I keep saying it, but we are in the final days. I am seriously starting to freak out, but I am keeping my cool (am I?!?!?!).
*breathe*
What will be our last day off together for a while, we headed out for one last jaunt through our backyard, Joshua Tree. Well, there was little jaunting because neither of us took Labor Day weekend in to account, so after waiting in line to enter the park (via shortcut. Buahahahahahhahahahaha*cough*), we drove all of about half a mile in before we parked in a turn out and hiked in a little; very little, because I don't know if you've noticed, but she's about to drop some serious water-weight (not like she's got serious weight, but she's carrying a lot of fluids [see what I did there? nice backpedal!]). Fortunately, as I have yet to really explore the west entrance, there were some nice structures, and all of the tourists were likely scouring the big spots like roaches.
We were both exhausted, but trying to make the most of aforementioned day off. I was exhausted from a 12 hour saturday. She was exhausted from...well... growing a human, and I'm sure she had to have been a little exhausted from tormenting me for all the things I do wrong every day (I believe I mentioned something about pregnant emotion in an earlier post, in all of its glory), and from dealing with all of my absurd silliness, me being all absurdly silly and shit. I must confess, I am a little exhausted from tip-toeing around these two temporarily joined souls, and even more exhausted from trying to tip-toe around writing about it without awakening the...
We were both exhausted!
I'm leaving it at that.
Anywhoo, it took us a while to get into shooting. First she had to announce that she was pregnant (wait...what?) and simply could not do any climbing because her body would not allow her to. Then, after walking past two moments where she wanted to turn back because there was too much walking, she proceeded to CLIMB EVERYTHING.
0_0
I just kept shooting and everything turned out beautifully, like it always does, mostly because I don't waste my rubbed together pennies on question mark models, and I happen to have permanent access to this beautiful creature. That's another post. This is the reality of us: our life; this life; this new life; consisting entirely of beauty...mostly.
My mind just flashed on all the consisting entirely of beauty fluids that I will bear witness to shortly.
Am I digressing again?
I've got three more photos to type words next to still, so they don't look all empty and shit, but my mind has already completely tangented (that's a word now) from what I set out to write about.
Always so much fun writing these (that, ladies and gentlemen, is sarcasm. subtle, I know). I wish I could just free flow and go, but I had some stuff I wanted to accomplish here.
*breathe*
This is it. Not only was this trip a last hurrah before we bring home a little, freaky, eat-and-shit alien looking baby, but I feel like this post is kind of a last word before the next stage of my life, better known as mid-life crisis, begins. I've been thinking about what I wanted to say for three days. We've been packing our "bug-out bags" and making checklists, and talking about a plan, et cetera, but my mind is just stuck on how many infinite souls were born without all of these preventative measures. I kind of just want to have the baby in our bathtub, or at my beach, but we can't afford a midwife in case something goes horrifically wrong.
Then I start thinking about my own birth, and the likelihood of my not having survived it had I been born a hundred years earlier, or even fifty years earlier. All of my life I've felt like I wasn't supposed to be here. She's asking me about what clothes we should dress the baby in to bring her home from the birth center? My only response is "wrap her in a damn blanket." That turns into an argument about me not taking this seriously. I am taking this very seriously, more than most ever have. My mind is like a clusterfuck of emotional chaos, but I'm Amish cool, so I deal with all of it by sitting by myself and staring at the stars. I just grab my camera and capture what's happening because that's all I'm good at.
This soul, this beautiful soul, who deals with all of my passive bullshit, is going to labor out another potentially beautiful human soul into this plane of existence, which, as far as human development goes, could very well be happening right now, but I can't hear her screaming in pain because the crickets out here are set to eleven (Spinal Tap reference. Nice). She has been Physiologically ready to go, and had a little false labor in the wee hours of the morning, but I also can't pretend like she doesn't cry wolf a lot. She's a bit of a worrier. Little bit. I love her, so, this is happening... hopefully closer to her due date: talk like a pirate day. Even more hopefully: two days later on the last day of summer, to go with my birth on the last day of spring, even though this is leap year, so being born on the last day of summer would actually make her a day earlier to the equinox than my distance to the solstice. Who gives a shit?
Babes is back, on East Coast time, so the "I'm tired, but I have no idea I'm tired because I'm two, so I'll just flip my shit and search for distractions until mom and baba get frustrated and force me to go to sleep" started at like 6pm. Awesome.
We are in the final weeks now of what will probably be my last opportunity to capture a pregnancy so intimately, even though I haven't really had the opportunity to capture the pregnancy too intimately. We have gone out to shoot a lot, and I have captured most of the evolution, but she is finally getting to the point where she is accepting that she is beautiful, as opposed to the cliché "fat" or "frumpy" or "whatever," and not bombarding me with excuses to not shoot, or torturing me with her silly insecurities.
In her "accepting" where she is, she contacted a local amazing artist, Michael Newberry, about sitting for him. This was really more in her comfort zone, as she worked as a figure model for about a decade. We went over to his studio last night, and sketching commenced.
His studio was nestled under Tahquitz Rock, which is only a reference that will make sense if you are familiar with my little mountain town, and is apparently a former "Bunny House," as this particular property was once owned by that Hefner guy. He turned out to be a really nice guy, and I don't really have too much to say because it was a genuinely beautiful experience. They talked a while about emotion, and woman-hood, in relation to pregnancy and partnership, where she was at and what she could bring to the work. It was nice for me to talk about little creative quirks with someone who actually knew what I was talking about.
I went into it thinking I wouldn't really be involved too much, aside from documenting the event, but he is planning on using my photographs as a reference in his work. That required my sitting where he was sitting, and trying to see what he was seeing, which actually felt very natural. I felt like we exchanged some art understanding that I don't find in most places. Maybe being forced to take those art classes paid off a bit.
He mentioned that this was the first time he collaborated with a photographer, so, no pressure. Hopefully the focal problems on my cut rate lenses don't mess everything up.
I'm trying to find one of my raw tangents to go on, but it was just a nice experience. I wish there were more creatives in my life to do things like this with.
My girl and I have been brainstorming certain projects, but it is really just difficult to find people who are open and free and beautiful..... "cool," as I like to call it.
Things keep getting more beautiful, and they will continue.
As previously mentioned, cuddle-bug is in Connecticut for the week to be in her aunt's wedding, but today my girl is in San Diego for a doctor's appointment, so I'm sitting here all by myself, doing the only thing I really know how to do: this; a kind of calm within the calm. Having a two year old follow you around is one thing, having a thirty year old follow you around is something completely different. I can joke about that, right?
Right?
I love them, so, whatever.
I'm just sitting here with my book, laptop, journal, beer, and rolled cigarettes, on my little mountain deck, basking in the orange glow of the sun setting behind a choking cloud of Southern California being on fire... again. Life is rough.
I'm not sure if I successfully explained how difficult it was for me to get through Walden. Nice segue, huh? I have heard so many minds, whose opinions I respect, refer to Thoreau as a kind of Zen pioneer in the literary world, but he was Zen like Nietzsche was an optimist: it is there if you're really looking for it. Honestly, if I have to read one more fucking word about how the ice cracks on his silly little pond I'm going to kill a puppy. I don't care. Plus, this work could have been so much better had he gotten to the point, or better points. The deepest he got, aside from going on and on about the literal depth of the pond in relation to surrounding ponds (smashes can), was relating the pond itself, and landlocked water in general, to human intellect and understanding, which felt like it went on for about a paragraph. As much as I heard so many people go on and on about how brilliant Thoreau and this work are, I fail to believe that this work took eight years and five drafts to be publish worthy. Was the first draft scribbled on a cave wall with stick figures? Plus, I will forever be turned off by the fact that he built his little shack on Emerson's property, and had plenty of visitors as there were people using the pond for various reasons and he was just outside of town.
That's like your kids demanding that they went camping after setting up a tent in your back yard and using it for about an hour before they came inside because they were hungry and the batteries in their flashlight were dead.
He was no Kerouac, who, might I also add, had the luxury of always having a place to go home to, if he so wished. I am not one to talk. I had to refuge at my dad's twice in my life because I had no other options, for two completely different reasons, seventeen years apart. My lowly father pales in comparison to Kerouac's parent's place, or Thoreau's fancy friends and well off parents, but I also don't pretend like I'm on my own and "roughing it" in my couch cushion fort that the fabric of which is likely worth more than my fucking car. My solitude was self inflicted. I can admit that.
I think this is a good time for me to breathe a little. I'm just going to slowly back away from the computer and take my shoes off.
Good.
I'm good.
Now, let's take a peek into my unedited mind, a la random journal entry, that was supposed to be a post, but was lost forever into the endless sea of work, relationship, toddler, repeat and fade: My only entry on August eleventh, a Thursday: "The young poet's life is destroy and be destroyed. The old poet's life is leave me the fuck alone; these swollen, bloodshot eyes, tired from a full life lived, wont not look upon your childish trifles."
That's a bit harsh. I am neither 'old', nor a poet, but these are the things that I write down. I might also add that my life has not been fully lived; I have tried to fully take advantage of the opportunities I am presented with. I still believe that most of what I write down, especially in these stacks of journals that no one should ever read, are partially my painful reality, and mostly whatever character I happen to be playing at the time. I've been trying to explain to my girl that what I write in these vomit-bag-esque collections of "words, words, words,"* can not be fairly read without an interpreter, but she still sneaks peaks and flips her shit, as is to be expected. Words have never been a fair interpretation for me as to what is really going on.
I could write volumes on how much I hate my life (wait... I have. No one read it.), but that doesn't mean that I didn't secretly love all the absurdity and chaos that I had maliciously chosen for myself. I am mostly past all that, so I can laugh at it, but it doesn't mean that I still don't have bad mornings where I just want to keep going straight where the road curves. I write my frustrations down, generally in the voice of a serial killer, then smile and walk in to work, later to be transcribed into something with less of an edge than that of...well..... a serial killer, cause who is really entertained by that? other than the psychopath himself?
It just dawned on me that I haven't heard my trust-fund baby neighbor, who has never had to work a day in his life and is living in one of his parent's many cabins, choke on his bong in a couple days now. I wonder if he is still alive?
Meanwhile, here's Bella dancing in the rain. I had hoped to accompany these photos with an essay on "beauty," as all fucking over the place as that term has become, but I went on this tangent, so, sorry my dear that your work with me was set to the accompaniment of this drivel. This particular potentially beautiful soul I have known since she was about eight, as I worked for her parents, the second owners of the theatre at which I spent a decade of my life. Then, she called me "Kitty," a temporal social reference to the Pixar film Monsters, INC., and also beautifully, like painfully beautifully, described me, both socially and creatively. I have since evolved, and she has since grown up. She not only showed interest in shooting, at the ripe old age of eighteen, but she showed interest in photography, which always peaks my interest. As of right now, she has disappeared into the question mark void of marriage, at the ripe old age of nineteen, but I have these, so I can appreciate these, and if she ever resurfaces, then that will happen; if she doesn't, that will also happen.
Things are not what they seem;
Nor are they otherwise.
- Lankavatara Sutra
That was actually a decent segue into what I'm reading now: Namu Dai Bosa. The term found me in John Daido Loori's The Zen of Creativity back in my epic 2010, in which he related his experience with Soen, Eido, and Maezumi, the latter of which transmitted to whom I have access to, or had access to before life happened, Tenshin, and whose kids I creepily went to school with. Loori's use of the term was picked up directly from Soen, if I remember correctly, and I carried it with me since. The punchline, if such a word is appropriate in this case, is that it is the name of the book that was written about Zen transmission to the West, a la Soen, Eido, and Nyogen (and yes, I am on a first name basis with all of them).
I had purchased it a short while back, when I still had the freedom (or oblivious negligence) to spend most my free time at my Zen center, but remained in the stack of books to be read, gradually getting bumped by debacles like fucking Walden (crushes another can). Upon receiving the book, I opened the weathered cover to find an illustration of a monk heading off down a trail, with the words, "To America, Soen!," only the top of the "o" is broken, so it looks like it says "sven." Not really that significant. I mean, I'm already in America, so... I should've just read it then and there... in one sitting... shikantaza reading. That's a bit of an oxymoron, but so am I.
"Peace as dualistically opposed to war is just tongue talk; peace is not a commodity to be negotiated. Only peaceful men can be at peace." - xii - in the forward.
Alright, so that was a mind-full.
Aaaaaaaaaaand there's my neighbor choking on his bong. He is alive. Yay.
I wonder if he'd let me borrow some money so I could accomplish something with my life? My Facebook memory this morning was a photo of me after almost being beaten to death four years ago.
Two years ago today I received a letter from the DOJ officially releasing me from my absurd obligation to register every year on my birthday at the local police department as a sexual threat. That came as a surprise memory, a la Facebook, on the day I happen to finish reading Thoreau's On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, where he goes on and on about how corrupt and tainted the system is. I finished choking on Walden last week, and finally understood what he was trying to say: something I already understood; he's bloody brilliant; let's celebrate him. This particular poorly printed version of Walden had the previously mentioned essay attached to it, and it really just pissed me off. Not only have things not gotten better in the last 150 or so years, but they have gotten so incredibly worse.
This just goes to show what impact "art" truly has on society: you can point out the obvious, clearly stated and eloquently argued, and the masses of idiots will continue their course, determined by the brilliant few who tell them what the course is, which is generally the one that gets them more power, control, and money. I can feel the negative hurricane swelling, so I'll just leave it at that. Two years feels like so long ago, and, just as when I stood before the judge fifteen years ago, no one in my life has been raped or molested, so nothing has really changed on my end, other than the fact that I can actually get jobs now.
See now, I just got completely distracted by searching for music to put on a birthing playlist. Going with the theme of the prospective name (Eroica), I had hoped to compile an amazing Beethoven soundtrack, but I didn't truly appreciate how much music he actually wrote. Everything will change so dramatically in less than a month. I don't even know how I feel about it yet. This pregnancy has gone by so quick. It doesn't help that we spent the first four months half expecting this one to randomly not have a heart beat, too. The calm before the storm starts now. The toddler is gone for a week, so we can breathe and take this all in. I, of course, just want to go out and shoot. I've already missed too much. I need more time.
I have wanted to write; sat down to write; so many times in these last couple weeks, but nothing has come out well enough to articulate it on this platform. There have been relationship and work struggles that I am not at liberty to discuss, but can, I guess, within the understanding that we all have moments of frustration in everything; I just never had the filter that kept me from disclosing all the information. I never cared what people thought. Think what you want, you're going to anyway. I've been through this so many times in my own little evolution. I have written extensively about it. Even in the few posts on here I have managed to repeat myself. I don't know if I need to write more frequently, or if my mind is stuck in a kind cyclic redundancy of neurological disfunction.
I am finally coming to terms with the latter. Clearly my mind is a minefield of synaptic misfire. The signs have been everywhere for a while now. I always had a problem relating to anything most people find commonplace, to the point of hating everything and everyone around me because "they" didn't get it. It has become clearer to me that I was the one who didn't get it. How else could no one understand? Because there is something wrong with me. That seems to be the only possible solution. I have met with a number of "accidents" where I was told by doctors that there was a "chance" of brain damage. My great fever of '07 that left me with optical problems, and recently understood auditory problems, really leaves me feeling like my brain just doesn't process information like it should. I mean, to be perfectly clear, how long was I dead before I was born? Maybe I've just been a little bit retarded this whole time? struggling to make things work in this horrific delusion?
Ok, so clearly that is something I needed to write about, as embarrassing as it is. Maybe I'll get into not feeling like I have the psychological or emotional freedom to write in future posts... somehow... without alienating the people I love or the people I work with. Some day I'll find some sort of happy balance there. In the meantime, pregnant emotions on an already absurdly emotional and verbose soul are fuuuuun, and toddlers... huh?... who doesn't love that emotional structure? I'm just going to leave that there. Everything remains beautiful.
The tyrannical toddler has been an absolute joy in my life. Do not read me wrong. I am usually being the ironically funny that people understand, but they don't want to understand. I have been here long enough for her to not remember me not being here. This is my girl... in between my only girl and my new girl. Life is beautiful.
Wow. January 28th. My last (first) post on this journey was six and a half months ago (did I math good?).
It is safe to say that I went into this with the best of all possible intentions, but it created a lot of problems at the time; a time when everything was still in a bit of a swirl of chaos, beautifully embodied by the (mostly) complete darkness of these full moon shots we got at Noah Purifoy's back in June; a consolation for my less than ideal birthday. She is noticeably pregnant here, which I have been open about in my website blog, but has been absent here because...well, everything has been absent here. I am a month away from being a dad, again, and there has been nothing posted about it on my new "life" blog that is dedicated to "everything consisting of beauty." Truth is, the last post (first post) was about the time she let me know she was pregnant, again, when I lived in a world where I couldn't have anymore children, but she had gotten pregnant immediately, then miscarried in August of last year. After making it through a difficult end to 2015, this is happening. I'm going to be a dad again, after trying for a decade and finally coming to terms with my painful reality.
I've been dealing a lot with that realization, in between working six days a week to be broke, raising a two year old who sometimes likes me, and fighting about stupid shit, like people do. Oh, and also feeling serious pressure to finish my book that I don't want anyone to read and accomplish something with my life, because I'm going to be responsible for another life, and I am yet to do anything to make the world a more beautiful place for her to live in, like I was supposed to do for my now 16 year old daughter who has little to nothing to do with my life (sorry Dag [do NOT pronounce that wrong]).
Anywhoo, these are the random ramblings of a random Wednesday night, so my blogging mindset that two of you paid attention to might be back, maybe. We'll see what kind of fight it causes. lol. 0_0
As of right now, I get a little time every night to compose some thoughts after the family has gone to bed, which has not gone without some bickering. Well deserved, really: she goes to bed with the two year old, and while I do read some stories with the tyrannical toddler, they basically go to bed without me, and wake up without me, as I get up early to enjoy some reading as the sun breaks over my little mountain.
I am currently knee deep in Thoreau's Walden, which has obviously been on my list for a while, having been praised by everyone, always. First impression?: born into a decent family, financially; went to Harvard; had the means to start his own college; built his little shack for Walden on his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson's property? Wait. What? So far I have a great big 'go fuck yourself, you poor little rich boy' for the praised Henry David Thoreau, but I am yet to finish the book, so...
Give me four years at Harvard and friends like Emerson and see what I accomplish. Just saying.
I'm still alive, and I'm doing it without those opportunities.
The more time that passes, the more I feel overwhelmed in this clamp of life that we all strive toward and ultimately wonder why we are doing it and if we are, in fact, living. Since this new life has begun, I posted less and less until I finally reached the point where I needed to post nothing at all, and zen'd out in my mountains for a while. Since returning to this platform, posting once a month became somewhat of a task, since we don't have an internet connection at home. You could say the connection has been lost, but I've been working on other connections. Everything remains beautiful, but my thoughts are lost, swirling calmly into the infinite abyss of wherever it is that thoughts go when you let them go, which is really what I have to do now: let them (a lot of things) go. The thoughts that I would normally vomit onto an internet database have been the most difficult, though.
It was always somewhat medicinal for me to just put it all out there everyday. Not only did it help me beautifully map out my life and give me easy reference points, but it helped me get through a lot of things to just write it down. It has become a hell of a lot more difficult to do that since returning to my little mountain town, where everyone knows my not so secret identity, I am worried about appearing more "professional," I am working for a business that I don't want my thoughts to affect negatively, and I am in a relationship that I am not interested in really sharing with the world like I always have.
Apparently there are a lot of things that I have been dealing with letting go. There is a part of me that needs to jump online every night and vent about my job and two year old and relationship and the check engine light going on in my car that I hate but am dealing with because life is what it is and you get it; everyone gets it. I was really attempting to entertain, but that was all misguided and gone now; let go into the infinite abyss of wherever it is that things go when you let them go. I redund.
In my attempting to write at least some of this life down, in journals that rarely get translated into readable, rational statements, I oft mention how little I am getting accomplished, but I am getting a lot accomplished. I have a difficult time defining what I would be accomplishing that would be greater or better or whatever than what is happening now, but I am accomplishing this now. This. That's it. It doesn't get any better than this. My problem is that after weeks go by without an update, or months *shudder*, I feel completely backed up, like I don't know where to start. So much happens in life, especially this particular part of this particular life, that I want to write about it all, but there is so much we have to simply let go, leave out, or bunny-ear to maybe come back to later. My life as a writer has taught me that those things rarely happen; you can never "go back" to what's happening "now," so you have to settle for how you remember it, or diluse it in reference to where you are now, and how it applies to now, because you will never be where you were when it happened, so as time goes by it naturally changes to fit into the current puzzle.
Diluse obviously isn't a word, but either you get what I'm talking about or you don't. This raises a necessary relevance of where we "were": unless it's fiction, which I wish my work to be presented as (good luck with that), are our immediate responses to things really that important, or should we really wait it out and talk about it later?...when we can form a rational argument and make a rational point? Jesus tap dancing christ, where am I going with this?
What I was attempting to transition into in that last painful paragraph was this beautiful soul that I have access to; this beautiful soul in this fleetingly rare moment in her life. I kind of hoped, but never really imagined that I would be able to capture a pregnancy again, at least not intimately. I want to go shoot every day, but life is happening, and this time is speeding by, as it does with beautiful little temporal circumstances like this. It really is a very small window, and the window is closing. Plus she is preggo, so there are all the cliché body issues and emotional ups and downs, and there is a two year old who is already fighting for attention, and I work 6 days a week, so on our (usually just my) day off we are still unpacking from our recent move into a bigger house and dealing with a yard that was let go for nearly a decade.
Time keeps going; it doesn't care where you are at or whether you can keep up. All you can really do to keep from going insane is deal with right now, and right now is a perfect example: she is off with friends for a couple hours, so I ran back to work to use the internet connection, and my time is already up. This is life. This is beautiful. I will resort to a copy and paste from an earlier post that I never got around to posting, like so many thoughts lost; let go. It is a different mood, and voice, which will likely completely irritate the reader, but is relevant to my mental process right now. The things I let go...
There has been a struggle with naming the new soul. My old wants have merged with new lives, over and over again. Ideals, goals, every little thing has been swirled into other lives and worlds so many times that I am left in a surreal cloud of memories and emotions and wants and needs and what was beautiful being now ugly and vice versa. There are certain realities, but even those are often questioned based on new information and doubts and blah and blah and blah. I ramble on. I wanted to name my now 16 year old daughter, basically abandoned by me to her new family and ideal that makes my soul weep, Eroica. The then wife (Sven), refused the idea because she said it sounded too much like Erica (?!). We settled on Adagio, which I am more than happy with, and so is she, I think (she doesn't talk to me much).
Eroica has remained an obsession in my life, even though my unhealthy obsession with music has since greatly waned to my obsession with capturing the beauty I see in the world and attempting to get people to understand it. At some point, in my creating online egos, there was an Eroica Skeezix (the old project) and an Eroica Ellirand, but neither of them developed, primarily because I’m not a girl, and I’m not about to pretend I’m one online. That’s just weird. In all this unexpected creating of life when I thought it was no longer possible for me, with this new beautiful soul, naturally the option of Eroica has come up. In this instance it initially sounded too much like erotica. I pleaded my case, and other names were welcomed, one of them being Aréte, which I think would also be an awesome name, and apply more to my recent push on philosophy (that’s a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance reference for you layman [laymen?] out there). Last night I asked Violet what we should name her sister. She suggested baguette. Honestly, I could go through my notes on all the ancient literature I’ve read and find some amazingly unique names. That was always one thing I passively noted: unique girls names.
Call it human will. Anywhoo…Eroica: her natural doubt in the name has led me to actually do some research, instead of relying on the beauty that only exists in my head. I purchased and read Beethoven’s Journals, which, while beautifully fueling the wanna-be tortured genius in my soul, didn’t help much. I finally just settled for the poor man’s college: google, or ooglegay, for the pig latinists out there. I knew that B’s 3rd was originally written for Napoleon, entitled Bonaparte, but reading about why and the events that led to it being torn up, scribbled on, and renamed, made me think immediately of my life: the volumes I had written for those who threw me away or gave up on me: beautiful.
The work stands; the meaning sometimes does not. I found one article that eloquently explained that Eroica was Beethoven’s transition into his “middle age” works. That certainly fits, beautifully. Transition and regret, not of the work, but of the loyalties and reasoning? Yup. We still have three months of consideration and research, but my mind is definitely leaning. I even found a beautifully unique recording of the 3rd (Wilhelm Furtwängler's 1953 recording a la EMI), which I purchased from a shop in the UK and have been listening to religiously, and has been the only thing to get me out of the Sigur Rós, Valtari loop (1. Ég Anda, 3. Varúð, 5. Dauðalogn, 6. Varðeldur, 8. Fjögur Píanó, repeat). I am fully open to whatever happens. My name was set to be Zebulun, until my mother died during child-birth, temporarily killing me, at which point “god” came to her in a vision and told her to name me what she named me. My actual name wasn’t even an option up to that point, and my father was taken completely by surprise.
That was meant to keep going. There was more I wanted to say. There were other things I wanted to add. They are gone; let go; I ran out of time and never made time to go back to it. I couldn't, because I'm here now.
A brief overview of the last couple months. The beauty abounds. I just wish more of it was now, instead of then.
