(See what I am saying?)

What I learned about design from my parents:

What I learned about design from my parents:

You can dream about rebuilding your grandfather's cabin in the woods when you retire. You can save for your entire adult life the money it will take to build it. You can schedule your retirement pay, military pension, and bank stock to help seal the leaks on your pipe dream. You can have folders of building examples, material examples, and floorplans and elevations on grid paper. You can even have those folders color coded and labeled. You can subscribe to log home construction magazines and tear out your favorite pages. You can calculate board feet of lumber, cubic feet of concrete, and consider south facing sun during the winter months. You can discuss with your friends, family, and professionals. You can plan, and write, and propose, and draft, and sketch, and write, for three years of your life. You can even turn your plans and writings and proposals and drafts and sketeches into 3-D renderings (if you have friends like Mugur).

but in in the end, descisons are made in thin air, standing at the corner of a the foundation of an already torn down cabin, 3 days from retirement, while pointing and speaking in simple words with heavy reliance of hand gestures in the driveway by the tailgate of a pickup truck while the sun sets below the treeline.

Christmas Eve.

St. Rt. 589 comes to a stop sign like an end a ball of bailing twine unrolled in a hay field. If you drive through the stop sign it becomes main street, Casstown Ohio. If you look to your right there is a white house with a sign on the porch that says 'Karen's'. There is a window in the front corner of the house. On the other side of that window i sat with my father and ate breakfast.

The sun shone in through curtains in the windows and through the steam in his coffee. Pictures of high school sports teams and class portraits hung on the walls from the 1950's and the linoloum tile by the threshold cracked along the edge of the floor where the foundation had settled. There were plenty of things in front of us to talk about. But instead we talked of things we couldn't see. And things that had already happened, and some things that hadn't yet happened.

After breakfast we drove south of town. We pulled into the Lostcreek township cemetary and drove to the back and stepped out into the snow. the sun met us down by his parents grave. It was cold and clear and bright and i stood there in wide open field while he brushed the snow from their names on the stone. Plastic poinsettas sat in the snow around us and the dogs hung their heads from the back of the pickup truck and waited patiently. There were no birds in the sky. The sun was in my eyes and in the snow like a flash bulb that forgot to go out. I felt time move like a photograph fading on the wall. like crack creeping through the foundation. like snow melting on the stone. I stood there in time until my pupils contracted enough to see him find some peace.

I let out a long breath and watched it blow away in the air, and then together we walked back to the truck where the dogs hung their heads from the back of the pickup truck waiting patiently in the sun.

My Dog Came Home For Christmas.

Sunrise; Miami Co. OH, USA

Sunset; Santa Barbara Co. CA, USA

(Location. #A)

Stationaryphobia (Or: read between the lines)

Everyone always has to be somewhere.

The whisky and water sat on the table. It made marks on the tabletop like ring-worms on the wood veneer that had peeled away from the particle board at the edges of the booth.

And we all want to be somewhere else.

I looked across the table at the girls we were with. They were sitting up straight and looking down in the indigo glow of their cell phones, holding them like squirrels hold nuts, sending messages with their thumbs to somebody somewhere else.

The only way to be in neither situation is to be moving towards one or the other.

I stood up and walked out of the bar and into the street. Orion leaned to the left in the sky south of Ventura. I put my back to him and walked up Main street. The street was empty and the fluorescent lights flickered under the awnings of the mattress store that was going out of business.

I always end up at a different places.

I walked into a bar that had wedged itself inside a plywood box between a pawn shop and a T.V. repair store. The wall behind the bar was a mirror printed with a repeating wildlife landscape. Hanging above the reflection of me was a clock. It floated above me in the mirror like a thought bubble. Habitually, I adjusted the time to Mountain Standard, and then into Eastern Standard. Then I finished my beer.

I always leave for the same reasons.

I walked toward home and tired to enjoy the stillness of my neighborhood. The way nothing moved like it were a living photograph. They way the edges of the moon soaked through the sky like teardrops on a love letter. The way I walked alone down the middle of the street completely, beautifully, free and alone in the middle of the night.

But i couldn't. I couldn't see anything. People and places filled my head that were sleeping and waking up and getting covered in snow and rusting and growing old and were doing so everywhere but on the street i was walking down. I wondered what the sunset looked like in cleveland and how cold the water was in Virginia, and if the UPS trucks were stuck in the snow in Denver.

Then I stopped walking. I stood still and looked up and tried to realize where i was. I looked down the street in both directions.

I wondered how long until I made it home.

Pittsburgh – Parkersburg

The propellor of the the Beechcraft 1900D hummed like a hungry hummingbird left out shuttering in the snowstorm. Just outside the window the muffler coughed in the drone of the dark. it flickered like a candle and it was all i could see the freezing black of the appalachian air.

I turned up the volume and in the earphones. Caitlin Cary sang in vein against the strain of the propellors and black of the night and the cold of the snow. Above me was nothing and below me was nothing and the gray snow kept sliding silent and lonely past the window in the dark. Through the crack in the cabin door i could see the deep amber of the countless cockpit calculations that kept us on our vector over the mountains of west virginia.

Faith in a god help people live on earth. Faith in numbers keeps them alive while flying above it. And there are countless corners of this earth where things live and die by the means of which we have no idea. all at once i felt all i had was wrapped in the surface of my skin. moving like a pill i swallow without water. moving like a satellite spinning in space. moving like a blinking amber x across an arc of an equation in the middle of the dark and lonely appalachian air.