I

My Life

At the coop school, my shrinking class was planning a garden project, and I was doing a lot of writing and thinking about my work with children.

February is often for me a  passage way that connects January to March, that starts out dim, damp and chill and by the end warms and brightens to almost spring. I can’t remember anything much happening in February.

II

My Region

The Winter Olympics came to our area, but had almost no impact on my life, being way to expensive to even dream of attending, plus you had to have a passport to get into Canada (actually to come back. How crazy is that?) I watched The Colbert Report for updates like everyone else.

III

Writing

I was struggling with many projects River of Dreams and Aranansi and a couple that went nowhere.

Here are some of my very scattered and dream laced journal entries:

2/1/2010:

Bus conversation:

“Mind over matter.”

“We’ll find out what’s wrong with you at the autopsy.”

2/9/2010:

A balloon flew up into the clouds over the river away from a small boy.

2/10/2010:

I am at a loss abut what to write. I seem to have lost momentum over the last couple of days.

I dreamed about New England Land of rolling green hills and Grecian colonial style houses as if in a painting or tapestry, but still real. A park of lush, spacious green with white stately buildings, there were children playing where they shouldn’t. It wasn’t ready yet.

2/12/2010:

Today I have time and nothing to say. I am blurred by sleepiness. I read 2 novels by Brautigan. I believe I have now read everything he published.

“Morality is the blind spot of the brain.” A Season in Hell

“Kimmeria: the land of shadows and whirlwinds”

2/12/2010

Penumbra= Almost Shadow: the animal people of the shadows

Tenebra= Blind Town

Thurible: Censor

“She dazzles like the dawn and consoles like the night.”

(I believe I was reading Dante’s Inferno at this point as well as A Season in Hell)

2/18/2010:

I was hiding in a classroom were a lesson on Icelandic was in progress, and she was hiding there too. We started touching and knew we had to find a place to be alone away from the students. The teacher was writing on a giant Kindle board in perfect fonts both Icelandic and English.

I took her to the house I lived in with my family when I was a teenager. Everything was piled around and the beds all unmade but sheeted and bedding piled everywhere. I was in the large downstairs bedroom when people came gliding out of a secret door, 2 giant women looking for my wife, Mary.

“Is she here?”

I didn’t know.

There was a long procession of these hunched and walk/gliding figures off into some vague misty land at the back of the house.

2/20/2010:

Too many children and dyed rags hidden under the folds of cardboard.

What about Baudelaire and men in France who did not seem to know about children. Sebold also. Belano seems to have had some contact with children. Salinger had children and enjoyed them.

Children are distracting and irritating when you are trying to think of anything on a deeper level. Their thoughts and lives are lived on the surface of their world. Their concerns are usually simple, but not easily expressed. They are a puzzle because they don’t have a clear enough thought process to communicate what is important to them. They must act it out or sing or dance or draw.

I think somewhere along the way we let words replace all the languages our bodies contain. We pour it all into words, and words are not big enough or have leaks. So much is lost of who we are, and that is where art comes in.

And yet living a life around children makes it difficult to actually work as an artist, but especially a writer, for words are so obviously inadequate when you are trying to take care of all the little boring tasks and big worries of raising small human beings.

2/21/2010:

Puppet to Another Puppet: I am not a puppet and I won’t be manipulated. No strings. See!

The puppeteer is visible above operating the puppet but the strings are not visible.

“Do Not  Move”

(I was thinking a lot about all kinds of Puppets)

2/23/2010:

Japanese face painting

My dreams are lost in the drone of life.

IV

A February Poem

Every shred of calligraphic skin

shed in lumps

and spread thin.

Time bights that hand

and tears

with teeth that hold iron

  begin to grin.