A Me that is already There because it itself is the destination.
A Me with liquid, hungry boundaries.
I would embrace that Me, pull its lips to my ear and finally hear what I’ve been trying to say all this time.
But right now I am a pail of water in a steel box:
Passenger 10C on a carefully prescribed arc,
Moving faster than I ever have while sitting completely still.
Three buttons give me the power to summon
A tiny sun, a tiny wind, or a tiny repose.
To see, to feel and to dream with the seatbelt securely fastened, small and safe.

Hidden somewhere ahead of me is a
Flickering matrix of dials, maintaining my fate.
They taught me that complex machines were required to yoke destiny.
Without buttons and dials the plane could land in Xanadu, missiles could land on the Civil War, and I could become anyone.
The gauges were necessary to measure progress.
So I bought into the buttons and the dials.
And I bought them with my blood.
An umbilical snapped, memory faded and I unlearned that ultimate potential, life in all directions, chaos, is easy.
Anywhere and Anywhen slide loose behind a thin amniotic membrane where my body used to breathe water and my soul used to breathe…used to breathe…
Where my soul just used to Breathe.

Outside the window, the clouds form the angular logos of their new corporate sponsors.
The people flying the plane weren’t just taking us,
They were taking everything.
Frantically, I reach out and press a fourth button I hadn’t noticed before and I summon a tiny point of contact.
A woman arrives and asks “Can I help you?”
I say “You can do more than that: You can get your hands dirty with me. Get me under your fingernails. You can stop lying and expecting me to lie back. You can drink my tongue and every other part of me and I will do the same for you. We can walk naked and give everything we see a new name. And don’t apologize if you end up killing me; I was made to explode and make a mess and stick to everything.
“Barring that, you can show me where they’ve hidden my sun, my wind and my dreams. I’ve checked way too much baggage onto this flight, so I know they can’t be here. While you’re at it, you can take back all the dials because I’m not measuring up, I’m going Up.
“Barring that I’ll proceed to one of the four exits (the nearest of which may be behind me) and get off the fucking plane.”
MAYDAY EJECT EJECT MAYDAY EJECT EJECT
…

She sits down next to me.
Her hair is not red.
Somehow that’s okay.
She pulls out a dog-eared copy of The Little Prince.
I know what pages she has marked.
“First time flowing?” she asks.
“Yes, yes it is.”
She holds my hand and my heart although they both stain her.
We’re going to slide up and through the plane now,” she says.
I nod.
There is a splash.
I stop holding on to my breath.

Zoom Zoom

by Drey on April 18, 2005 in Life with No comments

Had this burst of hyperproductivity yesterday. Ran all sorts of errands, worked on client projects, figured out that if you turn my two foam chairs to face one another you get a sofa, repositioned stuff in my bedroom for maximum aesthetics, rewrote my online dating profile, and didn’t stop until 5AM. Slept a few hours then got up and went at it again.

Yes I DID

by Drey on April 16, 2005 in Reft with No comments

It begins as a kind of warm fuzziness in the right side of the brain, as though a fissure has opened just above the left eyebrow, running just above the nose, under the right eye and down behind the ear. Sometimes the vision blurs and there is a sense of being pulled down under bathwater. Other times there is a sparking sound in the brain, mental static, the radio in between stations. And the voices robe themselves with wills.

Sigh

by Drey on April 8, 2005 in Life with No comments

“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
– Rumi

Cat Sentries

by Drey on April 2, 2005 in Life with No comments

See how my living room is vigilantly guarded by my cybernetically-enhanced sentry cats? That window would be a poor choice as an infiltration point. That’s Kallista on the right. She’s frothing with a sick madness that I wouldn’t want to encounter on some dark night with my leg halfway through the window.

Alucard Knows

by Drey on April 1, 2005 in Life with No comments

He keeps many secrets.

Listless

by Drey on April 1, 2005 in Life with 5 Comments

Sometimes the sense of being lost and adrift is so profound it is as though a giant hand prevents me from getting out of bed. What am I supposed to be doing with my life? Surely I’m not meant to be a graphic artist forever. I have this nagging sense that I am almost at a point where I can get a perspective on myself, a place of focus where I can see how all my interests, talents and desires mesh together. I’m also visited by this feeling of having to get Out There, like whatever I need is happening outside my world.

Rant

by Drey on February 13, 2005 in Life with 1 Comment

If you’ve actually been diagnosed with ADD, then fine, I can sympathize. But otherwise I regard the sudden proliferation of ADD as symptomatic of people’s lack of boundaries in their lives and an excuse to behave inconsiderately. Our technology has given us faster communication, but not *better* communication. When we say we’re getting “more” done, it’s measured in volume and not quality. We don’t get *more* done faster, we’re just faster. So now we can have more IMs, more erratic emails, more abbreviated cell phone conversations, and only meet face to face to seal the deal because actual connection and conversation should be savored like a rare wine and only opened for very special occasions. But let’s not acknowledge that we’re so busy being busy that we can’t be bothered to communicate; let’s just say we’re ADD.

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