A year is a collection of days. These days fashion themselves into months, which clump together into seasons, both hot and dry, cold and wet. But only one continuum extends as far as we can walk. All else arbitrary. All else rationalizes what we look away from. That being our own end, from which we run, even as we draw nearer to it still. Peering back through the wine-sweet debauched years at the dull bluntness of youth, with the long and short of our yawning parched futures hunched on our bony shoulders. With the many crisscrossing paths diverging from our own, now choked with twisting brambles, now hiding forever what secrets they may once have held.
All posts in category inner life
events transpire, time passes, and what end do we all hurtle toward
Posted by sean on October 8, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/10/08/events-transpire-time-passes-and-what-end-do-we-all-hurtle-toward/
see you when your troubles get like mine
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/
institutionalized
Due to cat needing vet visits, I spent two days working from home, driving Em El down south for work and picking her up in the evening. I haven’t commuted by car in years, so it was quite a shock to my system. Blood pressure rises, teeth gritted, eyes glaze over as you follow the same route over and over. I’m used to seeing the stupid things drivers pull as I ride my bike, but it’s totally different when you’re driving. It actually bothers me more, probably because I’m already extremely agitated just from the mere fact of being behind the wheel. Anyway, it got me thinking about people who commute the same route for years on end. Every day, a vacant thousand-yard stare fixed on the traffic lights ahead. The rote of it all would kill me in a matter of months.
So after the storms pass, and the dishes are drying in the rack, I step out into the cool air. That old cottonwood out back sings its timeless song with nothing more than leaves in the wind and I am so thirsty to hear it. I want to go to sleep listening to nothing but that. It takes me back to, of all places, Lucy Park and the hidden trails I found that one day, winding alongside the chocolate brown river. After a deep and full night of cottonwood sleep I want to wake up to the high fluted serenades of the thrushes. I want to turn my head to the window and breathe in the meadow breeze as it fills the room. I am so hungry for what feeds me. So desperate in this urban confusion. I keep fitting one leghold trap after another onto these withered limbs.
I can’t stop hearing Bill Callahan sing, “My ideals have got me on the run…towards my connection with everyone. My ideals have got me on the run…it’s my connection to everyone.”
I don’t even know anymore what my ideals are, if I even ever had a clear idea. I’m so shifty and drifty, I’m barely able to pin myself down most days. And I’m certainly not running anymore. Treading murky water, perhaps. As for my connections, they are few and far between. Far in miles and farther yet in states of mind.
I don’t want to become institutionalized. I really don’t. I know that much. Maybe that’s an ideal? It’s something I’ll keep fighting against as long as I have the strength, even if it’s with my last few ounces.
Posted by sean on June 4, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/06/04/institutionalized/
gargling truth serum
Never swallow, never swallow, but keep that golden truth serum swirling around in your mouth. That way it can become anything you want. A brilliant answer to a dusty question, a missing piece to a bruised and broken puzzle, a misplaced passion found again. Passed by the stairs at the top of this page again a day or so ago. Stairs to the future…stairs to wildness…stairs out of this purgatory. Traveling through the woods with my avian friends…walking the Mason-Dixon trail…coulda kept walking and walking and never stopped. There was no real reason to stop. The birds just kept singing and they just kept moving, and I just kept moving with them, ticking them off as I went. The water was there, too. And the sky. And the trees. The ground below my feet felt good. Everything felt good and right and I felt alive. I felt so good, high on the experience of being where I was and nowhere else at that moment. Something extraordinary seeking to burst out from inside…seeds laid to rest on bare soil and rising toward the warm sun. Rich feeling pervades for mere moments, gulp enough to sustain another few days, few weeks, few months. Don’t wanna be the second-guesser anymore…don’t want to renege, reinterpret, revisit, re- anything. Just clearing the path, one heavy stone at a time….all we can do, all we know to do.
Posted by sean on May 17, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/05/17/gargling-truth-serum/
blurred
I’m tired…allergy season is upon me and it seems like this year it’s gonna be particularly rough. I feel like I’m sorta falling apart at the seams and simultaneously sewing them back up. A little stuffing drops out each time. My dreams have broadened, become richer and more verdant, but I still struggle to recall them. This distresses me. I don’t think I’m prepared for another summer in the city. It seems different now…the violence more palpable, the callousness in the streets hardened to an impermeable crust. I seek open fields with endless skies and not a building in site. I just keep blundering along, not really knowing what I’m doing at all. I miss writing…it’s like an old friend I keep meaning to call up on the phone. It’s a challenge for me to prioritize. I shouldn’t have to prioritize that. But there’s no forcing it, either. I feel like I should know a few more things than I do at this point in my life. Other people’s lives fascinate me…do they also doubt themselves on a near-daily basis? Do they also feel like proto-adults? And by proto- I mean primitive. Ah well…another epic zen fail for the day.
Posted by sean on April 20, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/04/20/blurred/
be all end all
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/
furthest
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/
early reading
Yesterday, the leafless trees etched achingly across the blue sky, and where the clarity comes from all of a sudden I do not know. Like the right lens finally passed across the eyes and the details sharpened into focus. Today drinking yerba mate and feeling okay. Working out, flexing muscles, living outside of the mind; indulging the physical senses, where the grit of life grinds against you, polishing the brittle edges of your psyche smooth. Time to cast aside the shell game and dive in the fray. So far, so good.
Posted by sean on January 3, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/03/early-reading/
3:33
Wake up uncertain, through blurred eyes reach out, unmask the dread box full of time: 3:33 AM. I am untethering; I feel this, yes, I do. I float above myself all day, drifting, occasionally deleting Russian spam, wondering when this gossamer thread shall fray, then sever, to release me. I remember being young, staring at the ceiling, imagined walking on it, stepping over door frames to enter rooms; it seemed better up there. My thoughts upside down, always, then and now; my records all broken, need to melt them down, re-groove with new sounds and words.
Posted by sean on December 16, 2009
https://sd-stewart.com/2009/12/16/333/
far corners
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/
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