Loci

Madison. Milwaukee. Eau Claire. Minocqua. Columbus. Iowa City. South Bend. St. Paul. Gambier.

I am having trouble staying put, I am restless.

May 27th 2010

Today is May 27th, 2010. I am sitting on a couch that isn't mine. It is 80 degrees outside, and summer is starting to begin to boil. I started working a grounds and landscaping job this past week. Eight hours a day, two fifteen-minute breaks, and one half hour lunch break. Manual labor for 7 hours. The physicalness of the work gives way to a trance inspiring pace of the job. I am lulled by engines, gasoline, grass, mulch, and hoses into a state of sunburned contemplation. I have lost my self in the labor. I am soaking in the summer; the heat, the humid mornings, the sweat, the smell of grass clippings. I am stewing in it all. I am beginning to feel a rebirth. A rebirth facilitated by the physicalness of the season.

couldn't have said it better.

"Writing has not, as I first supposed, been a remembering of a concluded period in my life, but merely a constant pretense at remembering, in the form of sentences that only lay claim to detachment. Even now I sometimes wake up with a start, as though in response to some inward prodding, and, breathless with horror,feel that I am literally rotting away from second to second. The air in the darkness is so still that, losing their balance, torn from their moorings, the things of my world fly soundlessly about: in another minute they will come crashing down from all directions and smother me. In these tempests of dread, I become magnetic like a decaying animal and, quite otherwise than in undirected pleasure, where all my feelings play together freely, I am attacked by an undirected, objective horror."--Ander Monson

I concur.

There is a town in north Ontario.

I am listening to an album. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, "So Far", an album that I grew up with. One that has meaning beyond my enjoyment. One that extends its tones, reaching through my memory, and brings back with it the smell of pine trees in the summer, the image of lakes that look like pictures of water, and the smell of fish guts on denim. It was the album of my summer since I can remember, and it's only appropriate that I begin this summer with "Wooden Ships" and "Helpless", "Ohio" and Woodstock", songs I can sing word for word for word. Every family road trip we would roll to the north woods, with this album playing as our soundtrack, it was our tradition. Tradition like, cards before bed was tradition. Tradition like the NBA finals Bulls vs. Jazz was tradition for six years. Tradition like family is tradition. Traditions you don't hold on to until there is nothing left of them but flashes of out dated memories and a single pinch of a feeling that is enough to make you pine after those moments. You don't realize what is in them until you are out of them. CSNY is my pinch of feeling that sends me back. It is my last remaining connection to those filled-to-the-brim moments. There is no more MJ and the Bulls. There is still cards before bed, but not with the smell of humidity, still lakes, and dim lights that bring moths to the window, not those cards. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young is all I have from those summers, and in my mind I still need a place to go, all my changes were there.

the title

The reservations I had when starting this, mostly stemmed from the idea that I would have to give it a title. The thought that I need to place such permanence to something that has only so far become a vague conception of a purpose seemed daunting. A title is an exclamation. It is a statement; a decree. It is an overarching phrase or word that can sum mate the entirety of what lay below it. How do we give something a title, something that carries immeasurable weight, when we cannot even figure it's purpose? I figured I needed a title that was malleable. A title that could handle a constant state of flux. My purpose will change, it will change by the day; the post. It will have a new meaning with every key stroke and every glance over it's contents. What title could even begin to describe this constant shift?

I thought "wanderings" might be nice.