LOVE

I’m thinking back to pre-school, a distant out of focus memory of my hand fondling the red fire alarm. The ink of grade school turns milky blue for a moment as I make out a girl in a polka dotted skirt, a girl who hated me. High school is clearer with sharp pencil lines and a delicate outline of someone I very much didn’t want to lose. There’s more delicate shading now, but I still erase hard and start again with clumsy sketches. Then the dark thick oils of... Read More

Winning and competition

Every step we take is either closer to or further from the land of the living. The problem is, we never know which direction we are heading in until we get there. These words from Jarhead are a good way of indicating the importance of winning. As a kid, I feel that I was very competitive, my whole family was. Games were important to win. When I was taking Karate in 6th grade, I remember the other kids complaining loudly as we sat in invisible chairs against the wall. I always... Read More

A Cage of My Own Making

The first time I entered freefall, the moment I fell from the sky, I immediately wanted to get BACK into the plane. If I could have reached out Plastic Man-style and grabbed the edge of the plane’s door, I would have held on for dear life as the instructor attached to my back smacked at my hand and screamed over the propwash to JUST LET GO! Can you really blame me though? I remembered tripping on the sidewalk as a child. We spend our whole lives trying not to fall down,... Read More

The Doorway

The door banged open dustily halting the men’s filthy conversation. She paused there in the opening, a sudden wind taking its cue to wrap around her silken form. Red swollen lips threw daggers at the men. Her word leveled with the finality of a commandment, a gale force whisper, the men quickly dispersed, their eyes following their expressions down to the wet puddles at their scratched leather shoes. Slithering down the steps, dark tendril hair reaching out against the street... Read More

Assassin's Lament

Many of you who have been to my apartment or seen me at work around bugs know that I have a particular sensitivity toward all of the creatures that inhabit the world. This is perhaps best elicited in my so called, “Catch and Release Program,” of bug wildlife management. Here are the steps: Person from another room screams I acknowledge the call and move into action to rescue the wayward insect Cup (transparent) and stiff paper or board are assembled as a makeshift... Read More

Blessed and Damned

I am a luminous being. Look into my tomb and you will see my outline visible as though looking through a veil of cheesecloth. My identity is not the product of man-made fallibility. I have been illuminated by brilliant shafts of light cast about from many sources. That is why today, despite a potential 12 year absence, I walked into a church and participated in a Catholic Mass. The painted window of my memory reveals times when I was referred to as, “Christian Jon.”... Read More

The Death of Dusty Brown

I took the reins from Anne and mounted up. The sun was setting across a fall landscape of tall grass which licked my stirrupped heels. I was looking forward to riding again not having ridden a horse in some time. The feel was familiar and I looked forward to the thrill and fear of the animal moving underneath me. Anne walked and jogged beside us. I decided to let Dusty loose to a gallop. I let the reins fall long to his neck holding on only to the buckle. I urged him forward with... Read More

Love’s Dreamy Breath

Love is air. Lovelessness is the drowning after. I float now in that water. Were I suspended in sweet air, you would see the roses in my cheeks and the clover in my souls. But as you peer past the surface of my rippled sky, your eyes will ungrey a ghost of my former self, my envenomed pallor surrounding twin pools of striking loss. I once survived flowing in calm featurelessness, gilded waves lighting my arms and legs. Then I saw my unveiled siren, my legend reaching down to... Read More

Plump Berries

First I saw the cherry. Then I saw the long dark sweet ink trickling entangled down her creamy curves. Should I spoil her freshly fallen field of pale snow? Would I ever recover from sinfully sampling her unsophisticated sensuality? A hellfire might await me after such a kiss, or a preacher’s bliss. Such fires could flavor life forever. Melted in my controversy, embroiled in the fueled fury of indecision, unbroken in my desire, I take to the skies surely seeing soaring... Read More

Ascendancy

The rain falls down the glass, time-worn cracks tracing the road map of my life. Practical considerations have no ascendancy in the pointed monologue of memory or the inner dialog of reason. I can see the light coming through my bathroom window and dancing like music alighting on glistening copper walls. I see other things there too. A shoulder and a rare smile. I remember the falling curls resting on the couch as I strained to recall their detail now that it was just out of reach.... Read More

The Real World: Virtuality

Tonight on the Real World: Virtuality, we venture into cyberspace to watch real people presenting virtual people watching a real shuttle launch on a virtual movie screen constructed by real people virtually in a virtual world called Second Life. As an outsider to this mega-project, I can easily say that all of the people addicted to Second Life need to get a Third Life, one that doesn’t involve the first two. But I have found myself giving into the real world peer pressure... Read More

Shot down

All’s fair in love and war. Love and War. Comparing the realities of a divorce to the realities of the war on terror and 9/11 seem fitting unfortunately. The brown skin on a banana tasting just as bad as that old peach. Soldiers of love and war can be paralleled too. You both become accustomed to things which would be considered grotesque and horrific in the real world. Fortunately, I’m on the sidelines of both having not personally experienced a divorce or a war.... Read More

Black and White vs. Color

There are a lot of good photos which would work equally well in color or black and white. The same can be true for leaders of nations, ice cream flavors, and just about anything that is good at the surface as well as underneath. The problem comes along when people want to artificially change colors that wouldn’t normally be there. Case in point. Today I received a phone call from someone putting together a brochure. She asked me if I had any photos of babies in an ICU or... Read More