forest flocking

From the inside everything is matter, walking. - Leslie Scalapino

Yesterday Orland, Matt (two of my people I love the most!), and I flocked to a very top-secret location in the deep woods and plucked pillow-cases full of beautiful, golden chanterelles. I wish I had batteries in my camera so I could take a picture of the box sitting in my fridge right now. I keep shoving my face in the box and taking in a long drag. It's like...a sex-fruit. Deep, earthy, and robust (quintessential foodie word). Remember that line in Lolita where he describes her vagina as "biscuity"? It's sort of like that, but with under and over and in-between tones of apricot and apple.

I felt famished and dehydrated by the time I got home, but the only thing I wanted to do was sit on the floor in my dirty boots and sort through them, wash them, throw the imperfect, moldy, mushy ones in the compost (which my landlord ended up intercepting for herself). After giving her a third of my bounty, I still have a few pounds left! Tomorrow they will go into a cream sauce that will melt tongues (and minds). Of the pocket-ful of people who read these drifty annals, I'm sure some of you are vegetarians and/or vegans (Dan, close your eyes), but I made this recipe last week, and people went into an eye-rolling, belly-rubbing, food coma satorigasm. So I'm making it again tomorrow night and will be pickling the rest. I'll try to be a better documentarian this go-round.

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This weekend, a blot of manic winds. We all felt so wild on the ride to the [top-secret] mountain milepost. I was coasting on hours of espresso-strength coffee, but the Zen focus of the mushroom hunt, the huckleberries and the hazelnuts, and lots of dark chocolate tempered me. After we got back to the car, we drove up to the [top-secret] look-out and saw five summits (Jefferson, Hood, Adams, Rainier, and St. Helens, if one were to view them counter-clockwise), arising from a billowing desert of pink clouds and quiet mists. An unbroken rose world. Seamless tableaux of a sleeping planet, an arm's length from soma.

The melancholy set in today. My friend Nick spoke thusly of melancholy, in an old issue of eye-rhyme, a literary magazine we used to publish at Pinball:

The Greeks thought that this came from an excess of black bile. But where does this black bile come from? Are you born with it? Do you inhale it somehow? Is it related to diet? Does it start off a different color and then turn black? How much time can you spend thinking about black bile before you start to get sick?

This sadness isn't to be tossed aside. This sadness will take you somewhere. It will admit you to certain clubs. Clubs you want to be in. Let it take you.

Everything has taken on this trace of melancholy today. The two cat tails poised in a vase on my desk, the ones Greg brought me after he shaved his beard and cut his hair and came over to surprise me. They were part of a bouquet of red daisies and kangaroo feet, a palliative in the event that I didn't like his new look. The ripped up t-shirts my mother used to wrap breakables in a recent care package, t-shirts that, gauging by the size, belong to my step-father, who is dying of liver cancer. She attached a note to one of the t-shirt shreds that reads "Use these to dust your furniture." The fact that my cat might have a bladder infection. That I lost one of my favorite fingerless gloves in the forest, collecting mushrooms. That I've lost one of almost every pair of earrings I own. The forest relics. The care packages that include little Ziplock baggies of mascara and lip gloss my mom bought but didn't like. My landlord and her six dogs, and the new neighbor Peach, who is a fire-dancer and a seamstress, who, for a living, makes tiny dog & cat houses that match their owners' houses, down to the paint and the trim and the shutters and everything. That I have poor night-vision, and that, just as I was typing that sentence, Bill Callahan sang "my vision is failing," in the song "Fools' Lament."

Now I'm just steeping in the crisp sadness, listening to Smog and to Nick splashing around in the bath-tub. He was supposed to start his sublet tonight, but the key he has doesn't work, and he was planning on sleeping in his car, and I just can't let a friend sleep in his car. Not on a night like this. So he came over, and I fed him risotto and peppermint tea, and now he's taking a bath, and I myself need to go to sleep and let this wobbly melancholy teeter and trail off until tomorrow.

Lv,
A.