A Memoir for a Brief Moment

The river runs far enough for me to imagine it being endless. My mind travels off, as my eyes become useless in a moment as I see each drop of water move through its life cycle, from the ocean, to the sky, to the ground, and how it may never see this valley again.
In the spirit of memoir, I think of memories as brighter than they were when they were realities I could touch. I think of my memories of the Hawai'ian landscape and how beautiful it is, and how my mind works to preserve the most attractive features. In a far different realm, of being there, I see a different landscape. Nothing has changed, just the viewer, and even that change doesn't feel significant as I look at what I constantly leave and return to. In my dreams this place is the ground I walk, and yet I am walking those very grounds in my waking hour seeing nothing special, as I carry on as if it were normal. I am the fat of the tourist, the off-set pattern of a visitor, and blind just as justice with my eyes in disregard to what surrounds me. This is paradise, a voice of rationale speaks, and I yet this is just another place I try to adjust and fit in, hoping to find something that resembles "home" here.
An alien hovers over the landscape, scanning it for new land to camp on its escape from the outer worlds.
Shattered in this world of early and silent evenings I think of memories of the place I left. Tonight and many nights before the glimmer of her appears, and fades gradually, taking its time and cursing me in terms of lost. I can't escape you, I whisper in my restlessness, and soon even I find sleep, dreaming of starry nights, and ladies of fantasy.
In the unfamiliar morning, it's been two weeks and it still feels like noon, I awake to meet an overcast sky, and a higher peak in the wind. The coffee is all gone, and I don't feel like shaving, biking, or even leaving the house, I want to be a bum. I can't remember what I did soon after, eventually I ended up going back to sleep and woke up in the afternoon, and felt the same. There was no reset button to this mood, and so I just wandered the house my father built, and contemplated a list of things in my life that are either important or irrelevant, I couldn't speak for their importance because I tend to favor useless traps of time, or other bottomless pits.
It has only been few days after a moment of clarity, and my rehabilitation, recovering from matters that have dissolved from significance or mention, is still fresh and fragile, like the wings of a moth.
I remember very clearly one thing I learned from all the years of education I went through, and it was, you got one life, who cares what others think and do, what you do is all that matters, in my terrible paraphrase of Nietzsche. I keep telling myself to jump on that train, and I'm either too afraid to drop everything that has provided comfort, or I simply feel I am not strong enough. I kick myself, telling myself I am strong, and reflect on all the things I have lived through, how I have cheated death, crime, lived through much heartbreak, and failure. And yet here I sit, holding my chair with two square cheeks resistant to change. It isn't fear, it's laziness. And now that I realize my problem I hope to give birth to change.
Tomorrow, I say in all my clarity, is going to be different. And in a shimmer of hope, I believe it will.

Side A / Side B

It all starts now.

Side A / Side B
Two pieces, two artists, two sides to a story.
In this exquisite corpse, each artist has a week to fill the space of a square frame, using photography, video, or sound. Together they will form a language of coexistence; hovering in uncertainty each week until the two sides come together, existing in the temporal as they are replaced with the next sides.
Employing intuition and trust in individual artistic tendencies, Side A / Side B seeks to explore the connections between two practices.

Work by Danielle Bleackley and Brendan George Ko.

http://www.sideasideb.net/

And here's a link to Danielle Bleackley's amazing work.

Strangers Yet

(Test Shot, Backyard Engulfed By Darkness, 2009)

O the bitter thought, to scan
All the loneliness of man !
Nature by magnetic laws
Circle unto circle draws :
But they only touch when met,
Never mingle, -strangers yet.

Will it evermore be thus-
Spirits still impervious ?
Shall we never fairly stand
Soul to soul as hand to hand ?
Are the bounds eternal set
To retain us, strangers yet ?

-W.R. Alger

Even the distance of breath upon the flesh is an infinite distant, like oil over water, and the film of polar opposites that reject one another. It is in the finest of details; in the molecule it reads, two remain, forever, in a sea of strangers.

On My Way

(Untitled, The Return To The Abandoned Island, 2009)

Back on the island I wonder to myself if I could really last the entire time. I think of ways to make time go by faster, and think of the first astronauts going into deep sleep in deep space. I'm pretty sure my room mate uses that method for passing time.
I've been thinking to myself about this notion of the journey being the mode of change over the destination. I look around and though I am already here, I am still on my way.

Learning To Love Yourself (More) pt. 9

(Mr. Wang's Cars, Untitled Landscapes, 2009)

Something Has Changed

It's that feeling of recovery, and aftershock leaving you as it evaporates into whatever matter it once was. You don't care, it is gone, you're different, you are change. The feelings you once had look ridiculous like concepts you developed as a child, and you laugh at how silly the drama once was.
The things you value so much may not matter, because you are the only one that values them as they oppose you, resist your love for them. How swift it can all change, how you can live passed it all, how you can even forget in time. All that matters is you are different, you have changed.
And deep down inside, something has changed. The once you is now you, and the once her or him is now just her or just him. No longer is there someone holding you from high above, feeding you hope, carry you by your back against the ground, throwing crumbs to keep you alive, you have pulled your shirt clear, perhaps even ripped it from your back, the air fills the naked gap and your hairs point up to an attention that your body is now independent. Your flesh no longer registered to the hand at one singular point. It feels free; relieved of burden we place on ourselves, as we ask, why all the games. You no longer have anyone to blame, nor can you blame yourself, as matter turns into air, and what has happened, happened.
Your structure is high above as you walk with feet your forgot were your own. No more questions to the unknown for they will never answer. Walk the earth, and live. Something has changed. It really has.

Things That Fall Apart (Only To Come Back Together)

(Untitled #31, Bottomless (additional), 2009)

Eventually you reach a point where all efforts amount to nothing, and you have neither a path before you or after you. There's a voice that tells you that how you see things, is how you are blind. And that same voice speaks now telling you that you have stopped or paused, and you are hovering in-between, with no exits or entrances.
You are in-between yourself and that person. You are in-between losing and having. You are in-between breaking apart and coming back together. You are in-between losing it, and holding together. And you feel it all around you, it is the static, it is that moment before ignition; where gas-filled air is sparked, but everything still remains. Anticipation in the unknown. Will things remain, what things will change, and who will I be afterwards? After all, there are no answers until you push the chair that rests on the cusp losing its gravity and transforming into something else. I want to know what that something is? On what impact can a chair be made into...? What does the chair turn into? What happens when the value of utility of your rest on that chair is no longer? It falls apart, and then what? What remains to the pieces of what was? What happens when they turn around and face the other way? When no one kneels before you, and puts you back together, who do you have, when even you see yourself as bits and pieces, broken and without value? Who helps you back up this time? Why did you fall apart this time?

You are in-between losing your mind and going insane.

But you get back up, you learn to walk again, you whip the smile from their faces as you carry yourself away. For another day, you know you can't escape, but for now, you are together, only to fall back apart. Again with the push, again with the pull. Encore.

The Return

(Return To Huron (from The Great Escape), 2009)

This place is different. A once overrun of wild plants now cut short, cleaned and organized. The chaos is now manageable and how much is realized about the difference time can make. What time can do to you, change your eyes with carbon copies of the old ones but with a different perceptive. How this landscape targets a part of me that notices time has passed, like my eyes; a prescription seven years old and in need of a check up. I can see just fine. Yeah, just fine. I probably didn't noticed my eyes becoming worse because you don't notice gradual change that takes years to show itself, and by the time its there you are used to it. It's when you have an example of how it has changed, like a memory, or in this case, a photograph, compared to how it is now, with the time in-between.

(Huron, The Great Escape, 2008)

I'm going back to Maui, HI in a few days, and I'm going to hunt down each and every car from The Abandoned Island series and photograph it how it looks now.

Untitled from Untitled