PhazeBook

It's been three days shy of a month since I deactivated my Facebook account. It was hard at first, I found myself out of senseless habit moving my mouse to click on the bookmark as I wait the quarter second for a website to load, then abruptly realizing that it was now an empty urge that would no longer be satisfied. Five minutes later I found myself doing it again. Two hours later, returning to my email, I found myself again trying to shake the impulse.

Slavery comes in many forms. Habits are their indicators. Freedom is the power to leave the jail and return when it chooses, its not to never live in a cell.

Last year Facebook was a canal for friends to import and I to export news and relational cargo. Since then, with much empty unemployed time I have morphed into a homebody that uses Facebook like a twitch of nervous habit. I wouldn't consider my usage of Facebook overbearing on anyone, not even myself. This culture has a funny way of slipping under our skin and requiring the slightest interaction and stimulation every instance. Our brains are living organisms, they have the ability to function differently from year to year. Its scary.

Have you ever tried to have an out-of-body experience? Or how about just imagining yourself siting next to yourself, a mere ghostly observer? I gazed and found myself in a fit of incoherent A.D.D. who had thoughts skipping like a five year-old on hot, sticky asphalt jumping around the purple chalked hopscotch grid. I rose from my kitchen table, five unconnected thoughts a second, aimlessly pacing to fill the gaps, and then somehow five or ten minutes later one of the former thoughts would find the next rational step, and then five minutes later I might conclude the thought or forget about it completely, moving on to something else that wasn't concluded. I reached for the cupboard and fumbled a Cheeze-It box and shagged a few in my mouth, not really realizing why, or what they even tasted like. With nothing to fill the gaps created by Facebook and the English language songs and ads, nothing except aimlessness, I realized I have surely adapted back to America. A place where if I am not under stress and doing something, a different task or thought every five minutes or a next thing, I don't know who I am or have no control and have forgotten about the inner stimulus and how to be inspired to from that and to be self-initiating.

Since my brain is used to taking in ten different stimuli a second it only allowed for one congruent and complete train of thought every ten minutes. Then when the gap filler, the nervous twitch, the outlet of all that - Facebook - was gone, my brain skipped the gaps, but didn't squish the thoughts together. If my thoughts were water and they flowed that would be enough. They wouldn't even have to be a smooth river or stream, just a waterfall, anything but the puddles they've been. As simple and fanciful as I would like, I must admit, I am not the five year old running through the street sloshing up muddy water in his glistening yellow galoshes as he tromps from one puddle to the next.

Clear the mud, let my thoughts flow and be conscious and strong in memory. Maybe I need the stimulus of stress? Maybe I should write more. Although I am slow, and typing this took me about 40 minutes, it does help. Now I push myself, to think faster, to stream like a 4G network. No, to stream like a human brain that is creating the 5G network.

To Be Chased

The left side of the couch didn't feel soft, and his leg itched more when leaning that way; moving to the right side made the kink in his neck sting; lying down just felt like he was flat out lazy. The screen-door slammed behind and his steps thudded on off the porch and onto the pavement. Pacing like a flee bitten dog as he wandered tracing the dirt road around his neighboring, vacant home and back again to his porch.

There is foliage of 17 different bushes and trees, and just as many insects and animals. His house is hugged on the back the shade of a big live oak and kept safe by a slope too steep to allow anything but roots to build upon. After fifty feet the creek trickles and when the birds have their afternoon tea break from singing, you can hear it from the porch. It’s strange how living in a beautiful place can, at moments, feel like its squeezing you out like a wet-fish.

When he was about 15 minutes away, he thought that talking might stop what caused him to start driving in the first place. No friend was available at the moment. The grey suede of the bucket seat held him like a royal throne the day before, but today started to gnaw his thighs. The streets and turning down Barry Rd. was all instinct, so was turning left and then right after that when Regal St. ended. Everything was too familiar to appreciate. Reaching back into his memory he headed towards a beloved cafe shop, Stone and Larry's. Catching a glimpse from the storefront from a hundred yards, he let out a breathless and unsatisfying sigh of relief. Waiting for a blue Toyota Ranger to fill with the driver and three passengers and back out, a thought slipped in mind like a spatula in chocolate pudding.

He was running, and the only way out. So he thought of her, mystique and voluptuous with a full-bodied smile. He fixed his gaze, stern with a strong brow on the tip of anger, and said, "No."

He stepped out the car, dropped the keys in his pockets, grabbed some coffee and started to type: "The left side of the couch didn't feel soft, and his ...."

Old and Sick

I wonder if this is how I will feel when I'm old? A fever crept up on me last night and hit a summit of 102.9 degrees, leaving my body achy, flashing back and forth between the Sahara and Alaska. Not preferable over the typical health of a 20 something. But am I living in luxury now? And when I hit my 80's I'll wake up to reality? Is this is the kind of pain I'll have to put away daily to just enjoy the simple pleasures. I have seen old people groan when they sit on couches, and struggle to get up from them after they have sunk down deep. My grandmother was old, but I don't remember her groaning.

Idaho wasn't the friendliest of places in the depression, nor were many others for that matter. A vision my grandmother shared with me once was her mother feeding those who came to their front door to beg for food. When there was work, so that they would be dignified in their request they would do it, when their wasn't, they ate just the same. I don't know how many people she fed when she was small, nor how often, but she grew up dignified, working right along with those men. Feeding chickens in the blistering cold, tending to soil writhing with weeds and 4am milking appointments is bound to make you tough. So it is no surprise to me that Grandma would get up from any chair without a sound, and it is no surprise to me that she walked a few miles everyday until she was diagnosed with cancer, and passed two weeks later. And it is no surprise to me that her sick body went unmentioned by her, because she minded not her own aches but the aches of others, whom she continued to serve and feed since the farm.

Awaken my mind to words and stories.

Reprise

My fellow bloggers, I return to you. Expect me to read what you write as often as I used to check Facebook, since I have deactivated my profile.


Flesh me out
Would people know
if you were sitting next to me?
The eyes surrounding me at this coffee shop,
would all eyes string to you and weave
a quilt, pitched like a tent, draping
from your very presence, art
greater than anything my grandmother has made.

Or,
would people know
nothing of what we speak.
Our cairn stacked word by word.

Experience

"The religion Jesus gave the world is an experience, not a body of ideas or principles. It is in being lived that it lives, as it is in loving that the love which it discloses at the heart of all creation becomes manifest." - Malcolm Muggeridge

"Does my presence do any good here?"

I want this to be a constant thought in 2011.

"Does my presence do any good here?

Contact with the natives helps to lessen the feelings of strangeness, tames them, and slowly makes taboos and prejudices disappear.

It is very slow, a very little thing.

It is painful to see the reign of evil all around,

the lack of good,

the enemies of the lord so very enterprising,

the faltering of friends,

to see oneself so miserable even after so many blessings.

However, one should not be sad

but should look above it all to our beloved Lord.

For it is Him we love not ourselves, and it is His good that concerns us.

Hope is a duty -

charity hopes for all -

hope is but faith in the goodness of God.

He is good and all-powerful.

Unquestionably, he leaves us free,

and often we use our freedom,

lamentably, but while leaving us free,

he still remains master

and can at his will send a grace

so powerful that is overwhelms everything,

transform everything.

He has already done enough for us to make us believe in his love...

There are difficulties on all sides at all times."

November 18th, 1907

-Charles de Foucauld

(spacing by me)

Rocks of Santa Barbara beware!

I have really love climbing this break.



A rock is glanced at,
a nick becomes a landing platform
for the anterior of the toe;
a bulge the antithesis for the weary forearm.

A challenge is born,
not in the summit,
but in the assent.
Body contortions become a brush,
and the physic a pallete,
to smooth across
a nick here
a bulge there.

Nothing is as it seems,
flesh turns to rock
and rock again.