on Going North

Soft sun days and my mind half-sleeps in a luxury comatose. I could be anywhere in hell, but I’m right here--Highway 101, constantly moving, and effortless too. Like being the back-seat passenger to a Life that just happens, ain’t gotta do s**t. And I swear, it seems like these cows hadn’t moved since I saw them on the drive up; eating and shitting and grazing and sleeping all in the same spot, like a rooted plant made of 100% All-American beef. My mind wanders faster than this infinite scenic reel, only kind of catching each other at brief moments of moving stillness--weird junctions of space and time and I’m still on this concrete trail, somehow.

            The Bay is settled. in that way you feel when morning sun evaporates the mist off of sleepy Redwoods and dusty light hangs high, and you get the intuition of relativity that has your feet walking a slow love ballad.  And because there’s that soft marine layer of haze up here, the sun feels good, traveling through gradient atmospheres to reach your skin. The sun feels good. I tell myself like I’m repetition-crazy, “I could live here I could live here I really could live here.” But I don’t and I won’t until money gets some more of me. so I dream fat and walk amongst the trees and the woods and the parks and the ports and I’m still in the city!

           

Countless encounters in LA has shat repression and the idea of stagnancy lingers always on the last stool of the bar until dawn. An idle prisoner, waiting to die"by sunrise and seagulls over sunsets, the moon waits for me to die too. But it wasn’t until yesterday, visiting Alcatraz, that I realized the stark difference in the physical boundaries of the mind and the physical boundaries of your space. It was the first time I’d been to a prison without being a prisoner. The word confinement echoes along the densely reinforced brick walls of my mind. I walked to the far end of a corridor of cells. 250 lb. bars of steel separate the incarcerated from an idea of freedom. There’s this endearing light hazing through a cracked, flaky window high above"it warms a door, a big fat firkin’ door that harbors the “indecent” humans who broke the rules and went to prison and broke the prison rules and went to Alcatraz and broke the Rock rules and went into isolation. D Block is what they call it. Solitary confinement in a stonewalled closet. Complete darkness…but they say if you look at the black image of the door in front of you, for a nice long time, and I mean real nice long time, you may begin to visualize particles of photons hovering like thoughts, coming from the infinitesimally narrow sliver of a crack in the door. And once you find that light, you can allow your mind to wander in the malleable form of it"transform it, metamorphosize your physical surroundings and utilize the all black canvas of darkness to paint a world where freedom isn’t limited by your space.