Menses and Menarche

I didn't start out wanting to be a writer. I wanted to be a professional wrestler or a child evangelist before I had the urge to write. It wasn't until I was in the sixth grade and had Mrs. Carlson for my English teacher. Somehow I had decided to write a story around that time about a murderous deck of playing cards (titled, effectively enough, In the Cards…) and I showed her my hand-scrawled pages and she read them and told me she'd type out anything I hand-wrote, so I kept writing weird tales and got weirder I think, but she kept up through my sixth year of school. It did something funny to my imagination to have an opportunity to make things puppets and the arrangement of the tragedies and miscommunications was a mystical thing for me to do. Soon after I confiscated my sister's word processor and wrote notebooks full of cryptic broken poetry with no rhyming scheme or pattern, just lines of what looked good to write. And I made stories, and pamphlets and leaflets for a long time, like I was creating an arsenal.

It allowed me, in part, to live outside of my own life at times, allowing the escapism of it all disappear me into fantasy and daydream, and the recollections were my journals. And writing has flickered on and off throughout my life, leading me into the occasional odd headspace or neurotic fugue but then flowing out with the shower water. But, I want to put down somewhere what I have in my head, dumping out the contents onto an unmade bed and just sort out the shit and get it over with, maybe, but more like put it on a petri dish and watch it squirm under the heat of the halogen lamp. I have an obligation to myself, to pursue this and to allow this mess to be read and misunderstood, but it is what I have to share and something worth pursuing passionately.

So, if I may have this indulgence, I will share my words with a semi-invisible elect who will judge and justify with reason, things and recollections and maybe just a feeling, but just something somewhat regularly. I have every intention to be punctual, but truly I say I can't imagine being faithful to a clock in number.
Sometimes I will find something from my archive to not only share, but to interpret the interpreter, so to speak, and write of the aura around these experience.

I find my thoughts these holiday seasons turned to the departed, from one's inception forward, those who have gone away but never all the way really. We really do wear the imprint of those who's lives we have touched. They linger with us there, in the still, in the times most trying, in their most joyful. We never really ever forget the dead, except through neglect of memory, of the threat of a cold front passing before the moon to obscure her beams. We know they are there for us, there so close, here but not here in the in-between, there is a conduit that connects us still. And we honor them, and yet we can feel so distant performing these rituals and perhaps there needs to be something to stir the monotony of repentance and regret and somehow allow a spiritual reconvening in your life this winter season, maybe just to revaluate and seek the guidance lost to this generation and lost to so many others. Is this ancestor worship or just threads keeping the web from falling apart? Is this anything else but just a provision, just perception, isolated to a single strand.











How long was this meant to last?



I'm not so sure anymore.