Glacial Awakening

Walking backwards is always a guess.

A wandering cowboy slips through the snow as the thaw of spring rears its frosted head.

The soft crackle of arched steps sounds through the room. Pacing like a sun-bound polar bear.

An illusion is brewing

It has been for a dogs age.

This medley of confusion and open-ended paths that so neatly disguise themselves as solitary walkways. Instead of the outward spinning circle from which we’ve all originated at the center.

Hesitating to close with grief as no arms find themselves around me.

Hate to accept the cowardice of refusing to face the dark wings of heartbreak in a lush environs. The demi-glacé of reality will not find me there.

Gull

“I’m telling you something is wrong with him. I watched this man punch seagulls out of the sky for 45 minutes. That’s not normal behavior, Karen. I think this is a serious cause for alarm and if you don’t need something, I will.” Karen rolled her eyes as she continued to pack scarfs into a soft-edged cardboard box. The box read “Xmas” in faded sharpie.

“Tom, I already told you to leave it alone. You know he’s from Iowa. he’s got more Four Loko in his bloodstream than he does white blood cells. I am not trying to end up on his bad side.”

Tom shifted a couple more boxes around in the spare room as he tried to handle the volume of his grumbling. Usually threats of avian aggression worked better than this, he thought.

Dinner Time

“You’d be surprised,” she said lighting the final candle.

“I don’t think so,” a man in a velour tracksuit said. The dining room of a Victorian house still fighting to evoke prestige flickered with the dancing lights of thirteen candles. “I’m only here because my Nona told me to come. I don’t brook with all this-“ the man twirled his hand is a dismissive gesture, “nonsense.”

A fey smile crept across the woman’s face. “I’ve heard that before.”

The next couple hours the surrounding houses didn’t notice the eldritch screams or swirling vortex of clouds over the Drasvlin House. The statues in the front changed faces as creeping vines slithered through the yard. Still, no one noticed.

Google Searches

I’ve been looking through the Google searches that have led people to my website— and so far, “are butter menthols bad for dogs” and “Is there an inappropriate time for ham?” are my two favorite ones. “brady bud save our horny queen” and “bottoms summoning tops” are also top tier additions.

I didn’t even know butter menthols were a thing— but regardless of human or dog consumption, I’d wager they aren’t too healthy. As for the age-old question of whether it is an inappropriate time for ham— the answer is a resounding yes. Mid-funeral, any school bathroom, in a bouncy house, on the hajj to Mecca, at a pig farm (or maybe not on that one, depending on the owners), during a standardized test, any moment of seduction, and probably during an induction ceremony. The possibilities are endless for inappropriate ham times, so you have to ham it up in spirit, not physical substance.

Forward Flop

This weekend I failed forward. I was out at my coaching license course getting ready to demo my training session for the instructors and fellow coaches when the script was switched. Up until that point, all of the sessions had been run with coaches serving as players in the drills. I had that in mind as I created my session— the style of play, field space, numbers, etc

Enter seven u10 girls from one of the instructor’s teams. Not only was it not the eleven players I needed to run my drill, but the report I had built with my fellow coaches was out the window as I had seven new children in front of me. I had to switch the drill on the fly and interact with kids (which I wasn’t prepared for).

It was pretty disastrous. I stepped back from coaching— the players themselves didn’t have much success, and I felt like all the coaching experience I did have disappeared into the wind.

I couldn’t ask for a better scenario to learn from. Not only did it force me into an uncomfortable situation, but it clearly showed me things I need to work on. Stepping back from the players because I wasn’t prepared to interact with them isn’t a luxury I’ll have if I stay in coaching or education. There will always be scenarios in which new players or students, classes, teams, etc will need coaching from me in hurried circumstances.

I love soccer. If you know me or have read through my website, you’ve probably known that for a while now. But when it comes to the competitive soccer world, it’s been hard to shake the feeling of not belonging. I know the game—I love the game. I have an obscene amount of niche knowledge of players, teams, play styles, and numerous factoids. But it can be difficult at times to express that knowledge succinctly.

Really, it’s that I’ve had a severe case of imposter syndrome, and my demo yesterday felt like being found out. Only it wasn’t the end of the world. I went on to finish the day gaining new skills and knowledge. I left the field where the session took place and rushed back over to the east side of the town to coach two games for the U19 boys. A 3-3 draw and a 4-0 win weren’t bad ways to alleviate the post-lesson witches brew of feelings.

Learning can be a vulnerable process, especially when one's identity is wrapped up in it. The emotions tendriled around principles one is forced to cut away can be devastating.

I wonder in what ways I’ll grow as I continue along this lightning-forked path of coaching. What avenues will be pruned as I decide to carry forward in specific directions.

Across the Way in Light of Horror

The swish of fresh nylon track pants taking one step at a time. A venonmous grey hallway across the way from big floor to ceiling windows.

A short, melodic whistle with each step. But the steps keep taking longer.

Tension rising as if waiting for something or someone to walk down the dark hallway across the road.

The whistler waiting for chaos to unfold.

The night is otherwise silent, save for the swish and whistle.

No sounds as horrors reflect in the windows across the way.

Of Late Nights in Which We Charge Into Fire

It’s time to slip on the velvet gloves of revolution and kill bad men.

Brother, you don’t have it so bad that the crawdads have started crawling through your dreams. No noisy brook or kicked fence has kept you from aspirations others call foolish.

Kept awake by technicolor memories of reckless glory. Nights where youth sang hot-blooded songs of challenge and like the myrmidons on the beach of Troy, you answered.

It’s not that you lose courage as you age, but ignorance. The brash charge slows to a measured step. And for all the scoffs and regrets, life requires the call of undaunted action.

Powdered sugar steps cross the divide between inane and inviting. Tip toeing around desires like light night bathroom trips in old houses. Floorboard creak regrets for every dream not voiced.

It’s in the slow fall into bed where your head rests on a yellowed pillow when you ask yourself when you became afraid to dream past nighttime.

When did sparkling thoughts lose shine past the divide of what is and what is to come?

And so, and thus, and so——

Eight

For the first time in weeks, I slept long past eight o’clock. My body must have called off the early rise as the week's exercise caught up to me.

I’ve been flitting through books as snow threatens to fall. My coaching license course is disjointed in its expectations, but I’ve found use in its new material. The first meeting made me realize I have to reengage with learning. Too long have I been able to coast by without overt mental effort. It’s nice to reclaim some scholastic energies.

Half the time I write, I find myself wandering through lyric lines. There hasn’t been much impetus for stories lately, even if I have been combing through my archives to release the anthologies.

The other day, I was driving out to Troutdale to see one of my closest friends who had driven in from Montana to look at Portland area homes with his wife when I started laughing at the absurdity of it all. I’ve been haggard from the breakneck pace I’ve put myself on since I returned to the States. Since my first week back, I’ve been coaching soccer and doing anything and everything that’s come across my path to combat the relative inactivity I had during my island stay (although that idea itself is ridiculous when you consider I was doing new things daily in a foreign country) but rural vs. city provides two very different lifestyles.

It’s the beginning of February, and I’m helping coach four different age groups and occasionally attending gym sessions for the high school team. Saturday through Thursday, I have guaranteed soccer involvement, whether it be practice, games, or weight room sessions. The only day off I genuinely have is Friday, but that’s when I might end up on the mountain to snowboard or go to a local show. That being said, I laughed on that drive out to Troutdale because I was doing exactly what I said I’d be doing when I was in Japan. I told my friends and coworkers over there that I would move back and start coaching. Even the coaching license course is part of what I told them.

It’s only been about six months since getting back, and I’ve bedded in like a duck to water, but I can’t shake the feeling of “not enough” even though I know it’s absurd. If any of my friends were to tell me the same scenario, I’d be hyped for them. Especially adding in the artistic achievements.

The pace can trip us up. We’re constantly told (socially and perhaps personally) that we have to achieve more. Year over year, day over day, our output has to become exponentially greater. It's no surprise that unhappiness and stress levels are rocketing. The calm moments necessary for rest and re-energizing have been monopolized and rationed out.

Slowing things down allows the flavor to return to life. If everything is done at breakneck speed, the world is a blur as you move past. I think of sitting at a wooden kitchen table drinking coffee with clover honey as I read a book and imagined a future outside of Southern Oregon. I think of slow walks through the east side of Portland as the summer light faded, but dreams of expansive stories did not.

There’s no grand coherent message to this— just thoughts scattered like leaves and the occasional breath of insight as if knowledge took a sentient form to perch behind the ears of the occasionally receptive.

Starward

I stare out at a room with a bed covered by a patchwork quilt.

The amber glow of the bed side lamp fills the room and leaks out onto the street.

The dragon huff of the heating vent rattles the wall next to me

Expectations collapse inward like the center of an origami star.

A blue lined black hole lays on the table before me.

Ink drenched notebooks sit beside it.

I’m finding the edges of existence in between exhales.

Eras

The present is always the time of consequence.

Too often do we cast all desires into the past or future.

There is no time but this in which we can act.

“History is not inevitable,” Golo Mann said as he watched the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic. Revisionist and cynics claim backward foresight.

“We all knew it was going to happen. Nothing could be done.” Falser words could not be said. We do not live in a hard-set cast like the pour for copper. Institutions for centuries can disappear overnight.

The flicker of flame and black smoke of turned oil vanished under the lambent cast of filament lights— whaling boats lost over the electric horizon.

The illusion of normalcy is maintained as even in the fall of empires you have to rise in the morning and sleep at night. There are still birthdays and smiles. Smaller and brittle, perhaps. But the human spirit does not extinguish in one fell swoop. History has shown otherwise.

There is no escaping the connection to the world. There is no gently laid salt line that keeps the spirits from the door. No pair of headphones, book, or music that can drown out the ever present thrum of the universe that pulses through us.

There is no salvation in ignorance. No prayer in despair that will save you from experiencing the breadth of existence.

The only destiny we can claim is breath.

So fill your lungs with the defiant crush of the unknown— and all that it contains— as if we are to make a wager. If we are to stand as a speck in the vastness of it all— why not dare to breathe once more. To realize that even the darkness cannot remain an unmovable force.

Like a dandelion pushing up through concrete— it’s bit by bit as you move towards daylight.

Tres

I woke to three women standing over my bed. One by the window, one at the end of the bed, and one closer to the bathroom. They stood silently. As if they’d paused the moment I came to. The energy of the room crackled without words.

Porcelain statues looking down at me without word.

I woke again to an empty, dark room.

The lamp light didn’t cast their shadows. There were no shadows at all.

The Creek Hermit

I woke up thinking of you, the man scribbled in his notebook. I don’t know if I’ll ever tell you. The last embers crackled in the wood stove as he sat in the sunken recliner. The morning was chill, and the fog lay low and thick on the ground. Fall was quickly fading before a strong winter.

I wonder if you ever think about me, too. But never enough to move the block of ice holding my fear frozen. Easier to write and wander. Always easier to dream than to live. Worn journals and open books lay across a board, scarred kitchen table. Heavy wood held together with thick steel bolts. It could have served in an old lumber camp. These things aren’t made anymore. Wood from forests long gone. Out of time from lost worlds. Ones that faded photographs and looping script spoke of. The man sat nursing his cup of tea. No mirrors lived in the cabin, but he knew he didn’t present a pretty sight. Not anymore.

Still, curiosity remained as he weaved her initials against the ceramic mug. He was too lost in memories to hear the first birds of the day and the nattering of the chipmunks that followed.

Too lost to remember what still lay before him.

I would have been a different man, given the chance.

Bancorp Pink

There are days when I wonder to what ends I will follow for this path I am walking. Behind me is defined, but before there’s no arc to be followed— only what my imagination can craft and feet can sunder.

I’m laying in an empty king sized bed. I haven’t drawn the shades yet. No lights are on inside the condo, but down below is the ever-present Glisan fluorescence.

In the distance, the US Bancorp building is topped with a pink ribbon around its top.

Back ordered Girl Scout cookies set for a February arrival.

Weary mind and achy legs.

The disappearance of goals amidst a sleepy mind, but the small torch fire of hope that they remain intact and in pursuit.

I believe tomorrow I’ll wake in a sunlit room with a smile nearby.

As I age, I’ve begun to no longer trust the emotions that snarl beyond nine at night. They’re capricious little fucks and I won’t let their grubby hands steer the boat.

You are a haunting melody

I wonder if we will talk again

But I don’t know what’s left unsaid

That will cross between past and present

More of a ghost than a muse

The notes grow more silent as time wears on

Like soft creased kisses left atop the head

I don’t have anywhere to hold this

You know this

Further time unraveled

And letters left unsent

Nothing to be traded beyond glances across the bow.

Ships in the night

Bite Size

“Stop biting me! I’m trying to save you,” a gruff voice said as hands the size of cinderblocks pulled the boy from the wagon’s wreckage. “Nasty little sewer rat,” the voice added.

Roscoe looked up to see a small group of men pick through the broken boards and spokes of the wagon to try and get the supplies that Khallundun had sent him out with.

Ley Line

I wrote a song for you. Heard the melody float through my mind after dusk as I eat frozen mangoes and triple knotted my shoes.

Southern rifts spoke with steel twang as I walked the passage between the kitchen and bedroom over and over.

It’s not a song that’ll be played. Other instruments I possess aren’t owned by hands with the experience to make them sing.

I’m trying to map the stars off the lake’s surface. Surface slick with light from a galaxy away. No prophecy found as I bubble awake.

Bless the last acre of berry stained grass. Copper taint of summer water I’d wager outlines of ecstasy for steady hands intertwined.

No lyrics to be sung aloud in this name or time.

Alchemy

“Going on crusades has never been my strong suit,” Rikken said rubbing ashen knuckles. The fire crackled with strange alchemy before him as the dawn call tolled from the city bell. No cheeky last snooze for the band.

“Neither has been staying quiet when the rest of us need a little more shut eye.”

“Yeah, stick a sock in it, Rikken.”

“Seeing as none of you are going to hush any time soon, can one of you stoke the fire while I take a leak?”

The motley crew of Lars, Krendel, and Adair bickered as Rikken planned the day’s outing. The trio couldn’t help themselves, but what band of magicians can? At least Rikken knew magic wasn’t infallible, even if the peasants and overzealous clerics of the outer range temples believed it so.

Warlocks didn’t often group together. Individuals who enter demonic contracts don’t tend to play well with one another. But just as starvation is the best seasoning, desperation makes fast friends.

Adair was the odd one out. A wildling mage that hadn’t gained the trust of his ancestral demon before the empire marched on the Temari homelands.

With a cloud of wakeleaf and sour ale breath, the gang got on the road towards Kvil. Rikken had secured a contract for them to investigate the mystery in Malton Keep. The Duke’s bastard had used a royal courier to contact the group. Rikken wasn’t holding out hope for a long or lucrative contract, but he figured anything was better than staying around Kvil trying to dodge the attention of minor naval despots.

Jubilation

Lying down and staring skyward. Lost into a bluebird day overhead. Tethers loosened and spirits high.

I walked to the store with a smile pasted across my face. The actions of the day placed brick by brick to make a tower towards joy.

“These experiments are just quaint beginnings,” my sister wrote in our sibling chat from under the gaze of Mt. Adams.

My friend talked over the sizzle of Bulgogi frying in the background as we continued the decade long streak of phone calls.

I sent a picture of the flames reflected in another friend’s glasses as we sat outside last night.

Little snippets of existence taped across the mind.

Glasses and Classes

Electric candle covered by a half-sphere of mottled glass with globules of teased silica.

Turn of the year and I’m heading into an interesting marriage of commitment and interest. As of today I’ve returned to the world of substitute teaching. Combining that with coaching soccer and I’m back to where I was before I left for Japan, save for the experiences that have shaped the past two years.

A goblet of dark beer sits on the table before me. I’m reading an Adrian Tchaikovsky book as the booth light reflects on the lacquer of the stained, plywood torn strip artistic expression of the table beneath it.

I’ve been slowly ticking off my to-do’s as I’ve straightened out my plans for January and the year beyond it.