To Be Joyed Upon

I am berserker. It is not something to be joyed upon.

I understand that in this moment, more so than I felt in recent writing states, that the berserker is present in my life; it is happening now, tonight, in this conversation I have with her. That is berserker: destruction in spite of something good and calm and hopeful, destruction in spite of something good and calm and hopeful in pursuit of a sense of improvement and progress. Fuck.

Miles from here there is a road that leads to the southern shelf of the city. You climb switchbacks not too numerous to discourage but steep enough to excite. During the sunshine of an early Colorado spring the grasses are yellow and brown and dry in the breeze lingering from the winter. At night, the grasses are purple and black under foothills reflecting at their joints the light of the city. I have been up this road. Riding in cars during my high school years hoping for energy and action in life, but finding stasis and waiting for years to come. We would wait and dream. Now we wait and dream. The years are now. The life that I waited for is now.

Humans love to touch and test what is in motion. They desire to see if their motion can keep up with the movement of the world in which they live.

A life of dry front lawns and cement in alleyways/ a low standing district just southwest of downtown/ one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city/ low and close adobe houses/ bright colors in the summer and shaded cracking colors/ the same colors/ in the grey and brown Denver winters.

Getting Debi’d

I am older and so too is my mother. Today is her 65th birthday. It’s been almost two decades since I walked away from her in her moment of deepest terror, in that living room, in that town house that I enjoyed too much. She told me she was dying. And I walked away telling her that I hated our family. Two months prior I had helped carry my dad back into our house as he suffered from a stroke, my brother bearing most of his frame while I guided and opened doors and tried to keep my eyes open under confusion and fear. My mother told me that she was diagnosed with a brain tumor that August and I walked away from her. I was exhausted and I was scared of my mortal family, two parents, two heroes, two shields who were being taken from me. But I write this now after just texting her that I am home, driving thirty minutes back to Denver from her birthday party. It was almost two decades ago that she cursed God. Two decades ago that she glowed in anger at the fate that had been given to her. And the love that fueled that anger was the love that she had for my brother and I. She told God that she was not done living. She told God that she was not done guiding and loving her sons. She was not yet done helping those around her and helping the world around her try to be better. Her love for others made her catch fire amongst those rows of All Souls Catholic. Her love for my brother and I brought her to the edges of heaven screaming at a fate that she would not accept. She was not done. I watched her today, on her 65th birthday, be her best self. Smiling, comforting, encouraging, guiding, loving. And in all of this she was dancing, she was playing, she was cussing, she was displaying this victory of a life that she has made. The environment around her is due to nothing else but her conviction for a better life where happiness is a supreme possibility. She made that. She made all of this happen. She pursues a happiness that is aggressive in its effect on those around her and unheeding to it’s alternatives. And she knows well the alternative to this life. And she is here proclaiming that she is still living to the edge of what is possible and she is still loving beyond the edge of what is necessary or expected. Fucking right, mom. 

Rivers

I trust rivers. In that moment I know where they go. Though their banks may change, and the water within them is ever-different, and though the river itself may be gone at any other point in time, in that moment that I look upon a river or if that I am fortunate enough to step within it and sink my shoulders into its line, I know what it is that calms me. I know what it is that cools me. I know what it is that invigorates me. I know from where that energy came. I know from where that ease or presence came. And I know where it goes. It comes towards me and it moves beyond me. It is a moment. A river is the moment at hand. A river is a moment in my life. A river is a slice of time in my hand and under my feet and within my gaze. It is supremely there. I trust rivers.

Our Own Olympus: A Season in Denver City, Part 1

This is the most beautiful place on Earth. My breath is smoothed down as I walk the streets and pockets of this city, a breath I haven’t felt in three years. The effect that this city (its structure, its flow, its glance) has on the fearful mind is the pillar of its beauty. And the physicality of its setting and the colors that it dances among expand from that pillar, blooming. 

The grass and the slope I lay upon allow me a good angle to write. I can feel my stomach expanding against the ground as I add presence and connection to this calm breath. Sitting up, I turn around, now facing down the slope and facing west. The stacked, slim apartment buildings stand above the open green of Cheesman and into the peach haze of this late July evening. I have been back in Denver for a week, living well and working hard, I think. I am aware of my setting, this treasured context and hopeful city, and that awareness churns each day. I wish to embrace it all. I wish to live and walk and breathe and love within it. I want to experience all of my home. I want to feel everything I missed or disregarded when I was growing up here. 

…

7-19-18

I have done it

I have left

My corner of trees and hills

Driven four days south east

Now I sit in Colorado summer heat and try to write, attempt to put down all I have thought and realized over a thousand miles

…

Life is meant to be furiously follied, silly passions, laughing persistence through twisting canyons and up the most cutting mountains. Follow your love, your passion, the joyous tensions and loving difficulties of this world with the freshness and arrogance of youth, the resilience of a mountain, and the adapting and fluid smile of a grain of sand, perpetually under change and shifting with the constant waves but ever and always more so beautiful and calm and happy. 

I am home. In the backyard I have spent time in during the last ten summers (and a few winters, breaking ice on the lake during Christmas dinners drunk with my friend Pat). I find a chair facing the water. Feet play in the sand it feels good against four days in socks and shoes, accelerating and braking, but mostly thinking and worrying across I-90 and I-80 into Colorado summer. 

…

7-22-18

I mention the lack of rain in the already-warm Denver summer morning. By early evening or late afternoon, it is windy and raining hard. And then it clears, and it is humid, warm and sun shining again. 

7-29-18

I am in a city that I spent 26 years of my life, where I was born, a city that holds a portion of my family’s history, and yet in this past week I have been and seen places I have never touched before. Parks, streets, sidewalks, coffeehouses, regular houses, bars. This city is pocketed like I never knew, a thing that I was finding in Seattle and yet still unfulfilled was always here in Denver along with the steady gaze of my friends and family. 

…

People at art show

Grey wind afternoon

The trees provide shade

…

Books among grass

The ink is slow to dry

Body among grass

…

I think it is now time to selfishly, relentlessly, and unapologetically live my life as I want to live it. Work hard, breathe, live, rest, pursue. 

My mind races seemingly always expecting the next disaster that will pull my life from the tracks I wish for it to follow. I need to stop this and be within the moment. Be where you are, and appreciate the calm reverberating warmth of life at hand. 

Be your best self. 

…So I Can Too

I need time. Time for the exhaustion to move on. Time for the uncertainty to dissolve. Time for the love to grow. Time for the fear to subside. I need time for the life I live to be felt and realized and appreciated, not constantly rushed through and missed. I need time for a moment to become a moment. I need time to understand the breeze on my arms and my legs. And I need time for the afternoon sun on my cheek bones and forehead to settle in. I need time to fully inhale the breath at my proximity. I need time to sit on that bench that I’ve ridden past so many times. I need time to look west and finally rest my eyes upon the blue of the front range that I’ve seemed to miss all summer. I need time to fall in love. I need time to find a connection worth the connection. I need time to talk to her. I need time to listen to her. I need time next to her. I need time to listen to myself. I need time to learn about myself. I need time to conjure a proper response to all my fears and all the doubts I see each day. I need time to react. I need time to recover. I need time to progress. I need time to improve. I need time to become who I am. I need time to love who I am. I need time to forgive myself. I need time to appreciate the grass at my toes. I need time to smile and to become lost in an action. I need time to become present in myself and in the world at my senses. I need time to understand our histories and our stories. I need time to realize where I am now because of the storyline of my life. I need time to be here. I need time to be calm. I need time to be scared. I need time to be destructive. I need time to be joyous and reverberating. I need time to taste. I need time to savor. I need time to be as young as I am now. I need time to be as old as I am now. I need time to express. I need time to write. I need time to find my voice. I need time to develop the story I wish to live. I need time to decide. I need time to visualize. I need time to be confident. I need time to hate myself. I need time for penance. I need time to believe in myself. I need time to trust myself and those around me. I need time to hope. I need time to care. I need time to feel and believe in the good that can be. I need time to work. I need time to struggle. I need time for effort. I need time to push. I need time to soften. I need time to do it’s work within me and let me be. I need time to continue moving forward so I can too.

Totality

I am writing this at Cheesman Park, in my favorite spot. If you’ve ever been to this park with me you know where that is. I refer to it as the slope by the bench. The bench is well known. It is one of four benches that mean anything in this park and it is the only bench that faces the southern skies where the best clouds in this state gather. The slope is marked by the bench at its summit but the slope itself is the vitality of this spot. It is a small hill under two moderate trees and one big tree. I like to sit on the side of the slope that is facing northwest towards downtown. I spent many good days here last summer, days just like this, looking at the edges of the trees above me cut by an afternoon Colorado sky.

Back then, most of those days were spent with my mind and my eyes stuck on the golden light and golden heat I had reluctantly found. I wasn’t looking for it. Most of those days were spent here with her, sitting on this slope or up by the pavilion starting to learn about each other, or at least just talking. I say that because I lay here now, writing this, questioning if I really ever even knew her. I am questioning if she ever really let me into her life, or just kept me on the side where the light from her life, the light that I recognized as real, barely touched. It was a corner that was suspended in fading light never even knowing the amount of light possible to be felt. I also question if I did the same to her, if I let her in at all, or just showed things that I wanted her to see and not the things that I truly saw in myself, the things that I hated seeing in myself, that I hated knowing that they existed within me. That is part of it. I pulled so many things back from those days. My eyes were on the potential light, not the light at hand.

I have never seen the sun-lit grass flicker like it does now. It makes me think of love and comfort and truth. I want to fall in love completely and definitely just as the grass in a Colorado summer is engulfed in totality by the perfection of the sun. Like few rare and lucky things in this world, that grass knows the source of its growth and comfort for certain. And the grass rests in calm breath bearing itself openly to the light of the sun, exposing all that it is to the heat that makes it exist. That makes it real, that makes it beautiful to my eyes in this moment. It is existing and steady in the light of the sun, and that is true. The sun is making it grow. The sun is making it better and more beautiful, helping it find its potential. That is the love that I desire. That is the love I think I have found. She is the sun above me and I have laid in front of her exposing my heart, and she decided to remain and keep shining into my life. She’s still there, even after I have shown her the soil that I grew from. Her light still warms me; she is steady above me. That is the love that I desire. And I have found it.

It Starts Right Now

I have never been the best about folding my clothes efficiently once they have finished drying. Call it procrastination, call it doubting my folding skills. I have been known to let my clean and dry clothes sit for days until I either wear them again and put them back in the dirty basket or finally give in and fold them and tuck them away into my drawers. Tonight, and the last two times I’ve done laundry, I brought the basket back up to my apartment and immediately began folding clothes. No hesitation and no procrastination. I simply grabbed my headphones, played some Cloud Nothings and began folding. My mind is stuck on the word “surrender”. I get it again earlier this evening before laundry, while it was drying. The concept of letting go and letting the world choose its path of ascension or negation, creation or destruction, or both, or all options I am unaware of, but just surrendering. Let go of those things you hold so close to you and that undermine you and choke you with poisonous breaths. Surrender. Cut away that part of you by simply letting it go, let it go out into the world and do what it may. You can never extinguish or delete those things, but a life can be lived in transcendence of it. A life can be lived beyond it, evolved from it. A life can be lived in spite of it, by letting it go, by not attaching to it, by not letting it define you anymore, by releasing your grip on this fact and experience that is no longer you. Surrender. Live beyond it. There is a life beyond it that must be pursued. You are your life in all directions, don’t become too infatuated with only one of them. Surrender. Let go.

Hold Our Hopes Accountable

I can see only one street lamp from my window. It stands above Santa Fe drive. From where I sit, it is beyond the roof of the house across the alley, the abandoned and half-burnt house down from my window. I sit on my bed in my second floor studio and see that my bedroom window is still open. It rained well today. The afternoon brought a strong Colorado summer rain. But it isn’t yet summer so the cold stuck around and made most people around the city wear clothes they are trying to forget. The lights from the street lamp vibrate as I bob my headphoned ears and shift the rain drops that are still stuck to my window with my head moving side to side. It is framed by the pale black blue of a gone sun in late May. The sky is a consistent smoky blue I have never noticed. The color is calm and ascending. On one side of the street lamp, the frame of the night sky is stopped by the green of a tree next to the lamp. It’s green spring leaves are elevated to a brightness from the proximity of this lone street light. The green leaves are the only color I see through my window in a picture of black water, clear water, black sky and clear sky, smoked blue and glistening white and glassy black. I sit on my bed and try to write the words that I need, that I think that we all need. I wish to extend my heart and my reach towards the sky and make an attempt at the summit of my heart and thus the summit of this world in which I live. I will accelerate my push towards the limits of the sky above and push the threshold of the boundaries of the earth we stand upon. I will grasp for that which I know I am capable. I will write the words of my generation. I will write my testament to the eyes above and to the eyes within that recall everything. I will write my words for the present moment and for the next moment, seeking to be better as a man, pushing us to be better as a society, and I will hold accountable our hopes to make our light shine brighter as this flickering event in a random universe that we are.

Winter Memories and a Saturday

A light December snow comes overnight. Relative to the last few days it is cold. And it is windy. The wind blows the snow into thin slices around the city, not banks or a coating on the ground but thin slices of thread spilling among the city consistently. The latte I drink in this afternoon is doing nothing for me and it brings up a hate I haven’t felt in sometime. In a few days it’ll be a new decade and another year passes in my life. I am unhappy and lost between decisions. I’ve heard it labeled as a paralysis. Sartre said that humanity is cursed to be free. I didn’t understand that in high school when I first heard it but now I am getting the picture. A cyclist goes by. His legs moved in systematic lines, smooth and clicking and settling into a sustainable tempo, at least for the two moments that I saw him. Watching him ride by gave me a moment of detachment from the anxiety of this last week. My mind splits from topic to topic and anxiety to bliss and tense to tense, as do my sentences. I write like I think. And I appreciate you taking the time and attention to get this far. It’s going to rain a bit this afternoon. I need to finish this drink and go exert myself to small talk and customer service until I get drunk enough to not care. Another Saturday of not wanting to drink but seemingly it being the only option for happiness right now. Fuck it.

Motion

Everywhere I look, everything is in motion. All of this, all of this life and movement in front of me makes me ask if I am in motion. Or am I stagnant? Am I holding onto a life that has passed, a life that has come and gone? Am I holding onto the potential of that life? Am I holding onto the potential of the past, without giving balanced hope or effort or attention to the potential of the present and thus to the potential of the future?

There are places in this world that I will never go. Are there feelings in this world that I will never feel? Are there loves in this world that I will never know? Are there freedoms in this world that I will never taste? Are there strengths or moments of confidence that I will never own? Fear and uncertainty. But that is an expecting mind cultivating those things. My mind, like my eyes and my feet and hands, must be present. My heart must be present, because that pressure which it pushes through my veins is the utmost presence in our experience. That contractions and relaxation in my chest is the rhythm of presence in an ice strain and expecting and regretful world, an unpresent world, a distracted world. Be here, now, with your heart.

Life is imperfect. But it is sung with perfect moments. But it’s song is sung with perfect moments. Life is uncertain. But the present moment is the only thing. And in that resides all else and all else can be built from that moment.

Does anyone know what they are doing? Fuck no. I want to scream and burn and plummet into a machine that has been built against what I love. I want to destroy myself in effort to destroy that which is my nemesis. I wish to have a death and an obliteration that makes sense, that causes people’s eyes to feel the flame that weaves above my shoulders while my legs weaken below me. I wish for an effort worthy of the blood in my veins and the histories and pains and glories of those that have brought me here. I want to leave, probably to run away but mostly to start something new, to find new hearts to shatter, to find new eyes to fall in love with and then spend years regretting that I ever saw them cry, to find new mountains within and without, to throw my hand against them, to let my sweat drip onto the stone beneath my tilted head. I wish to leave to make a new world and pursue that which each human deserves: a moment of liberation and a memory of its possibility and a template for its return. A new world is possible and rightfully mine. It is rightfully all of ours. To find it, we must burn away the periphery of this framed piece that we were guided to observe, and expand the paint onto the walls and the floor and the ceiling and the world beyond it. Burn away that which is common and probable and stifling and stagnant on the climb of history. Speak a testament that is uncommon and improbable and hopeful for our eyes to look to the next incline. And thus build a world and a mind and a heart that is open and in motion towards the potentials of our dreams.

Bless the Rains

I like who I am. But I do not love who I am. I understand my actions because I am the only one who feels and knows my conscience. But just because I understand them does not mean that I desire them once they have been acted out. And just because I feel and know my conscience does not mean that I admire it or hold it above anything else, holding myself on a righteous step. I am neither righteous nor bold. Billy Corgan would grin at that.

I read earlier this week that one should not be so hard on oneself because they are doing their best. And that’s good enough. And if they are not doing their best then they are simply doing. And that’s good enough too. And if they aren’t doing then they are being. And that’s good enough too. And that’s where it ended. But what is intrinsic to that? What is the subtraction? What is left? What is this numb existence I feel where my decisions and actions and emotions seem to step away from my grasp at every exertion? What is this cloudy strolling that I pursue telling myself that my steps are in the right direction? I would label it as doubt. I would label this feeling as a doubtful existence. Not yet hopeless, but straining to find hope. I see and feel beauty, in the world and in myself, but that beauty doesn’t seem to add confidence to my step or to my reach.

Earlier this morning, after a moment of breathing in the sun, I kept my eyes closed. My face was in the sun and my eyes were closed. While I was laying down I repeated to myself (under the guidance of deliberately slow and smooth and then deliberately battering and accelerating breaths) to surrender, to let go, to accept all that lay waiting for me, but waiting for me only because my action would take me there. But still, surrender. My action had already brought me here to this moment in time, breathing and telling myself to surrender. I sat up, eyes still closed and my heart rate the lowest it had been in weeks, my mind emptied of expectation and want, open to what lay behind my eye lids out there in the world but also within. When one’s eyes are closed it is dark, but I had a light in front of me, the sun pushing against the skin of my eye lids on a Saturday morning. The light in the dark, expressed and caught as the burnt orange and pink of a sunlit eye lid. This was the beauty in the dark. The emptiness of expectation and desire was the beauty in the dark. And that gave space for things to move and change and new perspectives to be achieved. That ignited hope.

Not Right

I am the common denominator. The anguish and the shit I feel on a daily basis is my doing. I bring experiences into my world aware of the pain they will cause. But my heart and mind are more concerned with the fleeting pleasure or memories they may offer. And that now sickens me. I only find solace in asking forgiveness and laying my body at the altar of others, showing them my faults and mistakes and asking them to give me more time. I ask them to give me more time to cure myself and figure out and fix my fault and mend my mistakes. But looking upon it all now, will I ever change?

Blood and Coffee

My heart is breaking. The right angles of emotion pushing into a soft white wall, shifting the space of the brick into a shape that is less than what was intended. Her eyes mock me. Her head tilts to the side, observing and reading the air between us. The sweater she wears is painted in colors not known by her heart. She expresses vulnerability to me in her words but her head-tilted action allows no space for another heart to look upon and experience her life next to her. To not comprise her soul and her authenticity was my dream, to observe her life next to her but not shade the light that would shine on her, maybe even to hopefully magnify it onto her, to accelerate and elevate her soul to her potential. But that requires an opening and the opportunity to see her. She shuts off possibility of love by tugging your hand along and showing you probability of love. I fell in love when the world was ending. The wet air that I pull in cracks in my throat as my chest contracts. The muscles and ribs of my torso can no longer play it cool. The emotion and exhaustion and confusion of twelve months release in shivering tension under a hot shower head. I think to myself that this is how it ends, that this is the year it all comes out and my past self ignites and destroys and dissolves. I think to myself that this is when all of the lies and ideas of who I am fall aside for a truth that rests, waiting, in my chest. I press my head onto the tile at the front of the shower and clamp my hands and arms onto my own neck and shoulders, feeling force and strength… a reality that’s hard to ignore. My own strength and my own pain and my own ability intrigue me. They attract me to that option of an obliteration, an exit, a fucking bailing. It’s attractive to my heart to feel nothing and to become nothing, to exit this world that I’ve fucked.

To Be Heroic

She looked at the shelves of books I have in my apartment and studied the titles of each row. She looked at me and said that she saw the theme. I was never absolutely aware of a theme in the books I had collected. But as soon as she said that I realized that, yes, there obviously is a theme in the words I read and the sentences I expose to my eyes. With a feeling of intuition and a comfort in her words, I felt I knew the next words to come from her mouth. I asked her what she saw. After a moment of finding the right words she said to me “to be heroic.” That is exactly the feeling that I search for and try to conjure from the books I find, the words I read, and the life I try to live. To be heroic is a desire for most people. But the youth I lived pulled my eyes to a summit of heroism and engrained in me the ideal of a heroic life. I was told that satisfaction and happiness and glory rest, waiting for me, among the pursuit of achievement, not only for oneself but for all people, and in the bravery expressed in the pursuit for that achievement. Be brave. Be humble. Rip away the fallacies of the world and find beauty in the moments of life, find it among all the victories and all the exhaustion of life. Be heroic.

Shade

The brick in my apartment is now shaded. It is a calm Wednesday evening. It has been a week of guilt and shame and doubt and fear of if where I am is where I should be, if who I love is who I am meant to love. One of the greatest and most solidifying qualities of being human, one of the things that truly elevates us past the realm of animals and gives us conscious awareness and thus fear and thus hope and thus mortality, is our perpetual ability to question if what we are doing is right. Animals are concerned with survival and perpetuation of genetic information. Humans are concerned with comfort and certainty and loving themselves. In this sense, humans desire an assurance, a fact, an undoubted light in their hearts that they are real, that we are not imposters to our values, to our dreams, or to our pursuits, we desire an undoubted durability that we are good, and that we will ultimately bring good into the world and that we will have made this place better when we are no longer here. We desire a certainty in that we do good, and we mean good. This desire to know and totally feel these things causes doubts and questions to arise. What happens when our actions begin to express a morality or values that we don’t practice daily, that we don’t constantly remind ourselves of in times of stagnation or read in self-help books and write down on vision boards? What happens when those values cannot be found in an action or even a thought that flows through us? What happens to our certainty and stance on being good when an action cuts the alignment in two and we are no longer facing the summit, or standing in the light of hope and betterment? What happens when we look back into the valley and desire its ease and its cool shade of negation and apathy? Ascension is hard. Standing in the light is hard. Holding yourself accountable to the rhythm and the standard required to climb the mountain of self-improvement and living well is hard. Sometimes the eyes and the feet turn back to the ease of destruction and apathy and turn to find indulgence in the ease of just surviving, doing the minimum to breathe each day, turning our eyes back to where animals exist and where humans ascend from. We turn our eyes back to the place humanity has moved on from, or where you as an individual has moved on from, where we once climbed out of negation and survival with our hope for self awareness and knowledge and ideas of proving that we are good things in a chaotic universe, and finally, that we can bring good to this chaotic universe and lessen the entropy. Animals are not concerned with loving themselves and thus are not concerned with pursuing good or coming off as a good being or leaving their environment and their relations in a better place when they leave. Animals seek survival and perpetuation. Humans seek to love themselves and a certainty in their understanding of themselves, the ultimate comfort: completely knowing yourself and knowing yourself as a good thing that brought good to the world and to those around them. But what about the actions that align with values and desires not spoken of, ideas and chemical thoughts driven by psychological drivers from deep unwanted trauma or memories, the base values of an animal that bubble to the top of our golden pyramid of values that we structure throughout our lives as we seek to be a good for ourselves, a good for society, and again, thus, loving ourselves because we know we mean well? What happens when we mess up that pursuit? What happens when we falter in a well-lived, best effort? What happens when we don’t do our best and we know it? What fucking happens then?

A Place to Sit: Part 2

In the morning I stand out of my bed. It is after a few minutes of lying awake but with eyes closed and breathing steady, awaiting a push to lift me into the day. I look out the wide and short window on the west side of my bedroom. It is New Year’s Eve and the snow from earlier in the week is still present. It has been a cold week. The view outside my bedroom looks west towards Santa Fe, the area south of the more distinct arts district. There is an abandoned lot across the alley with two mattresses in the yard and one resting against the fence next to where my car is parked. Snow rests upon them but I’m sure they have been used in the last week. The building itself is slitted with burnt and bent openings and the roof is white and black with burn marks and snow and holes and collapsed framing. It is old Denver. Over summer there was a fire there started by some homeless folks burning what they burn and living their lives. But the fire was put out and the building still remains. Next door to this lot is a three story townhouse, new and square and angled and clean. An environment framed perfectly by my bedroom window and exhibiting the reality of the morning and the present in my eyes. This is Santa Fe in this part of the city. This is the Baker neighborhood. I walk out of my bedroom to breathe heavier. 

World Youth Day 1992

My earliest memory might be of when I learned about death. I remember a summer-lit kitchen in the evening, a smooth and relaxing shade among the white countertop and kitchen-set. I see that memory now. Dinner had just ended and our chairs turned towards the kitchen TV. I recall the sunset-lit orange and gold and summer shade in that room in my first house. I remember sitting on my mom’s lap watching the small white TV (currently in my dad’s basement and that same white kitchen-set currently enjoying storage duty and computer room duty in his kitchen). On TV was the Pope. He was in Denver for World Youth Day. The next exchange would grasp onto the air and the space of my psyche; giving direction, constant friction, and necessary speed to every dream, fear, and pursuit I would ever experience in my life. 

“Why is he here?” I asked. 

There was no particular companion in the conversation; I was putting forth a question to anyone or anything that had information. 

I recall my brother responding. 

“He’s here to help us get into heaven.” 

At that point in my life, maybe 3 years old, I had heard of heaven before at church and in school but I figured it was an adult concern and I paid no attention to it while I played with my toys in the long pews at All Souls Catholic. 

“What’s heaven?” 

My brother responded matter-of-factly as an older brother does, “It's where you go when you die.” 

“When I die?” This was something new. 

“We all die. One day everyone will die.” 

“Fuck”, I thought. Or whatever the 3 year old equivalent of that emotion would be.

First, I thought of my parents as I looked at my mom’s eyes. She reluctantly agreed to Casey’s fact. 

Up to this point in my writing and storytelling this conversation has been, and can only be, paraphrased from memory, but I recall the next statement so very well. 

“It’s okay, Mikey; I’ll die before you.” 

An older brother, maybe only 5 years old at the time, comforting his baby brother in the midst of newfound mortality. 

All things are mortal, genetically and generically. But a being becomes Mortal (freely and powerfully alive and freely and powerfully destined to die) only when they learn of the inescapability, the steady, consistent approach, and the cleansing truth of their death, of the ending of all they know and all they feel. I learned about death that day. I learned about mortality that day. I learned about the urgency and pursuit and passion of life. I learned about the ending that makes it worth everything. I became Mortal.

A Place to Sit: Part 1

I look up above the rooftops as I walk west back to my place from Downpours Coffee. It snowed overnight. It is a light layer of cold, dry snow. I noticed last night, as I was driving to Sara’s house for dinner, that it was a good December night. A Colorado winter has come. I walk through the Cap Hill streets pushing a blanket of snow at my feet searching for a place to sit so I can eat my breakfasts burritos and drink my coffee. It is my last day living in this neighborhood (for now) and I want to sit and enjoy it. No place has indoor seating because of this fucking pandemic and all the ledges and benches are covered in snow. And I especially don’t want to eat my breakfast and drink my coffee on this winter sunshine Sunday morning in my garden-level apartment. I see a bench outside Shells and Sauce that offers a vantage point onto one of my favorite intersections in the city: 12th and Elizabeth. I cross the street, it is in the shade but the angle of the bench’s view and the setting itself cause my foot to rise and kick off the powder snow. I brush away the snow with my left foot. Both hands are full. I sit down and eat my breakfast burritos in a comfortable pace as I only know. I enjoy the food and the warm coffee from Downpours but I enjoy the view and the moment more. I try to appreciate the things I see today as it is my last day walking these streets as a resident of this neighborhood. Well, at least for now. Cap Hill and the streets between 8th and 13th on the east side of the park will always have my love. I spent two years living among those bricks and trees, watching the seasons fly above as I sat back in the grass of Cheesman, as I walked crying along 13th on dark winter nights, as I sprinted and smiled down 12th drunk on friendship and opportunity and connection. The green trees above my head changed fast. The pains of spring in this city were pushed aside by the yellows and greens of a perfect summer in Denver. And followed upon by an imperfect but necessary fall and winter in the city of my youth. This city has my heart in its hand. “Do with it what you will.” And the trees and the cracked sidewalks of these city blocks have my tears and the eyes of my memories; I will be back here again. But Denver is a queen made of cuts and perspectives, a culture of balance and juxtaposition. To continue to love this city I must move, as this city moves, as it breathes and advances and falls and fails and rises and builds again. This city is my hand, this city is my breath, this city is my heart.

Winter Towers

The angles are perfection.

Facing all directions

the walls of this structure

provide steady vantage

in a shifting city.

Among its setting

its height is supreme.

It is the tower of the plains

set in front of the towers of the west.

It gives cadence to our view,

a view of the black rock and snow

of the ranges beyond.

It offers only respect and humility

to the rising hills west of this city.

These are towers placed not by the hands of men

but by the hands of God.

Molten earth and wind and rain.

This tower is supreme

only because those mountains are supreme.

And we strive for those heights.

Destruction

“We burn so furious beautiful.” Jack Kerouac wrote that in his novel The Sea is My Brother. It is my favorite piece of his writing. The imagery it conjures in my mind is that of mortality. The pure and absolute destruction we all face with each moment of our lives, closer and closer to that inevitable end. Inevitable. True and terrifying. Face it unflinching? No. Humanity has been hesitant of death since our souls fathomed that time here is finite. Let it be terrifying and let that fear move through you. Let it run its course. We may flinch and pull back at the idea of death and reluctantly pursue our mortality. And yes, we mostly disagree with the prescription we have been bound to in this universe. But what about the moments when that mortality, that finite existence, that destruction of all we love and all we are amplifies the edges and the colors of life? What about those times when the passing moment dials in your heart and your passions for a pursuit or a summit of the mountain you have chosen? What about those moments in life that are remembered again with a smile where your passion and love for another person was the realest thing you ever felt? The music and the words of this world would be nothing without the oblivion that resides beyond. Our moments here in this world, those moments spent in peaceful solitude, or even trembling loneliness, and those moments spent touching and understanding each other, make oblivion bearable. Those moments make mortality a gift unknown to the eternal forces of the universe. It is a gift, a treasure, known only to us. And that makes us powerful and beautiful beyond measure. We must ignite our time on this earth so brilliantly with such violent expression that the gods are envious of our destruction. Burn and breathe into the moments of your life, igniting your love for yourself and for those around you. Seek out the edges and the cutting colors of a place never looked upon. Send your eyes up but do not await the heavens. Your eyes rise above the tree line to tell the heavens “Not yet.” Burn your soul with the fire of mortality and be here.