She Shoots True

Have you been to Fayetteville Street lately? I've got to tell you, they really have dolled the place up nicely. I stopped by on the way home from coffee this evening because I was under the impression that things stayed open downtown past 6 PM. Well, places are open but mostly places that have cover charges and all I needed was a tube of toothpaste. No luck.

Raleigh has a peculiar quality that I am more and more growing fond of and that's the fact that it empties out. The place is like a madhouse during the day but on evenings like these you can walk for what feels like two or three blocks without seeing another soul. There's nothing to keep you company but your own footsteps, trouncing back and forth between skyscrapers. Fayetteville street really is beautiful -- pinned at both ends by the Memorial Auditorium and the old Capitol building. Its slate gray brick and jumbo decorative planters are also a nice touch, though sometimes it can feel a bit like a mall with traffic lights. The occasional hobo reminds you that there won't be a Dippin' Dots nearby.

From now on when folks come into town I'll have a new idea for where to take them, especially if we have time to kill on a weeknight. Perhaps not so much when we need toiletries.

By the way -- Dippin' Dots has been ice cream of the future for at least 15 years. I'm getting suspicious.

The Bacon-Chocolate Effect

Time and Italian dressing are two very similar things. Both flow, both separate into different parts on their own, and both have a certain tanginess which makes them distinctive. I believe I enjoy the passage of Italian dressing more than time, but that's beside the point.

Have you ever visited a strange place, only to visit it again once it was a not-so-strange place and realize that you'd been there before? I like it when that happens. For example, growing up I rarely came to Raleigh. My family homestead is something like 45 minutes away, but it was one of those things you only did when a distant relative died and you had to get a new suit coat or if someone needed to do their Christmas shopping at the mall. I usually was just excited at the prospect of going to Steak Escape and Barnes and Nobel, (two things I still get excited about, believe it or not).

I loved books growing up and my favorite author throughout middle school was a fellow by the name of Brian Jacques. He wrote a series of novels, most of them about medieval-era talking members of the rodent family, that I just adored. Visiting his fan page back in 2001 or 2002 revealed that he would be having a book signing at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. I went and had a grand old time getting two of my books signed. Fast-forward to 2008 when I got to know Raleigh properly as I interned at CCF and I had one of those moments. Stopping by the Whole Foods one day it hit me -- that time warp sensation that I had been there before. In what seemed like a slow-motion moment of crazy awesomeness, I twisted my head to the right just a bit and stared at the Quail Ridge Sign above me.

I think the reason I like it is because for a moment the world doesn't make sense. Just for a split second, the map you've built in your mind of the topography of this planet makes a dramatic shift in less time than it takes to read this sentence. It would be akin to gravity shutting off for about 2 seconds, only not as dramatic and with fewer confused and elated white guys having tried to dunk a basketball at the perfect moment. Magic. Something we could all use a little bit of, no matter how easy it is to rationalize later.

Craft Felt and the Mystery Woman

Have you ever just woken up and felt your physical humanity in a profound and unsettling way? Happens to me all the time. Maybe I'm just weird, or maybe it's God's gift that I would percieve just how temperal an existance this is. Maybe I'm full of crap. All I know is that some days I wake up and as the first fuzzy, bleach-blonde images of my bedroom stream to my retinas, I get the feeling. It happens when I strech in a certain way as to feel a rib brush againt my arm, or the bone of my cheek, and the thought that comes to mind is ...

"This is not me."

Such a thought is about 20 times deeper than I'm willing to go at 6AM -- an hour best spent pondering hot tea and English muffins.* Still, it's there and I am made to deal with it. Two eyes, two ears, a slightly crooked nose and a mouth from which so much awkwardness emits: these are the elements of the senses. From those elements, every detail of my life and existence is loaded into a wheelbarrow and dumped into my brain. Life, it seems, is percieved in the physical and yet it exists in some space between synapses. It's that space that both haunts and enchants me. While we all feel it, no one knows quite what to say of it unless they're attempting to refute its existence. Reality is in a way subjective and in a way not; It is largely built on-site through our own perceptions, but I ask: "In the bustling construction site of reality, where is my soul?"

For the answer I turn to a four year old Chihuahua and a battered old copy of a Star Wars novel. As good a place to start as any, I suppose. Mostly I think about writing or creating. Something in the activity usually reassures me that we're more than a cerebrum housed by our skulls and in its own way it's like having a conversation with my two known selves:

"Hello, Soul! You still in there?"
"Yep! Remember that kitten you kicked on the sidewalk last night? Without me you wouldn't have felt bad afterward."
"I still don't feel bad, though"
"Oh, bad example I guess."

Moving seems like a good plan too. I'm not talking about moving to another city or anything, I'm talking about keeping your life in motion. A good habit is to ask yourself if you're secure and comfortable. If the answer is yes, it is generally time to move. This constant revision slaps you in the face like a cool slice of lunch meat. NO. Do not sit on Park Place. Pass Go. Collect $200.00, and give some to a friend on your way back around the board. Wake up and remember that this game will end and when it does we somehow need the answer that we played it well.

And who is playing it, anyway? Is it this man? This foot I slide into a pair of Timberlands, or the skin that keeps my insides in or the heart that pushes oxygen through it all -- or is it the real me? My soul. That soul that speaks in the early hours of the day when all I know are the sheets on the bed and the gravity which inexplicably holds me there. It holds us all here, and one fine day if we're lucky and if our hope is justly invested - it's going to let us go.

*Incedentally it is not uncommon for me to ponder hot tea or English muffins at all hours of the day and night.