There's a certain sort of geek

7/5/2023 we greatly admire

I often find the folks claiming celebrations of freedom this time of year — are militantly aggressive toward those of us who freely choose not to participate

We forgot the official local fireworks display happened on the evening of the third and were watching “Strange New Worlds” in the darkened cabin when our walls were lit and shaken by flashes and booms through the hatches and portals

Not sure when we stopped caring about fireworks

Let Not Patriotism Be Our Narrow Home
Con/Jur/d, 7/5/2023

Under certain nighttime conditions, he left the hometown house to us
and we find it abandoned and unused since Mom’s death 27 years ago

Of course, the boundaries (especially in the basement, and the parent’s
walk-in-closet with access to the attic) are insubstantial, turning inside

OUT

As an aside, Mother having taken refuge in the USA after the last  world
war, brought us up as patriots with a capital P, she was a teacher after all

Looking through the ruins, the dungeons, the great towers, exploring 
the borderlands so clearly defined when we were growing up there

Usually, although not exclusively when this suburban house or the tech
capital basement hermitage appear in dreams, we’re questioning home

In that bedroom when afraid at night we would imagine curling up
in a hollow beneath the trail's edge while fear searched above making a

CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH

Why don’t we return there? Why do old-world fantasies of domination and 
death, a patriotic fever to die on someone else’s terms supplant Earth’s burrow

A belonging to dirt, mud, dust, roots, trees, forest, brook, river, lake, ocean, our 
nature, animal, and vegetable, and mineral, not virgin flesh’s parthenogenesis

We don’t arrive alone and disconnected, out of someplace else to here, we come
out of, not into, we belong amid blackholes and gas giants and moons and galaxies

SWIRL

Without our naming them, yet we feel we need to build fortresses, to label them 

SAFE

to  swear fealty to nightmares of power, to build tall walls demarcating us and them

To narrow what constitutes kin, to say “This is how and why I belong” narrowing the
great uncertainties by believing myths of freedom, confusing this passing moment with

HOME

Although — as an art form of impermanence— rather than an empire prop they are rather moving still

Will be heading to California tomorrow to visit with my daughter and brother and others from the extended family — we’ll see how often we’ll post but we’d like to reestablish the habit of measuring the gate(less)

Much love,

Con/Jur/d, 7/5/2023

PS a couple of things I’ve found valuable in the last few days:

Unraveling the Illusion of Resistance and Tapping the Flow of Creation (Cosmic Creativity 2)

How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City

American Culture Rant