[sticky entry] Sticky: this holy longing

Jun. 29th, 2023 10:10 am
bleodswean: (Default)

 the unwavering stare:  self-portrait, skull, Hasselblad remote, my father's watch, tree of knowledge

Welcome to my Sticky Post. A first for me in over twenty years of journaling, but it seems like today’s journalers are more discerning. I don’t do Tumblr, or twitter, or IG, or Facebook / Meta. And sadly, I don’t really do LJ any longer as I can’t get the cross posting to work. In 2022, I made a dedicated effort to commit to DW and here we are. It ain’t the glory daze of olde, but I’m coming to terms with that. Every few months I will fall into a despair-like need to lament those long-gone LJ times and then it’s out of my system and we’re onward and upward.

I have no friending policy. I read the flist every morning and comment as much as I can before work starts. I’m interested in almost all things and all folx. If I’m not interested, I won’t make a scene, because I’m not interested in drama. Been there, done that.

I’m a professional photographer by trade. Semi-retired now. Although it seems I'm shooting more weddings and babies lately than I have in a long time. I'm currently compiling a work of Serious Children portraits.

We run a family business. We live in a gorgeous hand-built home, on many forested acres, in a small mountain village in Northern California. Military brat and I’ve traveled the world and moved every three years of my minor days. English and Philosophy major, dropped out to manage a Tower Records import section. Spent the 80’s mohawked and living a very downtown alternative life. Spent the 90’s and 00’s raising children off the grid and living a very nature-based alternative life. LOL.

I do write and have published short fic and flash fic and poetry (and will make it a point to create a link post for my original work soon!). I also write fanfic and have some fic over at A03. I dabble in fandoms, wait to become obsessed before I write and read for a fandom and that seems to happen a couple few times every year. That being said, I do have a personal fandom I write in continuously - a modern dress Persephone / Hades. It's a myth that I've been working with for decades. 

Music IS the soundtrack to my life and an important part of my days. I’ve been listening to Nick Cave since 1982 when I bought my first Birthday Party album. I still listen to him today. He is my musical muse. I also listen to a lot of darkgrass and folk, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Swans.

I’ve been reading voraciously since I was 10 years old, contracted rheumatic fever and a librarian sent home The Narnia Chronicles to keep me company in my sickbed. Now I read: Cormac McCarthy *genuflect*, AS Byatt, DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Joyce Carol Oates, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Mary Oliver, David Whyte, Brian Evenson, and all things folk & fairy tale.

I’m older than most of you, younger than some. I’m finding myself here less and less and that’s disappointing, but a natural attrition, I suppose.

Merry Met!

ETA:  In July of 2024, the Park Fire destroyed 2/3rds of the mountain village of Cohasset, California; I have spent the past six months helping my friends and neighbors  - survivors tell their stories.

TELL YOUR PARK FIRE STORY SUBSTACK
bleodswean: (Default)
If it’s any …
 
It isn’t.
 
I just thought …
 
Don’t. Your thoughts are. Hesitation. Rudimentary. But sincere. I recognize that.
 
Well. For most …
 
Stop. Please. I’m not most.
 
Silence, broken then with. 
 
There is no comfort, no consolation, you see? There is only a letting go. My releasing. Mine. It is a great sluicing of water from off the skin when surfacing out of the depths. A leprosy in which the body sheds its recognizable humanity. Akin to fire, flooding, all the great equalizers of the human spirit is loss. 
 
No pain can be endless.
 
Time lessens, nothing heals. Perhaps the final loss, the dissolution of self. There is that momentary pause in which the soul tells the self rest rest rest now. With those strange urgent shushings the mind exhales and closes an interior eye and the soul sighs and the body relaxes. 
 
Always with the most extreme of analogies.
 
It’s how I process. How I’m formed. The shape of me in this incarnation is allegorical. I admit it. Is it unbearable of me to explain a poetic inclination? 
 
Of course not. 
 
Catch me in one of those expirations then. That numbing prelude to a sleep brought on by the physical and existential exhaustion of the quivering small beast caught in the snare incapable of the final severing of the trapped limb. Perhaps, between respirations I will show gratitude for whatever platitude you long to utter. With such kindness in the dulcet tones of your compassion. 
 
So insulting. But I forgive you.
 
It is no kindness to me. I’m admitting this to you now so that there can be no misunderstanding between us afterwards. In the quiet of acceptance, in the weaking of the bleeding out. You offered me not a ligature, not even a bandage, only the word bandage. Followed by an expectation of a deed done well. Yet, I will nod and listen insomuch as I am able before the next suck breath moment in which I am once again filled with not a gain but a loss. Filled with loss, if you can imagine such a thing. You who have been unlucky to suffer not. Yes, I say unlucky, yes, I call you cursed for your wholeness, your innocence of these mortal woundings, of the soul’s agonies. 
 
And you, I suppose, are blessed by this devastation?
 
Confounded and cast out by the privilege of cataclysmic injury yet I finger the beads and whisper the prayers and allow my eyes to roll back in their sockets from the sheer unknowingness of meaning, the definition of absolutes. Our mother, our father. All these soulful beings arting in their heavens. There is a consecration in catastrophe. 
 
I disagree. You are martyring yourself to this.
 
Martyr? Laughing. This laying on of hands while the blade is hidden in the sleeve, dropped into the palm, the knife snicking out plunging into the heart between the ribs through the lungs a great sucking sound when its pulled back out. Taking life itself with it. The body heartbeating to death through the collapsing arteries.
 
All this because I wanted nothing more than to offer succor.
 
Are you familiar with the consolation prize, my friend? 
 
Certainly, narrowly failing to win.
 
No, finishing last. 
 
Yet recognized! 
 
I don’t want to be recognized for my wounding. Your sympathy is of no value to me. Only to you. So, in an earnest effort to be brotherlike, to recognize that you too will one day bleed, I bite my tongue at refusing your solace. Give it here. In great bucketloads. Pour it out and over me. I’ll hold my breath to keep from drowning in your mollification. It offers some respite, admittedly, to others. 
 
It’s that you can’t bear to be likened to others.
 
bleodswean: (Default)
He’d been sick for a week. Summer cold they called it when he was a boy, but he didn’t think it was hay fever. What would he have been allergic to? Mold and dust? They’d mucked out the barn late, a mid-spring chore but time had wandered away from them and it was nearer to summer. The horses had already been turned out into the lower forty, hock deep in an abundance of growth and greenery, noses hidden in carpets of bluebells.

The barn took the both of them two days and just after that he’d fallen ill. Sick as the proverbial dog. Racking coughs, lungs that sounded like cedar being kindled. She was fine as houses, and they hadn’t been to town nor had a customer up from town for the mill. But he couldn’t breathe. Literally, figuratively, the physicality of inhalation and exhalation becoming an emotional toil. His lungs didn’t hurt; they were just not working the way they’d worked for the entirety of his life. She’d teased him good and hard about it. He was two decades her senior and he allowed the ribbing, deciding it was a good-natured lambast, but alone thought slantways about the distance measured by an ageing body and knew at sixty-eight he was old and at forty-seven she was not. Or not near as.

But he didn’t couldn’t spell out in words the extent of what he was experiencing. Later realizing not telling her was fear borne from a deep childlike belief that he could possibly jinx the very ability of his body to keep him bodied, ensouled. He tamped down his symptoms, dismissed the idea of going into the clinic. Waved away even a hint of diagnostic concern.

Naming a thing doesn’t always give the namer power. Some things acquire a name, and the power becomes all theirs, monstrous, overbearing, overarching, made real and whole.

The first sense of hardening, something lodged, something stiff inside his chest had woken him out of an already bad sleep and came at him with an existential dread so fathomless that he knew in those darkly pre-dawn hours that God had reached inside his body and touched the unseen organs toiling in their mysterious viscera at keeping him earthside. He knew he had been beckoned, felt that finger quirk within the twinned grey lobes, filters of the very air itself. A whisper come home son.

But he didn’t. Heed the call, respond. In another aeon without medical choices he would have acquiesced, quickly bent a knee to such a godly mandate, and within the year dutifully laid his stoved-up body down and not gotten himself back up again. He was astonished at how his corporeal self, pavlovian began to slaver at the command of fate.

It was hard work, to flee, to turn away from the lure of the abyss, the echo coming back emptied of his pleas, hauling great mouthfuls of air into his hardened lungs, willing them to soften beneath his will, to generate as though it were an act he understood or had any sort of control over oxygenated blood. His mind committed to a marathon, but he learned the body does not work that way.

Acquiescence. An exam, then labs, then quiet pronouncements from white coated analyzers.

ILD. Interstitial Lung Disease. There came the naming, the christening he’d gone to such extremes avoiding. He did not feel empowered. Identification did not lead to compartmentalization. The panic of it made it more difficult to breathe.

Accusations or recriminations were never part of the conversation in the sterile examination rooms. Neither courtroom nor pulpit. Regrets only his. All their probing and prodding, questions and answers.

But. Had he done this to himself?

Cemented his own lungs? The bronchus, bronchioles solidified inside the yeasty lobes. The deflated sacs, gummed closed. He wasn’t a smoker, leaf or grass. No childhood asthma, no rheumatoid arthritis. His heart was steady, his arteries clear. Occupational dust or fibers.

Years at the sawmill, whittling a figure of a man close to earth, organic and respectful of the mighty conifers, the broad-leafed hardwoods. Riven down to the heartwood, the splitting and the milling. The board feet of his daily grind, the blades, the growing mounds of sawdust, the smells and soils of a hard day’s work. The labor of the felling and the bucking, the chain dragging, and the ripping. The packaging, boards and stickers, and the redolent incense. The perfume of his own wood lot, his own lumber yard. It lined the inside of his sinuses, and he relished it. Tasted it on his tongue, scraped it out between his molars.

Fibrosis, necrosis, pyrosis.

One year. Into the second wearing oxygen but his strength was sapped. His vision swimmy, his ears ringing with the labors of his breathing.

Double lung transplant.

Now that was a thing to give a body the shakes. He quivered like a strung bow as charts and diagrams were shown, then the contractual agreement and he wanted to make a dark joke but could read the room. These men did not see themselves on a side other than that of a clinical, mathematical God. This for that. One life for another. Interchangeable beneath the skin that pretends a difference between one or the other. All scientific progress and supposed presupposed human gain. He signed and jested silently, inside his head about blood and souls bartered for a bit more of this and a lot more of that.

The waiting and the worsening. The dizziness brought on both by his body and his thoughts.

The loneliness ached him more than the faltered breath, the straining ribcage, the sinking realization, the bartered understanding. She tried to comfort or strengthen him up by relating the stories of her two births. It’s like birth, she said. It’s entering a room in which there is only one exit. He could not grasp the concept. For him the room was not a room, but a box fitted to the width and breadth of his shoulders, the length of his skeleton head to toe.

After after afterwards. Sitting wrapped in a blanket he’d pilfered from the months’ long stay at rehab on a rocker on the deck he had built when a younger man a different man a man breathing through his own lungs staring out across the land he owned had bought for her wanting not just one thing but all the things for her for her for them such a short allowance we are given he measured the length of a thing against the weight of a thing and wondered. And could simply not decide.

bleodswean: (Default)






Idol is back and it's WHEEL OF CHAOS time! I'm in and I really encourage all of you to give it a whirl, too! It's fun, truly! And even when it's not, you're writing and isn't that what we're here to do? 

therealljidol | The Wheel of Chaos Sign Up
bleodswean: (Default)
I've decided to share this agonizing labor of love love love novella with the flist. A decade old now. Time, and all that hoo-hah she says dismissively. Back in the day, a few of us became OBSESSED with Rico's tattoo. And that's really putting it mildly. He was still earthside then. We created our artworks in his likeness and one of those creations was this story. It went through endless incarnations, but it began with a fandom fic challenge - Spin the Bottle. 

Is it perfect? LOLL, no. Do I have the ability / energy to rework it? Nope. But - 

I love it, it's mine, I made it, a treasure in an old cigar box under my bed. And now I'm gifting it to all of you. It will take 13 days to share it, and I will post daily. 



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