“We are living in the dark ages”–NMN
The crows are gathering…
Life is in the interstices.
In the moments after what happens is where we find ourselves.
It’s all we’ve got left. It’s all we ever really had to work with.
Not answers to find, per se, but maybe a subtle understanding.
Maybe some rocky, unsettled…peace.
Posted by sean on October 28, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/10/28/indivisible/
Small tragedies and minor victories twist around your idle fingers like woody vines. You trade witticisms like barbed wire slipped underneath your tongue. A single scent scatters a part of the brain already always a bit on edge. But at arm’s length, you don’t ever find the visceral. You won’t ever find it there. So push away the veil of ions, then, and you will see the rush of blood. Warm air on skin, brushing off a touch that never came. Color in cheeks, déjà vu and try to ignore imagination prone to wanton escapades. Think and wish, then, and think again. Fall into the ordinary, fall into it open and true, with wild grit in your gut.
Posted by sean on September 3, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/09/03/see-you-when-your-troubles-get-like-mine/
When sleep still clouds your eyes, and the day has not yet dawned upon you. When dreams still stuff your head from ear to ear, and sleep still lies in reach. When there’s still a chance the day belongs to you. When you haven’t yet sat down for hours and when your mouth can form words and electricity showers the air with invisible sparks. There is a single moment, plucked from so many others, where you feel it, that which you grew up without but saw in others instead, from afar. Then later, sifting through a pile of the day’s written words, stacked up in your electronic woodlot, a certain desperation grows again. Even later still, the banjo duels with the fiddle across the orange light seeping into the wooden floorboards. The country in the city, within these four walls, shut up in the stale air, but breathing life. The night’s sleepy eyes begin to shut, and in between each drowsy blink, I think of you and you and everyone.
Posted by sean on August 27, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/08/27/in-the-morning-or-the-late-afternoon-or-in-the-midnight-hour/
3 AM, the witching hour. Eyes pop open and then…a kaleidoscopic filmstrip of every thought you’ve had lately chugs to life and begins the slow plodding death march across the 360° screen of your head-space. The thoughts are lurid and over-developed, much more menacing and ridiculous than their original incarnations. You toss and turn but that just makes the film move faster. Three nights in a row at 3 AM…you’ve come face-to-face with the dreaded triumvirate of sleep interruption, blazing an insomniac trail through a week of too much daytime coffee and too little time at peace. Congratulations, here is your gold tie tack.
Posted by sean on August 11, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/08/11/3-am/
…each day feels like starting over. And there are so many things not to care about but that still inflict themselves upon you. When I have a million things to say I barely croak a word. Other people’s lives are a foreign language: they fascinate yet confuse. Why this weight of the temporal? Like life is a waiting room. Seeing the future but never getting there. And the past looks like disjointed squares quilted by a madman and torn to shreds. It’s so far away, even what’s recent. Anxious compulsions wrap tendrils around restless hands. The bands of time tighten. We’re all settled in now so flip the switch and let us ride the unfinished track to blankness.
Posted by sean on April 6, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/04/06/sometimes/
Foment angst so there is a thing to describe, not straight nor flat nor dull nor the same as before, but colored instead with the red of madness. Like Dillard says, stalk the gaps. But sometimes there’s waiting to be done. Blank days, empty months, they shape themselves into forms you will recognize in time. I can’t even pretend to care anymore about the empty words flaking down around me, stuffing my mouth with cotton ideas, my head so ready to explode its vitriol across the table, spreading over your useless papers, seeping through the fabric of your dress pants. My internal voice so hoarse from screaming the vilest curses I can barely think just a word when I finally throw my leg up over the handlebars in defeat and make it all a shrinking dot behind me. I’m hollowed out from the inside, your words carved out whatever mattered and replaced it with a frothy foam devoid of substance. I sit and wait, sit and wait. There may be nothing out there, nothing at all, but I still sense the madness, up in the corners, in the late night hours, triggers ablaze in the dark circles around your eyes. I seize upon it and bite down to suck it dry. I will fill myself back up, every time, no matter how many times you empty me.
Posted by sean on March 24, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/03/24/this-slate-can-never-be-erased/
Twin telescreens of death stare unblinking at your bleary listless eyes. Four o’clock on a day of daylight supposedly saved, but actually just an extra hour wasted in a box inside of a box inside of a grimy concrete and asphalt wrapping. An hour saved, an hour squandered. I’m so worn down by the angles, the geometry of what surrounds me, what stares me rigid in the face. I’m tired of the traps, the ones I walk into every day knowing they are there, and knowing they will snare me once again. Day in, day out, I disappoint myself…my raging imagination like a balloon full of nitrous I suck on just enough to keep me standing up (and sitting down). It’s a cheap high, and the euphoria of what whets my synapses carries me along, as the concavity of my soul deepens. Further degradation in my psyche occurs, my social development a crumbling stone wall snaking back through the years behind me, each day pounded into smaller pieces, ’til no longer can I see through the cloud of rock dust to even know there’s someone on the other side. There’s no alarm system triggered, no preventive maintenance performed, no evasive action taken. I am unsupervised….out roaming the barren plains, shuffling and stumbling over minor events while veering away from major catastrophes. I am giddy and lightheaded with a belly full of lead shot. I want to run and never stop. I wrote once that stasis has its merits but even then I knew motion was the skeleton key. When you’re limb-locked and dusty, there is no other cure.
Posted by sean on March 15, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/03/15/be-all-end-all/
I’ve made it to the end of another of my work weeks. There’s something that seems not quite right about this drive to “make it through another week.” Shouldn’t we be treating every day as an amazing gift, not something to slog our way to the end of? People say, oh, if I can just make it to Friday. Yeah, well, you made it…so what are you going to do now? Get drunk for the next two days? Try to forget your crappy job and live your “real” life for a brief moment? What a sick system we’ve built for ourselves here. I generally try to spend Fridays in the woods, away from people, but the blizzards and general crappy weather have hampered that often in recent weeks. I guess you could say I’m ready for Spring.
Back when we had our work retreat, during one meal I was eating at the same table as our facilitator. Someone commented on how this one guy had hardly been seen at all outside of the work sessions. Well, the facilitator said, some people are introverts and it’s hard for them…they need to be by themselves and recharge. She said that actually she herself was an introvert, and, in fact, that she would probably opt out of the scheduled “social time” after dinner that night (so she could recharge, I suppose). [I wrote more about this night in an earlier entry]. Anyone who knows me is, I’m sure, well aware of my introverted status. Sometimes I feel like I never recharge, though. I often can’t spend enough time by myself. But other times it feels unhealthy, and I get to the point of craving companionship. I spend so much time alone that I can drive myself to the breaking point, where I just generally feel crazy and by then it’s too late to be around people because I would just feel and act too weird. I often find it much easier to connect to sounds, smells, and textures, than to carry on a conversation with a person. Music is an important interface for me to explore emotions and just generally function in the world. And clearly nature is integral to my life. Even though technology surrounds me and I use it every day, I would always choose the natural world over the manufactured world. Every single time. So…that’s where I’m at right now, here nearing the end of this week. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow. I’m supposed to go look at the stars tomorrow night. Peering out into the night sky at those celestial bodies so far away. It sounds pretty perfect, actually, and the forecast looks mostly clear.
Posted by sean on March 5, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/03/05/furthest/
We are under a Wind Watch. So this morning I watched the wind. It was snowing and the world outside looked like a snow globe shaken by a vicious god. The relentless wind blew the flakes in every direction, hardly ever allowing them to touch the ground. The vent on the skylight rattled, and I found a feather that had blown in through it and landed on the bathroom floor.
I listened to Fahey’s “America” and watched the frenetic flakes dance outside the window to the rich, odd twanging of steel strings. The coffee went down smooth, as did Heinrich’s ruminations on a winter spent in Maine’s woods. There was a certain synchronicity to my morning that doesn’t often visit.
I fed the birds and repotted a few plants. I recorded my dreams of the night before. Everything seems to be in order, for the moment.
Posted by sean on February 26, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/02/26/wind-watch/
In motion, we are immunized against lassitude. Working muscles open the vessels for more oxygen to enter. Don’t want to stop, don’t want to sit still. When you do, extremities lose their warmth; thoughts dull to a sluggish tempo. But outside, even as the wind wipes the smile from your face, the crows revel in it, swooping and soaring on currents we can’t even see. Later you glide on one of those currents in your mind, as the mood pendulum swings in your favor, without the benefit of active motion, but this time with the slow warmth of drink and easy talk. But when all that is over, quicker than you’d like, you still can’t stop the mental projectiles shooting off in every crazy direction, moving too fast to follow, all with holes burned through like the strip of caps you carried in your jeans pocket as a kid, one after another spark-cracking under the strike of a rock, as you watched and inhaled the acrid plume of smoke drifting up. Reach up quick to snatch them down with inked lines onto bleached white paper, but they are too elusive, having turned to vapor, damp and transparent like late night fog hanging over an empty field.
Posted by sean on December 13, 2009
https://sd-stewart.com/2009/12/13/far-corners/
s. d. stewart 