"The only manifesto is a blank page"

Breaking a Cycle

I don’t usually go out on a Sunday night. School the next day I would say to myself, commitments I would say to myself, responsibilities and such, but at the sake of breaking a cycle it was all worth. I was kicked out of my typical writing area due to the time constraints. I went and experienced. I lived and learned. I went out to experience the life. I channeled Whitman, I channeled Hemmingway, I tried to channel Emerson. Looking at every opportunity as a new opportunity, and experience to tell, but more specifically to write. I drove with conviction and looked at the city lights like a child immersing myself into it all to live it all. I wrote and wrote and thought and thought till I couldn’t sleep anymore. I walked to feel the earth, crawled to feel the ground, and breathed to feel reality. To break a cycle I must believe in the cycle and I believed it all.

The Devil's Dictionary

http://www.thedevilsdictionary.com/

Ambrose Bierce wrote this entire dictionary with his own definitions of the words. It's interesting and funny at the same time. Kind of ridiculous as well. Bierce was a great American writer but saw the human race in a negative light. Bierce fought in the civil war, so he saw carnage and destruction of life and everything that relates to it firsthand. The story goes that in Bierce's later years he rode off into the sunset and with a gang that was out of Mexico, and his cause of death still remains unknown. He couldn't take humanities' innate destruction and war against itself. But it doesn't really make sense why he went to Mexico with a gang, hopefully it was to get to a beach somewhere to forget about the universe and its crude ways.


-Colter Fox

Tuesday

"Jesus is this weather terrible, wind and rain and fuck man this sucks"

“I know I bought this stupid rain jacket and I didn't even wear it, I got this useless wind breaker on, and I’m gonna be soaked all day in class”

“This weather really fucking sucks and when the hell is the bus going to come”

“Hey man look at that bald guy standing out in the rain haha oh my god”

“Oh he's the man, he doesn't give a shit, he’s just standing there and taking it”

 The 10 finally pulled up the stop. Eli and I catch an assortment of buses from downtown to Capitol Hill for class. We also ride the 522 from up north together. It's funny; Eli and I don't ever see each other at school. Our friendship is completely reliant upon the buses. And I’d like to keep it that way. We apparently went to the same high school, even though I didn't know him in high school. He graduated a couple years later than I did, from what he's told me. Eli mentioned that I was seeing one of his friends for a while, Christina, but I never remember ever seeing him. He's an all right kid for the most part, but he can be kind of bitchy sometimes over nothing.

“Jesus man this fucking weather, I hate to bitch about the weather living in Seattle and all but this is a downpour, I mean this is fucking typhoon kind of shit, my socks are completely soaked through these loafers, I mean fuck dude”

“Yeah finally this bus shows up”

We ride the bus to our SCCC stop and we both exit and he goes off his different route and I go off my route and we don't see each other for the next few hours till we ride the bus together going home.

I'm walking up the brick sidewalk towards the main entrance. The water was riding on top of the brick and it was its own ocean floating down the orange bricks. I could feel the water seeping through my shoes soaking my socks and onto my feet. I had my rain jacket's hood over my head but the wind was kicking so much that my hood kept slipping off and there wasn't much point trying to keep it on. There wasn’t much point to anything. I kept walking in the pouring rain and wind and shit and rain and wetness and I was soaked and it all fucking sucked.

 I had a vision there walking up that brick sidewalk like I was on the front of a ship commanding a fleet through a storm and we had to reach our destination and fulfill the mission. It was a wooden ship and the crew was watching me and I was watching the ocean and pointing out into the distance and the waves crashing and then I had brick back under my feet and I was trying to light a cigarette in the wind and rain but then I realized there wasn't any point. I threw the cigarette into the grass and kept walking.

As I was walking I was watching the water ride upon the brick, like that ocean I saw and how it went through the cracks but then there would be more and it would push the other water away until there was just water and there wasn't any continuity to the water flow it was just chaos and I would've thought it was beautiful if I didn't feel miserable and then I saw a couple walking by smiling at each other and holding hands while being in this miserable gale like environment and I realized everything is relative and I'm just a miserable bastard.

But then I went back to looking down at the brick and I was about half way now to the entrance of the school and everything still felt shitty because the weather was shitty and I had to go to class on 4 hours of sleep because I like to day dream too much of situations that could happen but probably won't happen.

Everything changed when I finally saw something going against the tide. A little blockade in the ocean on the pavement, something going against the relative beauty but the actual chaos. It was a rudimentary form of revolution. Revolution to this chaos and that couple walking by happily, and bitchy Eli and my misery of my cold and wet feet. It was going against it all and yet nobody was stopping to look at it. But I did and I saw it.

It was what seemed like a broken necklace because I could see the chain strewn about in the wake of the water going around it. The piece was a dove with an olive branch in its beak. It looked like something you would see on the cover of something “biblical”, or a poster for “peace on earth”, or an “anti-war” thing. I don't associate myself really truly with any of those things. I try to not associate with really anything too big or too serious. However this struck me. This shit weather, the wind, rain, Eli, me the captain and my crew, and that couple that walked by all happily, everything was witness to this little broken necklace of peace and serenity yet nobody noticed it.

I don't think that bothered me. Maybe somebody did notice it. I don't really believe in symbols at all but I just thought it was too binary to the environment not to recognize. I didn't pick it up and I didn't touch it. I just stopped and looked at it and stood there in the rain and wind and misery and just looked at it. I looked at it and I just tried to see something past it but all I could see was the brick and the passing of the ocean. I didn't see myself back on that boat and I don't think I saw any peace. But I just saw a necklace laying there in the water and brick and thinking somebody threw their piece of peace away for everyone to see and everyone to observe and try to take in.

 I didn't want to take it or move it or disturb anything, I wanted somebody else to stop and take it in and see what they wanted to see.

The Late Summer

She was walking in front of me and walking with the road. There were tall trees on either side of the dirt road. There was a strip of green grass going down the middle which was the gap between the tires of the tractors and trucks that would come down it every once in a while. She had her shoes off and was plodding down the road with confidence swirling around her. The pedals that had fallen of the trees that were tall and that stood on either side had grabbed onto that confidence and swirled with her, and around her.

“babe, catch up what are you doing back there, cman now Coohlter, the day is young catch up”

“I’m just taking it in, we don’t have to get there too quickly do we? We can take in the day for a little longer can’t we”

“Cman babe I want to hold your hand cman catch up please”

Since she asked so nicely I thought I would just catch up. I jogged up to her to hold her hand. We walked down the country road for a little while longer taking in the breeze, taking in the warm air, and taking in the sights.

“I can smell the ocean babe, we gettin closer, I can feel it in my bones”

“Oh yeah, is it all coming back now? Your childhood and all?”

“Yes” she said with a smile and looked back into the countryside. “We would come out here in late summer to just see the ocean from here. It wasn’t that we wouldn’t ever go see the ocean, but it was different here, you know?”

“yeah I know exactly what you mean”

As we walked down the dirt road, on the green grass strip to the ocean view I couldn’t remember why we didn’t drive instead of walk all the way down this road but I realized it didn’t matter. I didn’t care that we walked and it started to hit me that it is the journey to everything and I don’t quite know if we had driven that I would’ve been able to see this beauty as much as I did. I wouldn’t have been able to see the swing of her hips every time she stepped or the way she would yell “babe” over her shoulder in wanting me to catch up. I noticed that I wouldn’t have been able to smell the blend of the country air and the ocean air and suns gaze wouldn’t have been so powerful. I noticed that I have to take in moments as moments that all lead to an end and its not necessarily the end, but the exhibition of getting there.