I watched Faces again tonight. It’s been at least a decade, maybe longer, since I last watched it. Cassavetes crushes me every time, maybe more the older I get and the more I’ve seen and felt. When I think about the movies I like, the art I am drawn to, the music I connect with, the books I fall in love with, I see that they all share a common thread: their creators do not shy away from an honest portrayal of life as a human being. They do not judge; they simply show life for what it is. We humans are messy, we screw up a lot, we’re vulnerable, we’re fallible, and sometimes we never learn from our mistakes. There is a beautiful ugliness that hangs about us…it could go either way what you see, depending on our moods, depending on so much beyond our control. And when you talk about things like trust and expectations…well, then that is where it really gets complicated. People don’t bargain so easy with those, and with good reason. We can build and destroy these over and over, throughout a life of trying not to be alone for a little too long, carrying resilience with us, the one weapon we hope to always hold close to our hearts.
All posts in category life
when you don’t leave the house
Posted by sean on October 22, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/10/22/when-you-dont-leave-the-house/
horoscope
My horoscope for the week, courtesy of The Onion:
“Your life will soon lose all direction, which, considering how it has been going, should come as a vast relief.”
I thought this might serve as a jumping off point for a longer post, but I don’t really see a need for further elaboration. I realize that sounds overly dramatic; it’s just funny, that’s all.
Latest lifer, Lincoln’s Sparrow, found at Cromwell Valley Park on Sunday evening at the tail end of a very productive walk (photo courtesy of Kelly Colgan Azar via Flickr under Creative Commons license).
Posted by sean on September 28, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/09/28/horoscope/
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/
in the morning or the late afternoon or in the midnight hour
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/
perched on the precipice of the week
Thursday night once again I come drink from your dirty trough. I am like a moth dancing with the flame, my paper thin wings licked by fire’s cleansing fangs. The filmstrip of my life rattles on, a string of vague faces in scenes etched on celluloid. I stumble along behind, stretching out an arm or leg here and there, just trying to stay in the field of view. And in the shadows the fiddle plays high and lonesome, keeping perfect time to the insanity of it all.
Posted by sean on August 20, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/08/20/perched-on-the-precipice-of-the-week/
minutiae
I wrote a post last night but it was way too introspective to publicize on here. Seeing as much of what I write here is probably way too introspective, it must have been pretty bad, huh? Yes, yes it was. So what has been going on? Well, I went away for a few days to the beach. Did some birding over there, but nothing extraordinary. The mist on Saturday morning worked against us. Birds were present but it was too foggy to see many of them. Next day was clear, but birds were on the inaccessible side of the pond, and we had no scope. That’s on the list to get. On Sunday, I saw my first of year Barn Swallow, flying over the ocean of all places. Best shot of the trip was probably that of an osprey perched in a tree limb leaning out over a pond, clutching a dead fish in its talon. It was a majestic sight, and in my opinion much more impressive than, say, a Bald Eagle holding some scrap it just stole from a Turkey Vulture. Many Pine Warblers were present in the pines (natch) but it was still early for most passerine migrants. A few other warblers are being reported elsewhere in Maryland (Louisiana Waterthrush, Palm, Yellow). In a few weeks things will be in full swing!
We planted the garden last week. The mesclun mix came up yesterday, but nothing else has poked through yet. The sprawling multiflora rose (aka “rambling rose”) has been targeted for removal due to its invasive nature. I hope to replace it with a native shrub, probably one with berries that birds like to eat.
It’s taking me three days to write this entry…
Updates: some radishes and lettuce up now in the garden. I put out the hummingbird feeder this morning. Crabapple tree out back is in full flower (white), and the cherry tree out front has shed all of its flowers…pink petals now scatter the yard. Weather has been in the low 90s (!) past couple of days. Not good for sleeping.
At work, I sneak away for a few minutes in the afternoon and listen to the house finches sing as I walk around the harbor. One of them has staked out his territory on the Coast Guard vessel and sings his heart out from the very top of the ship each day. This is all I can do to maintain a few tendrils of sanity.
Another cyclist was killed by a car, this time in the county on a road I’ve ridden often. The usual “road rights” argument rages as a family grieves another senseless death.
I am weary, and my dreams, when I remember them, horrify me.
Posted by sean on April 7, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/04/07/minutiae/
random
Nicest day we’ve had in weeks and I’m stuck inside waiting for a tardy contractor. As I wait, someone intermittently uses a loud drill next door. Sometimes homeownership sucks. Muggings and robberies are up, in both the neighborhood and the city at large. This depresses me on an epic scale. Drilling next door probably indicates installation of new deadbolts. Bars on windows, steel doors, quadruple locks, where does it end? How safe can you be? Muggers lie in wait looking for opportunities. We really have no control over it. The problem is systemic: the haves and the have nots forever divided. No reconciliation possible. Only solution is to take to the woods. The cities are doomed.
In 1960, John Steinbeck traveled the United States with his dog and wrote a book about his trip. At one point he notes, “I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.” Since then, we have happily continued to destroy all the natural places, with the exception of a select few that are so overrun they project a carnivalesque atmosphere. We have built a society so spread apart that most people see the automobile as the only way to traverse the uncomfortable distances between point A and point B. To not own a car is anathema. You are branded a freak and possibly un-American; at the very least, you are suspect. Similarly, to eschew the consumerist lifestyle that is so red-bloodedly American is also viewed with suspicion. Why wouldn’t you want to buy all the latest greatest stuff? You saw it on TV, after all, and it looked totally awesome. And everyone who had that stuff looked really happy. So why wouldn’t you want to be happy? Get out there and shop, sucker.
Often I think I was born in the wrong century, perhaps in the wrong country, possibly of the wrong race, and maybe even on the wrong planet altogether.
I just got back from a work retreat that I had been dreading for quite some time. During said retreat, I spent some late night hours carousing with a few coworkers who I hadn’t really gotten to know beforehand. I found them to be decent and fun to hang out with, at least in my inebriated state. I’m sure they were surprised by my sudden bout of gregariousness. I’m not a mean drunk, but I can be a saucy one. During the work sessions, I was surprised to sense a tiny flame of enthusiasm ignite somewhere deep below the layers of cynicism within me. But I know better. We can talk grand and eloquent away from the office, but reality is grim. Knowing how long it’s taken to get this far (still a sad state of affairs) makes it impossible to expect that even a quarter of our lofty ideas will ever come to fruition within the next three and a half years. And that is not cynicism talking; that’s just pragmatism.
The place where we stayed was a Bavarian-styled inn that was the type of place where the Griswold family would’ve roomed during one of their epically disastrous vacations. My bathroom had a disused-looking bidet in it and a space heater mounted in the wall that smelled like burning dust when turned on. Still, the king-sized four-poster bed was comfortable and the vaguely shabby past-its-heyday look to the entire place was preferable to the sterility of modern hotels. Not a good place to be a vegan, but I got by (barely). I wish I had photos to share, but the camera was left behind.
Posted by sean on January 15, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/15/random/
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/
halting the aversion
The holidaze has come and gone, a blur of mostly family and some friends, a lot of eating, a touch of music with an old compatriot, some reading and sleeping, and a long, luxurious respite from work. I traveled by train and car, but have been off the bike for far too long now. Worked out at the gym, tried my hand at pedal steel guitar, cooked and ate with some of my favorite people. I received an unexpected gift intended to enhance my birding, which I haven’t done in about a month now, besides car birding, and some very meager backyard birding. Christmas Day did unexpectedly bring to the yard jays, cardinals, doves, sparrows, and even a junco or two. We’ve seen glimpses of a hawk (probable Cooper’s) in the trees across the street. Meanwhile, with the close of the old year and the dawn of the new comes the inevitable reflection. I don’t make resolutions, but it’s hard not to stare ahead at a blank slate of 365 days before you and not scratch around in your head for some ideas of what you want to see rise up from that expanse of time. Personally I know I need to stop treading water and start making headway on the changes I yearn to see in my future. No more averting the eyes. My passivity knows no bounds and the time to corral it is way past due. I need to spend the afternoon, as Annie Dillard says, because I can’t take it with me. There is a path that I am supposed to be on and I will claw my way through the brambles to get to it.
Posted by sean on January 3, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/03/halting-the-aversion/
from the bottom of the roiling pond
As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the previous name of this blog had nothing to do with the content. It was just a nod to a type of wordplay that I enjoy. I think that many disappointed web searchers arrived at the site as a result. The new name is actually an old one, the title of an essay I wrote many years ago. It’s about a common thing that happens between people: you bond through shared experience, but as the vaporous passion and overstimulation of youth burn away over the slow dull coals of maturity, you perceive the true tenuous nature of that bond. Either what we need from other people changes as we grow older, or it just takes us awhile to figure out what we needed in the first place. Then again, with human beings it is rarely a matter of one option or another. Sometimes other people simply stop giving us what we need, either consciously or unconsciously. Or we tire of seeking it out from them, realizing we’d sooner squeeze blood from a stone. I suppose that, in the end, it’s usually a blurry blend of all of the above. Often when I look around and try to figure out what’s going on in the world, it’s like I’m peering through a jar of cloudy pond water. I see signs of life and movement, but what it all points toward is beyond me.
Posted by sean on November 30, 2009
https://sd-stewart.com/2009/11/30/from-the-bottom-of-the-roiling-pond/
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