The Stream (Newsletter)

Are clouds lonely? Get a nephologist on the phone, stat! An atmospheric cleric with their head right up in ‘em, digging about in that barometric baggage like some kind of thermostatic therapist. Where on the moisture spectrum does loneliness hail from? Is there a Cirrus sentience scale? Do they wonder as they wander? Do they question life choices? Do clouds miss their mothers, lament their empty schedules, or watch on as dreams evaporate, raining down sobs of solitude on the vale?

You slip on your old faithfuls—your worn out Blundstones, leather scuffed and toe box tired—and stomp them hard on the landing. You look down and note their sad, moisture-deprived state. You admire their knuckle-down-and-just-get-it-done nature, and vow to give ‘em a hit with the good ol’ Kiwi brown when you get back. You know they need a polish. You know they need some love. You think about these boots.

Take a hike. Slip your moorings from that dock of doom, from that scrolling rectangle of hand-held gloom, from powerful hatred found in uninformed rooms. Take a hike! New world, new land, new you. This harbor, they say, is not safe for your kind where your kind is a mind made easily blind—with fury, with sadness, with fear ill-defined. (I’m not all that sure I can keep up with this rhyme.) Exhaustion Harbor. Thar be Dragons.

Disappointment at first bite. Tastes like acid. Tastes like bile. Bile with a hint of orange mold tickling at its periphery. That first bite of every letdown rips another metaphorical flake of toxicity from the situation for you to consume. It lingers on the tongue like a smart ass with a comment, waiting for a lull. The licking of a lip does not wipe disappointment away. It gets in and massages the nerves of old cavities with agitated, metallic vigor.

Knowledge takes time. It takes time to listen and connect and study and graduate. To repeat and write and erase and improve. To apply and submit and hold up a finger to poke at the breeze with ambient curiosity. In our pursuit of it, we fail and recover and readjust the parameters of our experimental dabblings, flipping pages, clicking buttons, and listening to the age of it pour from the mouths of our mentors. With reverent attention, we learn. We learn and we get smarter. But it takes time.

/ Once had a thought, and it was a gas / Touch at my forehead. Can you feel it? It is a prickling, urgent heat, roiling and rising, ready to pop the top off my brain fart thermometer. Idea. Coming in hot. It comes to me in a searing spit of action, sizzling at the insides of my cast iron skillet skull. Fizzing and futzing, it dances in the fat and tallow and ghee, licking at the edge of some excitable, manic insanity. So wickedly hot. So sinfully alive.

This is the haunted artifact of my anxiety. Like a triggered tsukumogami, 100 years old and seeking a sort of nagging retribution for my neglect, it rattles its ghostly chains in the darkness of its abandonment. The sound of its torment is amplified in the shadows by the low ceilings of the caves I hide myself in. Turning to look at it Boo! I shriek. This is the result of my careless discard. This is the run-but-can’t-hide of my horror.

Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you👈 Cup your palm. Examine your petite prize as it idles, quiet within the scribbles of your palmar creases. Small as a grain of rice, delicate as a silkworm. It is warm and pulsing. Eager to be planted, it cannot wait to begin the journey. This precious thing wants nothing more than to sprout and stretch and grow in all directions along your expectant timeline, mapping the intricate lines and setting down its fresh and vibrant runners upon this landscape.

Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈 What will it be, the last thing that I see? There. Last blink. There. Burned hot onto the mirrored plate of my retina like some daguerreotype of truth, stillness holding, a moment set and fixed within the shuttering eyelid of my demise. The last thing I see at the moment of my death. What will I see? What will it be? Will it be the grain of a leaf, its intricate patterns of veins and tributaries waving chlorophyllic goodbyes as I fade to black?

Three dots—that’s all you need. Two eyes and a mouth. You don’t even need a nose dot. A fourth dot is a visual waste of brain-calculating space and is not necessary for facial recognition cognition. You just need the general sense. A suggestion of. That’s all you need for face pareidolia. Two eyes for the seeing and one mouth for the accusatory whispers. Three dots. Pinholes in the world for hallucinatory expression to shine on through and trick you. Three dots.