People! Wake Up!!!!

Understand Your Understanding

Allow things to be.

A disallowance of things to be as they are is an insistance that you could better design the moment.

However, do not deny that you naturally, inevitably, have personal preferences for the order of It All.

Temporaly, this book will physically exist longer than myself.

My Me-body Here-body Now-body

I'd like for it to leave a good impression.

If this is my echo I hope it's a soft and soothing sound.

Not a lullaby, rather, a wake up call.

Used: a poem in four thoughts

I find myself rummaging through an old garage sale bin, filled with unsold memories.
Electric leavings and splashes of sound form what I use of those days past.
Each reminiscence has value, but not nearly so much as the hands which now hold, rotate, and examine.

I am too young to live in the past.

Strike

Bowling tonight.


Pitcher for a glass.

So goes Lawrence Kansas.

If I went on for too long I'd probably bore you with slurred ramblings, so I'll transcribe a lovely story I have of a night spent drunk waiting for a plane in Nairobi.

27 obvious americans were sitting in the Nairobi Java House cafe. Can you dig?

We finished bottles of Tusker Lager with vigour. American swigs.

American kids,

making obnoxious noises while the international crowd waited,

for thier ships to set sail.

Jetliners sailing through the clouds.

Read if you know where I'm headed.


17th January 2009

I've been sitting at at a cafe with the group for 3 hours. We're in the airport in Kenya. Nairobi.

Disconnected thoughts. Or do thoughts just evade me?

2 Litres of Tusker. 2 Litas of Tuska.

1)Formative Know

2)Knowledgable How?

These were the names I gave Wilson and Irby's vans in Kenya.

I wrote them in dust on the cab roofs. Perhaps 2 Litres of Tuska has illegibilized my script.

Perhaps, however, maybe...
It has loosened my lips.

But the resultant outflow seems little. Nothing more than speech for sounds' sakes.

How can I be content when my contentedness is dependant on ink shapes staining paper?


How much more must I write before I realize there's no real need?

Creating a Web Log? Ho do weBlog?

First night on the road, I'm creating my blog later than expected.

Sorry to anyone that was waiting to see what's up with me, I'm getting on it now. I promise I'll update when I have Internet access.

Unfortunately/Fortunately for me, too bad for anyone who is really watching, the road to New Zealand is not lined with routers, so no promises on updates.

I'm going to try to make what I post interesting or at least relevant to my current situation, but this is more of a therapeutic process for myself than anything else.

I write consistently, publicly, hoping that an audience will give me more incentive to commit and regularly update this outlet.


More poetry than actual narrative might appear here after a while. I find it easier to transcribe my handwritten work than to write originally, quickly, rushed by a limited window of Internet access.


Tonight I have access as long as I want, however, so I'll tell you how the trip is after our first day on the road.

Maddie called me 18 times this morning, we were supposed to leave at 8am, I woke up at 9:07. Off to a good start.
It was alright though, because they were off to a somewhat late start as it was. However, they still ended up driving for a while calling out my name into the cold Cornell morning.

When I got to the car, I was able to get my toothbrush and run back into the Risley Residential Castle to brush my teeth, go to the bathroom, and I even had time left to find my big heavy gloves I'd lost the night before.

In the car, on the road, we drove for 12 hours to West Lafayette, Indiana, we're staying with Maddie's friend Chris, a grad student at Purdue.

This is Chris, at an underground bar in Indiana, it was fun:

The drive let me get acquainted with Maddie's other tag-along for the trip, Marshall.

Marshall is an awesome guy, he manages a doggy day care and pet salon in New York City, he's coming along for the ride to Davis and flying back at some point after we get to California.

I'll do a bio on him for a blog post at some point. Some posts will be mini bios of people I meet, some will be pictures with captions, some poems, and some just stream of thought narratives. All to let Mom and Dad know I'm alive :)

Much love to you all, especially those who will be waiting to see how I'm doing,

I'll try to make this fun to read...no promises.

Now I'm getting my 4 hours of Z's before Marshall makes eggs!
Goodnight all.

Surroundings

Entailing the place that has enveloped me. With the lovely wrappings of people, events, emotions, plans, keeping me bundled.

So lucky I’ve been swaddled so warmly, its 5 degrees outside last I checked.

Arms wrapped and locked lips occasionally forming words to trade. But calm understanding, sharing quiet sounds, makes more sense than this weird language we make with our heads.

I pick up frequencies that tell me when to laugh and cry. The receiver glows bright red when I feel, truthfully; seeing the waves as they are, before the static, buzzing, sounds they become. Soon after, I don’t need the receiver or the speakers at all.

I’m the waves watching the waves.

But back to HERE, Vermont, with Roni and her family, casual hospitality and love.

***Written 24 January 2009***

Dear Cornell

I’m leaving you.
I’ve promised so many panicked faces that I will be back, that it’s just until the Fall.
I do hate promises.
Perhaps they would not have panicked so breathlessly, scurried so readily, frantically preparing their worry wardens, had I broken the news some other way.
As it were, I never broke the news; I let it do its thing, the media machine will run Its course.
The news has been a tangled mess for a long long time; Anna Nicole’s death got more American news coverage than the cyclone in Burma.
But that’s neither here nor there, that’s in Burma, wherever that is.
I decided to follow Roni to New Zealand while in Transit to Kenya on the thirty-first of December, 2008, Happy New Years!
Having made my decision I told nobody except Angela, who was going with me to study the elephants, ants, and many varieties of small, stabbing, trees, she’s lovely.
I signed up for a Boingo!© wireless account in the Heathrow International Airport, London, in order to apply for a work holiday visa in New Zealand, the application for which was submitted five minutes prior to boarding the Kenya Airways jet to Nairobi.
On the Mpala ranch I spent two equatorial weeks with field researchers, pastorialists, and other students, experiencing the savanna.
When I shared my plans with others there, my professor Irby helped me to get a satellite internet connection.
Using my limited email window I alerted my parents to my changed plans, requested a leave of absence, asked Roni to help me find a flight to --------, and received confirmation that my work visa was approved.
Upon my second email check a few days later, Roni told me that all flights are cheaper through America, I would be coming back through the states and leaving from California, not London.
I told my parents not to cancel my flight from London to Washington, I would find a way west.
What are the odds? Maddie, another girl surveying ticks and dung piles with me in the tall, hot, grass, was moving from upstate New York to California a week after returning from Kenya, I was welcomed to join, she’s lovely.
I returned to America, moved my stuff out of Ithaca, dealt with a speeding ticket in the Penfield town court, bought backpacking gear in Rochester, said goodbyes to family and friends in Williamson, and drove to Albany.
Priscilla Corwin is my mom’s friend of over 40 years.
Her curio crusted apartment serves as a busily fluid display of the many places and people that have resonated with her.
This gallery of Ms. Corwin in Malta, New York, outside of Albany, is where Roni picked me up and brought me to ---------.
I accepted her family’s casual hospitality and stayed the weekend of the 24th in Vermont.
This marked the first month Roni and I had been together, half of which I was unplugged in Kenya.
This marked a year since her father had died.
It was my last weekend before setting out.
On Sunday we went to her house in -------- Connecticut; where we were, we were there together.
On Tuesday I took a greayhound bus from Stamford to Ithaca, I raced a snowstorm into town.
I imprinted fresh powder paths in the snowstorm with my friend Davis, Tuesday night at Cornell.
Here in Becker House I wait to meet with Maddie, Wednesday afternoon, bidding Farewell.
Soon she will be here, I will load my things into her car and leave.
I have backpacking gear, a laptop, a nice outfit, paints, pastels, charcoal, pencil, pen, paper, and an easel.
Before we leave, my friend Sidney will use her surplus of Big Red Bucks to buy us travel food, peanut butter and power bars.
Sidney grew up with Roni, she introduced us, she’s lovely.
So now I’m crossing the country, with eighty-five dollars in cash and four hundred in the bank.
I’ll be looking for a job on the west coast that can pay for a ticket to New Zealand.
In New Zealand I will work, write, and be with my love.
An Ideal world is, Necessarily, comprised of Idealists

With much love to your luxurious Ivy, and all those who gaze on it,
Clayton DeFisher
P.S.
Big Red Pain does not equate to Big Red Pride
Work together, not against one another, your minds have been assembled for good, RIGHT NOW.

If I proffered an artistic vision, Promised to be the true state of the world, Would the clarity move you?
How can I possibly change your minds?
I cannot.
I must change mine, As you must change yours, let us understand our understanding.

Love
Exists

Provides