conversations with the future

on a train leaving Las Vegas

i thought to my (future) self

with all the deception in the world

who needs magic?

#katyamills

how you keep it together

the sun rises every morning. sometimes you have to pull the curtains back from the windows and let the light in, otherwise you may not know. the sun did its part and showed up. you have to do your part now, and arrive on scene. in the light and feeling the world upon your exposed skin, you can be rugged and raw. just exist. you won't have to recite your lines, though they may ask you. the longer i live, the more i find it difficult to rehearse. painful to memorize. how i keep it together (when i keep it together) is by showing up honest and true, hiding nothing. it can be painful getting here, and the magic lies in spontaneity. which also means... we cannot always keep it together. it won't necessarily break their hearts to see us falling apart for a moment. i love to watch them watch me regroup.

magic

life becomes tolerable
moment by moment
it won't ever be acceptable
in analysis

 life won't ever add up
 to any magic number
it won't hold in retrospect
 it won't measure up
 to any ideal

life falls apart
then regroups
life is never the same
always changes and

cannot be predicted
by forecast or made
meaningful

no
life is unkempt
windblown
bedraggled

life will not love you only
you may love life
for the moment
you are lucky
to exist

two clicks and a book

I do not write mysteries. Writing is the mystery and a book, a puzzle piece, a small part of being solved. I am wondering if I have what I need to do what I wish to now do? The magic number, I make it fourteen. Two weeks, to get back to you. To immerse myself in the colorful cove of creative process, and finish what I started a little over a year ago. There is a battle on our screens, online, for our eyes, our attention, our desires. When we are tired, they win. I go to do something creative and if I make one mistake, chasing down an email or a tweet - any packet of information - I may be sucked to the bottom of a sloping hill of mud, two clicks away, marching my way up and back to reclaim my sacred land... but always two clicks away. I wonder if I have what it takes to stand my ground? I have all my rations, all my munitions, and all my comrades around me. I have my health and my family, and my faith. I can easily recall when the world came over me, a long shadow before a setting sun. I plodded my way through the deepest night. Lost, I surrendered; and they had mercy on me. I don't know how or why. I was a pitiful starved creature, lunatic raving and howling, chained to an iron post on a cracked island of asphalt. I was the one who broke dumb from the pack. Now they saw I was no threat and marched me through a wasted land of drought. I focused on the stars of windless night until I was one, too, the smallest and farthest away. And brighter grew. I stretched for the sun out of a cold, dark place only I inhabited. Not at first, but soon I was touched. I found something there I cannot describe. In the poverty of speech one may call it 'god' - if only to relate. The thing which keeps me bright. This thing which can keep me up all night. That which helps me shine through darkness. Immerses me in sacred process, helps me hold my ground. In fourteen days or not, two clicks away and shot, from the bottoms ever climbing... I wonder will I find my way, and back to you? Otherwise, this book may live a lonely life in my heart.

helicopters and obamaphones and you

Life can be pretty strange and you don't know what to make of it, so take it as it comes. Last night I went to bed in our beloved police state and woke up startled at 8pm as a helicopter was flying very low with loudspeakers and searching for a 'suspicious person' near eggplant alley. All the soft edges of the last polite evening have been pushed and shoved and formed into something bigger than the pushes and shoves. We are left this morning with a lot or enough or something more than nothing I guess. A thermos of coffee sweetened with cream and sugar... and I still don't know how things will work out between us, you and me, or if it will continue on and be space harboring satellite transmissions to obamaphones and tower drops. I remember when it was once chemistry. And then it was magic. That lasted quite a while but not long enough. Once you have magic you can get awfully upset when you lose magic. You want anyone who had anything to do with the magic to disappear, because they remind you of the magic you lost. And now I am left peaceful and guarded, cause if you come with your late afternoon talk show dsyfunction a-knockin on my door, I might just have to call the cops.

me and my pumpkin

I ate a pumpkin seed whole without chewing and a pumpkin grew off of the vine that pushed out of my navel. I was very surprised but not shocked because of the season. The pumpkin turned orange and I had to drink a ton of water to get it that color. I really felt dehydrated and drained but my pumpkin looked grand so I felt better though I looked terrible. The people who used to be my friends wouldn't talk to me no more or go to the clubs with me looking like that, dragging my pumpkin behind me. Cars got really angry, well their drivers did, they made their cars honk at me and my pumpkin crossing the streets. We were in the crosswalk, okay, so exercise a little patience, people. Only the children seemed to really like me anymore, and they followed me and kicked it with my pumpkin. After Halloween my pumpkin and I sat sorrowful at the dinner table, as I prayed for guidance. My pumpkin spoke to me through the vine, I swear, it told me it was okay. I know you think I'm crazy but you all stopped coming by anyway, so what would I care what you thought anymore? And don't even try. When the kids circle round, we will celebrate the season and eat pumpkin pie. You won't be invited and that's why.

the living dream phase

I really hope to see you randomly in the streets, to meet you there in the sun or the shade, the rain or the glade, by the fence or the tree, the lamppost or newsstand, you and me once again have a chance at a life, a stopping of time. I am only fortunate because I believe myself fortunate, and it would be a great misfortune if I did not. I only love you by showing my love to you, but who says you cannot show your love in a thought or a prayer? Life gets more confusing and then I stop thinking, let something else take over, less abstract and more concrete (perhaps right under our feet), there need be no confusion so long as if or when the moment arrives on the tangent of our lives on the streets of this city, we see one another in that random beautiful way and connect in that semi comfortable way of matching up against the small changes in our separate and recent fortunes, and what I can do at that time, if that time were to arrive, is turn my attention and presence to you completely, perhaps with a smile - definitive in the eyes - and listen when you speak and not interrupt and not let the magic dissipate by any technological device in my possession (calling to us like they will), but rather undivide my attention toward you and if the chance arises for a handshake or a hug, choose the latter, for who on this dying earth does not wish for the physical rapport? - some great reassurance in a small gesture - and though we may go on our ways off the tangent back on queue, and though I may depart without any certainty I will see you, I can thank you for your time in one of many different ways, and show clearly how I care, burning through the haze... the living dream phase.

credit is good (at the food bank)

She did her day like any day before it, squeezed the juice out of the whole orange. She was a benevolent juicer. And a clear and present danger to rinds, husks, sheaths, shells, and exoskeletons. Snakes slithered away from her grasping hands, in the tall grasses of her her unmowed back summer yard. Turtles sped away. Turtles!

She had done her day. She had chased the sun over the horizon. It started like any day before it. A dark room. Predawn. A box fan sucking cool air, and spitting it, into her face. A goosedown blanket, tossing feathers into the breeze. Like some retentive golfer, worried any ever slight change in the direction of the wind might add a hook to his drive, and a stroke to his score. One of those night lights you can buy for five bucks at Rite Aid, splashing a spotlight image of fish in water, on the ceiling.

Featuring prominently: the awful sound of her prana, facedown in her pillow, half-suffocated by the weight of her own head. And by virtue of relentless dreams in which she was being chased by a clock with great arms and long legs. As the arms windmilled around the face of this clock chasing her, the time seemed to age her, in this recurring nightmare, and before she woke, breathless from her mouth in the pillow, she was an old woman losing ground to the malevolent clock behind her.

So she cried out, startled, then, upon realizing she was in a soft bed with a soft light of fish splashed above her, and a boxfan of fresh air blowing into her face; she snarled and grunted, and turned to her side. So to Live! my friends So to Live! She was and is and will always be a survivor, like that. Saves herself, from herself, every predawn morning. Wow.

Near dawn, she hunted down the tv and chose a special treat from among a sparse channel universe. There would be extra-special commercials with former NFL legends touting catheters for men. Former talk show hosts touting blenders. The Fonze, touting reverse mortgages. Alex Trebeck, hawking life insurance. Wow.

In between the deafening roar of former TV-icons gone dollar signs, she got drool relief from the wonderful world of cold cases, put in the DNA microwave and come out piping hot. She was only one of denizens of global tv junkies and insomniacs who had fallen completely head over heels for the soothing voice of Mr. Bill Kurtis from Chicago.

Aside: She was no ordinary listener. She had once directed courier traffic to Mr. Kurtis' very office on the near north, arts-intensified, hollywood central of Chicago, Illinois. True! Thus was her tenuous, personal connection to that lullaby soft voice, which helped invigorate, relegated files from the eighties. She neither knew nor cared to know anything about his legend, how he exposed Agent Orange, among other things. In her mind, TV has bombed the hell out of Vietnam, and she was sick of it. She wasn't even born in the sixties, yet she had watched so many war stories, she felt like she had fought in Vietnam. She even considered naming her three cats, Ho, Chi, and Minh. 

Nudging the darkness back into some light. That's what made the difference in her days which were all almost the same. Being just like Bill Kurtis. Staring at death, with a benevolent kinda gaze. The kind she would have between her and her newborn, if she ever gave birth, again. The kids she had already created, were trying to destroy her happiness, she thought. She preferred to think on other things. Nudging the darkness into light. Having survived herself at dawn, facedown on the pillow, she could relate to the victims of darkness...in the most tenuous of fashions.

Aside: Not to mention her other glorified attribute: she was a hot-blooded, one part Irish, one part Icelandic, lightning rod for truth! Any personal description of her, risked undermining her exceptional aura. Only her television set cast a brighter light, than herself. Oh, and her credit was good (at the food bank).

Katya Mills, 08/13