Expeditions in the Cold

photo by davebrosha.

Arctic air slid down off the iron range and pooled around the Twin Cities. Each morning I woke up with my steaming pot of coffee and turned on the radio to hear the latest temps: -19 degrees, with a high of -5 planned for later in the day. It was warm inside, the furnace almost never turning off. I went down to check on it, touching one of its aluminum vents, and quickly drew back my singed fingertip. At least if I burned down the house, I would be warmed in its glow until the fire died out, and who cares what happens after that? The wind chill would carry me off to someplace else.

In the evenings, I drank brandy and escaped this place altogether. From my den, with snifter in hand and a few good books spread around my lazy-boy, I could dip in and out of various novels that had somehow escaped me in my youth; “Treasure Island,” “A Wrinkle in Time.” Sometimes Jung would interpret the symbols of my dreams. When I really stretched out these nights, I picked up my pen and that handmade little notebook my sister had given me years ago. I wrote down the string of words that came from who knows where, telling me things that I always had trouble understanding. If I was lucky, the ink would dry quickly enough to freeze the feeling to be deciphered later, but more often than not the dry air evaporated all essence from the ink so that I was left with a bunch of unintelligible scribbles.

Huh. Interesting. Something is forcing me to remain here writing. I keep trying to go on the internet but get failure messages, pages that can’t be found, proxies that can’t be bypassed. This is good; I’m excited about this news. Somebody is sabotaging me. At least something out there is listening, a paramour of the other side blitzing my motherboard, sending binary critters to rewire my router to guide me down a different route--to here: another empty page, but with words poised at the ready.

The cold even gets to me here, in a room puckered dry from a space heater. I make believe this cold comes from arctic winds howling around a science outpost, a circle of tents huddled on ice-flats at the tip of the world. We are beyond the rim of the sun’s route. There is hardly any sign of life on these stretches of ice, and I would never have realized, without having been here, that this also results in a lack of death. I have always mourned the lack of death; it leaves nothing for contrast. We have come in search of oil, at least that is the mission of the team that has allowed me to tag along to report on their progress. I come in search of something completely different, something captured in oracular visions, in hieroglyphs that modern words can’t translate, and by a side of myself I let few people see. It is only within the arctic circle that I feel safe enough to explore it further.

That is, until the brandy runs out, and the candle sputters down, and I fall asleep in the chair. I wake to the radio forecast: a warming trend is on the way. Finally. I wonder what a thaw will bring.

Beware the Jabberwock

artwork by: Teodoratan

Hear these somnulary baby gurgles in linen wraps. Dry docked night suspended in evervescent crushed velvet. The dredger stalled in Oakley swamp in the bulge of bioforge greenmunge. The lily blooms have bereft our noonside gardens, trilled to naughtingshire brambles and den. We cleaned the glen of all woodland sea nymphs and glypheril. These dragwired fairies of the crescendo moon, guilty of the lurid pose and pansy musk, expunge the triple goading of flesh and blood and bone.

Always the Last Customer

photo by Dragon Weaver.

I am about to become the sole patron at the TeaSource on a cold, windy Friday night. From just a few yards down the sidewalk, a movie house expels crowds of couples at various stages of dating, families catching the latest Pixar animation, teenagers squawking in little flocks that quickly form, break apart, and just as quickly gather again.

Here I am, sitting alone at a side table in this quiet, warm little tea shop. Somber music plays faintly over the room. A college-aged shop girl ignores me from behind the counter. Or is she wondering what the hell I am doing here on a Friday night, the only customer that remains? This is how I choose to live my life, peacefully, cognizant, introspective, and solitary. There it is, that word that holds such allure for me; the solitarian.

A second employee appears. They rotate taking their breaks in the back room or skirting outside with a cell phone held to the ear. This new tea-girl packs up boxes for catalog orders. She pours looseleaf tea into tinfoil bags, seals them, slaps labels onto boxes, all of the while chewing on her gum and sniffling. Tea powder gets in the nasal passages, causes a tickle you can’t scratch.

People shuffle past the shop window, shoulders hunched against the wind. Maybe it is the cold wind outside, or the fact that I am alone in a teashop on a Friday night, but the Feist song playing over the speakers has never sounded so solemn. I think of going home and playing her CD in its entirety, but I know that it won’t hold the same spell for me that it does here, in a warmly lit shop on Cleveland Avenue on a Friday night, out among people, watching them without interacting.

New customers arrive, families coming out of the cold for a cup of non-caffeinated herbal teas and lemon cakes for their children, newlyweds with their magazines or laptops, occasionally looking dejectedly at one another.

I eavesdrop on a young couple pitched forward on their chairs. It must be their first date; I can tell by how interested and happy they are with one another. I am glad that I can still feel happiness for them, being a divorcee that could instead be thinking jadedly of their naïveté. I feel their optimism warming the back of my neck. It wasn't so long ago that I felt the same thing, right? I feel it again through them.

I stay until the customers slowly filter out, and I’m once again the last customer. It’s time to close up shop, to finish my writing, but I want to end with something else, anything besides what is directly in front of me. I want to block out music in the teashop with the rhythm of words. Words that ring with their own music on the tongue, the harmony of vowels, the sharp staccato of consonants.

What do I see? Foothills flicker in the light of a campfire. Orange and yellow shadows play like silent films on the sand and brush. Burning logs collapse upon themselves, letting loose a spray of sparks like a burst of confetti falling skyward.

"The Song Is You" by Arthur Phillips

I was looking for an entertaining read from a modern writer, something with some hype around it, and maybe a love story from a man's point of view. This one fit the profile, and was about inrequited love; even better.

Though it involved a middle-aged man and the mutual attraction with an Irish vocalist/songwriter on the brink of making it big, I think it was really about a man and his love for music. The way it takes just the right song at the right moment to bring out the strongest flavors of life. The way songs of our past can be a more potent memoir than photographs or diaries could ever be. The way "shuffle" on an iPod can be a direct line of communication with the fates.

It was good, not great. I found myself frequently being hit over the head with Phillips's wit, kind of like I felt with Wilde. I liked how well he showed us the passion and perfection-seeking of the audiophile. It also explored the pursuit of art under commercial influences. Our hunger for acceptance and praise, the need for accolades, but not at any price.

What the Cicadas Showed Me

photo by Dave Allen Photography.

Listen to those Cicadas wailing away. There’s something distinctly electronic in their song, something strung out taut like a piano string wound too tight, something otherworldly. It is as though the circuitry of the planet is rewiring itself in preparation for the change of winter, only there is a cross-circuit somewhere nearby, a blip in the grid and the cicadas sound the alarm.

You become aware, through certain words, certain thoughts tuned to just the right frequency, that there is a thin curtain concealing mysteries from you and everyone else. Once in a great while, you catch a mere glimpse of what lies behind, but just enough to know that it is there. Despite the split second exposure of this secret, you know with absolute certainty of its substance, its fact, its truth, but how can you be so confident? Maybe within the brain there is a buried sensitivity, a sensory gland that you have done everything in your power to turn off, but at certain times, something triggers it. Like the sound of cicadas. Synapses fire up, microscopic lightning bolts light up the darkness of your subconscious: “Oh yeah. That’s right. I remember now.”

Then it’s gone. A soothing voice like that of a loving parent leaning over the bars of your crib says, “Ssssshhhh. It’s only cicadas. It’s late summer, and fall is coming. That’s all. You’ve heard them thirty seven times now, remember? Go to sleep. Fall back to sleep now…”

But the curtain stirs restlessly now, and what lies behind peeks out with increased frequency. You wait with impatient excitement for the curtain to be drawn and the show to begin.

Dream With Eyes Awake

photo by Teodoratan.

There was this guy once who could begin to dream while he was still awake. He would stare at a certain spot in the room with unfocused eyes, begin breathing deep and regular, and then wait for the curtain to fall. Or rise, depending on which side you’re standing on. Once his thoughts took the form of images that began moving on their own, it was all he could do to hold back his excitement and maintain the balance of dream and wakefulness, like cupping his hand around a sputtering flame to shed just enough light on his subconscious.

What did he dream about in those moments between hemispheres? He dreamt of the cars he had stolen in his youth, submerged at the bottom of a lake after the wild rides across town had come to an end. He dreamt of beachfront mansions flooded by the tide, hallways filling with sand, water crashing at the base of a staircase, escape routes cut off, the foundation sliding into the sea. He dreamt of fishing in pools of water so clear that he could see the shadows of fish curling among the rocks, the glint of green scales. The line tugged as he caught a big one, but as he dragged it to shore he saw that the fish had long been dead.

All the while he dreamt, his eyes were open, scanning back and forth, up and down, fingertips twitching until, without reason, his eyes stopped their rhythmic movement and drew their focus back to the room at hand. He would start to laugh, or look sad, or still afraid as the dream wavered like drapes in an open window, dissolve away like cotton candy on the tongue.

Look What The Tide Brought In

photo by Gayle_T.

The bum washed up on shore on a beautiful May morning, seaweed chained to his legs, a bottle of bourbon half drunk in his pocket, no message inside. Was his death a message to the town? The bay was a killer, and she was just getting warmed up for summer, waiting to claim unwary swimmers, fisherman that stayed out in the storms, the occasional suicide from a Bay Bridge leap. The bum was her calling card that the drowning season was just getting in gear.

The bum smelled badly. The woman who had discovered the body, taking her dog for an early morning jog, held her shirt-sleeve up to her nose and mouth when she brought over the police for introductions. Unwashed, sweaty, oily, and that was back when he was alive. The police recognized him, remembered his slight lisp, bags under his eyes, the way he wiped his nose nervously on a sleeve when children would point him out to their mothers. The bay had bathed him, but that didn’t help the smell. Instead of the stink of life it was the stink of death, the simple fact of how quickly we become so much meat the moment the spirit leaves the body.

They photographed, bagged and tagged him while the sun glinted off the water, and a cool breeze blew leeward. Seagulls dipped and weaved over the waves. Teenagers clambered into sailboats for a morning lesson, ropes clanging against the rigging like bells.