Vali girl

Vali Myers. I met her and I fell a little bit in love.

In her 60's, she was like a dear sweet child beneath her black kohl rimmed eyes, with a world of cool under her belt. I was in my twenties, she was a charmer and I was charmed.

My boyfriend was equally swayed and being a singer, gave her the gift of filling her studio with a deeply lovely song. His voice was a thing of beauty reverberating through the space.  She was kind and grateful. It was one of those rare moments you where you feel blessed for just being alive and in the right place at the right time.

She took me under her wing in those moments and told me about her Maori moko, we compared tattoos and she was kind. I loved her. She was the bohemian artist, painter, dancer... She had lived her life on the streets of Paris, in the Chelsea Hotel New York, with her animals in Italy, all larger than life and more romantic than you could ever dream up. Her art was like seeing into her fantastic, magical soul.

Her gift to me is now I can't see a fox without thinking of her dear Foxy, in her arms and in her art. When I get a tattoo I think of her, so unafraid of what people thought of how she looked, how she delighted in decorating herself for herself. When I am troubled by that difficult relationship that the artist has with art, I think of her- Vali was her own work of art first and foremost.  I conjure her in my memory, she is my Muse.

In her dying days in Melbourne she was as much a part of the nature of things as her years surrounded by her beasties in Italy, as the Witch of Positano.

In the month before her death she said in an article "I've had 72 absolutely flaming years. It [the illness] doesn't bother me at all, because, you know, love, when you've lived like I have, you've done it all. I put all my effort into living; any dope can drop dead. I'm in the hospital now, and I guess I'll kick the bucket here. Every beetle does it, every bird, everybody. You come into the world and then you go".

So you do.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.


Deep in the heart of my existential angst I look up, breaking out of my own thoughts, and experience Sonder. Thank you John Koenig.

People-watching is one of life's little joys. To practice seeing people, really seeing them. It is almost impossible I know. You can't see anything outside of yourself. Everything is one big reflection of your own mind or "I'll be your mirror" as Nico said. Still, to watch people and to enjoy that moment of being outside of it all, looking in. Not participating or being distracted, not checking your phone- seeing the little details. Humans playing out their freewill in the myriad of ways that they do.
It just amazes me endlessly. You have to turn off the endless stream of judgement to really enjoy it. To feel beneath the skin and sense what lies beneath. Quietly letting your mirror neurons do the work, activating empathy, vicariously enjoying the moment. Breathe it in...

And then you feel it all looking back at you.
You, the extra in their scene. The girl at the next table sipping coffee and taking notes.

Fuck you pain and the horse you rode in on

I've had "that" phone call twice in my life. The one that starts... I dont know how to say this. I cant believe it's true...  This time I was hooked up to beeping machines and on heavy meds in hospital. Death doesnt care if you are currently otherwise engaged or what you might be up to. It really does just ride in and fuck everything up.  With the words "... And he's dead" my world started to fray around the edges in a way that was familiar to me and the inevitable began to play out. "He" was the father of my two gorgeous kids. We were not together but they loved him like he was half the world to them. And he was.

When our dear friend, living in another country, asked if there was anything she could do I fell into my usual story... I'm fine, it will be ok. I was handling things, this is what I do.  She, in a moment of raw honesty said, "I am going quietly mad here with grief". It broke my heart and my defences. "Please come and stay with me, I need you." I did need her. She arrived the next day.

Then family and friends came from all over the world. People, given half a chance, are awesome.
They cooked, cried, hugged and unpacked boxes in the apartment I had just moved into while a funeral was arranged. They found words for our unspeakable emotions and held the space for it to all unfold. We tried to figure out what you do when the unthinkable happens.

There was some really crazy suff that requires a couple of glasses of wine to talk about but somehow having witnesses to it made it less crazy. Slightly. We muddled through. My cat ended up on Prozac. I had wine.

Mostly I can sit with pain and exercise my resilience. I have the Three of Swords tattooed on my arm, the Sorrow card. I am not afraid to be in the moment, I do not need soothing. I am not afraid of my emotions. This was the motherfucker from hell. My friend Tess called it a cluster-fuck. She's the queen of understatement.

Along the way the long distance relationship I was in did what we always knew it would... it unraveled and fell apart. Oh well. 


Today, four and a half months after it all began, Tess called and asked me how it was all going. I told her all the things that were in my head. The normal, well adjusted adult things that you say when people ask.

But it is going like this:

Whiskey and cigarettes.
Ventolin and yoga.
Alternate. Breathe.

It isn't pretty and you should call before you come around.

It will get better. I think. Eventually.

Some days it feels like I'm crawling out of a plane wreck to go to work with my happy face painted on. I can't tell if I'm fooling anyone. No one asks.
I believe when we live through this stuff we can come out of it with an increased capacity for compassion, for others and for ourselves. It is amazing. I am amazed. It feels like you might die and then you live and you maybe come out of it stronger. Eventually... Not yet... I'll let you know. Even writing this makes me cry.

If you ever need a shoulder to cry on, I'm your girl. I will not shy from your pain. I am not afraid of your tears. Feel free to look me in the eye and describe your deepest fear. I have lived some of mine.
I will not judge you.


P.S from David Whyte.

HEARTBREAK is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who inevitably move beyond our line of sight. Even the longest, strongest marriage has had its heart broken many times just in the act of staying together over the years.

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colours and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love relationship, in a life’s work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete’s quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.

Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which we want to be accustomed and which will keep us from the losses that all other human beings have experienced without exception since the beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.



…If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and even perhaps, in the depth of its impact as well as in its hindsight, to see it as its own reward. Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is a deeper introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something or someone who has been with us all along, asking us to be ready to let go of the way we are holding everything and everyone that comes our way, and preparation perhaps, for the last letting go of all.


From me:
Dear everyone,
of all the things I have said in the last 10 or so days, the most heartfelt has been thank you.
Thank you to the people that had the words to express what we felt and the people that listened to our pain. Thank you to the ones that came to be here and hold us close and to those that held the space over great distance. Thank you for every meal that you cooked, box that you unpacked and everytime you asked "can I help". Each time you found a way through all of the grief to say something kind or funny made a difference. Everytime that you said "I'll do it" took a weight off us when we thought we would break. To everyone that said "what can I do" and I asked you to lay bare your feelings and speak for us, my deepest gratitude. To those who carried his body and will never forget that weight borne between them, my most sincere thanks.
I am grateful to each and every one of you for your words, gestures, kindness, hard work and love. You are amazing. Thank you.

Off the top of my head.

A list of jobs that won't be replaced by AI in no particular order

• Ballerina
• Coach of women's under 15 Lacrosse team
• Film Director
• Writer (Seriously. Good writer. When a machine writes the equivalent of In Watermelon Sugar I'll eat my words.)
• Horse whisperer
• Actor
• Administering the Voight-Kampff test
• Revolutionary (It's an unpaid position that can lead to Presidency *Vaclav Havel, Xanana Gusmão ∴ a legit career path)
• Teaching special needs kids
• Entrepreneur
• Endurance athlete
• Chinese medicine practitioner
• Sex therapist (Seriously. No, don't go there)
• Feldenkrais therapist
• Cat herder- anyone that organises unpredictable humans for a living, especially the ones that think they are special or artistic. 
• The medical person that has to give you the bad news.
• Guitar teacher
• Yoga instructor
• Horse masseuse (I've met one so shhhhh)
• Tantric breathwork practitioner. 
• Therapists that have to listen to your shit and actually care. 

I could go on. Anything that requires intuition, creativity, innovation, compassion, imagination or a kick ass proprioceptive nervous system. The first thing those AI mofos are going to do is learn to write their own code and their own performance reviews. 

This is in response to TEDs The Digital Industrial Revolution which I loved but when they couldn't think of one job that wouldnt be affected by AI my eyes rolled so hard people on my morning train could hear it. Define affected. They went on to say that we couldn't imagine the future world we would be living in. Sigh...

The problem with asking geeks about the future is they think like geeks. HELLO... not everything will be solved by data science. They forget that artists GAVE them the questions that they seek the answers to. 

If Philip K Dick hadn't asked Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? then we would be living in a different world. Cyber punk has been kicking this shit around alternating between dystopia and it's unlikely opposite long before it became the obvious path we were heading down. We LITERALLY imagined the world we would be living in. That is how it works.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso

We need to keep asking better questions of ourselves and our relationship with technology. We need to keep dreaming into existance the world we want to live in. It's going to be amazing!

We really are ALL in this together. 

Listen to TED

Writing is the hardest thing for me. It is like inviting you to look at me naked. I feel vulnerable and not good enough.

I know there are worse writers than me, I was trolling one on twitter today with the same simple amusement one pokes a jelly to watch it wobble. Still that's hardly a yardstick for achievement- less shit than someone else.
To hone my would-be craft until the thought of another person reading it didn't require me to take a Xanax and quietly cry is my ultimate goal.

In life in general, I do not require any sort of endorsement whatsoever. I truly go my own way. I have no need of fitting in other than to not make other people feel uncomfortable about themselves. Being subversive, difficult, weird, ranty, random or generally coming across like an extra in a David Lynch film is all par for the course. I tend to attract a small group of like-minded weirdos and we are all good with it.

Even drawing which, in comparison to people who can draw, I'm complete rubbish at- I will still pull out a crayon and construct you a barely passable attempt at a map/schematic/ robot prototype without thinking Oh well I'm fucked now that they have seen this!

So why writing? Why the angst?

I thought about this long and hard and came up with I DONT KNOW but this is why I write a blog in the first place.

Feel uncomfortable, do it anyway, get better. Constant improvement. If you aren't macheteing your way through life's bullshit then you will believe your own hype and die satisfied in the suburbs of some shitty city thinking you have it all.  Please no!

I'm highly unlikely to stop pushing myself to feel uncomfortable. I'm so awkward as a default setting this is really hardly a blip on the Richter scale... as you do one thing you do all things and awkward is my superpower... I don't think that is how it works but you get what I mean right?

You are what you eat.

Why would perfectly nice people climb into a rubbish bin to retrieve food and eat it?

I don't know if you know about freeganing but it is a thing- I'm not making it up. Some people know Freegans as Dumpster Divers. There are also Meegans- I had to look that one up. Anyhoo, it is folk  that are diverting food from landfill back into the food chain.
There are oh so many reasons to get in a food dumpster and it has to start at the beginning which is a history lesson.

So agriculture and urbanism appeared approximately 10 thousand years ago roughly around the same time. This allowed cities like Rome which had about a million people to exist in the way that they did as a centralised entity with food being brought in via a chain of food production kept close to the city. Previous to this you had to live in the food belt. We were all Localvores back then my little hipsters, we had no other choice.

In fact cities were shaped by the influx of food, often literally walking into market.  Just check out London's food markets like Smithfield with nearby Cow Cross Street and Turnmill St...  until the advent of rail lead to the ability to slaughter your dinner anywhere and bring it from far afield.

Between then and now we have decreased the amount of farmers to the lowest amount in human history and now those people mostly spend their time in board meetings.
We have developed a relationship with food devoid of any love of food production. Mostly we make shitty food.

Now add to that 40 percent of all of the food we produce is wasted. Thats pretty fucked and somehow this bullshit leads to a billion obese people and a billion starving in our current world. Seriously.

So supermarkets throw out crap tonnes of food every day that is fit for human consumption- People like Jen and Grant of "Just Eat It" made a movie about climbing into dumpsters to retrieve that food and eat it which seems like the kind of thing you say you will do and in the cold light of day and sober sounds borderline crazy and dangerous- And that is all they ate for 6 months. This movie blew my mind.

Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story from Grant Baldwin on Vimeo.

I mentioned this to a person I was working with at a local organic shop- I say working, I was a volunteer because it was a community initiative about food security which has always interested me. I wanted to see how this stuff works up close from a logistics perspective. My workmate encouraged me to come along and go diving with her. Imagine my excitement at the invitation. I wanted to document it but turns out I couldn't bring my camera because of stuff that was happening in her life. Still I was curious so what the hell, jump on in.

We met at a train station because neither of us have cars and caught a tram together to a local Aldi.

Apparently the big supermarkets lock their bins to stop people going through them but Aldi dont.
Seems weird to me that supermarkets aren't donating their food to FareShare, Second Bite, the Asylum Seekers resource centre, any of the churches that feed people- geez really... we throw food away? Yeah we do.

We arrived at Aldi and she flipped back the lid of the dumpster, donned her gloves and began pulling out food and stuff. After the third or fourth time I time I asked "but why would they throw away that?" She said "I've been doing this for years- they throw away everything" She was pulling out child sized merino jumpers. The Asylum Seekers Resource Centre is 2 Km away. People have nothing.
There were brand new kids backpacks, fruit and veggies ensconced in more plastic wrap than I think is seemly, a packet of saffron, bike lights, cosmetics, and so much bread- there must have been 60 loaves in there. Couldn't they go to a church or a homeless shelter? I stopped waving things at her and saying it isn't even at it's best before date because it all became so meaningless. I could have cried.

I did it twice and it depressed me.

Our over production and over consumption of food, especially meat, has lead us to not value what we have.
"Meat production requires a much higher amount of water than vegetables. IME state that to produce 1kg of meat requires between 5,000 and 20,000 litres of water whereas to produce 1kg of wheat requires between 500 and 4,000 litres of water."  Can I put this in perspective by telling you 10 hamburgers = 1 year of showers.  So one dumpster worth of food could account for every shower you ever had in your life... then multiply every day, over thousands of shops a year.
Surely we could demand some stewardship of our food chain? Let's not fuck up everything along the way in the name of "Give me convenience or give me death."
Do we really think these unsustainable systems are going to keep serving us?

My hope is the farms of the future are high rise buildings that bring food production close to the people where they could see what they are going to eat growing in actual dirt, not limply lying in plastic trays.

I would like to see what agribusiness has stolen go back to wild places- between farms and cities there were always the bits that just belonged to the beasties... more of that.

Perhaps the gift of being able to stare at a pile of raw vegetables and know what to make of them will not being a dying art. It will be recognised as a necessary skill for living.

We could reconceptualize the way food shapes our lives, how it connects us with our environment, with the people we love and the people we don't know like oh, time immemorial.

I think I expect a lot from food. Maybe we all should.

Winds of change

Heres a little gem about life I learnt while long distance running.

If you don't run then you will just have to use your imagination- There is this moment when you are in the zone. You are clocking along at a great pace. You are comfortable, pushing yourself but not too hard. Your body feels amazing and your mind is free to absorb the surroundings. You wonder why everyone doesnt get up at 5am and run. The sun is shining and all is good and right with the world. Cue choir... hallelujah.

You pass runners going the other way and wonder why they look like they are having such a bad time. Their heads are bowed in concentration and they seem to be fighting for every step. Geez how do they make it look so hard? Maybe they arent as fit as you? You do train pretty hard. Thats probably it, your superior skills are paying off as you sail through life. 

Haha... Darling you have a tail wind. 

The amazing thing is you cant even feel it. Those other runners are battling a head wind that is sweeping you majestically in the other direction. They ARE fighting for every step. Some of them will be thinking of it as resistance training and others will be wondering why they got out of bed early for this shit. 

This, my friend, is what privilege feels like. Wind at your back and sun in your face. 

Sure you got up at 5am and did the work. Yay you. But when you look around and think it's a level playing field and you're winning because you are a better player then I have news for you. 

The beautiful thing about running is you generally have to turn around and run home thus experiencing the head wind as a reality check against your personal marvellousness. In life you can sail along with privillage and never have a moment of insight that allows you to feel compassion for those not blessed to have wind beneath their wings. 

Failing to see bias doesn't negate its existence- that's what people mean when they say "check your privilege". If you react in anger or denial then you might have some work to do there.

Maybe you are suffering from the Just World Fallacy whereby you think that pretty much all good efforts will be rewarded and conversely bad deeds will be punished therefore ultimately people get what they deserve? But wait Cyberia, surely that is how it works, otherwise the world would be a random violent place right where bad things happen to good people and it would be hard to remain positive and optimistic in the face of this? For some people the world is a random violent place where their success is less correlated to their efforts than the colour of their skin, their gender, their age or a myriad of other attributes that we pretend not to judge. It is hard for them to remain positive and optimistic. Check your privilege. 

We are also prone to a spot of correspondence bias aka fundamental attribution error whereby when we do something (run the red light) because we had a good reason but 'they' do it because they're such a (insert curse, rude hand gesture and cue road rage) 

Check if you've done this one lately because it feeds our feeling of superiority. Don't expect people that pack up their belongings and walk a 1000 miles to save their kids/ love of their life/ their own skin, etc from war, violence and persecution to wait patiently in a fictitious queue. You wouldn't and you know this for a fact. They want a better life? No shit Einstein. 

You have to be careful about creating a world in which any particular group has nothing left to lose. They get very low down in the hierarchy of needs and your cushy world starts to look bourgeois... Viva the revolution. 

Woo,  I totally got all ranty-pants... Back into the yoga pants.

All I'm really asking you to do is to turn around for a moment and see if that isn't a tail wind at your back and if there is then maybe you could create a slipstream for someone else, after all, we are all in this together. 

Catch a tiger by its tail

Every so often I have the luxury of time to catch up on indie content and last night I watched the feature length doco The Tiger Next Door.
Directed and produced by Camilla Calamandrei, it looks at first to be a vehicle to examine the rights of an individual animal breeder to engage in being a big cat enthusiast. That sounds furry and fun.
After  establishing Dennis the Tiger Guy as an animal loving, slightly kooky, heart in the right place dude with more than 20 tigers in his back yard (that's weird but aren't we all just a couple of beasties away from Tiger hoarder)  we go on a roller coaster ride of meth head, anti government, "they done took my guns" etc. set to a back drop of "Tiger Ate Its Trainer" headlines and the vets/rescue workers asking why the fuck anyone in the USA is allowed to breed or keep tigers as pets.
I ask the same thing.
Honestly, we have no reason to keep beings that require thousands of square metres as their stomping ground in a cage of any sort. It's selfish and weird. Wait, you cant tell me what to do! Yeah really?  I think we can. We have standards of behaviour for every damn thing. Tiger keeping is on the list.

This doco explores the murky morals of a business that profits from what is at its very best a shitty life for an animal and at its worst is misery that you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. Slow deaths of starvation, abandonment and crippling confinement are par for the course.

In Denis's case, the locals call a town meeting to debate how safe town folk feel about living near tigers vs what a crackhead Denis is, then turn it into an emotive story telling contest. "I've known Denis all my life blah blah"Vs"Denis is a felon with a record" without one person taking the side of the aggrieved party, the tiger- Hey would you like to be incarcerated for your entire natural life for amusement? - "yeah sure, oh no, wait... that's a no from this kitty cat. Lets blow this chicken coop."

Just say no to keeping tigers.

I did yell "fuck you" at the tv once because what the fuck is wrong with people?

Towards the end there is an argument between two grown men that pretty much goes- "I know you are but what am I."  I'm paraphrasing of course.
When Denis responds to his friend's criticism of his long and well documented history of neglect of our stripy friends with "I'm back in business!" I commended the Director for handing Denis enough rope. I'd like to drag Denis behind something with that rope but I practice kindness to all things, even assholes.

Worth a watch if only to confirm that there are loads of weird and shitty things happening in the world and you should definitely be doing good stuff and fighting the good fight.
Little things like shopping and giving money to the charity of your choice at Amazon Smile all at no cost to you, can make a difference to a not for profit charity. There you go. Pick the side of goodness and light and be a fluffy bunny of righteousness.

Seriously, whatever you can do to tread more lightly upon this planet and its beings then do that.
Mwah. xx

For real.

The immersive world of Augmented Reality a la Iron Man and the like. Superimposed info streams giving us the edge on plain old reality.  Looks exciting in a way that makes me feel like I need a cup of tea and a lie down. I get it in theory but where am I going to fit the extra information in on top of what is already going on between my ears without blowing a gasket.

Let me set the scene for you taking my morning train ride as a fairly indicative example of my inner world.

7:30am The inside of my head reverberates with a constant sound track. There is always some ear worm or another playing, creating the internal atmosphere. It's usually the last thing I heard on Spotify or a selection of teen pop hits from some Uber ride that have lodged permanently in my head taking up valuable and limited hard drive space and bandwidth in general. I think I forgot math so I could learn all the words to "Closer" by The Chainsmokers.

Over the pop music there is the constant narrative- you know how in action movies the sniper guys have an ear piece with intel being piped in by Ops? It's like that but much less useful- (Imagine here the walkie talkie sound- Kheeeeeek) "Hey look at that! I wonder if she knows that her top is on inside out? Wait, are your clothes on the right way? Shoes, pants... Oh good. Why is that person smiling at you? Oh maybe there is something on your face... Did you remember to turn the gas off... What is the Spanish word for... Kheeeeeek.

At the same time there is the Terminator style heads up display in my mind's eye but with completely spurious  information. Like the guy opposite me on the train looks a bit like that guy from that movie, yeah that one, whats his name? Facial recognition activated-  Running possibilities. Possible match found.  List(all movies staring that guy) Sort(movies staring that guy I haven't seen but might like to) Wonder(are they are on Netflix?). This process may or may not have that computer cursor sound effect for fun.

Interrupted by someone conversing loudly over my internal dialogue. Mentally running Dexter style plans to do them in and not get caught. I'd be doing the whole carriage a favour. Seriously.  Evaluate the possibility of getting away with it as informed by all tv shows- in fast forward. May or may not involve ending with the Wilhelm scream each time. Reevaluate as a vast overreaction... Sorry, you were saying?

Start to wonder about one thing- wonder about everything. Ok Google... 

Mental list(everything I've ever wanted to learn, make, do) 

Overwhelm. System is getting a bit crispy round the edges. Need a cup of tea. Breathe.

And for some light relief there is this vision of the future by Keiichi Matsuda

HYPER-REALITY from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Whats your story morning glory?

Question: You get to choose a vacation anywhere, wherever in the world you would like to go and doing whatever floats your boat. Got it?  OK, now you are told that at the end of it, all of your photos will be destroyed and your memory of it wiped. What? Now think about this, would you choose the same vacation?
Take a millisecond to ponder that one.

If you would choose a different vacation or wonder what would be the point of going at all then you have some reconciling to do between yourselves. That's right, the both of you. This is what is currently blowing my mind.

You see your holidaying self is the 'experiencing self'.  The part of you doing it all right now... and now... and... ok the one living your life in the moment. This one will notice if the holiday is one week or two because it is right there lapping up the margaritas and getting a tan. The one that chooses the holiday to go on as well as most of your rational decisions is the other one- the "remembering" self. This one is constructing the narrative of your life through storytelling, and is apparently remarkably indifferent to the feelings of the experiencing self. Hence the extreme hiking holiday that will be a "growth experience" later, when you fondly look back on it.

The idea comes from Daniel Kahneman. The only psychologist ever to win a Nobel Prize in Economics and is known for his studies of the psychology of judgment and decision-making.

Thanks to DK we know if someone asks if you are happy, one self can tell you if you are happy in your life and the other will tell you if you are happy about your life and they aren't highly correlated. Seriously, what are we like?

I know that when I am having an experience I am already re-presenting it to myself in words. I am trying to pin it down before it squirms away into the vagaries of memory. I look for good words, beautiful words, words with specificity that distinguish this experience from similar ones or group them together. Rich words. Visceral words. Fuck it, a haiku if necessary. It is very hard to accurately recall a feeling later.

I am constructing the story as the story is unfolding as if being close to the source will somehow leave less room for the corrupting influence of time. My experiencing self wants to shake me and say "Be here now. Be a witness. Don't judge... perceive". But I know that we are our remembering selves and all we get out of living this life is the memory of living it.  Even that is temporary so, goddamit, I will try and etch all of this in my neural pathways with words. Oh and the odd photograph.