i hoped the bat was vegan, reprise

These are pictures that i took while watching tv or hiking in the hills.

Maybe we should go back the way we came.

It has been hard for me to write lately, and when i have written, it has been hard for me to post what i have written in public view.

i have been locked away in the dread dungeons of the ivory tower, surrounded by people who know more than me about anything that i could choose to talk about for pretty much the first time in my life. i have been working to become a better researcher and scholar. i have been mildly shocked to realize, for instance, how much information exists in the world, or the extent to which essentially every miniscule phenomenon to which i have ever given even a passing moment’s thought has been the subject of countless hours (years) of somebody else’s life, and their agonizing years of rumination and reflection probably exist in condensed form as a readily available book—or, at the very least, as a dissertation that could eventually be sent to me via inter-library loan.

This has affected my willingness to write my thoughts about a given topic in prose. i’m afraid to express a feeling or an opinion or a hypothesis about anything until i have read (or at least skimmed) at least a few of the more influential works in whatever the relevant field is. And i’m a grad student in linguistics, so i’m already devoting pretty significant tracts of time to figuring out what the literature has to say about any of countless linguistic phenomena, which leaves little time left over to research other things. (Incidentally, the more research i do in linguistics [the one field that i’m supposed to know a thing or two about], the more i realize that i don’t know the first thing about linguistics, which serves to do not-positive things for my confidence in dealing with other fields.) So ultimately, i find myself a little bit afraid to write about pretty much anything, because i know that i’m ignorant, and would probably recant whatever i had written if i were to do just a touch of research on whatever the salient issue may have been. It’s largely an issue of pride—i not only want not to be wrong, but i also want not to be obsolete or redundant.

That’s not as much of an issue with poetry. Poetry is supposed to be an art form—it mainly serves (or aims to serve) as an expression of beauty (or emotion, i suppose… probably not always beautiful, even when successful) rather than as a claim of truth. Beauty is a lot more flexible than truth, and a fair bit more subjective as well. A poet isn’t likely to be told that he’s wrong—unmoving, perhaps, but at least not wrong.

But laying aside the fact that it has been a bit of a struggle to write poetry at all lately, i find that even when i do write something, i am hesitant to make it publicly accessible. For a while, i was writing poems that were fairly opaque—they featured overwrought metaphors, long tangents that distracted from the main push of the poem, and indirect references to obscure events that i had noticed. They were basically incomprehensible to anybody who didn’t know what they meant. So people could read them and make of them whatever they wanted, and whatever they decided was perfectly fine with me—i knew what i meant, and that was enough for me. Perhaps sometimes i enjoyed to privately share to other people what i had meant, as well.

For whatever reason, i have found my style to be a little bit more raw, a little bit more transparent lately. This has made me hesitant to put recent poems in a public place—i’m generally disinclined to make my frustrations and strongest feelings property of the public domain. But again, the main reason for this is probably that i want to appear a certain way in public—self-confident, independent, etc. i’m not really those things, though, and there’s surely a strong element of pretense in any expression that i am those things. So this is pride, as well.

So i’ve come to realize that i’m too proud to write anymore. But i don’t think the answer is to not write. i’m far too proud for that.

Oh. And here are some pictures from when Cody Piersall and i hiked up Pawnee Peak a few weeks ago.

Mead will cure his dying soul.

Cody Piersall came and hung out in Boulder for about a week in the middle of August.



It was a good week. We played by rivers and in fields and on slacklines.















Then we called up Kirsten and John and played in rivers.







It was a really good week. It is good to have friends, and to play frisbee, which i refuse to capitalize.

When the earth is still

i wrote a poem-ish thing tonight. i’m not wild about it, but it is what it is. i guess i’ll stick it at the bottom of this post.

Cody Piersall just flew back home to Oklahoma today. i enjoyed his week-long visit. During said visit, the man and i spoke about just about everything that there was to speak about that we could think of, because the alternative was awkward silence. Although, admittedly, sometimes we embraced the awkward silence. But since we embraced it, it wasn’t very awkward.

One of the things that there was to speak of that we could think of was poetry. We got to talking about my time in Africa in 2009, or something like that, and i realized that the easiest way for me to remember how i felt at particular times was by re-reading some of the poetry that i had written. So i dug up the old poems, and talked him through them while i tried to figure out what i had meant in them. Usually i couldn’t figure out what i meant in them very well (a case in point).

In the process of doing so, though, it became increasingly clear that—in general—i don’t really care if people understand what i mean in my poems. If it were important to me that people understood what i meant in my poems, then i would write them in prose. Or at the very least, i would write prose explanations of them. i think that it’s more important to me that the poems exist, and if anybody ever reads them, then they can make of them what they want, just as long as they don’t try to act like they know what i meant when i wrote them.

A few Saturdays ago i went for a little hike in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, 45 minutes from Boulder. i had intended to summit a few mountains, but i wasn’t feeling particularly well, and i pulled my back a little bit. So i decided to call it a day after summiting Mount Audubon—which was disappointing, as i had planned to climb the same mountains 11 months previously, but instead ended up summiting only Mount Audubon, and then calling it a day. Following are a few pictures from the day: i was at a stream for sunrise, so i took advantage of the morning light to take a few landscape-ish pictures. i did most of the climb with assorted other groups of hikers on the mountain, and they will appear in the remaining pictures.








































When the earth is still
and the night is long
and the day is calm
and the wind is cool
and the crickets crick
and it sighs in displeasure
and the earth is still
and the night is long
and the day is calm
and the wind is cool
and the crickets crick
and its eyes in displeasure
see that the earth is still
and the night is long
and the wind is cool.
And the crickets crick
and we could never know what it is
or what it did to deserve its cricking
but the earth is still
and the night is long
and the day is calm
and the wind is cool
but we don’t seem to care
or to feel any of it.
And the crickets keep on cricking it.