The Twilight Blues

Colonial Failures First Hand

Redd — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:49:51 +0000

The young man stands there hesitant, staring up at the old Jaguar god whose empty eyes have long watched over this strange cafe by the train tracks. Much of the free wall mural is now covered up with red and tan checkered boxes. Black hat tilted to the side, the young man is moving slow, dragging the long pole of his paint roller in an arc around the god’s face, as though afraid to cover up the silver eyes gazing out from beneath the teeth of an Aztec, Jaguar-spotted and toothed head dress. Above the blood-stain-brown checkerboard these men paint in the late afternoon gray paint chips away to reveal flecks of white which chip away to reveal the bright colors of of a past mural. Through these layers is an archeology of repetitive redundant defeat in the face of organic resurrection; Aztlan lives, has always lived, for good or evil, and there is nothing the Last Days rulers of the Fifth World and their anemic dying gods can do about it.

smokey mystical encased

Redd — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 05:25:38 +0000

Recovering from an unrequested Renaissance by drinking the dew of the second Moon I found myself enamored of times past contemplative and receptive by way of mortar and brick misaligned to the sun setting rather than rising but pleasant and none the less nostalgic in the company of unknown unfamiliars warm and inviting providing murmurs of long-sought molecular encounters enhanced by art and artists joining our minds in moments lucid yet smokey-mystical encased pausing between demented hypnotic murmurs bound tightly to pixelated unlucky measured rhythms.

Sparkle of the Wolf, excert

Redd — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:29:56 +0000

The little robot stared in confusion up at Elliot. He had a fleshy human face, even lips and a tongue instead of the communication implants most such creatures preferred to install, yet knobs and dials and the gleam of steel bulged out of the gaudy button up shirt with its bright yellow flowers and pink ukulelees. Something wasn’t right… Elliot looked like a cyborg, he really did… but somewhere deep within this new awareness born out of the little robot’s emotion infection whispered a strange and unfamiliar doubt. There was no logic, no equation, no process of analysis birthing the little robot’s strange questions. Was this what the Feelers called “intuition?” And could the cyborg help him with this mad quest?

The little robot looked Elliot in the eye, and stretched his upper body to its full height. “Elliot,” he said, “you are not a computer!”

Elliot arched a fuzzy black eyebrow, and with a quick movement his face was only inches from the little robot’s face, glaring inquisitively and cockeyed. “You’re right,” the cyborg whispered, “I am not a robot.” The cyborg took a long, rasping breath. “I am a unicorn! And you, my friend, are searching for the Sparkle of the Wolf!”

“Then you know where it is?” A rush of joy and dread and fear overwhelmed the little robot and he was unable to say anymore until the new bloom of his emotion infection could be processed.

Elliot grinned with his crooked stained teeth, and gestured for the little robot to follow.

The dust storm

Redd — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 10:24:06 +0000

Heaven is burning.
The crimson sky digs at the Earth
raging with velveteen shadows
wind whistling and wailing away
her screams and her shame and her sin
demons dangling dusty dry tongues
eager to lap up all her hope
staining the rug

Chorus:
And in the sky
Death is dancing
with the Desert, singing of sins
and wind and blood
in the dreams of
dragons dying
in the depths of
a young girl’s womb.

There’s a guitar
in the corner where he he left it
a promise to return someday
to soften the shine of the song
he sang passing through her darkness
she was a starry silhouette
he meant to conquer and forget
inside the night

Chorus:
And in the sky
Death is dancing
with the Desert, singing of sins
and wind and blood
in the dreams of
dragons dying
in the depths of
a young girl’s womb.

The red halflight
of serpent-ridden storms has stained
the hands of prairie folk praying
with no thought for young girls bleeding
away the faith of salvation
the foundation is shivering
this house, not meant to stand against
serpentine winds

Chorus
And in the sky
Death is dancing
with the Desert, singing of sins
and wind and blood
in the dreams of
dragons dying
in the depths of
a young girl’s womb.

And she lays there
waiting weeping wondering where
those whispered words of withered love
were whipped away to on the wind
the dust dries up his blood mingled
in careless loving with her life
savaged now by serpents seeded
in starlit lust

Chorus:
And in the sky
Death is dancing
with the Desert, singing of sins
and wind and blood
in the dreams of
dragons dying
in the depths of
a young girl’s womb.

Oh my darling Clementine…

Redd — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:22:24 +0000

At night in spring in the city of Austin, frogs croak from shadowed creek beds and fireflies dance green streamers through the mist drifting through the orange street light glow after the rage of an unforeseen thunderstorm. I walk up and and down hills through the shadows and the artificial light, watching the crescent of the Moon lazily drifting westward. My skin is damp in the humid air, my clothes are still damp from dancing in the street hours before with other women as the storm washed us clean of all our human cares. For a moment.

I have spent the last few days redistributing my possessions. Books are one of the hardest things for me, every time. Tonight my heart ached as ownership of my beloved vintage red Collegiate 3 Schwinn passed on to another woman. Rachel will take good care of Clementine; she understands. We have raged the hills of Austin together many a time, she does not drive and she believes in the revolution.

I am utterly in love with this city, but the coming summer will be hot, humid, sticky. I spend very little time indoors these days, and the early heat cushioned by the heavy threat of rain has often left me gasping for breath.

I think that once a person initially gives in to that urge to go… somewhere else… staying in one place becomes the difficult thing to do. I have sketches of ideas of dreams of plans for Oaxaca, Ireland, India, and I will eventually return to Alaska.

The last few times I have made it south to my favorite coffee shop, I have been surprised to hear the territorial cries of a raven. Perhaps it is a crow, but hear that sound cutting through the soft breezy drift of tree branches once, and one never mistakes it again. I have never lain eyes on the bird up close, and I have only sighted him circling above Bouldin Creek once in the hot blue sky. I feel confident in this decision, for all the by-the-seat-of-my-pants aspects of the venture…

It will be good to be home in the Flatlands. I ache every day for that sky, and all I want to do is be able to bike out to the middle of a field and watch a proper sunset. The smell of dust and turned earth, dry grass and fields of yellow daisies for a day or two after a storm. To sit under the desert willows at the park and watch white geese hold court over little gray ducks while thunderheads build up and slide past the city. To have a beer with my brother, my sister, and my dad, to smile and listen to my mom lecture me in that voice full of love trying so hard to understand me. To bike to J&B for bad coffee and good company. To go to the cemetery, put a rose on Albert’s grave and cry for a bit.

I feel so adrift.

Sin Fronteras! May Day 2008 in Austin

Redd — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:25:48 +0000

It was the beating of the drums and the strength of voices screaming in Spanish that seemed to shake the dust of jaded bitterness off of my political sensibilities. My feet were moving and I also was shouting in Spanish with the crowd holding up U. S. and Mexican flags, bilingual banners, and babies.

The last time I properly celebrated a May Day there was barbecue and the singing of old activist songs from the 60′s, learned off of an old vinyl record owned by a fascinating woman who was there when the Students for a Democratic Society splintered off into the very weird direct action cell known as The Weathermen.

Before the march started, there was singing and a play about the struggle of crossing the border, the passing out of flyers and the meeting of new friends. It was a fairly calm and fun event, but there was a tension underneath all of it. My favorite poster had an image of an Aztec priest, pointing the way Uncle Sam points in his posters, asking, “Who’s the immigrant, Pilgrim?” Walking back to my bike after the march ended at City Hall, I was watching the young family in front of me chatting animatedly in Spanish and smiling, when their little boy, maybe seven years old, suddenly started yelling one of the Spanish cheers from the march. He was violently hitting the water bottle he held, and when his younger brother started chanting with him, they traded a couple of blows in the manner of small children, in rhythm to the chant. Their tiny faces contorted into strange and adult grimaces, and I beheld both the future of this land, and its amazing past.

The part of the continent that the modern world calls Texas and Mexico has been inhabited continuously by people since the end of the last ice age. Ten thousand years of people moving across the land, north to south, south to north. An ancient highway of economic, cultural, and even political exchange. The point of invasion during times of war, the point of escape when humanity was forced to flee the ravaging whims of nature during the great drought which turned the savannah into barren desert for two millennia. Ten thousand years of people doing exactly what they are doing right now. A cabal of ruling class imperialists now has the audacity to try and stop this ancient and unbroken line of history, by building a fence.

Families get broken up by the Border Patrol. Little children are tossed into a holding facility, and the stories are consistent that those children are only let out for maybe half an hour a day to play. On an old rusty and wooden play ground, the kind you can’t find in Texas really anymore, that was replaced every where by the new plastic jungle gyms because the old metal ones were deemed too dangerous.

The policies towards immigrants in the border states are racist, and show a complete disregard for the humanity of people trying to feed their hungry kids. Of people fleeing the same sort of desperation that the detritus and societal refuse of Europe fled only a few centuries ago. The manner in which these people, these human beings, are discriminated against, is born out of fear, illogic, xenophobia, and a complete and total lack of understanding of the history of the New World.

What is happening along the southern border of the United States is an injustice of the highest order. The pathetic attempts at establishing a border fence is an empty gesture against the surging forces of history. It’s also just generally one of the stupidest things the federal government has ever tried to do.

Immigrant rights affect all of us. You are a human being first, and the citizen of a nation second. I love Texas, and the ideals of the Founding Fathers I hold in the highest regard, but I will always choose the good of humanity over the interests of my country.

Anyone who has been paying much attention to the frightening details of our economy’s spiral into oblivion realizes that there are very strange times ahead. The rice shortages across the world are only the beginning. The playing field is eventually going to be leveled between the descendents of European migrant workers and the descendents of this land’s original migrant population. It’s the people we vote into office who are allowing horrible things to happen to the faceless thousands looking for something a little better. If you haven’t been making a point of paying attention to this issue, you might want to start caring. And I sincerely hope you end up as pissed off as everyone else paying attention has become.

The spring days of February

Redd — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 09:54:15 +0000

It’s a beautiful day in Austin. The wind just a touch brusque, the sky a friendly spring blue full of the whirling silhouettes of falcons and buzzards, I was inspired to go on a nice long bike ride in a sun dress and jeans.

The downtown library in Austin is four stories high. I still have moments when I feel like some small-town girl lost in the big city. The air conditioning was on in celebration of global warming, but I was only inside for a moment, my rendezvous waiting in the front. Back outside on a low bench in the sunlight, a few moments of cliched phrases and trite responses to my questioning stare left me alone outside the Austin Public Library.

Dead leaves rustled and crunched, whispers of February rains and ice which may not be. A scrawny kid with a skateboard, maybe twenty, called out that it was a beautiful day, that I looked sad when it was such a good day. I smiled a little and listened to the kid tell an erratic story of climbing to the top of the parking garage across the street, spiraling back towards the street and narrowly avoiding the bus. He was spinning the skateboard chaotically, pointing here and there to nicks among millions of nicks in the wood as proof of his harrowing escape from a sure death in the traffic. Two more boys walked up and greeted the first skater; I took the distraction as a chance to shoulder my backpack and jump on my bike before welling emotion had a chance to explode.

It’s about seven miles, including the river crossing, from the library to my place. Mostly uphill, my little single-speed Schwinn sometimes makes odd clacking and clanking sounds when I am standing up in the seat fighting the breeze and gravity. My mind was hardly distracted by the ruts and bumps and gravel of the path home. Even as my body and wheels struggled to crest and fly down and crest again, heart and mind raged and cursed and wept and laughed and raged and laughed again. Settling upon a Sunday chance taken in honesty and trust, anger would well up again, just barely tempered by the swell of the hills.

It was a long ride, and I forgot to put on sunscreen. All sorts of things are aching

Meditations of many movements

Redd — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:55:01 +0000

The full Moon lit up the great expanse of the Flatlands all deep blues and silvers, the large bus and its sleeping occupants racing south little more than a footnote in the ancient cycles of the world. The feathered clouds gradually obscuring the horizon gave little hint to the deadly cold seeping across the more northern reaches of the High Plains.

The old pain in my shoulder blade kept me from sleeping, I was too tired to bother knitting, and reading in a moving vehicle always gives me motion sickness. And so I found myself meditating upon the lyrics of The Red Hot Chili Peppers. “It’s time to leave this town, it’s time to steal away, let’s go get lost anywhere in the USA…“

A curly-haired little girl refused to go to sleep, and was bouncing back and forth across the isle between a woman my age and another my mother’s age. “Hola! Hola,” she kept shouting. Her mother and I chatted for a bit; they had been traveling by greyhound since Friday from Iowa, and still had another day before the border town she called home. The child, whom I had guessed to be just shy of three years old, turned out to be a very tall and verbally advanced eighteen-month old. I offered up all my sympathies at the thought of going so far by bus with such a young and active child.

Staring out the window and up at the Moon, I smiled at the thought of that child trying to say hello in Spanish to every single person she saw, as her mother scolded her in English to leave people alone. Vaguely hispanic in appearance, bilingual, certainly very intelligent to have such verbal skills at that age, already very pretty. What amazing things she has the potential to become, but what will the world she was born into make of that potential?

“Are you missing the love of your kin? Are you wasting away in your skin? Drifting and floating and fading away…“

Watching the infinite expanse of the prairie gradually bunch up into hills and escarpments and woodlands somehow always leaves me thinking in broad and abstract historical terms. My mind is full of far too much information on the ancient world and the shift into the modern era. Too many people try to teach or explain that shift in terms of definite, linear events which can be mapped out on a time line that is supposed to reveal the relationships of those events. But when one is dropping off of the magnificence of the Edwards Plateau under a brilliant full moon, it is a difficult thing to see history as a matter of straight lines through time. The idea is that, by evidence of those carefully plotted straight lines, we are somehow more advanced, evolved, different, than people from the past. But I will never be able to believe that centuries ago some Apache woman took in a similar sight and was not equally overcome by great and unspeakably deep movements of the psyche and the heart.

I also believe that in ancient Sumeria, when it finally became plain to all who would see that the once fertile land of Mesopotamia had been utterly wrecked by salinization caused by over-irrigating the desert, and the flow of the life-giving rivers had shifted out of reach due to deforestation from centuries of logging in the hills, people were just as afraid as they are now. There were frivolous wars over resources, disturbingly similar in their translated rhetoric, to what we hear from world leaders today. Great migration patterns similar to what the Southwest United States is experiencing also were occurring. The Elamites brought in a new language, and eventually Sumerian faded into the language of priests and scholars, just as Latin would do some two thousand years later with the fading of another empire.

The silver cloud bank had caught up with us, swallowing the Moon and my meandering thoughts. I shifted my coat around and curled up on my side, hoping for at least a few hours of rest before San Antonio. I had to turn my iPod off to stop my mind from turning onto another tangent threatening to keep me awake all night. “It’s the edge of the world and all of Western Civilization, the sun may rise in the East at least it settles in a final location, it’s understood that Hollywood sells Californication…” Not the best of lyrics, but somewhere between the southern edge of the cold gripping the nation and early morning hours in the middle of nowhere, anything can wear a dark cloak of cynical romance.

The dry side of the glass at J&B Coffee

Redd — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 08:16:22 +0000

The black puddles dotting the parking lot’s asphalt are rippling to life, and the wind is wildly twisting the green trees of Tech Terrace in and out of harm’s way as the lightning arcs downwards. The glass panes shudder every few moments with the rhythmic tensing and release of the cloud-scented air. A tint of twilight blue stains everything within reach of the thunderhead’s shadow. A week of dead still air has broken through into fresh cool rebirth.

My chaotic friend Isaiah walks up with a grin, a styrofoam cup, and a dire warning; he is drinking iced espresso. I ask him if he is racing the storm above us to produce a tornado, and his laugh is a resonating boom from one end of the laptop filled coffee shop to another. He extends his fist, and I press my knuckles against his; then Isaiah wanders off, sipping cold bitter espresso through a straw.

Eric looks up from his Macbook that matches mine, and I see a social-networking website reflected in his glasses. He gives me a bemused smile and shake of his head; I nod in complete understanding and chuckle. His oft-shaved head and precisely trimmed goatee have fuzzed out enough to destroy the super-villain countenance he strives for, and so instead there is only before me the erratic grad student writer who seeks to invoke a new incarnation of Dionysus. Eric understands me.

Isaiah materializes again just to my left. The styrofoam cup is gone and it has been ten minutes since he disappeared. He announces that he is running for mayor. I want to know on what platform he will be running. With no hesitation at all, he launches into a plan to award one hundred dollars cash to each and every person who takes a shotgun to the controversial and universally hated “Stop Light Cameras.” With a straight face I tell him that this excites me just enough to take a look at his other policies and wish to read his website. He promises with great enthusiasm to put up a website as soon as possible, and so having run the “Isaiah for Mayor” concept as far as he could, dances off yet again.

The sun has gone down now, the puddles have joined into a river through the parking lot, and the windows are still shaking randomly, though the lightning has died down quite a bit. The coffee that my friend, Michael The English Professor, bought me earlier has affected my caffeine-sensitive head. The Pollock-esque collection of randomly placed rectangles that are painted directly on the north wall seem to be vibrating, and vague memories of Color Theory in my Design class seems to be conspiring to produce some sort of low-level psychedelic synesthesia. This happens to me all the time.

Eric had disappeared, and now sits back down. He pronounces himself fully recovered from the day’s blood plasma donation and subsequent beer imbibement with the statement, “I have recharged my Soul Power.” I ask him if he has checked the battery. Eric is confused by the idea of Soul Power having a battery gauge.

“Of course it has a battery gauge,” I insist, “you have to meditate up to the proper level of consciousness to see it, though. Didn’t they teach you anything in Seminary School?”

Eric then claims that he has a different model, similar to the kinetic Timex watch that recharges off of energy produced by the human body. He shakes his right fist up and down vigorously, charging an imaginary watch. I must have an odd look on my face while I watch him do this, as he suddenly becomes defensive and snaps, “What? It’s not like I would masturbate my Soul Power back up to full force.”

Eric is one of my favorite people.