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Monthly Archives: December 2011

Answers don’t question beliefs

21 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by Alice Salles in Reality check?

≈ 3 Comments

What to do while in the dark, waiting for light?

Plenty of things; my rational self replies in a crispy tone as if nothing that I’ve ever tried to teach it was even worth my time.

Nothing but cry, be miserable and then wait a bit longer; my fully functional, emotional self replies while chewing on a chunk of shameless and impractical love of everything that even seemingly improbable is more real than the hands I type these words with.

What to do but wait, in the dark for the light you know the color and warmth of but never felt the reality of…? Wait.

The certainty of a reality that is nothing but what you’ve imagined for yourself makes it tolerable. The tolerance makes it real. The reality makes it heavier than the skies above your head because it’s made of that matter that creates more of the matter you carry so heavily around on your shoulders like a sack of guilt… Belief.

The faith in whatever you choose to believe in even if it’s just the belief in you.

So I wait in the dark for the light I’ve known of without questioning its source, only believing it’s always been there regardless of how or when.

Answers never question beliefs.

~I’ve been rather repetitive lately, forgive me <…3

The Season of Ted

15 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by Aubrey Anne Dickinson in Brother, Family & Friends, True story?

≈ 5 Comments

Ted lives in our cellar.
Wait, that is not a proper beginning…
Ted was born the year we moved to Snohomish. I had just entered second grade and was the new kid for the first time and there was no fitting in gracefully; I was a spot of red on a white wall. At my old school I was beloved and celebrated and when I announced that I’d be moving with my family to the next town over tears were shed and a giant party of showering gifts was given. I’ll admit that I was sad at my departure but mostly I was excited; these people knew me and they loved me this much, imagine being the new kid; everyone would want to be my friend. Naive little idiot.

I was Wednesday Adams dropped down into a Thomas Kinkaid painting. All the other eight year olds looked at me and knew right away that I wasn’t of the same cloth. “You’re not from around here, are you?” Brittany asked me one day. Maybe it was my cutoffs and flannels verses their pink stretchy leggings and Beauty and the Beast sweatshirts. Maybe because I never wore pigtails in my hair. Maybe because my mom dropped me off at school in our 74’ Volkswagen bus, Nirvana or Pearl Jam blasting out her old windows. It probably didn’t help that we moved into the towns infamous haunted house that sat perched on top of an overgrown hill. And then there came Ted.

For a week the local police who had very little to do took turns watching our house. 7am or 9 pm it didn’t matter, one of their bejeweled white cars would be parked across the street with two sets of eyes pointed our way. Was he real? Were these people serious? Obviously they don’t belong here…general consensus around town. They almost seemed disappointed when fake cobwebs were stretched across our deck and pumpkins were carved and placed down our stairs. Okay, he’s fake but still it’s weird.
Ted looked much like the locals dressed in beat up denim and red plaid buttoned up to his chin. He was given shaggy untrimmed dirty blonde hair and his face wasn’t all that bad that first year. He even wore shoes which were hard to attach. And when he was stuffed full of the leaves that my mother had made us rake into giant piles he was splattered with blood and hung up high in a tree. Yes, it was weird.
The school bus crawled past our house every morning and every afternoon and it wasn’t long before it started to spread that we hung dead bodies. And then my mom was a witch and we were quite abnormal children. Everybody soon wanted the token freak as their friend. If I disappointed them by being a giggling eight year old like the rest of them they never told me besides, the sleepovers at my house were the best…we had a ghost that lived in the bell-tower.
October came and went and Ted was unstrung and packed up with the rest of the Halloween decorations and stuffed into our cellar where real spiders would make home inside of him. Between now and then his face would rot a little and the leaves that filled out his pants would dry and crumble and Ted would shrink into an emancipated corpse…no longer fresh.
Year two we were still given the eye but by the third Halloween the ceremonial hanging became quite expected. People asked for Ted. It was quite an honor to be invited over to rebuild Ted’s face or re-stuff Ted’s legs…forget hanging him…that was my brother’s job.
Time has lapsed and Ted has been refigured and rebuilt. He has had several different faces and worn multiple shirts. He has lost nearly all of his hair and in general looks much older. Sad how that happens to us…and I too have grown and changed. I live some 2000 miles away and my mother just called; Ted has been hung. The season has officially begun.

EinStein & Perseverance

14 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by Alisha Dickinson in Living

≈ 1 Comment

Anyone who’s been in close proximity to me these last nine months knows I’ve been struggling, sometimes epically, to get through this damned biography on Einstein.  I’ve lugged that 600 page book to work & back, over the mountains, to job interviews & the grocery store and I even recently pondered taking it with me on the plane. (Considering the thing weighs 50 pounds & nearly requires its’ own set of luggage, I fortunately decided against it.)

Why did it take me 9 months to finish one measly book you ask?  Normally I consider myself to be a relatively fast reader, but the main topic in this monstrous work of literature besides Mr. Einstein himself, was his science; a topic which immediately slows my brain & reading comprehension to a sloth’s crawl.  I’d struggle through the thick murkiness of relative theories & mathematic formulas, barely grasping what I was reading and questioning whether the book was even in English.  Then, on top of this, my OCD kicked in which forced me to find it necessary to read the footnotes as well, all 30 pages of them.

Needless to say, it was quite the task but in the great battle of freewill & desire versus borderline psychopathic perseverance, my stubbornness eventually won and I did finish the book.  I even learned a few things, such as the name of the undertaker who performed Einstein’s autopsy & who likely would have remained anonymous in the archives of history had he not stolen Einstein’s brain.  Or that Einstein gave his Nobel prize-winning money to his ex-wife so that she would finally grant him a divorce so that he would be able to marry his cousin.  All tasty anecdotes for my next intellectual soiree.

What we leave out of living

13 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by Alice Salles in Dying, Living, Whatever

≈ 4 Comments

There’s a reason for things to happen, or so I tell myself.

There’s a reason so the reason won’t escape its cycle leading back to meaning. Reasons like to find more reasons to hide or pretend to be what they are not. Reasons like to blend in with trends, file suit then fall out of fashion. Reason pretends to hide in plain sight although I see it everyday. I hear it. I smell it, and then I let it go.

I don’t intend to play its game because I’ve figured it out; empty spaces are filled with reason, crowded camps are numb and hollow. Reason only is where there’s none.

When I heard a bird stop by and sing about the kind of luck I never dreamed of having, it came to me: the luck I never dreamed of having was mine all along, I never had to dream about it in order to obtain it.

Reason is what you grasp without twitching your forehead. Reason is the know in the knowledge of being and reasoning is all we leave out of living.

We’ve been doing it all wrong, not I. Not I, believe me.

Drew

10 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by Aubrey Anne Dickinson in Family & Friends

≈ 3 Comments

Drew’s hair is it’s own wild beast. It has parties; it rocks and it rolls. It brings out the wolf within him. It tells him that it is okay to howl at the moon. And it is Drew; it most definitely is.

We try so hard to mold ourselves into this perfect little human with kempt clothes and combed hair. We try to be what everyone wants us to be. We try so hard to quiet that wild wolf. We try to pretend that we aren’t all animals full of guttural growls.

And I must tell you; my brother is one of the most true & courageous animals that I know. He is not afraid of the feral beast inside. He questions everything—he tears things apart to understand. He roars with laughter and his anger.  He allows himself to live the greatest moments and he crawls himself out of the shit mess that sometimes we fall in. He brings color everywhere he goes. He rips the world open with his curiosity.

So this is an ode to my brother: may we all learn to be the wild little beasts that we are.

The Rolling Beat

07 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by Alisha Dickinson in Beat, Raw Passion

≈ 2 Comments

My love of hip hop is one of the few things about me that my dear friend Alice does not embrace.  In fact, when she discovered my iPod hit list, she says she had serious doubts about our friendship.  In my family, my hip hop love affair is actually quite an anomaly.  My brothers will occasionally crank up some 50cent or Tech N9ne, but I believe that it’s their love of all things loud that inspires them to blow out their speakers rather than a true affinity for the beat.

I’m not sure where my love affair with hip hop started because it definitely didn’t originate in my parents cassette collection.  It could have been those early friday nights with In Living Color when I was 10 & which I had to beg my mom to let me watch.  I used to hum out that opening credit song for hours, rolling my tongue just so, trying to replicate the smooth blending of words, one into another.

It’s not necessarily the words or the style that I love though.  It’s the beat. The simple, unnerving, unapologizing beat of something raw, real & alive. For all its cliches & stereotypes, for me, hip hop is the music of youth, the thobbing beat of life’s passions no matter how misdirected they may be.  And when my speaker is booming & the beat is rolling along with me, I can imagine for a moment that I’m hipper than I am, that I could pull off those crazily complicated dance moves & that there’s some raw passion yet left in me.

Océans

06 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by Alice Salles in Film, Ocean

≈ 2 Comments

It’s not easy being me, you know… particularly when it comes to being me around movies.

When I first started watching ‘Océans’ there was only one expectation I knew the film should meet: the sharp documentation and narrative of an overly exposed and saturated reality, the reality of climate change, human interference and of how the continuity of thousands, maybe millions of species out in the deep blue depends on us.

Silly me. The movie goes way beyond that.

With the language that could only belong to a true poet, a master of word and verity, the silhouette of the story is presented with a simple and gracious line: ‘to really know the ocean, you have to live it’.

How bright and yet simple.

The moment you live anything, you’re part of it. More than having the experience shaping your own perception of life, the experience itself embraces you and takes you into its unique view. It opens the doors for you to perceive everything under a new light as if through the sight, taste, hearing and tact of another being. From the very first minutes of this movie I knew I was about to live through another essence, one who never speaks through words nor feels with emotions but embraces with the most mothering of all embraces and allows all life to be given a chance to be prosperous; the ocean.

I was it. Its deep, weightless core, its dense but yet see through matter. I was its warmth, its candor and its magnanimity yet I was humble.

I allowed all things to fight and prove they deserved to live in my womb; I let them improve their skills while respecting the timing of others. I taught them quietly but was never absent. I held their hands, prepared their cradle and when it was time for all creatures to live on their own I let them borrow my whole self so they would always remember where their essence came from, so their own singularities could thrive on me. They learned their lesson and succeeded.

But a few also learned to forget, and that’s where this film steps in. It opens the curtains again, it reminds us of the ocean’s humility: ‘down here it’s like nature gave everything a try, every color, every shape, every way of life’. No objections, no judgment, only permission to try a little harder, live a little longer and take care of your environment for it’s not only just a place; it’s who you are.

With a powerful message, but most importantly, with a majestic honesty and generosity, the language in this film equals its subject. It allows the viewer to slowly remember that they too are part of this being and that one may never live without the other.

“Instead of asking what exactly is the ocean,’ we should be asking who exactly are we?’”

It spoke to me and I replied back in ways words could never describe.

Oh, Etta…

06 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by Aubrey Anne Dickinson in Sunday loving

≈ 4 Comments

Etta James is singing about Sunday Lovin’ and it’s cold and I feel like there should be some warm fire that I could be hovering over—drinking wine or tea; just listening to her. And maybe my cat purring.  And my lover breathing.  And the wind outside.

But its fucking cold and the heater blew up and no such fire exists in this house. I can’t really listen to Etta because I am doing all that I can to listen to my own damn voice, chocking, drowning—doing everything that it can to keep from being hushed out.  I can’t hear my cat because she is mad at me (yes, my cat’s personal dialogue is that in depth) and my lover is working. But I can hear the wind—I can hear it rush through those pathetic Palm Trees outside, knocking them to the ground. And I am in this frozen home praying to God that I am more substantial to the world than those Palms are to the wind.

Etta, I want to lie upon some dark Persian rug and close my eyes and listen.  I want to hear you move in to “At Last” and have it mean more than just a dream for me. I want to roll over and see my books unpacked upon shelves that I have been hiding in some dingy storage unit this past year. I want to know that my head is upon my own pillow and that in the kitchen, my own dishes are waiting to be used.  I want “At Last” to mean something to me—I want it to be tangible, I want to taste it and feel it between my fingers. I want it to mean that at last, I am home.

The Downside of Contentment

05 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by Alisha Dickinson in Hollywood, Reality check?

≈ 3 Comments

The other day, the delivery driver at my illustrious Italian pizzeria asked me why I worked there.  Or to be more precise, why I had settled for working at a place which was so obviously below my personal ambitions and coolness standards.

The short answer was that I had a mortgage to pay..but was that really it?? Or had I become lazy? Complacent? Content enough with the mundane tasks laid out before me? Or perhaps it was something else all together; a thing so typical & ugly, I shuddered to think it.  Was I afraid of succeeding? Of achieving something other than simple survival?

As Donna Summers belted out “MaCarthur Park” on our cheap surround sound stereo, I realized that it was a bit of everything. The mortgage part was true enough but there was perhaps a bigger slice of fear than I’d care to admit.

  • Alice Salles
  • Aubrey Anne Dickinson
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