17 Mar 2024 7 min read

"Ancient Dreams"

General Reflections on Everyday Life

You see, one cannot get cocky in winter in Colorado with a toddler. Wasn’t it last week that I was boasting about still putting out three essays while juniper had strep? Well, I got my come uppin’s this week with our gargantuan snow storm and a wee little Intestinal cleanse we carried out for juju. I usually can handle one curve ball a month. if multiple are thrown in successive weeks, I tend to struggle mightily. However, this is nothing new for long time readers of this project. I have had a writing moratorium in any week where I am cleaning up vomit and diarrhea. I am still writing, but it’s only once, instead of three times.

Aside from the excrement cleaning, I am rather tired with producing so much. This hyper-productivity has to be another way my own feelings of inadequacy in running a business have manifested themselves. In true super-virgo, anxiety-dude fashion, I have tried to work my way into people signing up for this project. I kept telling myself that if I just posted more, better essays that more people would be willing to join my weird corner of the internet and read my stories. Gosh, it’s funny when you realize that beneath the most earnest pronouncements of, “I do this because it fills me up,” there is still just someone hoping that their investment in themselves and their dream will pay off. The problem is that asking anyone to pay attention to anything but our ongoing active genocides and just trying to get through the day is sorta not fair. I just hope that folx still want some roses with their bread.

I’m not going to stop doing this. No, my intention is quite the contrary. I’m gonna take some advice I got from Risa Dickens of Missing Witches on a recent coven workshopping call and just chunk stuff up into more digestible little nuggets of song, story, and stills. That means taking my three distinct strands of photo, essay, and song storytelling and weaving them more explicitly together or just touching on one topic a week, rather than trying to do all three each week. It’s a form of resistance to notice how capitalism makes you feel, how it influences your behavior toward production, and to make the choice to turn back to something slower and more methodical.

Aside from the 20 inches of snow on the ground, it also is getting nice outside, and I will have less time to write three essays a week. I have responsibilities in the dye garden and to my riding. I am also training for my first century ride and subsequent 200k for riding. I have been toying with the idea of making this project more seasonally intensive or aloof, depending on how much I will be in my basement reflecting. As we shift to the warmer months, I will be more aloof as I have less time to write up workshop notes and philosophical essays.

Tis’ the season for rebirth, ya know? I keep pulling cards from my Way of the Wild Oracle deck that are nudging me to just go with the flow and let myself iterate through this project. I think I can let myself have that space considering I am 110 essays deep into this project at this point. So, here I am, letting myself transform again, even if there is a little nagging voice in my head that says I am slipping on my discipline. Having explained all the rationale for the new approach, that voice is already growing fainter.

Workshop Notes

I told you that I was going finish weaving and immediately move on to stitching the hanging cloth right on the back of the weaving. Well, that didn’t happen. Everytime I had that notion to measure and cut out that cloth, I fell into a vat of quicksand, which sapped my ambition right out my fingers. Ultimately, writing about the timeline that one’s practice will follow can turn out to be much more aspirational than factual. That’s ok. Words and plans are just little worlds we make up to be either erected or blown aside by the winds of change. In this case, my attempt to use this project to direct my activity didn’t pan out, but by and large, that project is hugely successful in that regard. I have fashioned myself into who I am by writing essays about making stuff with my hands and being a human on a rock hurtling through space.

Instead of doing what I said I would do, I finished hand stitching a patch on a hat. This whole process may seem silly, but it meant a lot to me. It’s still a big deal in my own music-obsessed world to be able to wear a patch of an album that meant a lot to me as I grew up. I don’t know if I can fully articulate what Godspeed You Black Emperor means to me, especially the album “Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven.” They create the sound of decentralized leftism to me. Most of my writing style is just a prose version of their music, all dark, hazy, and resolute. So, when I found a patch with the album art from that record on Black Dungeon Patch’s Etsy shop, I had to have it. Now, that was back in October of 2022. It took me a year and half to finish the stitching. That is the definition of a long-term work-in-progress.

I stitched the patch onto my favorite “Mystic Alpinism” hat that was designed by my buddy Glenn of Be Your Own Drum Circle. The hat is the perfect shape for my large cranium, so I also bought a second one so that I would still have the mystic alpinism hat to wear around. As you can tell from the picture, it takes a lot of stitches to get that patch onto the hat. I could count them. I could make up a number too, I suppose. I won’t, because I don’t need to prove myself with a number. It took a good time; a time I enjoyed and found revelatory. Specifically, I really enjoyed handstitching with this tulip tapestry needle. It had a slightly bigger eye than the smaller embroidery needle I was using and moved through the fabric smoother. It was nice to find a use for this needle, because I bought it hoping I could use it to weave in ends. Boy was my face a bit red when I realized it was much closer to a cross-stitching needle.

Photo Essay - “Ancient Dreams”

“There's no tomorrow just sadness and sorrow
Hold on to the ancient dreams”

Candlemass - Ancient Dreams

This is the mood. I am just riding my bike, experiencing that purifying trance state of riding a bike for close to four hours. I haven’t had a drink or a puff in months. I am just focused on soaking up the beautiful oddity of everyday life. Below is a collection of some of those moments. I rode roughly 45 miles. It took me forever, because I stopped to take photos. I had a blast and then ate a lot of food, including, but not limited to, tator tots and seafood CHOWDAH.