When I was younger, the sky and everything in it was like the sea. The clouds were boats and often vast, sprawling armadas would fan out across the sea. Other times, the sky was a busy seaport with fleets of trading vessels, frigates, and exploration ships. Of course, it could very easily remind me of the future and of some large bustling spaceport. Clouds cans take on amazing shapes and sometimes, lo and behold, a massive freighter that you saw as child in some sci-fi movie is floating across the sky. I still tend to see the sea and outer space when I look into a cloudy sky.

The most vivid memory I have of being in Alaska almost ten years ago was the crystalline azure color of the bottom of a glacier that I saw dangling off the edge of a mountain on the Kenai Peninsula. I couldn't take my eyes off it as we drove by. I also remember how expansive the landscape was. Incredible. It made the vistas of Upstate New York seem completely claustrophobic when I returned home.

I thought about that glacier the other night while talking to this wonderful girl about birds. She was going on at length about some Macaw and I kept bringing up the Albatross. Then the Arctic Tern. And then the Bald Eagle. Which led me to Alaska. My mind often turns these impressive cartwheels and hand-springs whenever I am talking to a girl and there is a smidgen of potential for any manner of relation. And I will try and let the contents of my rather uninteresting mind try and crowd out the reality of my simple lack of appeal.

Someone can make just the smallest mention of her in conversation and my ears will perk. Despite that, I will always refer to her casually and with a forced hint of indifference...because I simply cannot admit out loud how much I adore her. Of course, she is constantly on my mind and I am constantly trying to dislodge those thoughts. They are plainly impossible thoughts. As impossible as an anarchist victory in America. As impossible as me writing excellent verse.

She is some wonderful Stevia or Golden Fennel plant that will not tolerate my Winter.
I lose sight of her in the distances, where the land evaporates at the horizon. I lose her in the cornfields, in the hay-lots, and along the bottom of creeks in milk-colored Spring-time waters.

She is a cosmonaut, an acrobat, an explorer. I am a miner, a mason, a farmer.
She is the distant Green star. It is amazing enough that I am even aware of her existence.

This evening, I can only tell you that
Stars do not cluster like a Maple's
Whirlygigs in the Spring-time sod;
Nor do they cling like
The traces of snow crust
To the edges of hedgerows
In the early Spring Sun.

The afternoon sky was the color of the water that one would rinse their paintbrushes in while painting in elementary school. Remember it? There would be a cup full of water that you'd swirl your brush in to rinse off the current paint color before moving onto the next. The water was always a milky purple-grey.

And Kodak's smokestacks seemed to be feeding that color into the sky.

And another of my friends is engaged. But that is a topic for another day.

I liken a certain girl to an area of land that had grown beautifully from being an over-exploited and under-appreciated field to a lush meadow of New England Aster, Goldenrod, White Clover, Purple-Fan Thistle, Black-Eyed Susans, and a mix of variegated grasses. And now this pristine meadow was in danger of being dozed over and developed into the sterile, puerile lawn for some god-awful country house built by someone who made their money in the Financial Markets and spent their lives in some horrendous place like Pittsford or Webster. And there is little I can do in this world of sacred Private Property and aversion to protest over land-use. To save her I would need some massive Proudhonnian revolution...and that is just absurd.

Another day of snow and slush. To drive in this weather is to suffer from mild anxiety. You don't know if there is ice or slush or if you are going fast enough or too slow or if the car coming up behind you is going to take you out. You don't know if the big rig coming alongside of you is going to jackknife or if you are going to get pulled into his orbit. It is all very disconcerting and the only proper thing to do is smoke cigarettes and listen to decent music rather loudly.

I spend a lot of time at work. More than I ever thought I would spend at any workplace. I realized this whilst standing on the back docks this evening, smoking a cigarette and looking out across the lots toward the smokestacks of the old Eastman Chemical complex. I think that is all Carestream or DuPont or some such shit now, but it doesn't matter. It occurred to me that that vista was more familiar to me - at that moment - than any other vista. Amazing, really. Amazing that in three-quarters of a year I have grow so familiar with a place. Chalk it up to long hours. I imagine that I will sink slowly into this job and into this industry. I've already about seven years into it. Parts management. And still slogging it out in the pits. Or, rather, in the racks. Up and down Mt.Read Boulevard working in shit-hole warehouses doing third- and fourth-party logistics, chasing accounts and desperately flaunting my specialized knowledge in IBM, HP, and Dell parts inventories. Like so many other parts jockeys up and down the Thruway.

There is a song by the Tragically Hip called "Bobcaygeon" and the lyrics go like this (as I type them as I listen to the song):

Left your house this morning
'Bout a quarter after nine
Could have been the Willie Nelson
Could have been the wine
When I left your house this morning
It was a little after nine
It was in Bobcaygeon
I saw the constellations
Reveal themselves, one star at a time.

Drove back to town this morning
With working on my mind
Thought I may be quitting
Thought of leaving it behind
Went back to bed this morning
As I am pulling down the blind
And the sky was dull
And hypothetical
And falling one cloud at a time

That night in Toronto with its checkerboard floors
Riding in on horseback and keeping order restored
'Til the men they couldn't hang stepped to the mic and sang
and their voices rang in that Aryan twang

Got to your house this morning
Just a little after nine
In the middle of that riot
Couldn't get you off my mind
So I'm at your house this morning
Just a little after nine
It was in Bobcaygeon
Where I saw the constellations
Reveal themselves one star at a time...


Fucking beautiful. The constellations revealing themselves one star at a time.

I remember one night so many years ago when I liked this girl and I was desperately trying so hard to impress her and to capture her attention. I went on and on about the stars and the myths behind them, making sure drench them in as much romantic frivolity as I could muster. Of course I failed. Of course she wasn't as enthralled as I became as I talked about it. Of course she was much more interested in the drunken flirtations of my buddy. Of course I rationalized it away. Years later, many years and in fact last year, I stood in a pitch black field on top of a hill above the Conesus valley and pointed out the same constellations to a wonderful girl who did seem as enthralled as I was with those distant pinpoints. But she is the girl I mentioned above...the beautiful meadow perched on the verge of callous development. And no amount of stargazing will change it.

The past week has been cut out of February and pasted onto this part of November. Temperatures deep into the single digits, snow crusting over in the chill, and tingles inside my nose when I take hearty breaths. It is wonderful. It is invigorating. I want crackling campfires and slow pulls from a cup of hot, percolated coffee.

In the morning when I first go outside to start my car, I am caught for a moment in the almost paralyzing cold. It passes quickly. But I think in that moment about life in these colder climates before the development of and widespread use of furnaces. It wasn't that long ago that most homes in this rural region depended solely upon wood for its heat. And the woodstoves were not the efficient and technologically enhanced wood-burning stoves of today; I mean the pot-bellied cast-iron monstrosities of old that radiated heat the old-fashioned way. I then think about the dream of the solitary life in the farthest reaches of Wilderness. This means I think of Dick Proenneke and his forty years alone in the Wilderness of Alaska waking up every morning to temperatures well below twenty-degrees below zero Fahrenheit. What incredible fortitude. I imagine both my grandfathers in their youth, waking up to similar temperatures in similar wood-burning situations, getting ready in the deep chill to go and milk the cows at Four-in-the-morning. How impressive and wonderful was the body heat of a cow after that long, dark, early-morning walk to the barn?

And yet, I would prefer a cold experience similar to my grandfathers' and Dick Proenneke's to the brief moment of almost intolerable chill I feel every morning when I go to start my car in order to warm it up for the long ride into work in Rochester. But, oh well...right? We do what we have to do in this day and age of plenty. I need to pay for electricity and processed foods. I need to pay for gasoline and parts for a car so I can go to buy these things. I need to keep myself afloat in the slow river. I need I need I need. So much shit.

On another note: loneliness is a half-full rock sled. Being lonely is having the trudge behind that sled and heave rocks into it as you pick our way across the field in early Spring. The more rocks you pile onto that sled, the heavier it gets and the slower it moves across the field. Often, I find myself stopped in thought, in the market or after talking to people, pondering my loneliness. The other evening I was in Wegmans to buy some bread and fruit for dinner and everyone seemed to be coupled up. All I could do was walk slowly and take in the fact that I was silently making my way across the parking lot alone, to get into my car and drive, alone, back home where I would eat my bread and fruit...alone.

I spent the greater part of this past Thursday with my mind locked onto coming up with the perfect metaphor for a feeling I had. I can easily go through the motions of work while letting my mind run in different directions. But it didn't run very far. A weak metaphor came up for a moment to sniff at the bait, but it soon disappeared into a hole beneath an old fallen chestnut tree.

There has been snow off and on all week. Inches upon inches. In some areas just to the south there were somewhere around 16 or 17 inches of snow. All along Lake Ontario, there has been almost continuous snowfall. And the air is getting frigid. Frigid as in brittle and dry. Squeaky, crisp, and sharp. Frigid like it should be in late January and early February. Frigid like it should be right before Winter finishes sharpening its knives and lacerates us with the wind.

Whole regions are emptied out by fighting and only a few pockets of civilian life remain. Quietly, like Stalingrad whenever the sides were reloading, frost moves across the puddles and into the spaces between coats, shirts, and skin. Into the boots and above the socks, pushing moisture in between the toes. Flying across the empty lots like leaves in full retreat after a month of captivity underneath petrified snow. Whole regions like this. Fields in muddy disarray. Leach fields blown out into the open and months-old shit festering underneath the cold moon's glow. Shit and rags. Smoke. Piles of used cartridges. A small, surprisingly untouched and unsoiled stack of magazines taken from a bombarded convenient mart. Magazines so boring and puerile that the combatants pass them up in favor of bathing in the fetid ponds. We wait.

Set sights upon a chunk of good land in the hills to the south of Rochester and Buffalo.
Set about growing any number of wonderful vegetables and fruits.
Be prepared to go it alone.

~~~

It follows that those whom we admire from afar will be attracted to idiots. It follows that those whom we admire from afar will travel in opposite directions from the silent admirer. I want to compare it to Quantum physics, really, about the Uncertainty Principle (where I cannot determine both the location and the velocity of that which is being observed, or, in my example, that which is admired) and, even more so, the strange fact that our simple observation alters the state of the observed. Of course.

~~~

Winter is easily discerned by the Winds it sends as its advance guard. Blasts from the North and West scraping through the recently barren-ed trees and across the hibernating ground sound the imminent arrival of Winter like a trumpet blast from the approaching herald. After the Winds read aloud their proclamations, there is only a few moments left to be ready.

In those winds I scan the horizon for a break in the steely grey skies. A glimmer of that dying golden Autumnal light. So that I may once more sink spade into the sod. That I may once more walk through the garden and cover the endangered Thymes and Fennels. That I may imagine there being a purpose to it all.

Wake up.
Drive for about thirty-minutes.
Work for about eleven hours.
Drive for another thirty-minutes.
Read for a few hours.
Tip-tap-type for a short while.
Sleep.

Repeat.

What was it about an un-chiseled, non-sculpted slab of marble that sparked the pistons in my mind today? I was reading about Robert Browning in the next-to-current London Review of Books and they mentioned a poem of his called "The Statue and the Bust." My mind went skating toward metaphor and - voila - dense slabs of marble and granite remain fixed across the warehouse of my mind. Each boulder represent something else. Or they are all the same, in a way. There is that well-worn quote from Michaelangelo regarding the imprisoned figure withing the uncarved material. So on and so forth.

Nicotine.

I have not written any lines of verse in over a month. I had a burst of energy and wrote out the outlines and skeleton frames for about five poems before succumbing to laziness and emptiness. Out of those five poems, one or two lines were fine. Maybe even very fine. And that reminds me of what a couple old women said about John Reed's poetry in the movie "Reds"; very fine.

Swirling in an eddy within sight of the main channel and its lazy progress.
Like the cream and brown coloured foam that grows in amongst the sticks and leaves that gather along the edges and in the nooks and crannies.
Like so much debris dragging along the bottom until it meets a fallen tree or a submerged limb.
A sharp rock or a long-forgotten automobile.

Or sitting along the banks watching it all. On the grass and out of the sun. Heavily breathing after a long descent into the canyon. Or a long, ever-downward walk into the valley. Watching with some apprehension as the climb back up and out weighs heavily on the mind.

Or with John Wesley Powell through Glen Canyon in battered boats looking for mappable features. With an eye toward exploration but a mind set on survival. With beautiful country up and out of sight. With the reality of a water-less future hanging over the inevitable colonization you are about to open up when you report your findings. Perched upon a mesa far from the maddening crowd.

Mostly, though, just swirling in the eddy. Removed, but moving. Not progressing other than in circular motions.

I thought for a minute that writing this blog would be good for me. As I think more about it, it seems to be neither good or bad. Nobody reads it, so there is always that. I don't think it is any more helpful than shouting in a vast wilderness.

Vox clemantis in deserto.

Anyway, I feel semi-devastated this evening. But I'm an armor-plated motherfucker.

A question that I have been asking myself lately is: How much land does one need to live self-sustainably? How will one go about living if many modern conveniences and conveyances were to disappear or seriously diminish in the near-future?



I am not a 'peak-oil' alarmist or a collapse-of-society survivalist. I am simply concerned with the further existence of my current quality of life and that my quality of life adds to the slow destruction of the planet and its resources. If I can live simply and self-sustainably, it might help in prolonging the availability of resources to those who need them. That those in need might have adequate electricity, food, or medicine if we in the fat west weren't hogging it all. So, there is my impetus for making inquiries into a simpler lifestyle.

So I ask myself: How much land does a man need? I am thinking only incidentally of Tolstoy's great short story of the same phrasing. I say incidentally because in the end, Tolstoy was referring to the amount of cubic space required to bury someone. I am referring to life. But I suppose death is that great hovering inevitability that we constantly struggle against. Like gravity. But really, how much land? And how much work? And how much struggle? And with how many people? And and and.

I am inclined to believe that anything more than five acres would be superfluous. Were I one who wanted to not only sustain myself, but to also make a living from the land, more than five acres would probably be justified. But orchards, berry patches, herb garden, garden plots, and animal areas couldn't possibly take more than five acres. I am not thinking about fuel, though, either. I am not thinking about gathering enough wood for heat. Heat is an important element to consider up here in the Northeast, and it cannot be take lightly when considering self-subsitent living. But ignoring that for the moment, five acres is enough land (unless you live on a commune or in a communal situation - which is something I just thought about - then more is warranted).

I refer myself to Scott Nearing's classic "The Good Life" for small amounts of inspiration. Also Richard Proenneke's "One Man's Wilderness." Yes. More thinking. But it is always so much easier to think about something than to just go and do it. Always and without fail.

Over the past month, I have been slowly meandering through the first collection of Guy Davenport's essays, "The Geography of the Imagination." It requires of me a slow meander. The ideas and the concepts, the allusions and learned references demand more from me than I am used to. I am just a simply country fellow with no formal university education, so trying to keep up with one of the most classically learned people of the twentieth-century is quite an endeavor.

Anyway, I just read an essay on the American poet Charles Olson and in it, toward the end, Davenport quotes from Rimbaud's 'Une Saison en Enfer':

Si j'ai du gout, ce n'est gueres
Que pour la terre et les pierres.
Je dejeune toujours d'air
De roc, de charbons, de fer.

...or thereabouts:

If I have any taste,
It is for earth and stone.
I take for my meals
Rock, coal, and iron.

I first read Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' when I was in Eleventh grade. I read it, initially, to impress a girl who was parsecs ahead of me intellectually, emotionally, and in every other way. But I spied her reading Rimbaud and I wanted to have something in common with her. She would eventually leave the school to go to an alternative, gifted public school of the arts in the city where she would slowly, disastrously merge with the suburban-fueled city bohemianism and drug culture. I would see her years later at a hold-in-the-wall bar in Rochester and talk to her for hours about how she had fared in those several years. She still made references in French, but those words came from a mouth puckered and weary of a life lived at the level of pavement.

That was almost ten years ago.
I wonder where she is now, with her tastes for rock and coal and iron. I could only ever have offered her corn, Chard, and raspberries. No competition.

Say the correct things; be witty, thoughtful, and vaguely philosophical. Don't hammer anyone over the head with facts or subjects too profound for casual conversation. But don't condescend by avoiding subjects that might appear too profound for casual conversation. Avoid those conversations that may appear to be too casual. Allude to the weather only when it suits your mindset.

Speak enough to distract attention away from other troubling aspects. Allow your mind to be the main attraction. Allow everything within your mind and all those aspects of you that emanate from your mind to take positions in the front.

Never allow your subterranean thoughts to surface. Maintain them as nature maintains an untapped artesian well. Never allow your intentions to be recognized or guessed. Leave no trace.

Though you are a mountain, carry yourself like a knoll, or, even better, a common hollow or ravine. Again, leave no trace. Mountains cast long shadows, impose themselves against the sky, and seem persistent. The Earth's tectonic plates had to smash into one another to create the mountains whereas the slow, quiet retreat of glaciers left the knoll. The slow and silently steady course of long un-named creeks created ravines.

Be unique by emphasizing your commonality. Let your descriptive power create ubiquity.

Don't be too sad when you fail and continue to move on alone.

A message I will not relay: My flattery was actually sincere the other night. I think as highly and as well of you as I implied. Really, I think the world of you and often imagine myself in your presence.

A message more in-tune with how I communicate: We indeed are, as Sagan liked to say, the stuff of stars; your magnitude, however, is greater than mine and I could never hope to complement you as a binary.

The following words were lifted from my half-assed blog on Myspace. Few people ever read it, and now even fewer will.

dulce et decorum

The vast tangible intellectual wealth of this country should be stored in Upstate New York, far away from the areas so prone to natural (and popular) destruction.

Indeed - what more appropriate manner (dulce et decorum) for American museums, libraries, archives, and natural history collections to be treated than to fade away into neglected rust as has all of Upstate New York?

~~

harvest season, ii

Best to sow on distant property,
Best to raise it far from home
In other people's fields or, better yet,
To act as usufructuary in the confused ownership geographies
Of ravines and well-wooded creek-cut glens.

Best to keep all themes and topics as far away as possible.

~~

harvest season

As late Summer fades softly into Autumn, the helicopters are already
Flying low over the treetops and through the ravines and glens;
One has to wonder how pork belly futures are doing.

~~

...throw aways

Sir Edmund Hilary once commisioned an artist to create a honeycomb out of gold in the manner of the ancient Greek inventor/aviator Daedalus. The artist fashioned it and Hilary placed it in the garden, whereupon the bees instantly recognized the golden honeycomb as their own and immediately began filling it in with honey.

The Russian poet/translator Vladimir Pyast went 'stark raving mad' on stage in front of a rather large crowd while reading his recent translation of Edgar Allen Poe's 'Ullalume'.

The night sky this weekend was spectacular. The Milky Way was a long trail of high-atmospheric chimney smoke; the Pleiades Cluster was brilliant and clearly discernable.

~~

Fog sticks loosely to the tree-line;
The cool air settles along the smooth mounds between the deep plow furrows.

Another day of radio silence;
Lines of purple clouds on the horizon at dawn.

~~

again.

There are some who are astronomers most of the time. Or all of the time. One can use telescopes mounted upon imperceptibly slow gyros that adjust for the rotation of the Earth so that the unbearably distant objects of our interests do not fly out of our unbearably narrow field-of-view. Of course, many of us cannot afford such extravagances and must stick to the crudities of table-top telescopes designed for terrestrial use; telescopes weaker than Gallileo's own crudity. Others still must rely on the naked-eye and can only guess at those heavenly bodies that fill the pages of National Geographic or Sky & Telescope. Globular Clusters, Nebulae, Novas, Galaxies and Magellenic Clouds. With Celestial Charts in hand, they can only see what the ancient Greeks saw and make conjecture, divorced from the vivid realities the Greeks were able to utilize.

In a similar vein, imagine a comet hurtling across the Solar System on its predictable course toward pre-planned observation. Imagine a meteor or an asteroid in orbit between Mars and Jupiter - let us say Ceres - that wobbles on its irregular path and gives pause to Kepler's laws. Something along the line gets the shank and the aforementioned comet veers off its path and avoids the anxiously awaiting glances of those who had been expecting it. Even those heavenly bodies that promise a moment of joy away from the telescope swerve and elude us. The denizens return to their refractors and reflectors, their Dobsonians and their Cassegrains. And in the coming light of Dawn, those who never had such elaborate implements never knew what they missed.

~~

Of course, there is more to say about the various creeks that jump their streambeds and flow down muddy, stick-barbed floodways. There is more to say about the lamentations over dry streambeds and dying mosses in the shade clinging to still-moist formations of slate. But after heavy rains, creeks sometimes fail to appreciate the value of their paths, avoid the grand meander, and recklessly spill across thickets. Like fools.

Wedding ceremonies are on common ground with Civil War Re-enactments. Outdated and overblown. In this day and age, though, it is as if the Confederacy is in the ascendancy; with something like two-thirds of all marriages sinking like the Merrimack, the losers have the majority of the soldiers. What does that mean? Nothing, but fewer and fewer get to wear the brilliant blues of the Army of the Potomac. Or even the bright greens and reds of the Volunteer New York Zouave regiments.

It used to be that slow and quiet moments at work were what I enjoyed the most during the day. Times when the orders slowed to a halt like trains winding their way down a gradient. Or when the space of time between the inbound trucks was perfectly long; a spread in time that seemed to allow for the reading of entire essays and the release of thoughts in the aftermath to wander along the paths opened up by the essay one had just read. Of course, these 'free' moments are no longer so refreshing.



The slow and quiet moments are almost oppressive now. I cannot concentrate on reading. I cannot let my thoughts wander too far for fear that they may be lost if (and definitely when) something intrudes itself into my attention and forces me to move on from where I had been moored. Each moment is surrounded on its edges by anxiety and impatience. Something is always lurking on the horizon. No spectres, no enemies. Just happenstance. The mundane. Certain realizations.

I still have a hard time understanding the thirst for wealth that drives many people. It bewildered me when I was fifteen years-old and it bewilders me, still, more than fifteen years later. I do not understand the almost selfless devotion to corporations that many middle-managers feel. I do not understand what keeps those sales-reps and various salaried administrative-types glued to their lap-top computers for sixteen hours every day. Is wealth so important that you would compromise your very being to have it?

I was a bottom-feeder at one of the largest companies in the world. I was one of the millions of legs that moved the milipedal body of a massive transportation company. The world was promised to you and everyone was made to feel that they were important and respected. Except, in today's economy (and I do not mean that of the falling markets and financial crises) there are no promises and there is no respect. The first sign of profit distress, no matter how miniscule and how localized, will trigger an amputational reaction. Done. Expelled like snot in a flu-ridden nose.

So I watch these upper-level administrators and these upper-level managers and directors and I have to wonder what makes them believe they are different. Though, actually, I should start to wonder why it is that I am still in places where I see all of this. I should ask myself why I am still hauling boxes out of trailers and filing shippng manifests and not building cabins or stone cottages in the woods.

This afternoon, in the sky:

Clouds like hundred-year-old portraits of long-forgotten, unrecognizable
Family patriarchs.
Clouds like mountains received in dreams,
As if Lonely Mountains were miniaturized by David Caspar Friedrich.

At night the theories always work,
Before Morning's arrival it seems that
All is elegant.
Then Dawn,
When shadows lighten and Light
Obscures the equations.

~~~

Through fields like weather-shredded
Tarps stretched across a
Decaying roof
Below which red ants, Potato bugs, snails
And the most grizzled bleached weeds have
Settled.