Field Notes, #34, May

notes, photos, affirmations, time travel, teleporting, what i wish i wrote here, what i did

My mother’s eyes got swollen when she cried. I am not sure what the problem is. Why not dream of the little paper cups and a strong odor, the carpet, or something, that smelly place, chairs (?)

I folded two socks I found in the yard, left them by the door. 

When I saw you it was difficult again. Why difficult? This is all I mean when I ask, why difficult? Like our mouths are filled with cotton, why?

In my dreams you are asleep and I carry your body. Or you are afraid and I am secretly afraid. 

In my dreams I see my mother but she’s annoyed usually. Maybe because she knows it’s not her, c’mon you know better, i love you but give it up. 

On the phone I hesitate, what window, which room? I tell my boss at work I just went camping at the drive-in movie theatre, when really I did that months ago. So? I told him when I was watering in the back a branch cracked down against the fence, and a squirrel fell with it. Maybe he should be careful of the tree if a squirrel is breaking its boughs. It loosened like someone just let go. 

The security guard watches me take a photo of the newspaper at the convenience store, this is what I do sometimes while waiting for the sandwich. 

In the secret field the wind is perfect and moves the trees like bags of flies. the one covered in ivy shivers like a jacket, like loose clothes at the night beach. it takes the wind down from the top like it’s swallowing and sends it out the bottom of its skirt. I am paralyzed by it. The moving of everything is exactly. It’s just what it is. I could watch that story for a long time, the rain made everything greener and open. 

Peeled open underneath my bed I thought I saw a reddish pit, someone’s forgotten wound, a loose stigmata. 

When I water the plants the cat-birds call around me, they feign thirst so I build them fountains with rocks and leaves. I told one of them to stay away from the garage door, it wouldn’t like it in there after all. It took a red berry up its throat and let it fall on the ground in front of me, as if offering its small heart. 

I don’t think my mother ever knew THE NEWS, didn’t keep up with politics. But she knew that it was not very good and that no one could help her much. And she knew about other people that couldn’t be helped much. Death glued to her skull early. Someone told me.

I spent too much time as a kid experimenting with waiting. Seeing how long I could sit outside in the cold. Seeing how long I could hold. Seeing if I could go the whole day without talking. Seeing if I could go the whole day.

I wanted to rip my hair out when you were upset. I wanted to offer it to god if we could only just start over.
…
(hair) take it like kindling, or for a nest, put to rest those old angels who have been weeping already for eternity. Burn their wings off so they aren’t suspended over us anymore, so they don’t have to reach for us and never see our eyes meet theirs. 

My car has been shuttering up the hills, carrying me along, wiring us through the city and its rivers. 

I was studying how to explain everything. Reading all the psychological experiments, hypotheses, hypocrites, statistics, flow charts. I’m worried I thought that the writing was a set of religious instructions for me. My framework in which there is a reader, in which I have to put-to-words. I’m worried I dissected myself like a fish who now needs to swim but forgot it pinned its own flesh open against a board. 

---

I felt uneasy 
For 23 years, once.
Then i decided i had made some error
Drink more water!
Viola ! 
ALLLLLLLLLLL BETTER.
...

I’ve pulled my body through time and sometimes feel the rattle of a tether, like when I shook the chain that held the raft in the lake and knew it sent a pulse all the way to the bottom floor. (hello?)

Could we feel into each other's palms and find what the other is holding onto? Living like you’re dying hurts. Watching dying hurts. Living knowing you’re dying is a requirement, but doesn’t have to hurt all the time. I feel that shape. I feel a hole in your hand, it goes inward a long while. I have it too, if we press them together it sounds like the ocean.


Once I woke into the night and felt it flatten out around me like a soundless snow, all suspension. What direction to move in with no wind or noise?

No, more than once__ I used to wake into the night and feel it flatten out around me like a soundless snow, all suspension. What direction to move in with no wind or noise?

What if I was like some insect who had its receptors taken away,   (?)   so that I had no will, or motive, or inclinations? I could follow no invisible trail to home, food, no loyalty to preservation of species. I looked around me and saw stretched air, starved and thin of meaning, like meaning had stopped, or had been left behind in another dimension I had slipped from. 

It crashed into me again, (meaning) into the air, thickened it, and then I wasn’t sure, for different reasons, where or how to move. Meaning was there, but too numerous, exhausting, illusory and material tangled beyond separation. 

I would flicker between the flattened pull-lessness, and the suffocating urgency, like a rippling pond. Center remains, constant drip, heartbeat, each pulse sending out a new small wave which expands out and causes either silence or shimmer.

The light through the window from a car’s headlights would slip across the wall onto my nothing body, or was it pointing towards a book on the shelf, or some simulacra of a day I’d forgotten, something hidden I could remember, bring back, use(?)

I held myself like a mother, like a coffin. I drew my body through time, pulled it down the wire to the futured memory of those moments. Looking at it now, I see myself sitting up in the bed, in the flat night, staring at the motionlessness, gasping at its sudden change back into a tight throat, staring at the motionlessness again. 

Was the light, back then, some accidental reflection of my future glance back in time, myself driving past the old house in the dark without stopping in (?)

I’ve pulled my body through time and sometimes feel the rattle of a tether, like when I shook the chain that held the raft in the lake and knew it sent a pulse all the way to the bottom floor. (hello?)

Could we feel into each other's palms and find what the other is holding onto? Living like you’re dying hurts. Watching dying hurts. Living knowing you’re dying is a requirement, but doesn’t have to hurt all the time. I feel that shape. I feel a hole in your hand, it goes inward a long while. I have it too, if we press them together it sounds like the ocean.
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i forgot to mention

to you,

that shadow,

persistent despite position

of sun.

i’ve worked up a new idea

Mostly just

A mixture of water and salt,

And a heavy hand to scrub it away,

(It doesn’t away, but the ground

All darkens from wet,

And lessens the vividity of its presence.)

The new new idea

Is to stand on a pinnacle of land,

just big enough for feet,

all around sunken,

so there is no place for shadow to fall,

or it’s too far away to tell,

,,,

could also try a narrow hole,

where one’s shadow

couldn’t be distinguished

against the general dark.

…

a flyer at the laundromat

said, in big letters:

HAVE YOU BEEN CRAWLING UPSIDE DOWN

UNDER YOUR SKIN?

I could tell

quite a few people

seemed to want

The solution

the flyer might offer,

but no one wanted to be seen

looking at the fine print.

…

Did you see on Tv?

The string that’s been holding

Earth near the sun got cut.

…

Did you see that the groundhog

Said he didn’t see his shadow,

He saw something else

But no one would listen?

…

Did you see it is free ice cream day next week?

…

I cannot wait to swing through that narrow hole again.

…

In the breathless suck of air

I get at top’s pause,

I reach one end

of an always-swing,

A light flashes, camera shutter,

It cost extra to see the photo.

…

truthfully,

all depends on my ability and rate of transforming energy -

when i am at my best i can do this quickly

and intake high loads without as many side effects,

outputting immediately,,

transforming pain, anger, anxiety, grief—

into love, understanding, calm, acceptance, or action.

i can do this for myself and for others.

when i am not my best the transforming

will become slower,

or i will forget that i can do it,

i will hold everything

in my hands

and become confused

about what to do

with it all,

start smearing it

on my skin

or eating it quickly

in an effort to rid.

As a child I dreamt of having a bike with a basket, and a mailbox with mail. I wanted to have things to go pick up or deliver. I wanted someone somewhere sending me something, out of the whole world, to my location. I think about this when I get junk mail or have too many things to carry. These things found their way to me, i must be on the map.

---

How is violence deemed?: (REDACTED)
An Attempt: (REDACTED)

-
Leaf
The right to beauty
The right to time
Willingness
Defense 
Seeking
Finding 
Being found by ___

Against a wall i held myself by the throat for a few years,

So. 
Our framework here involves-

THE RIGHTS OF MAN- DISCOVERY, REVELRY, BELONGING, GRIEF, TIME, MISTAKES, TRAVEL, TRACKING, 
THE IMMEDIATE / THE REMEMBERED/ THE PARALLEL/ THE SIMULTANEOUS
THE IDENTIFIABLE 
THE OUT OF REACH/ ELSEWHERE
MOTIVATIONS- INTRINSIC / EXTERNAL
THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS/ CONSUMPTION/ TRUE REALITY

This is just a terrible explanation, for something which I could explain clearer, 
and maybe am afraid to, or exhausted by.

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AFFIRMATIONS: 

Hi.
x
Thank you for coming here. I had all these things I wanted to write here, and I did write them here, but then i took them away, or wrote them elswhere and unfinished. for a few years I've been concerned about the decline of payphones. I notice them and check if they work whenever I am out. I was mapping them for a bit, and then found other people's maps online, and then I found a payphone archive, where you can listen to nothing, or the sound of operators. I became very involved in doing this and in trying to call the numbers of all the payphones listed in the directory to find one that was working, to have someone pick up. There's more i want to say about this in more depth, more research I want to present coherantly, my thoughts, but for some reason I don't want to right now. But I'll include some payphone information breifly below as homework.
Besides that I wanted to write about the Macy's closing sale. The big Macy's near City Hall in Philadelphia. It had that big organ inside of it. Over the past year people kept telling me the organ was gone. I questioned if it was actually gone- because I suspected it was a word-of-mouth-rumor, and not based on ground-exploration. (I also had debunked this rumor already twice seperate times the year before)
And       When I walked into the surreal world of the EVERYTHING MUST GO Macy's last day closing sale- there was a man playing the organ. 
I never had gone to Macy's except to hear the organ. That exceptional day, however, I was there to find a filing cabinet. Everything was for sale, the Calvin Klein posters, the shelving, the clothes racks, everything. There wasn't much clothing left there, it was the last day or two. I had a lot of thoughts wandering through there listening to the man play the organ and circling a filing cabinet too wide and too heavy for my needs. It was all very strange, like the last day in a city that had exhuausted itself. The man playing the organ kept stopping and starting intermittently. I have more to say, but I don't want to get into it right now either.

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I LOVE YOU I WANT FOR EVERYONE TO FEEL LOVED AND WHEN I WORKED WITH THE CHILDREN AT THE SCHOOL AND TAUGHT THEM TO SAY SORRY I FELT SAD THAT THEY ARE GOING TO SUFFER, BUT UNSURE HOW THEY COULD EVER BE AS KIND OR LOVING AS I HOPE FOR WITHOUT SOME LOSS. I HOPE IT IS NOT AS CRUEL FOR THEM. BUT I DO NOT WISH TO REVOKE THE CRUELNESS I KNOW. EVERYTHING GOOD AND BAD HAPPENS HERE. EVERY CONCEPT OF EVIL OR OTHERWISE COMES FROM THE SAME PLANET OF CONTEXT WE HAVE INHERITED. DEAR FISH, I ATE YOU. YOU WOULD HAVE NEVER DONE THAT TO ME, I HAD TO EAT YOU, I AM BETTER FOR IT. I KNOW I AM STILL DRIPPING WITH SALIVA, IT IS FROM WHEN THE BEAST SPIT ME OUT.

homework:
Payphones - investigate this. make some findings.
https://www.payphone-directory.org/sounds.html
you do not need to turn it in you are not graded

if you have a letter to the editor please leave a comment or try to contact me via payphone. or you can put it HERE Can you hear me? Can you see this? Is anyone reading? It has to not matter to me, and it has to matter also. 

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