the Tuftees

Watching a huescape brilliant sunset deepen it's orange-red sky saturation before sleeping beyond the ocean. I suppose the sun never sleeps really; I happen to be exhausted wanting sleep, but it's not everyday you get to see this from 30,000 feet. I am flying Alaska Airlines (the friendliest of skies) from my home in Portland, Oregon to Oakland, California, where I'll take a bus to the train and the train to the bus which will take me to the sleepyhouse in San Francisco where the bands await me.

The sun is at a place where it is a cool blue beneath and a soft mellowing sky blue above. This is a bloody egg yolk sunset smearing across the horizon with a wisp of yellow chasing it down. And then she's gone, blood red sepias hug the edge of the pacific. The land below in its gray-bluish tone is becoming more soft-spoken in its visual enterprise. I could sleep in this sky. I could lay flat on my back into the green-gray warmth of space hovering just above the ocean. Pull myself in the nude and lose my senses in that queitly violent murky depth as the blood of the sunless sky possesses me in the weening moments of day.

So it is the Fourth of July too. Not my favourite holiday, but a good day to start a vacation.

Two days ago I felt an epiphany. My sense of self stopped and a sense of truth in identity passed through me like a tight wind. A moment of peaceful personal pleasure; a softness; forgiving the self for past sins allowing the future to undulate at will. An approaching fascination. A sense of adulthood. Near an understanding as I've had of the life , a passing time; a sense of loss, close, but not quite.

So it is good to be continuing on my path and following my everpresent dreams. I'm not so different as my 21 year old self, perhaps more poised, more aware, aware that this is all. Aware that one must grasp, grapple and defend this only chance. It felt as though the bleeding sun were singing an hymn towards my tomb. The long march, a mile is an inch, each step the same long foot, each step awakened to the cool mass of ocean below.

Tuftees - fucking love you