expansion

Warm saturation of dark colors.  Moody, the broadcasts are ersatz information, rummaging through files and video clips for some definitive optimism.  The graphics on the cheap cans of coffee are changing again.  I don't know, for instance, what BGI is.  It sounds like a trash company or a low rent designer drug.

Here in the woods.  I'd let a robin's egg rest on my palm.  There are jays, robins, sparrows, ravens.  Squirrels, chipmunks, the occasional coyote.  It is the plan of outdoor house cats to fight each other for territory in the dusty climate of a desert forest.  The deciduous trees are on the decline, and there is a young apple tree and avocado sapling out back.  In the front there is dust mixed with pavement, dead seeds and stale bread picked up by birds.

The people seem muddled.  That is mostly all.  There are some really sad stories that I know personally, but thankfully those people seem half conscious and checked out, no terrible spear of fate plying at their nervous systems and emotions.  I'd intervene but it's trouble, like taking on a sea anchor as a possession while diving.  That's enough about the people, mostly.  Some of them seem tough and wiry in fall and winter clothing, faces like parts of landscapes, telling of the weather of humanity.

Waiting for the snow to fall in the midst of a drought where the el Nino pattern off the coast became obliterated.  Well, they are looking for signs of its return.  I wonder how long that ocean current pattern existed.  My guess is probably not just for ten years.  There are memories there, of gigantic waves in fall that would break over harbor breakwaters, that would reach higher than the LA piers, days when you could go down to the lunar scene of the beach under black clouds and watch it storm from the emergency berms.  Sometimes the waters would flood the beach mansions, the sight of sandbags amid the torrential fall rains.  Those seem consigned to a distant memory, the weird glowing dust of middle childhood, where beach toys were abandoned for surfboards and new friends who seemed to have better senses of humor amid pre algebra lessons and changes in diets.  The only thing that seems similar now is that I am still voluntarily allowed to drink soda when I want it.

I don't know.  Rummaging for old files of happiness is a lot like being a washed out librarian.  You look to the past for solace, sometimes in things the shape of a necklace cameo or the way the sun could burn your arm when it rested on the inside of a grey passenger door in some used car that you happened to be in.  Too much yawning desert, freeways intersecting dirt house lots irrigated by water from the eastern rivers.  The torsion of water rights in a desert landscape.  Need I get into it?  Probably not.

Nightfall and bank thermometers broadcasting the temperature.  Fifty six degrees seemed colder than forty three for some reason.  Walked into town with two men.  I left.  What was I doing, trying to be tough?  I had no money and they wanted to go to the bar.  All that I learned about bars is to stay away from them in the dead of nighttime unless you are in a group.  Well I left.  Not much of a lesson there, the two men parted from each other anyway, there was talk of polygamist sexual politics which didn't sound appealing in spirit, practice or design.  A lot of broken pavement from last years frost, laid bare in the turning from summer to autumn, shredded newspapers with hints of crime reports, community news, and a sort of aura of positive thinking and attitude that seems like it is on the verge of failing.  The lakes still there, water levels are low.  You could see the recession even in nighttime, walking on the cracked pavement, while the universe burgeoned above in a dark sky without clouds or moon.

There were echoes of stories up in the stars in the sky.  The ones that fell from horoscopes, the old legends muddled with modernity, constellations in derelict geometries reminiscent of partially completed spider's webs.  Stories on the fringes too, the ones that filled bookstores, science fiction feats of landings and politics and war and outposts set up on Pluto for the sake of cargo.  It seemed upon contemplation of a stranger mental landscape that maybe man would not make it to the stars.  The point rested in the fact that in between the stars and man was ultimately man.  But that is another trajectory entirely.  Ellipses, charts, and graphs and mathematics overlying star matter and space, but for billions of years they got along just fine without the notations, without the hooking orbits of launched satellites, without the telescope's half orb imploring of celestial beauty like a fish eye, wonderous and slightly terrified of what we cannot subsist in without costume swaddling and spaceship walls, while even then we are lost like fallen earrings on some massive beach.

Too much, too little, equations balancing invisibly across the board.  The mathematics of the human race and the planet, subjective when observed, terrifying when put into fact or fiction, majestic when left palpable and barely known, like a pack of undiscovered black wolves, rushing around, following something mystic like the flight of ravens in a metaphorical desert sky, rushing despite of us, flowing, existing as a curve at the limits of understanding.  Some sky, some moon, some stars.  Really though, in retrospect, perhaps these quickly drawn notes here were and are about the fate of the Earth, nudging and subtle, avoiding didacticism and categorization into intellectual perimeters.  I don't know.  Slate, stone, obsidian.  Chalk outlines drawn with pieces of coral.  Old dead satellites cast out of the solar system, a few into the sun.  An old man's careful drawings wrecked.  The poorest flute solo you ever heard.  Random images, junctures, united by threads of association, not working or working.  Our finest.  Our worst.  You.  I.  Them.  Us.  We.