The Old Mule

The Middle Ages

The middle age philosophers had a name for it: The Black Bile. It was that which flowed in a man and turned is thoughts inward, smote his dreams aflame, rendered a mood sour and a countenance odd. A journey, though, always seems to set a mind to wander.

Bolder gentlemen can heave themselves from deep holes of poor thought and inwardness with a stroll through the mountains. I require grand shifts and tectonic pressures. Latitudinal change brings interruption and necessitates one to refresh all assumptions. Imagined world orders are cast into flux. Rethinking the boundaries and borders of ones life lends perspective and widens the options for future investigations.

I dream of other shores and hidden trails – of losing my way and then finding, amid the frightening void, that all is fine and right. The shameless fetters that bind a man sag loose in midnight’s wandering pathos. Last night, three hours of sleep rendered thrilling escapes through the minds wandering stroll. Daytime explanations and recapitulations fall flat. This morning, I came too in an era of chaos and order. It is the 28th day of August. I reside in a rented home with unmatched art. I make cereal. I put on my shoes and I can not even begin to imagine what might be next.

For a moment, disappear.

In any instance, many worlds are occurring. There is much thought, many beings, and a river of lives. As seconds pass, a person may unravel, carry forth, expand in profound expulsion, purchase hog knuckles or throw a dart. There are places so different that I can not even fathom their being. There are dark shadow people, men in capes, old women sleeping; there is the thud of carried out garbage, and the toll of tin can lanterns held by a poor soul’s luckless gloves. We dwell among different beings. There is a seething momentum to our new millennial earth, one that swims forward with a reckless and forbidding smile. There are untold fortunes of beauty trickling across the most barren lands. I have seen the planets arranged in the reflection of a fallen leaf. I have held a dowser’s branch. There is talk of a storm, a calm, a rain and a growth. I can smell the lightening from my awkward stance just inside the cracked wood door of my secret mountain home. I advise the unmindful night to darken just long enough so that I might, for a moment, disappear.

Mexico and otherwise

Mexico city-sounds seemed alive and desperate at all hours of the morning. I would stroll from the tin house lodgings in San Juanito, nod to the mustache man in the cowboy hat and lather in the calm regularity of a morning dust bath. The market smelled of too many things, too much ripeness. I remember the silent communications and admonitions of the flower men and the meat women. They accepted me as a visitor and stamped the air with a hatchet on a young hens leg. I was tired and thin, and had run out of film. All air stirs there. Nothing is quite. I ducked under their tarps a dusty and unusual site. It is always the shoes. We spoke of late mountain blackberries, the green pot ladies with woven hair, and the miles between homes. No one knows where America begins. Directions become meaningless. Time envelops. The hours become moments stolen and minutes tiny daggers like owl eyes or shards of an old wrecked bus.

August, again

We came back from the moutains and it felt like descending back in to some sort of joke, but one I like and adhere to. I feel lost at the oddest times, but it was still nice to know I still had enough energy to buy a small funky chicken picture. And there is a new mint cake in the fridge. It rained on my walk through the swamp and I knew there were some sort of ghosts fluttering around as I passed through the older trees, the ones back beyond the regular trail. I am not a spirit person, but something funny was going on. The South is not what it used to be.