This is my creative writing journal. Some of it is streamy, some of it is dreamy, all of it is intentional.


11.11.15  -  Silly Psilo Silo Sigh

Articulating the folds of the brain. Folds within folds, creasing craters wrought by a formless sense of outer-space. Placing a thought within the globe of heavy meat. Do we actually see inside when we close our eyes tight and strain our pupils so that our capillaries fire with fan-fare patterns of light? I’ve seen forms in this hypnogogic field. Noise articulated as form, creating a channel where thought and sight can speak directly. No lamp, no plant, no motorcycle, no mouse, no battery pack, no packing tape. Just an undulating idea, changing without recognition-feedback. I’ve seen this before while on psilocybin, staring into the white noise of a television screen on Channel 3, controlling with lucid delight the shallow, bulbar glass tube before me. I’m always looking for these sorts of visions. Moments of true hallucination, where time stands still, and you feel as though there is magic somewhere. Or at least your belief in magic is finally validated. A reward after years of practice, using your imagination, convincing yourself to see beyond the world and to transform your environment. As a child I was so convinced that these worlds I’d construct could, and should, exist. Why wouldn’t they? It’s in your mind, is that not good enough? Everyday is a shifting, constructed reality. A ship in a vast ocean, collecting debris, loosing parts and humans to a forgettable void, everyday sailing towards a distant and indistinguishable horizon.

10.8.14  -  Road Warrior


3am, roaming over the endless prairie, in and out of consciousness. The constant rumble of the diesel engine translating to a heady cushion to exit the world. Thoughts deepen and then are shattered by the jolt of a bump in the road. “Who’s gotta fix these bumps?” she says out loud, only audible to herself, sounding into the window glass, tacky with head-grease. The ride from Chicago to Denver is long. The only way she can sleep on this bus is by forming a twisted buttress: shoring up her heavy head against the window with her Tommy Hilfiger Jacket wedged under her chin, on top of her backpack, but leaning against the seat in front of her. Her neck becomes the unfortunate fulcrum. In and out of consciousness. Desires mix with features in the tiny landscape in front of her. The seams between the wall panels become the roads to Mexico, where she will one day travel and work on an Agave farm. The crinkled bag of potato chips wedged in the seat pocket is her deeply nested fear of commitment. The arm rest is Mike’s misshapen penis. Her reality is now pulled into this very small sphere of influence between her head, the window, her Tommy jacket, the seat in front of her. This is the universe as she knows it, this tiny sphere. The window pane flattens out, the panning landscape becomes abstracted values. Blackness. Stress dreams. The dream where nothing exists, turning in a void, reaching for anything, only interrupted by another bump in the highway, or the sensation of drooling, the sound of a man coughing, and then pulled back in. Uncomfortable heat on her eyelids, hypnogogic vision outlines the stark shadows of early morning. She can feel the bus slowing down, the changing RPM has upset the tenuous biorhythm of Bus sleep. A gas station silhouetted by a mountain range of immeasurable distance. Crisp, cold morning air and the grinding sounds of gravel and sneakers. 20 oz coffee, 3 cream, 4 sugar, off brand cigarettes that look like Newports. She leans agains a telephone pole staring staring at the sun until it hurts too much, closes her eyes, sees the burn in her retina against her eyelid, breathes in the cigarette smoke. She pulls deep, exhales, says: “I think I should start a band.”

10.1.14  -  Creature in Sand/Time

Following light paths traced in sand. Soft sine wavs beckoning the wind and bending to shape as ordained by solar wisdom. Dark faces lie beneath the millions of specks, lying dormant, waiting for words spoken through time to wake them into terrible action. Mutant creatures. Bodies twice the size of men, long in chest. Their skin is cobbled with scabs, armor that has hardened over a thousand years to the fury of the storms. Hair is woven by will, untouched by the clumsy paw attached to their thickened forearm. Eyes clenched shut. Lying in their grave, layers quickly being peeled away. When will the master-mind send the klaxon? Has it been hours, or years in between the dull presence of an awakening mind and now, sitting at the threshold of an ancient and prescient command. The first jagged scale of flesh is revealed. The tip of a pointed nose creates a new contour in the sand. The nose is slowly excavated but creates a powerful mark. A new contour against a constant algorithm of sand and wind spanning a planet. It is only a nose but at this point it is a monument. It does not move, the body is still. Lips are revealed- calloused strips of leather, parched. No tenderness in their folds, only the shadows of formed words for slaughtered men. Landscape as analog hourglass to ancient corpse. Finally the full oval of the face is revealed. In contrast to the gnarled textures of nose and mouth, the face is now smooth. Polished stone, a river rock in sea of sand. The face now almost seems gentle. The smooth features off the cheeks offset the brutal forms, as a scabbard hides the violence of the blade in simple decorum. Our perspective in time constantly stretches and expands. Minutes turn to years turn to eons. Winds of sand become the white noise of simulated chaos. Patterns emerge in the flow of things, interlocking loops of physics cascading. Our specimen is now fully revealed, prone on a flat slab of stone. Still. A great howl of wind rips across the planet, and the specimens eyes open. Pupils appear dilated, but are simply refracted dots magnified by the bulbous cataract of a shielded system of optics. The siren has been heard, the Creature stirs. Muscles wrest free of sleep and the detritus of a barren planet. Tendons like the roots of a mangrove audibly creak as the vessel of this lonely monster fulfills it’s duty. Eyes gaze through the sandstorm and focus to the horizon- a cold strip of light illuminated by a dying sun. A thought enters both our minds simultaneously: “The planet will die soon, the Sun has reached the final threshold, and we are formed to witness it’s destruction and broadcast to the collective fear of the universe”

9.6.14  -  Concrete Language

Roiling pain tosses the mind in and out of a lucid state. Beta to Alpha to Gamma to Delta waves, not sure if it’s time to rest or react. All reasons for pain are based on a lack of joy. that’s completely wrong. Pain can enter the realm of a body through many avenues. There are in fact so many points at which pain can manifest, and in so many forms, that it is surprising that people leave their houses at all. You can experience pain for not seeing or being near a thing you had never met or know of. Desire is pain also. A feeling so closely linked with pleasure and joy that we forget that it bridges these two opposing spheres. Desire can just have an A to A "pain is the pleasure" relationship, or Desire can be, for instance an A - B, or A + B where pain is in the absence or excess off something that in no way causes pain. Pain comes with the knowledge of things. Is the ultimate zen goal of buddhism an exercise in not only quieting the mind, but erasing it? This dialogical relationship of pain to its other's, bonds the word to these other meanings. As the ultimate void: its absolute nothingness has the same fear and joy as the absolute eternity promised by Christianity and other religious models. Space in this instance provides us with the same promise of nothing and eternity. All of these opposing terms, they are all linked to each other, their meaning is embedded in the other. Mirrored unto each other in a perfectly balanced Gestalt form. Is this the case with other words? Can we say that “red” is formed by “green”? In certain ways yes, they are complimentary, but “red” is not an absolute value. Red is a perception agreed upon by the majority of humanity. Red is an approximation of a wavelength of light. Red is not concrete by any means in so much as a Chair is a fixed object. Google “chair” and see if you can come up with a concrete (not literally, but probably) version of what a chair is. You will find that the only thing a chair is fully defined as, is by it’s opposite: “A thing to put asses on.”


9.4.14  -  A Dark Valley

A valley, dark skies, surrounded by friends, acquaintances and family. Faces are barely visible in the dark. All eyes pointed up and ahead and scanning the shadowy periphery for lines to mark their paths. I crouch and look at my hand, cusp it and bring it close to my mouth. I wish to tell a secret about myself. The first troubled murmurs are tremors of sound, amplified in the unseen valley over the hill ahead. The valley like in Alaska as a young man. The one you all saw on your way back to Nome, that unexplored, but implied heavy wilderness. A section of the world known but never to be seen, by yourself or other explorers, or even mechanical vision. The whispers you speak to your self echo, LOUDLY. But instead of becoming self conscious you get excited. You yell to all the people around you, listen, I’ve found a secret! If you stand right here, like me right now, and do exactly as I do we can send the sky ringing with our voices! What a power! What a privilege! You wonder now as you did as a young man, teetering on the brink of adolescence: Can we please climb the ridge and see what’s on the other side of that crest? Is it a deep cavern, like you hope it is? Perhaps there is no valley, that it’s really just a trick of perspective, and once you’re at the top you realize that it is a mesa, flat and barren. Maybe it is even less special than that. Like some nameless verdant eddy on so many Microsoft default desktop wallpaper glowing for no one in particular. You take a breath and know that either way, no matter what lies on the other side, that the magic of the sound it makes, and the magic that the unknowing allows it, prevents you from exploring. You would rather die than have it’s secrets revealed. The want you have for an unknown, the distance between you and this natural sounding wonder, the urge is the present. Don’t give up the present, don’t open the present, keep it under your shitty tree.