Movable Type Hair

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Brainstorming

If legend has it that you use a rain stick to bring rain storms, do they have brain sticks to bring brainstorms?

Dear Brain,

I’m sorry that I sometimes misspell your name as “Brian”.

I know you’re dying to stretch those creative muscles and that I have been giving you no time to do that. I’ve watched and listened to enough TED and Pop!Tech seminars to make the creative side of you stir-crazy.

I haven’t worked on my book in months. I have a playscript in progress that has been sorely ignored. I could probably reawake the fishing village in the back of my mind called “Poetry” if I only gave myself time to read more of it. I read a little bit by the poolside the a couple of weeks back, but that’s the most creative I’ve been in months.

Consider this my formal apology, and I am going to do my best to remedy this discrepancy.

Signed,

Me

I love

Chocolate milk.

What’s one of the simple pleasures that brighten your day?

Pannekoekens

The streetlights running along the canals were fireflies floating around us. The silent amber lights were fountains that washed us away. I could attempt to make pannekoekens and couscous for everyone in the room and the twenty of us would watch your low-budget Dutch movies in the quietness of a random living room like the world’s motor hinged on us.

The Concert Hall

My car is the perfect concert hall. In the mornings on my way to work, I sail along in my venue on the freeway and sing my heart out to my audience pretending to be Eilen Jewell or Brett Dennen’s counterpart. In the afternoons in traffic I’m on the dance floor with my boy dancing to Frank Sinatra who is singing to us from the stage. At night, I’m spinning the ice cubes left in my glass while sitting at a small table alone in the back of the dark room listening to Joe Purdy sing about the seasons. Occasionally, when the sky is empty and the moon is brilliant, I’m sitting by a campfire deep in the night listening to Dallas Green and looking up at the stars wondering how long it will be before I reach them.

Above Audible

Maybe we have been lost in a book. The question now is who is the author.

The lightning tonight was like a lighter that never really took flame and yet refused to run out of fuel. It was like a story that starts to be told but then is forgotten before the story ends. An artist whose piece is seen and the fireworks explode for days in one person’s head and yet they cannot remember the artist’s name.

Or maybe it’s like our memories. The cup of coffee I never drank, the letter we never wrote, the road trip you didn’t take.

It’s the same feeling coming home after a long day and massive nosebleed seeing the room filled with unfamiliar faces wrapped in your blanket watching a movie whose volume is just above audible.

Poetry

I hate the feeling of needing to use art and create something and not being able to. I have so much to say and yet my words are blurred somewhere between wondering if I’m just the irrational child or wondering if anyone would care if I opened my mouth. I’m shocked at how I’m still not really able to write or talk about my experiences in Amsterdam. It’s too bad it’s two in the morning otherwise I might call you up and tell you how arrogant you sound. I wouldn’t, but it’s nice to have a “I might” in my head.

There is something very satisfying when a storm and I both leave to go back to my house and I reach it first. I half feel like a storm-chaser and half like a mad scientist who jumped fifteen minutes into the past for the first time. Sometimes I feel like I need to eat an apple after talking to you to clean my throat and stomach. There are days where I feel like the world is a joke or that the world is a riddler whose riddle begins with the letter “k”.

I have so much to say. How do I learn to write in a coherent form again? It seems that right now my mind is running on pure gasoline and is producing endless stanzas of poetry, each about fifteen lines long which all vary in length.

If you’re any kind of a mediocre stalker you already found this site and I could write something to you, but I won’t. These trips to other worlds in my head are almost coming true with the weather we’ve been having. The mornings and afternoons are blazing and sticky but by the time evening comes there are violent winds and rain and we’re all hoping we didn’t get stuck in some tv show as the minutes turned into midnight. The ridiculous thing is not knowing what I should say to you. And you’ll be gone in three weeks. I’ve known you for so long and maybe that’s why you listened with a grin when I told you a tale about three animals who were stolen away from the zoo. You ask me for a story. What else did you expect?

I hope you can help me decipher my poetry.

yaycalendarbones

I feel like there is too much emphasis on my schedule. When we speak, I know it’s going to come up and it will more likely than not be the bulk of our conversation. When you are only talking to me about my calendar and not about how I am or how my life is going, I sometimes feel like you aren’t listening.

I know it’s your way of trying to stay connected to my life and where I am and where I’m going… But I desperately don’t want to be defined in your head by my daytimer.

It makes me feel small.

So, if you’d like to hear from me more often… Maybe… You could… Ask me how I am? And I don’t mean the hihowareyou’s at the beginning of conversations.

EDIT:

I know this is kind of weird hearing this from my keyboard, but I didn’t know how to say this up until now, and I am fifteen times better with words on paper than I am letting them sky dive out of my mouth.

[Ridiculous me.]

1740

I’m number 1740 on the Million Blog List.

Tagless

You’re like a tea bag that does not have a tag on the end of the string
You are drowning and you wish you knew your own name

Not Andy

I was originally reading this article about Jon Foreman of Switchfoot. I already knew most of the information presented but I had been looking for details about Fiction Family, a project by Jon Foreman and Sean Watkins of Nickel Creek.

Though, that’s not what this post is about.

I got to the bottom of the article and started reading the comments.

Commenters make me giggle.

 

The toes of a butterfly

Today is the third day of rain in a week or so. It wasn’t pouring rain like last night but there was a liberal spread of fog and mist that clung to every curve of my body as I walked out into the parking lot. It’s been grey and pleasantly dark most of the day. It’s the perfect setting for me to sit in my unlit living room with a bowl of Cheerios and write.

I went to Walmart this afternoon to pick up some groceries. I still don’t understand how we have enough food and enough agricultural demand to fill one of those huge super centers and yet we don’t care or can’t seem to find enough resources to help feed people that actually need it. They need food in their bellies and we need less variety.

We’re disgusting.

There was a couple in the parking lot at Walmart with a little girl who couldn’t be older than two. The mother brought a cart over to their van and the father brought the little girl over in his arms. As they were getting her situated in the cart their faces were lit up with smile and they had been laughing the whole time.

I was very close to literally walking up to them and thanking them for laughing. It was the life-breath that I needed at that very moment.

Even though today has been a bit dreary and despite my feel overwhelmed at the fact that I feel like a disgusting pig for even walking into one of the superstores for the latter part of the day, I received a text message this afternoon that brightened my day:

“I miss you, my hobbit-toed butterfly.”

Under a Honeysuckle Tree

This morning and afternoon felt like summer. It’s the most summer it’s been since I came home from Amsterdam and the air made me feel beautiful. It was low eighties and the sky was bursting with sunlight.

Later in the evening there was a thin layer of grey spread evenly across the spatial ceiling that was thin enough to still let the sun burn like a giant candle. The yellow light rushed across the streets and up blades of grass and through the trees. The air smelled like the sweet fruit of summer. Every breath smelled like I was sitting under a honeysuckle tree.

It’s days like these that remind me that I’m alive. They put the sunlight back in my veins.

What is fire? When you see fire burning inside another human being, what does that look like? Is it warmth? Is it light? Is it anger that has been transformed into a discontent and passion to see change created? Is it a need to hear the truth proclaimed from the corners? Is it the determination and mercy to be able to say I’m not willing to wait because someone needs to help these people now?

Ever since my plane’s wheels parted with the runway here in America, my whole life has changed. The amount of change verses time ratio is incredible. Months before I left for Holland I felt like my whole existence was pointing towards the trip I was going to take. I was only in Amsterdam for ten days and I feel like the trajectory of my entire life has changed.

I reached the fine point of the cliff and now I’m flying through the beautiful flood below.

I have new hope and I officially have to do something about it now.