It Was That New Years Eve Of 2019 Going Into 2020 And I Had Bought A Bottle Of Prosecco. It Was A Last

There was this moment yesterday morning around 6:30 am. It was after a rough night. A fair amount of people had called off from work, we were short staffed, and it felt like everything that could be going wrong. Was going wrong. Eventually we got over whatever hurdle we were facing, and we moved onto our next plane assignment. The flight was an international one, so they load the pilots up with food. Sometimes they dont eat all of it, they might give out whatever is left to the workers offloading the plane. There was Cheesecake on this particular flight that they didn't eat. I got dibs on it. It was a frustrating night, and I felt gross and sweaty. I was exhausted. But there was this moment where I was sitting in the bay door, watching the sunrise, eating on some of best chocolate cheesecake I've had in a while, and for some reason my brain went to that quote that Wanda said to Vision. "You are my Sadness, and My Hope. But Mostly You are my Love." We get these moments in our lives where we can get Angry and Upset, or where all we are is Sadness and what Pain we might feel. But there are others where we get those moments in the sun, at least in my experience, these precious moments despite whatever trial and tribulation I am going through, I can whisper in quiet satisfaction to the world or maybe to myself "But, Mostly you are my Love."

I wonder how many per mutations I am from my daydreams? Michael Faudet once wrote "I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place." I would modify this to "I am hopelessly in love with a memory I dont yet have". How many decisions, or indecisions, a moments wembling, a pause, a misplaced stutter, getting caught in traffic red when it should have been green. A vain attempt at times to scry into futures yet unseen. Has my own ambition tripped me up from my own success? Some other version of me is also on this couch right now, somewhere. and there is laughter his rooms. McAlpine would sing "Somewhere I lost all my senses, I wish I knew what the end is. Over and Over, I am watching it all Pass... I wish I knew what the end is" Dostoevsky would say, "I am not angry at him. I know his thoughts. His heart is better than his head." I am not angry at him; I knew what the end is

Lemongrass in the Summer Sun. Just as bare feet dance so beautifully on the browns of the earth. A water hose then becomes the plaything of two people. Laughing Laughter that can still be heard.

There is nothing I want more than to be aged and grayed. With a porch and chair faced towards a sitting sun. A garden where there is always work to be done. A kitchen with full complements and recipes. Adorned with Wooly Blankets and Knitted Sweaters. And sharing my life with a spouse who is in love with and is loved by me.

thinking about how orpheus turning to look back at eurydice isn’t a sign of mortal frailness but a sign of love

Not even Poetry within all it's meter and form, within all it's unstructured beauty, can adequately capture you.

Night after Night I lie awake. Eyes closed; Mind spinning with Fractured Verses.

If you sift through and break yourself down to it's smallest parts. What would they actually look like honestly? I think some of us would automatically respond, positively. And insincerely. Not honestly.

I think it would all do us well to better inspect ourselves.

Look, I don't know which one of y'all need to hear this right now. But just because something comes back to you doesn't mean it was always meant for you. If you just regurgitated something, you wouldn't put that vomit back in your mouth would you?

I'm just gonna talk here for a minute. I've been stuck at home a lot these last few days quarentining. I just have had thoughts I want to share I suppose and when you are single and live alone in the middle of a global pandemic, sometimes it's hard to find an ear. Like seriously TL;DR who wants to be lectured at. So sit with me for a minute or scroll past this I guess. A lot of us are probably familiar with the famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh as an Artist. He was born in 1853 to a middle class family in the Netherlands. He was kinda solemn and quiet. He worked as an art broker for a while in London, and even was a missionary for a time in Belguim. Before becoming a full time painter in France. In his life time he made over 800 Oil Paintings mostly in the last two years he was alive. He wasn't successful as an Artist until after his death. In life he only sold one painting. He was known to struggle with Mental Illness. A Great record of this is in The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. They are available for reading for free through the Van Gogh Museum. This where I'm a lot more familiar with the artist. More as a Writer. There's over six hundred collected letters between him to his siblings, to other impressionist artists at the time or even to critics. Written across three languages, Dutch French and English. Most of the Letters are to his brother Theo van Gogh. In his Letters to Theo he writes with this sense of duty, and calling. Of Urgency. Vincent very often questions his place in the universe, and what he could be doing to better it. If I had time to annotate and write and comment about all 600 letters, I would. There is a lot of meat there to understand him as a person, and by extension an Artist. And when you understand someone else's story better you also sometimes understand your own better too. But I'm just gonna take some selected thoughts here and think alongside him. In April 1878 Vincent writes to Theo pontificating about the proverb "We are Today, what We were Yesterday.", to Segway to my next thought I want to say twelve years later in 1890 Vincent would die by a self-inflected gunshot wound. He was 37 at the time of his suicide. There's this book, "A Grief Observed" by British Author C.S. Lewis which was written in response to his wife's death, American Poet Joy Davidman. Lewis writes "The Pain I feel Now, is the Happiness I had before. That's the Deal" it's published almost a hundred years after Vincent's letter. I wonder if in those last few days of their respective lives if they had thoughts that looked like this often. Where Compassion decays into Despair, or "The Pain we are in Today, is the Happiness we had Yesterday". We can't ever know for certain what thoughts Vincent had on that sad height. But back in that April Letter, I think he finds some peace there. In his closing thoughts he writes "Woe-spiritedness is quite a good thing to have, if only one writes it as two words, woe is in all people, everyone has reason enough for it, but one must also have spirit". Almost all of Vincent's paintings were made in the last two years of his life. Those are the things he left behind. Those are things we inherited. His Woe, but also more importantly his Spirit.

I dreamt of a dark and failing world. Where I met an Artist who wept for his wife. "Oft people believe that better is a lingered life. I tell you different now, which of these would you prefer Rotting or Dying. Dead is better."

And later in this dream a giant disembodied hand that blazed and burned, took the man's aisle and turned it upside down. There he was burned and crucified. Leaving only ashes of an artist and a painting of his wife.