many falls elsewhere

Thursday night Genevieve and Calina and I all went to the Maiden in the Mist for tarot readings. Despite the fanciful name, the place is actually really nice and not hokey like I expected it to be. It's billed as an "industrial" bar on its website, but it seemed more velvety and mysterious. It's non-smoking, dimly lit, operated by cute, attentive girls. And they have really good deep-fried tempeh sticks. I even got a free "mistake" drink, so this place wins.

We stuck to singularities, six cards. I asked her to focus on the course of my writing, and the ways in which my anxiety and over-analysis have toothed away at it, but how I feel as if I am at this threshold of finally feeling comfortable enough to share my work, through publication, readings, etc. I'm private to a fault. And her reading was a needed affirmation, that the pores are anxious to receive (heart and mind cards, both open grottoes, lined in carbonate), the inspiration is there, curdling, but considering the fact that the death card was the card around which all the other cards revolved, it's going to take a significant shift in ego, intellect, letting the nether speak, like Benjamin's "dialectic of awakening," but under strictly organic intoxication. Working along the channel.

Perception is not a perception of things, but a perception of elements (water, air...), of rays of the world, of things which are dimensions, which are worlds, I slip on these "elements," and here I am in the world, I slip from the "subjective" to Being. -Merleau-Ponty

My goal is to have my first chapbook in print by next summer, with a two-week writer's residency at Caldera in the interim.

The tail-end of the reading was about love, the ten of cups. Swimming in love and fulfillment.

Time now for some coze. One of my high-school best friends is visiting from Seattle, and we're about to pop his Powell's cherry.

Currently reading:

Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card (re-reading, loving)

Books I want to pick up soon:

Dune, Frank Herbert
Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embroys, Donna Haraway
Seth Speaks, Jane Roberts
The Secret Life of Puppets, Victoria Nelson (one of my favorites; Brannon stole my copy)
Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, Michael Taussig

And a nice book on gluten-free cooking.

Listening to:

Midlake
Bone Thugs 'n Harmony (so realish)

The village used to be all one really needs,
That's filled with hundreds and hundreds of chemicals
That mostly surround you.