Month: October 2018

Man of the Earth

Do you ever feel like everything you say is completely wrong? I do. Not that there is something particularly wrong about it, but just that the whole realm of my thought & feeling is off.

I am hoping I can take some time away from both reading and human civilization for a while, living a life of manual labor, so I can clear my head and try to realign it with something more real. It is hard for me to do manual labor, though, because I have been brainwashed to feel that it is a waste of time. If I spend too much time on it, I feel guilty. That is just social pressure, though. My personal feelings are that manual labor is where its at.

Like, I would think, for example, that being a housekeeper would be much richer than working in an office. All the smells, textures, colors… creating a world that is your own and getting to change it at will! How much more intelligent would you be if your didn’t spend your days eating other people’s ideas and vomiting them back up? Ideas that pass from human to human quickly become toxic. Our real ideas come from nature. And in manual labor, it is nature we are interacting with.

You can’t clean a cast iron pot without taking some of the knowledge of iron into yourself. You can’t bake a loaf of cornbread without absorbing a touch of corn’s power- the ability to be evil when evil is called for.* Cotton, wood, metal, plant, clay and fruit… all of it loaded with wisdom and new worlds… all of this loaded into our minds through contact with our hands, making us feel renewed. Inspired.

And yet, the social pressures I feel are always to do something dumb- such as read the “classics” of literature. Some of which are okay- mostly the ones written for children, I think, and the ones written by those who aren’t writers. But most are just belabored retchings of unoriginal ideas, filled with human waste, created only to impress.**

But I guess I don’t need to pit books & manual labor against each other. There is no reason you can’t do both, if you are the pretentious sort. But still, my ideal will always be the illiterate savage, the man of the earth. This isn’t a rebellion against intelligence, as some like to say, just a different idea of where intelligence comes from.

One scholar and one man of the earth take a walk in the park.

*To learn more about my feelings for corn, see here & here .

**I don’t mean to seem completely anti-scholar. I do think scholars have their place and am 20% scholar myself.

Tags books, Corn, Earth, iron, nature, scholars

Charleston, West Virginia Earth, Pink, Mothers, Love

Goodbye Air, Hello Earth

Moving into a new home last year was an adjustment for me. For starters, all new places feel unbearably cootie filled to me, especially if they have been previously inhabited, and since this house is 111 years old, it is has been inhabited many times. (Including JFK, at least for a day. And considering that he was a sex addict said to have sex multiple times a day, I like to think he may have done so in our house as well. Probably the guest bathroom, as was his custom when visiting a new place.)

Also, as much as I admire the down to earthiness of West Virginia culture, it can make me feel claustrophobic at times. Truthfully, the culture of every place I have lived eventually makes me feel the need to escape. The sun shiny cultures make you stupid, the icy ones freeze your heart, the airiness of the West Coast leads you to make bad choices, the human density of cities makes your head go up your ass, etc. I can’t help wanting to be the opposite of the world around me, no matter what that world is like. Otherwise it can feel hard to breathe. Although I like like people a lot as individuals, I have a hard time dealing with them once they have turned into giant globs sharing the same thoughts and perspectives.

At any rate, the point is that when I first moved here the home and world around me felt foreign and oppressive, so I compensated by making my home a symbol of airiness and flight. Painting the walls sky blue and covering them with airplanes and butterflies, clouds, stars, and lightening bolts.

But now it has gotten to be too much and my whole world feels as though it is empty and blowing around in the air. It is time to redecorate my home to make it feel like the heaviest, stuffiest place in the world. Every symbol of air must be replaced with a pumpkin or a bear. Everything white must be painted brown. Everything high must be placed on the ground.

Of course, last time I made my home as earthy as I could it made me feel stuck, depressed and flat, as though I was being pressed beneath a heavy book. However, it turns out that was also the time Saturn was passing over my horizon, which makes everyone feel as though their life is a dry and burdensome drudge. Maybe this time the impact of earth will be quite excellent. I will let you know. 🙂

I painted this bookcase with some leftover ocher paint to be earthier. I think ocher and brown are the essence of earth. As are dogs. If you look carefully, you can also see some of my favorite collectibles in this photo, such as blenko water bottles and fiesta ware. The books in the bookcase are ones I would be embarrassed to be associated with (and the ones I read the most) which is why they must be kept upstairs. I would like eventually to have a case of books downstairs which have been purely selected for their pomposity.

Tags Air, baskets, blenko, dogs, Earth, fiesta ware, West Virginia

Astrology Blue, Black, Silver, Water, Moons, Death & Ghosts Charleston, West Virginia

My Life

Post author By julien
Post date October 1, 2018
1 Comment on My Life

The Kanawha River, one block over from where we live. I really like this river for some reason. Maybe it is the name, or the fact that rivers look extra nice when winding through mountains. I think this was the day I wrote “Park Man” inspired by how grey the river and the sky become in the spring. I have started to love the color grey. To me, grey represents everything that is hidden, but could potentially be known.

Recently, my life has fallen into such a hyper-mundane phase that it is hard to say anything about it. Setting the tone for a day of laziness and apathy, is my morning ritual of writing in my “ESP” journal, in which I write down some of the colors & shapes that are floating in the air around me- along with my best guess at their meaning- until I get too exhausted & find myself scrolling through facebook instead. I have been doing this for a few months now and am on my 4th notebook.

Aside from a couple things I learned “from the ethers” which sent me into a state of shock that has taken me about 2 months to recover, the funny thing about my ESP journal is how hyper-mundane it is. No mystic secrets of the pyramids, but an endless stream of details mostly about my husband’s life and business transactions. Why that? Why not winning lottery numbers or perhaps useful information pertaining to my own life? I don’t know. I guess I haven’t yet learned how to adjust the frequency of my antennae.

One rule of ESP seems to be- the more a person wants to keep something hidden or even push it out of their own mind, the more it shows up highlighted and spotlighted in the invisible realms. Same with lies. It is as though there is a siren and a strobe light attached to them. Which has made me incredibly annoying to my husband, like a nightmare wife. Whatever little details of his day he would most like to forget, whatever tiny thorns are lodged in his side, are the first things to show up in my pictures.

The unrelenting trivia of it and the fact that most of the trivia is related to other people (usually husband, but not always), does leave my wondering what the point is. (Yeah, I was drinking straight lemon juice, SO WHAT!?!)

And since I was too in shock, for a while, to follow my normal routines, I have also spent a lot of time indulging in languid and miscellaneous interests, usually involving either planets or colors. One day, for example, I lay in front of a green lamp to see what would happen. Being a practical sort of person, I hoped it would make me rich. Instead, it overstimulated my brain so much that it was impossible to sleep that night. In the place of sleep were red lights which flashed inside my body, each one lighting up a horrible image of catastrophes that could befall either myself or a loved one. I became painfully aware of how little I was doing in real life to stop these bad things from happening. I swore to myself that from then on, I would be a different person, living by the book, and dutifully following the advice of experts in every field. When morning finally came, though, my limbs were so weak I could barely move. By the time I regained my strength, the feeling of eminent death and disaster had faded, so I ate 2 king sized bags of M&Ms to celebrate & let my dog have her favorite dinner- spaghetti.