jersey city

sunday, daisy was supposed to go to jones beach with a couple friends, but they both bagged out on him. so we went over to john and charles's place in jersey city to hang out by their condo's pool. we sunned ourselves all afternoon gazing at the statue of liberty off in the distance behind the security fencing of the pool area. sunan, a good friend of john and charles joined us.

john and charles are documentary filmmakers whose recent film about playwright and actor, charles busch, the lady in question is charles buschis gathering leafy little award icons on it's website and has been screened with standing ovations across the country. they're also starting jersey city's first gay and lesbian film festival, chillfest. as we were hanging out at the pool we got to talking about showing my alphabetized version of dorothy and her trip, known as of oz the wizard. so, i'm sending them off a dvd today. chill fest is august 26-28.

nyc

after hanging out with family all day saturday, i took a train into new york to meet daisy. i arrived about 8pm and we strolled along the hudson in the beautiful new park along the river that's become very popular. i love walking in new york. looking at people never ceases to intrigue me and there is just so much to look at the city, from architecture to drag queens. after dark we headed into the village for some dinner and after that for a hand-crafted cup of ice cream. i had two scoops of ginger and a scoop of pistachio.

daisy has been a friend for many years. he and gabriel were actually sort of starting a relationship when i showed up on the scene nine years ago, so i guess it's been nine years. i didn't really get to know daisy until i become more involved in the radical faeries here in vermont and after we spent a mardi gras staying at the same house in new orleans. daisy is a "core" fairy, helping organize, cook and fundraise for faerie camp destiny, the vermont radical faerie camp that i'm helping design and build.

beach

friday was spent with family, namely brother frank, his wife marlene, and their children dario and dela, walking the beach along long island sound from a nature conservancy property to my mom's place, about a four hour endeavor. we stopped for iced fruit bars, which after a couple hours in the sun, tasted divine. i've also been reading like a fiend. i love vacation time because it's really the only time i get to read. no pressures, no duties, nothing to do but soak in someone else's spirit.

MoMA

i promised my aunt paula months ago i'd take her in to see the newly renovated modern museum of art in new york city for her birthday. today we hopped a train into the city and checked it out. we arrived and skipped the line around the block because i'd forked over five bucks to get the tickets online. so five bucks, well, ten for two tickets, bought us time, even though we didn't spend much more than a couple hours in the musuem. we first stepped into the sculpture garden, towered over by a cesar pelli skyscraper that was erected in the last renovation of the musuem.

the new renovation, by japanese architect yoshio taniguchi, has transformed the museum into a brand new space. even the sculpture garden, which i don't think changed at all, now feels completely different framed by two symmetrical and stoic ends. i didn't like the interior, however. instead of feeling awed by the vertiginous atriums i felt confused, awkward and uninvited. the materials are beautiful, stark and sometimes elegantly composed, but the overall effect left me non-plussed.

i think the best places in the museum are the occasional glances you get of the street. by their popularity, i think many agree. the museum somehow created the impression in me that the art was lifeless, disconnected, old and seeing life from above through a small break in the white monotony of the museum drew me and many others to glance out at the world for inspiration.

other really great spots were the bathroom hallways that, much like the fake hallways at versailles, or the entrance to willy wonka's factory, seem to get smaller and smaller as you move toward the toilet, perhaps representing the narrowing of focus as one prepares oneself for bathroom activity. i managed to catch the hallway here almost empty, but for most of my observation it was packed with people bumping shoulder bags and scuffing walls. i liked the way all the white acts like a hard fog making the only grounding reference the wooden floor and the exit sign on the ceiling a trap door to heaven.

due to the very slow nature of my camera/phone my aunt thought the picture had been taken here. she is frowning in front of a cezanne or pisarro. we had lunch at the "level five" cafe, on the fifth floor of the musuem, were seated outdoors on a patio overlooking the sculpture garden. i was impressed by how dirty the place looked already. new york has such amazing grit. our lunches were delicious.

travel

i took the train from white river junction to bridgeport, connecticut today. there i hopped on the ferry to port jefferson, new york, where my mom, aunt, sister and nephew met me in a downpour. we drove through the tropical summer landscape of long island to my grandparent's house, now my mother's, and feasted on fresh corn. yum.

free body

there is a tool in structural engineering called a free body diagram in which you take a piece of a structure, for instance, a piece of steel in bridge, and analyze the forces acting upon it by looking at the connections the element makes to the larger structure. i feel this is happening to me in my relationship to gabriel. we have separated for a while freeing ourselves so that we can see the forces acting upon us without being connected. so much has shifted in me since the separation. i feel more connected to myself, my deepest wishes, and much more aware of the forces at play in my relationship with gabriel. i think we both were absorbing energy from each other to sustain our relationship in a way neither of us wanted. we overloaded each other. so, what is the next step? i think more time, to let things settle. gabriel and i haven't talked much, or seen each other much, but i think there will be a time in the next couple months where we should sit down and share.

i'm going to long island today to visit family. back august 1st.

card: knight of wands: fresh fish: be creative, enthusiastic, confident, courageous.

pest

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the first pest has shown up in my garden: a dog who daily traipses through my freshly fluffed soil leaving heavy footprints. i'm hoping it will get bored with the garden soon or it's likely a lot of plants won't come up.

card: 14. Art/Alchemy: this card is called Temperance in the online deck, which is about balance, combining forces, health, vigor, and being temperate

death

today death crossed my path, but i didn't realize how profoundly until afternoon. the morning i spent with bambi, a fellow faerie, on the faerie land, marking the borders of our clearing so that loggers, coming in a couple weeks, would know what to cut. as i went around tying orange tape around trees to delineate a border inside of which all trees, except a few, would be cut, i thought about how strange it was to be arbiting life and death. while we all have to kill in order to survive, whether it be plants or animals, the scale of what i was demarcating put me into a solemn mood, not unhappy or sad, but more deeply aware of the cost of doing what we want, that nothing is free, that in all our activities there is push and pull, positives and negatives.

after marking trees, i headed south to meet my friend jai. we drove to rock river, a beautiful swimming spot with several swimming holes that get progressively less clothed as you move up the river. the last hole is almost all gay and very cruisy. we set up our towels in the shade and relaxed. jai picked up his copy of the latest harry potter. about an hour later an older man made his way down toward the opposite side of the river from the difficult trail in. he was stiff and nearly fell several times. he made his way across the river with as much difficulty, set down his things. i noticed how blue he looked and remarked to jai about him. but, i didn't think much else of him until an hour later when someone said there was a guy up in the woods above the river who was having a seizure. they tried to find a doctor but by the time they returned he was dead, apparently having had a heart attack. someone called the police who arrived a while later. i didn't visit the scene, but did chuckle a bit thinking about the surreality of what it must have looked like: a dozen naked men, a dead man on the ground, whom they had clothed before the police arrived, and the police in full uniform.

on the way out, jai pulled his tarot deck and asked another man whom we were walking out with to draw a card. he pulled death.

my card: 3 of wands: exploring the unknown, having foresight, demonstrating leadership.

breathing

my friend roger drove down from montpelier today to guide me in a rebirthing breathing session. he's training in rebirthing facilitation with a man named jeremy in keene, new hampshire, and part of his training is to practice guiding. the breath is simple: you breath in and out through your mouth without stopping between the in and out. the inhalation is fairly rapid and the exhalation is all relaxation, unforced. i did this kind of breathing once before at kripalu in massachussetts.

it was an intense and novel experience then, so much so that i had some fear that it wouldn't be as good the second time around or that i might not be as moved as i had been at kripalu. but, trying my best to put those fears aside, roger and i began the session with some fun dancing around, just moving, getting blood flowing, energy up. i marvelled at roger's fluidity and grace when in motion, as i always have, while trying to bounce around loosely myself. then i lay down on the floor atop a couple yoga mats, my head on a pillow, legs outstretched, arms at my sides. roger placed two speakers beside my head and started up music. i began breathing. after a couple minutes, with roger coaching, i began to feel a bit of a headache, which is normal and which fades, or is overcome with other sensation, as you move further into the breath. the challenge for me is to keep breathing, and roger coached me well, reminding me often to keep breathing, that everything was fine.

with this breath, you are overbreathing, putting too much oxygen into your system, changing the balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen, and the natural response to this from the body is to stop breathing for a while, to let the levels return to normal. but forcing oxygen into the body awakens all kinds of energies, shifts the mind, time seems to stop for me, sensations that i've felt only while doing this breath flow through me and, for the most part, i lose track of my body and feel as if i'm floating. the strangest sensations are of boiling blood, intense tinglging and uncrontrollable cramping of the hands and feet called tetne (not sure how that's spelled).

in this session, i found myself dealing with fear of going too far, and i felt like i held back more than i had at kripalu, where i was one of twenty going though the experience in the same room after two days of intense personal exploration. this time i was in my own space, day-to-day life was all around me which i find makes the transition to other realities difficult. but, even though i didn't go as deep into the breathing, i was surprised by the intensity of the experience after i stopped breathing. waves of feeling came through, from happiness to sadness, fear and elation. the transition from intentional breathing to relaxed, normal breath was pronounced for me this time, and unlike the first time, where i was really out of it until the end, i found myself this time lucid soon after i stopped intentional breath and witness to a flood of feelings that seemed to wash around me like ocean swells around rocks. i found myself feeling the same kind of peace when watching the ocean swirl up and into rocks, foaming, roaring and then hissing, receding, only to be repeated. as time went on the tide kind of went out and i returned to feeling "normal" and opened my eyes. an hour and a half had passed!

this kind of breath has been explained to me in many ways, but for me the rebirth in it, from two experiences, comes from the "trip" nature of the experience, essentially leaving and coming back, rediscovering oneself like one rediscovers one's home when returning from a long trip away. it provides a fresh perspective and for me, a profound respect for breath.

i want to thank roger for facilitating and i look forward to doing it again!

prince of cups: ryan's eye: loving, tenderhearted, intuitive, psychic, spiritual

main street museum

the main street museum officially opened last night with javier cintron's print show, scenes from the rio blanco social club. javi, in an amazing fury of output, hung a beautiful show of scenes from white river junction in a mix of media including shredded paper that bernie, the museum cat, loved. don (pictured) and i had a yoga dueling match. i'm not sure what this posture he's in is called, but he claimed victory. the opening became more of a party around eight or nine and people flowed on and off the porch in concert with the intermittent downpours. pizza arrived late.

i took a break at about eight to visit bill and phyllis whom i met at the barra homestead during the homesteading workshop and who arrived in town this afternoon. they're an interesting and fun couple from california touring the states. we shared some soup, conversation, and lots of thoughts about sustainability and life in general. bill has been hiking the pacific coast trail and the appalachian trail the last few years with support from phyllis who's book, grief, climb toward understanding, she promotes as they tour. next time i'm in california i hope to visit them in san luis obispo.

katie montgomery, whom i've known since she was born wrote me earlier in the week and wanted to get together. she's a freshman at dartmouth college, just up the road, so i picked here up and brought her down to white river to see what our scene is like. it was great to catch up with her some. i spent a lot of time with the montgomery family in my twenties and not so much in my thirties as i navigated coming out, relationships, and work. so, it was really great to reconnect with katie and start to get to know her again.

card: ace of discs: becoming involved with nature, prospering, using common sense, trusting

tilling

i borrowed a friend's tiller and began my garden adventure today turning over the soil behind my place. some of it was tough and i turned up a lot of old junk, including bottles, cans, pieces of hardware, lots of stones in one place and even a large sheet of wire mesh.after about three hours my arms were jelly but i had a pretty good handle on how to run the tiller. at first i struggled with it mostly holding it back from leaping across my patch but then i figured out if you get it good and buried it will slowly creep along chewing up the soil in front of it slowly and completely.later in the evening i picked up a small permaculture booklet whose first words on gardening were, "don't till!" too late. but, i won't till again, i promise. from what i've read, it's not healthy for the soil. i'm pretty sure, though i don't know, that my soil doesn't have a lot going for it at this point anyway, being almost entirely sand with very little organic material. i saw no worms or insects, nothing that indicated activity that i was destroying. of course, what insect in its right mind would hang around with the forks of a tiller heading its way?

today i'm going to level the site. it slopes about 8 degrees north which will substantially reduce the amount of energy it absorbs when the sun is low to the south. i'm hoping that the tilling will be the last time i use a fossil fuel burning tool.

card: 4 of wands: done: celebration, freedom, excitement! woo hoo!

yama (niyama)

my yogi friend jai, from short mountain, tennessee, and yogi friends roger and danny, from montpelier, visited yesterday and came to my yoga class. jai arrived early afternoon and i had fun touring him around white river, showing off our semi-functional town. we also visited dan at new england camera repair, new london, nh and picked up jai's fixed camera while thunder and lightening struck close by. jai headed home after yoga. roger, danny stayed and we tried to eat at yama, our local japanese/korean yummy restaurant, but it was too busy, so we settled for italian food at three tomatoes. i left my take-home container there. like lost socks, there must be innumerable forgotten take-home containers, but i shall not forget the dinner filled with good conversation. the theme of my yoga class was "don't fight forces, use them," a phrase attributed to buckminster fuller, whom i find fascinating, and whose thoughts about buildings and machines i find meaningfully applicable to yoga. i'm heading down to faerie land this afternoon to mark trees for the loggers who will be arriving in a couple weeks to clear land for the faerie campground. i feel the power of saying which trees stay, which trees don't at the same time i'm feeling the ignorance of someone who has spent more time in front of a computer than in the woods.

card: emperor: fathering, structure, authority, regulation. maybe it's about the trees.

garden sun study

garden sun study

the true purpose of this post is to reveal how much of a nerd i am. the image is a sun study i did this morning to see how much sun will hit my garden plot over the year and whether there will be enough light to keep plants healthy through the winter. it looks promising. my garden site is more or less south facing and the hill to the south appears to be just short enough to let the sun clear it on the darkest day of the year, december 21st.

my soil sedimentation experiement seems to be telling me that my soil is almost all sand. i live on a piece of land that was probably once river bottom, so the sand doesn't surprise me. by the way, you can get sun angle and azimuth from the navy for anywhere in the united states for any day of the year. go navy! the sun study kind of looks like bomb damage assesment diagrams the military parades out during blitzes to show how good they are at blowing things up.

card: tower: gourd on high: sudden change, release, downfall, revelation.

soil

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it's early morning and i'm watching a jar full of muddy water slowly settle into layers, kind of like jello 1-2-3 from my childhood. what i'm doing is testing my soil to see what it's made of. soil is made of three different sized particles: sand (coarse), silt (medium) and clay (fine), which ideally should be in the proportions 40% sand, 40% clay, 20% silt for cultivation of most plants. it's clear i've got a lot of sand in the mix. the silt and clay are going to take a couple more days to settle out.

this test is simple and kind of fun. you go out and dig about 6" into the soil you want to check out, take about a cup of material, sift it and let it dry, making sure to get everything through the sifter except organic material and rocks. then you put an inch or two (make sure you do this accurately) into a jar. on top of this put a tablespoon of automatic dishwasher powder to help the soil settle. fill the jar with water, shake three minutes, and let it sit. the sand will settle in a minute or so, the silt in several hours and the clay over several days, or perhaps never. the different kinds of soil will be pretty clear and banded. measure these bands and take them as a percentage of the original height and you'll have a rough estimate of soil composition.

i also dug out an old soil testing kit and checked three locations around my property to see how the soil stacked up. i really am not sure this test works (i'm sending soil samples to the university of vermont extension service tomorrow for a real lab analysis), but my cheapo home kit tells me that my soil pH is about 6.5 (okay), there's no nitrogen (bad), there's lots of phosphorus (ok), and no potassium (bad). i think this essentially means no organic matter in the soil. the plants thriving in this poor soil include ferns, raspberries, blackberries and some other tall flowering things. my newbie analysis is that i need to till in quite a bit of organic matter before i start planting.

more food for thought

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i'm at borders, having used fossil fuel to get here and more of the same, no doubt, to sit in this air-conditioned space sipping a very, very sweet chai latte made from powder for which i shelled out way too much money. these conveniences and the means to them are very hard to resist.

i'm here this afternoon reading up on four season gardening. i'm astonished that in vermont, yes freezing vermont, you can have fresh vegetables 12 months of the year without using any heat sources or other high tech solutions, not even insulation.

how? according to elliot coleman: cold frames inside hoop houses. in his book, four-season harvest, published by chelsea green, right here in my building in white river junction, coleman describes covering crops with a cold frames or low tunnels of breathable fabric inside of a larger plastic-covered hoop house or green house providing double protection from freezing weather and trapping moisture and heat. even without the outer hoop house, the cold frames alone can provide enough protection.

this strategy nets up to a 72 degree difference between outside and inside temperatures on a sunny day in mid-winter and up to a 14 degree difference on a winter night. these thermal buffers are enough to keep hearty vegetables green and happy, though dormant, through the entire winter. by planting in late summer or early fall and growing vegetables to maturity by november, when cold sets in, the vegetables are maintained all winter-long for harvesting. coleman's garden is in harborside, maine, whose average low temperature is 26.7 degrees. white river junction, vermont's average low is a couple degrees lower at 24.1 degrees, but white river gets more sun. so, it seems completely feasible that i could be growing most of my own food out back of my place 12 months a year!

how much land, part 2

i'm back from barra, the homestead in east corinth, vermont that i visited saturday and sunday. jim and rowan, the homesteaders, live almost entirely off the land. their answer to the question: how much land? three acres per person. this three acres includes everything they need: shelter, garden, storage, forest for fire and building wood, water, and equivalents for energy spent not directly related to land. driving their car to town, for instance, increases their "footprint."

their food producing garden is about 1/4 acre. so, for food alone, they need 1/8 acre apiece. they eat directly from the garden during the summer and preserve the rest of their food for the winter, by canning, pickling, or storage in a root cellar. they were just nearing the end of their canned tomatoes last weekend.

i attended a workshop entitled gardening for self reliance. over two full days, jim and rowan showed us how they "make it" in vermont. they have no animals. their garden is fenced to protect from deer, gets good south sun on a south slope. they grow a wide variety of foods including, grains, beans, squashes, roots and herbs. many beds are intermixed in beneficial arrangements. for high nutrient fertilizer they put weeds into a barrel full of water (pictured) and let it steep in the sun creating "manure tea" that kills the weed seeds and smells almost exactly like animal manure. they collect water from rooftops and use gravity feed from a nearby stream. drinking water comes from the same stream. human waste is composted under a post and beam platform with squatting holes screened by woven saplings. leaves intermingled with the waste encourages breakdown and there is no offensive smell, unlike pit toilets.

they keep stocked several cord sheds of wood, burning about 1-1/2 cords a winter. they cut live trees, for the most part, because fallen trees are part of the natural process of the forest that help retain moisture and provide habitat. they heat the house and cook with wood. they also have two outdoor ovens: a solar and cob. the solar oven is a mirrored parabolic reflector that focuses about 600 watts of energy on a cooking platform. with full sun, after only a couple minutes, a pan of rhubarb stems was steaming.

the cob oven (pictured) requires firing for a couple hours and then it stays warm for quite a while and can be used for different functions as it cools, such as baking, warming, drying veggies or fruit, clothes drying (on the outside), or warming up pretty much anything. the oven was still very warm when we first arrived, about 24 hours after it was fired. the local snakes love it when it gets below cooking temperature. rowan said she often finds them in there when she takes the cover off to start it.

the biggest surprise for me was their grain growing. i had no idea you could grow wheat in vermont. while it was still a little green, the chipmunks were feasting on their crop this year, and in an attempt to save what we could we got to try our hand at harvesting using a sickle, tying sheafs, and threshing. it was still too green to thresh so jim tied up what we cut into a traditional bundle (pictured). much of their grain is winter rye which is planted in the fall, sprouts, winters over and then continues in the spring. it retards weed growth and can be turned into the soil as a nutrient builder before growing other crops.

the thread through the weekend was permaculture, a concept of bringing man into harmony with nature, where design decisions mimic nature and encourage multiple uses for each feature and multiple aspects to each use. i came away with a much better feeling for how one can live in vermont with the bare minimum, in harmony with nature and mostly independent of fossil fuel. i highly recommend visiting barra for one of their weekend retreats. you can find their programs at the global living project website.

card: queen of wands: madame maria, queen of all favorite things: creative, inspiring, forceful, charismatic, bold [king of wands in standard deck]

card

8 discs: diligence, knowledge, detail. taking a course, learning a new craft, working hard, being absorbed. this card was totally dead on.

nina's

last evening i drove up to montpelier to visit nina and her family, jay and son bodhi (pictured), and roger and danny, who are camping out at nina's for a bit while they settle in vermont. i wasn't sure i was at the right house at first, but knavin, roger's dog, bounding through the screen door, settled my uncertainty.
nina welcomed me as a butterfly and we had a little photo shoot out in the yard. danny cooked us some yummy beans and rice pudding and nina made some super intense kava that numbed my tongue and throat! i brought an aduki bean and seaweed dish i'd made earlier inspired by the nutritional healing book that danny gave me after our trip to tennessee.
roger toured me through the camper he and danny are sharing. it's packed! danny and roger were preparing to camp at solarfest, a music and alternative energy fair in vermont. roger tried out a new campstove which erupted at first into long leaping yellow flames but then settled down to more manageable hissing short blue flames.

i'm looking forward to more visits, hanging out, perhaps hiking, or backpacking.

card: 2 discs: juggling, flexibility, fun

How Much Land?

I've been asking friends how much land they think it takes to feed a person for a year. I did a little research today and found this by John Robbins: "To feed a meat eater for a year requires 3-1/4 acres of land. To feed one vegetarian for a year requires 1/2 acre of land. If Americans reduced their meat consumption by 10 percent, enough grain would be saved to feed sixty million people. That is close to the total number of people who die of hunger related disease each year. In a world where a child dies of hunger every two seconds, only an ignorant society can continue to view meat as a status symbol. Chronic hunger now affects upwards of 1.3 billion people, according to the World Health Organization - a statistic all the more striking in a world where one third of all grain produced is being fed to cattle and other livestock. Never before in human history has such a large percentage of our species - nearly 25 percent - been malnourished. " Original article. So, I'm wondering, given the land I own, could I feed myself ? Using Google's nifty calculator I entered "30 feet x 90 feet in acres" and Google returned 0.0619834711 acres. I really had no idea how big an acres was. So, to feed myself I need a lot more space, about 8 times as much. And I wonder if it's true that 1/2 acre can feed a vegetarian in Vermont. I'm hoping to find some of this out this weekend at the gardening for self-reliance workshop.

Bucy's Law

i've just discovered there is a bucy's law: "Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man."

om

om

i'm feeling scatterbrained. unsettled. maybe stripped down. i think i'm feeling the deeper effects of separation from gabriel. even though he'd have been gone all this time anyway, knowing that he's going to be moving out when he comes back on tuesday brings a sense of change, disruption, shift. my inclination is to do something to dump the energy around this change, but i'm trying to sit with it, just watch it, watch the wheel turning.

roger stopped in yesterday afternoon. he is full of joy. he wore rainbow striped socks, black caterpillar brand shoes, suspendered pants and glittered eyes. we caught up a little, meditated, and i'll be heading up to montpelier tonight to camp out with roger, danny, nina and her family.

card: 17. star / lucky stars: hope, inspiration, generosity, sincerity

gourds

i've been drawing a card every day for the past few weeks from a tarot deck designed by my friend jai who lives at short mountain sanctuary in tennessee. i've only used a tarot deck a few times in my life, never regularly. it's been interesting to draw the cards each morning in a mini-ritual at my desk. i've noticed it brings me calm. it's interesting to see how the cards parallel my moods, feelings, swings. today i drew the 6 of swords. i don't have a book to interpret the cards so i simply look at them (they're beautiful) and there is an online guide that i use, www.learntarot.com, which tells me the 6 of swords is about feeling the blues, recovering, and travelling. i awoke this morning deep in the blues and i'll be travelling this weekend to the gardeing workshop. gardening is something i almost never do, and i feel this trip marks a change, reaching for something different, making changes, trying something new, nothing major but a simple challenge to what is, placing myself in a position where i know nothing, where i can simply take in and learn. card: 6 of swords: feeling the blues, recovery, travelling

most popular pic

matt_beach

one of the interesting things about flickr, the place i keep my online pix, is that they track how many people have looked at your pictures. so, why is this picture of me as a child on the beach so popular? what is clear amongst my pix is that those with flesh in them get viewed the most. but why this one? am i just so damned cute here? there must be another explanation! i think it would make a nice cd cover. i purchased a book called radical simplicity: small footprints on a finite earth by jim merkel and i'm attending a workshop called "gardening for self-reliance" this weekend in east corinth, vermont at the global living project. i feel i need to be better prepared for the end of oil. card: 6 cups: gourdelini: experiencing good will, enjoying innocence, focusing on childhood. well there ya go.

flume

flume

i travelled today with gordon through the franconia notch area of new hampshire. it's a rugged area with lots of trees and beautiful natural and man-made-abandoned features. gordon gave me his lowdown on real estate in the area including condo developments, old valuable houses, and cheap prefabs. the image here is from the flume, a large crevasse through which a waterfall flows. the rocks are moist and covered with beautiful fungi and mosses. there are a few more pix if you click on the photo.

card: 2 of cups: making a connection, calling truce, acknowleging attraction

weekend

sigrid

sigrid visited over the weekend, up from rhode island where she's living. she and i are often mistaken as sister/brother and sometimes we play the part, especially when my hair is bleached blonde. dick mitchell, from new york, and link, from new orleans, also visited. all surprises. one the joys of living in our place, a spacious old mill building, is that people just show up, especially in summer, creating a nearly continuous parade of new and familiar faces. winter is almost the opposite. gordon and i had a kind of tense talk last night. it felt like a subtle fight. card: 5 of discs/scary mary: hard times, ill health, rejection

another reason to think about what you eat

male chicks

here's yet another reason to contemplate what you eat: here live male chicks are tossed into a dumpster behind a factory egg farm to die by suffocation, starvation or dehydration, because they're useless to an egg farm. think about where your food comes from! more fun at factoryfarming.com

card: 6. Lovers (gemini: that's me!)

Late Night

Five AM

I stayed up almost all night working on the Marsha P Johnson film. My friend Dennis Grady gave me a CD by Sigur Ros. Like magic their song, Samskeyti, inspired an approach to editing that turned out beautifully. I often find that rhythm and timing, musical notions, are just as important in moving images, even dialog, as they are in music. what makes a film flow? lots of the same things that make music flow. it also struck me how one has to remain open to everything to be creative. so much played into my editing breakthrough: there was an art gallery opening here last night, to which i went, to which my friend went, at which he gave me a cd, to which i listened after getting frustrated with my work, which then gave me an idea that worked really well. we're all in this together!

card: six of discs: having/not having

pix from the past

matt_face

my friend marco asked to see some pictures of me when i was younger. so, i started scanning them and here they are.

it occurred to me while looking through the photos that it would be cool to build an online autobiography using pictures, kind of like i do my blog.

separation

solo

gabriel and i are separating for a while. he's moving up to our friend jon appleton's house for the rest of the summer and the fall. we're still going to share a studio, so we'll see each other but we won't be living together. i feel both sad and excited. i feel failure and the open road. gabriel and i are going to check in with each other late in October. i do wonder if i'm cut out to be in a relationship, if relationship is healthy for me. this separation may help me answer that question. at the moment, i feel a long depression dissipating, a new excitement about my projects, freedom, the dark cloud lifting. i love gabriel, he loves me, but our relationship has been depressing both of us. i have asked myself, what does it mean when your lover goes away and you feel suddenly alive?

tarot: ace of discs: prospering, proceeding with trust, being practical.

new shirt

tiptopcafe shirt

i got the latest in upper valley wear today: a tiptopcafe t-shirt, in orange, to match my clogs. the orange threw off the white balance on my phone-cam. it doesn't take much. gabriel and i had an intense talk with jon last night. i realized how much my projections of gabriel have affected the way he is and how much i need to work on letting those projections go. i also realized how important spirituality is to me and that i'm seeking spiritual environments, nourishing relationships, deep connections. how strange it is that what i used to make fun of is now at the center of my life.

card: 7 of discs: taking stock, reaping reward, considering direction change

solitaire

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it struck me this morning how much life is like the card game solitaire. perhaps that's why it's popular. the game starts with the hope of resolution, completion, reaching solitaire nirvana where all the cards end up in four ordered stacks. but most of the time that doesn't happen. instead, after a brief flurry of matching and progress, most games turn difficult, reach impasse and have to be scrapped. but every once in a while, it all works out. so, how many couples end up with four neat stacks of cards? how many reach the impasse but refuse to start a new game? i feel like i'm shuffling through the remaining free cards over and over even though they don't change.

tarot: 2 of wands: boldness, doing what i want. the last two days: 2 of swords: stalemate: denying emotion, situation, hidng distress, being defensive.

fourth

column on saint gaudens porch

happy fourth. and happy birthday sigrid! i awoke in my tent on the faerie land, helped wave and jim collect tiki torches, walked the labyrinth with them, then headed north to white river junction. habitually, i turned on my computer, got sucked into chatting for an hour and then reflected upon how much a waste of time it was. but, the afternoon was redeemed by floating down the white river in an innertube from hartford village to the main street museum. the day was gorgeous, truly, blue sky, warm, the river gentle except for the boulders that smacked my ass, and afterward a relaxed cookout on the river. my faerie friend from new york, jade, came up from faerieland with his dog, scoot and hung out with us.

marsha "pay it no mind" johnson

marsha p johnson

last week my friend bunny gave me a cd of music by antony and the johnsons. great music. then my friend andy sichel calls and tells me he wants me to edit a short film of marsha p johnson, a drag queen from new york who saw it all from stonewall through the early nineties that andy taped in 1991 just before she was killed. then i find out that anthony and the johnsons are named for marsha and that bunny's son, nico, has been doing some gigs with antony. at destiny i met a friend who worked with antony on a play, doing lights. providence?

serendipidy

driving

so much happened today, and nothing happened!

i awoke in a tent on the faerie land in vermont about 10:30am. my watch alarm is broken leaving me at the whim of my natural sleep pattern. i strolled down to the kitchen, ate some quiche, strolled up to the meadow with jade and did yoga for an hour, then walked the septic mound site with peat measuring the slope there so that we can figure out how much sand we're going to need. then back to the kitchen where i met jai and dan harlow and we decided to go to dan's organic farmstand for lunch. lunch was delicious. the day was so beautiful we decided to go to rock river, a nude gay swimming hole near brattleboro. we arrived at four, the water was warm (well, relatively as someone from florida pointed out) and then i stolled the beach naked, met a nice blonde boy and had a wonderful late afternoon. we headed out at 6pm, i drove back to faerie land, dinner was just being served, a delicious and healthy veggie meal topped off with double chocolate german cake. an impromptu talent show ensued and i was handed a guitar and pressed to perform a song. since i really can't remember songs for the life of me, i concocted one about my leg hair being too hot near the fire and my orange clogs hypnotizing me, something like that. the night was warm, i lit a latern and sauntered back to my tent and put my head down on my pillow of rolled up clothes.

i'm feeling a tremendous lightness here on the faerie land, accepting myself, being myself, allowing myself to flow unchecked, uncensored. trusting myself is one of my biggest challenges. i trust my skills, but i so often do not trust my heart, which i know to be a lovely thing but which i so often fear revealing. returning home some of that lightness vanished and i drew a tarot card, the two of swords, a card about hiding, not revealing, not acknowledging situation. i must figure out how to bring lightness into my daily life.

groats

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breakfast this morning: oat groats (raw oats) slow cooked overnight with home-made almond milk. since my friend danny and i took a trip to tennessee and he imparted a tremendous amount of dietary wisdom to me i've been more conscious of what i eat, focusing on whole foods, locally grown, unrefined or processed. i find i eat less, eat more slowly. always pretending to be a scientist, i tried a vanilla oreo the other day as a control. it tasted great for about ten seconds then a horrible aftertaste developed and stuck in my mouth for about an hour. it's no wonder that one oreo begets another: the aftertaste is so bad that you crave another to get the high of the first ten seconds.

heading to faerie camp destiny today for a campover. back tomorrow night.

gordonesque

gordonesque

the burlesque show at the main street museum began what may become yet another annual parade of freaks in our freaky little town. the acts included live waxing, psychological strip-tease, body painting, dickram yoga, a hot spoken work piece, and brief class in vaginal spirography, all performed by friends and friends of friends. pictured here is gordon, a burlesque in his own right 24/7, dancing in the streetfront window of the museum like one of those boys in amsterdam advertising booty. a skinny dip romp into the white river (in the middle of downtown) followed the event, breaking all the town's nudity ordinances.

teddy and humpty

teddy and humpty

these are the childhood companions of gabriel and me. i had humpty dumpty and gabriel had a teddy bear whose eyes are different buttons. humpty was repaired many times too. in some ways, if i could keep nothing else in my life, i would keep humpty. he was my first pal. i can reimagine so much of my childhood being with him. whoever gets out of bed last gets to set them up. lately gabriel has set them with their heads butted. i wish i knew how to place them so that everything would work out, as if they held the magic to make our world harmonious. that's all i want.