Hello, This Blog has Moved

It’s its own thing now. Or at least has its own site. Thank you!

http://saltcathedral.com/

Handwrought: I Have Images

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Am Stars, Will Travel

We are made out of stars that once were. Our very own, individual pieces of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen got their start in what NASA calls “the nuclear furnaces that are the deep interior of stars.” They exploded, and now they’re us. Examine your hands—they’re sparkling.

If we could chart this kind of DNA, we could find our oldest ancestors on star charts—we could incorporate them into our family trees. I’d like that; it would actually mean something to me. It would both expand and quiet my constant redefining of the concept of home.

If you’re an only child who learns early in life that houses don’t stand still, you hunt home everywhere as an adult. Your eyes slide over unfamiliar freeways exits and tiny towns 40,000 feet under your plane and other countries and you think, “There?” You are forever on the lookout. Then one startling day, you meet a person with home inside them, and ohmygod is it exciting. Far better than a freeway exit. And when you get to go visit them? Forget about it. Like, 14 terra electron volts exciting. Linear accelerator exciting. Unified theory of physics exciting. Ninety-six tons of liquid hydrogen exciting. I-remember-you-from-the-future exciting. Large Halcon Collider exciting:

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A-1 Altitude

The “Holiday,” circa 1960, en route to a A-1 Altitude Record via the first manned flight of a Mylar or polyester balloon. What I know is that you can see the clouds through it.

Getting There

Charting a path in bits and pieces, arriving whole.

Ever Since Then

“Desolation” is one of the quietest words I know. Whether you sink into your own or bear witness to something else’s, there’s not a lot of noise in there.

In people, that kind of emptiness is too grim to be beautiful, but in places—usually places that need saving—you can occasionally make a case for the aesthetics of standing on the edge.

Bekefy and I got within 45 miles of Salton Sea late one day in September. It was 114 degrees and had been for that way for hours, and to say we were tired or that the air was oppressive is to assume we still felt some connection to our own discomfort. In fact, instincts toward self-preservation had evaporated somewhere in the flatlands outside Phoenix, so it was as much luck as actual decision-making that we turned away from the Salton Sea and headed instead for the Ace Hotel and Swim Club. Plus, as those who’ve fallen in love through the shimmer of triple-digit temperatures know, the bright-white euphoria ensures that it doesn’t really matter where you end up—even if one place has mojitos and the other dead fish.

It was the right choice for that particular September day. Next time, though, we start earlier, pack electrolytes, and head for the haze.

In From the Cold

Secret lairs have always loomed large in my life—along with a fondness for spy coins and lipstick pistols, a tendency to tail strangers and cars just for practice, and a compulsion to sit with my back to the wall.

The photos below are of a 1940s air-raid shelter and ex-MI6 complex that once had excellent SL potential. As it’s been widely advertised through the past few years, however, I wouldn’t pay $8.60 for it, let alone $8.6 million. Shame.

My Best Fiend.

“The moment I first saw him,” director Werner Herzog once said about Klaus Kinski, “I knew it was my destiny to make films and his to act in them. But I cannot deny,” he added later, “that there were moments, which were dangerous, when we could have killed each other.”

I’ll leave the dictatorial directing to Werner, and the rage and albino hair to Kinski. But I will lift a glass to things you don’t see coming and cannot live without.

I Fell Asleep. Possibly Under a Bushel Basket.

It’s been nine months since I last posted. I don’t like yoga anymore. I do, however, like the following, which teaches us to smile and nod should Willem Dafoe ever approach:

Realer Than Real

My brain.

In the post below, I complained about my brain’s tendency to manifest as a big, heavy, grey organ—a big, disgusting monkfish of an organ—instead of a gentle and elegant gravity-free concept, which is what I would prefer. That’s how I understood my preference, anyway, until something weird happened during the shavasana portion of Tuesday’s yoga class.

Shavasana, for those who haven’t tried yoga, is the part at the end where you lay on your mat with the lights turned off and try to think about nothing. Which means you think about everything. Meant to relieve and rejuvenate stressed-out minds and bodies, it’s considered one of the most important asanas out there—and one of the most difficult. At its least successful, shavasana inspires people like me (who can’t do it) to spend their entire shavasana penning mental lists of all the people and things that are fucking with their shavasana in absentia and preventing their monkfish from attaining even momentary peace.

Hidden brain refuge.

I’d been having better luck lately, though, because my current teacher is really good. Instead of saying floaty, useless things like “let your worries melt away,” she says immediate, visceral things like “let your eyeballs drop into the back of your skull.” I find that immensely helpful; it’s a real relief to have someone dealing in the same kind of internals I do. And on Tuesday, right after she said “Keeping your lids lowered, let your gaze settle into your guts,” she added, “Now let your brain slide down the same path.” And mine totally did—the hyper-real got realer. With a fleshy sigh, it gathered itself up and oozed over my eyebrow ridge, down the greased slope of my gaze, and squelched in amongst all my other organs, where it found itself empty, content, hidden, and not expected to speak.

Huzzah.