Tempest Penumbra

Dear…. In hand, soft flowing ribbon,  Pinched between thumb and finger is this parchment,  Between the hungry eyes and the giving of what’s written,  Skimming one another as two streams that flow over and under juxtaposed in, This dithered correspondence while, The rapid foam spray of thoughts prevailing the spirit of its commission in, Vision fixed within imagination’s visage of what the minds eye may conjure, sincerely….

I once met a guy in Indiana that worked at the local IGA that told me that the Aztecs didn’t disappear From history. He said that they became buried in goat poop, why? Because goats always come home to poop. It didn’t matter how far out they wandered, they always come home to poop. I myself have noticed that their poop is always the same no matter what they eat. Little black pellets. I’ve seen them eat underwear off the clothesline and still, little black pellets. Tin cans, again, little black pellets.  Here’s some more of my goat observations for the purpose of flavor text. I saw a goat once standing on a stake that was no more than 2 inches around. It had all four legs up there and was standing perfectly still with no teeter. I saw two goats standing on the side of a high wall once near the highway in a place where I could not see where there was somewhere to stand.  I once ran into a question in a trivia pursuit game that asked what animal did scientist’s claim was the most...

When I was thirteen years old my uncle taught me how to slowly lower the arm of a record player onto the vinyl record without scratching it. Vinyl records….a very delicate thing. This concept was quite figurative in comparison to threading a sewing machine while it is running.  The needle itself that scratched out the audio and transferred it to the speakers was made of nylon I believe and would dull over time. If you didn’t replace it regularly it would widen the grooves in the vinyl disc causing them to sound bad. The alternative though was to buy needles made of graphite commonly called diamond tips. These eventually had to be replaced too but not as often and they didn’t dull, they would just snap over time.  When compact discs (or, laser discs) came along we were led to believe that they were virtually indestructible. This was not true. They were compact but, just as delicate as a vinyl record. Through the transition of this genre there was a lot of skepticism throughout ...

The years following my drug rehabilitation were not easy. I found myself without friends because when I hung out with the friends that I had then I would wind up back on drugs. I found myself for a little while in need of a different environment which happened to be a Baptist Church.  Looking back through my drug addict years I realized that I knew along that I had a guardian angel looking over me as well as a keen instinct for knowing when to walk away from certain peril. If not for that I’m sure I would have died tragically or wound up in jail a long time ago. The unrealized dilemma in all of this was not realizing what this instinct was. Guardian angel, that’s easy, you just apply a physical manifestation to a being of which plenty of visual stimuli is already present for and you’ve got it but, applying that criteria to something that is no more than a feeling is a little harder. Words hardly describe it. Vision of it is abstract and hazy. How do you describe knowing without rea...

I once saw this episode of Ren and Stimpy where they found the mountain of lost left socks. I can’t really remember what all else happened in the episode that led them to the mountain of lost left socks but, it was then established that this was a universal problem among the human race that socks do indeed go missing, mysteriously even, to who knows where other than the mythical mountain of lost left socks.  A lot of times it’s in the wash. I have personally placed even numbers of socks, confirming the count multiple times to still come out with a missing sock. Static sometimes dispositions them to a endoparasitoidal existence clinging to a towel or sweater but, in most cases it just simply vanishes. As a little side note. In my personal walk in life there is no left or right sock. They are universal in placement but, I know there are people out there who designate socks as left or right so I will not judge. My grandfather was one of those. So, while packing for vacation the whole ...

I don’t exactly fancy myself to be a mechanic. I do believe that I probably know more than most people, especially considering that most people don’t even know how to change a tire or put oil in a car but, most of what I know about the subject has been from setting on the side of the road broke down.  Most things in modern vehicles though I struggle with where on older vehicles I did not. Changing an alternator for instance. Very recently I changed the alternator in my wife’s van, and utterly failed at the task even though I was standing right at the finish line but, this story isn’t about alternators or working on cars, directly. This story is about Kenny. (Names in this story will mostly not be changed to protect the guilty.) For a brief time I lived in Indiana mostly as a vagrant, job hopping, migratory type glorified couch decoration staying with friends and family. People talk about Mexicans migrating to the states to work and how they will all pile up in the same house, well,...

Yesterday I was standing in my yard and found an empty Marlboro cigarette pack that looked like it had been chewed in half. It’s not really uncommon to find random trash in my yard but I can usually figure up a possible origin of said trash. I smoke but, I don’t smoke Marlboro. My nearest neighbor doesn’t smoke, and my next nearest neighbors are a couple of hundred feet away. It wouldn’t be outside of the range of possibilities for one of my cats to chew it in half. One of them, in particular, I’m sure would have hunted it, he’s Just creative like that. What it reminded me of was a time when I was a child that I went outside to play, I was five I think, and as I played in the yard I started to find headless kittens and their heads as well. Quite gruesome I guess for a five year old. I went to tell my mother and she cleaned them up. She told me later that someone had done it to revile her because they thought she was a witch.  I’ve heard of things where in medieval times people woul...

The weight of a crap ton and a regular ton is so insignificant that there is literally, with only the slightest inclination to figurative, no difference at all. The only difference between a crap ton and a ton of anything else is the measure of ridiculous proportions of how much would be needed in logical quantities of a particular item. For instance, a ton of scrap metal in the back of a truck would be considered reasonable so it would be called “a ton of scrap metal.” On the other hand, a ton of light bulbs would be disproportionate to the needs of anyone who would use light bulbs so it would be safe to say that if you had a ton of light bulbs it wouldn’t be outside the range of reasonable speech to say, “a crap ton of light bulbs.” Really, it doesn’t have to even weigh the equivalent of a ton it just has to be more of something than reasonably needed by any amount of persons, places or things,  at any given time. Salutation Pending Johnny R Draper 

I have found that it is a universal concept that in the late of the evening the world winds down and goes to sleep. This is true even for people that work the overnight shifts of the world. During the day shifts the world is alive and awake and that wakefulness is shared with the shift scheduled need of the world but, it is left to the overnight shift to replenish that wakefulness while they themselves are not awake. Though they are awake, they sleep in the sense that they are removed from the hustle and bustle of the needs of the waking world who dreams for those invisible servitors of the night, cloaked in shadow, and rise to find the renewed world that has been left for them. Salutation Pending Johnny R Draper 

Okay. I’m going to go out on a limb here and not research this piece before I write or post it. Due to the holiday’s, work, and illness I haven’t made a blog post in a couple of weeks so, I’m desperate and still don’t really have time to do much needed research. A good edit will be about as good as it gets. Elephants. Have you ever heard anyone make the statement “to address the elephant in the room?” it simply means that there is some kind of problem that exists that no one wants to address. Its big and everyone can see it, but no one wants to say it. Elephants are generally peaceful creatures that are not prone to aggression unless provoked and this is usually the result of a stampeding heard that has been spooked. There is always someone who wants to spook the elephants or address the elephant in the room. If you are one of these people you should keep in mind that spiritually speaking, elephants represent peace so, try to take into consideration the repercussions of your actions wh...

I believe the brain and its thought processer, the mind, are far to vast and powerful for one simple personality. A single person should grow and develop multiple personalities for the sake of creative complexity. These multiples don’t have to be a disorder or a negative impact in any way. They can be your own fun little friends that live inside your head and make you smile. WARNING!!! Creating multiple personalities can cause symptoms of severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia, psychopathy, sociopathy. So, remember to tread lightly and develop positive attributes in these splinters of the psyche. You can even give them names and I’m sure there’s a “how to” guide. Salutation Pending Johnny R Draper, etc 

I never really was one to run the railroad tracks or hobo trains. That was something the my uncles did, mostly for fun and to cut a little time of a walk that probably wouldn’t have took long any way, which brings it back to just being fun.  For a while though I found a little peace and comfort in stopping at the corner store, buying a cigar, and walking the track puffing on it. Back then a thirteen year old could buy tobacco products no problem and walking the tracks was a place where I could smoke it and no one could see.  The backroad I walked crossed back and forth over the tracks but there where places where you couldn’t see the tracks from the road.  Sometimes I would set on the bank and watch the train go by and count the cars. Most of the time there were one hundred and two, sometimes a few more, sometimes a few less.  I never tried to catch a ride on one though.  Jumping back off, by process, required a nice cushy briar patch to jump into. I hate briars...

There are some thing, some styles, and just some ways in the way of fads that should never come back. The mullet is a good example of this. Parents don’t let your children get mullets. Let them shave it off, dye it green, whatever. The flat-top had more depth than the mullet. Disco. There’s another one. Nothing really great or enlightening ever came from disco. It was more like that pause you hear down in the sewers while you wait for the next person to flush. It was a decade left empty by the hippies once they figured out that they were adults and had to get a job. I’ve found that the things that have had the long-lasting effects are those things that no one can find fault in. Jazz for instance. You can hear elements of jazz in any style of music. Its that feeling of everything falling apart while melodically still being held together by an underlying pattern.  Chess is another one. The geometric strategy of this ancient game can be seen in so many modern games and, I bet you will...

It says plainly in the instruction manual for a kerosene heater, for those who take time to read it, that you are supposed to turn off the heater before refilling it. I will admit, I have often violated this safety precaution. Now, I will share with you my observations of this infraction. Each time you squeeze the hand pump the flame rises about a quarter to a half inch. I imagine if you pumped it fast enough you could probably raise the flame to a significant length or intensity necessary to make the heater explode. So, if you do this, and I don’t recommend it, then you should probably go slow with it. Fire is probably most people’s favorite element; bonfires, cooking food, keeping warm. Water, I imagine would be the second; swimming, bathing, or just cooling down in general. People who prefer air tend to be…. breathing it so, enough said about that and, there probably isn’t a farmer out there who doesn’t have a lithomancer’s appreciation of the earth with passive regards to the other...

The word heliotheism comes to mind today. Heliotheism encompasses any religion where the central deity is the sun. Now, most of these religions were developed by desert people who probably didn’t see much in the way of winter but, every night for them would have been cold because the desert doesn’t really hold on to that humidity when the sun goes down so, the rising of the sun every morning would be a blessing.  The seasonal withholding of that great fiery orb Is even more special. I recall some February’s where the sun was obscured by clouds for so long that one might begin to forget it even existed then, alas, there it is bringing life to everything; flowers, tree blooms, the thawing of streams that they might flow freely and loud.   Mountain or tropical cultures, not lacking in appreciation of the sun’s rise, would be more inclined to designate tree gods or cave gods, etc., so on and, so forth. As for myself. On mornings such as this one was, I do find an extreme appr...

As the song goes, people are strange when you’re a stranger but, keep in mind that they are strangers themselves to you. I’ve heard it said about snakes that they are just as afraid of us as we are of them. I’ve found this to be true of spiders as well, and even doves, deer, skunks, people. Either way, we all share in common things with each other in that we have so much, not on common. One way to break the ice when faced with strangers is to do something really smart, or do something really stupid. Smarter is better but, stupid is more fun and its easier.  Salutation Pending  Johnny R Draper

If a skunk runs when I come out the door, then it is clear that it knew that it was in violation of the laws that exist between nature and domestication.  So then If, while in retreat it sprays me, then that is an act of aggression. A blatant attack. Not only has it disregarded those laws by coming to my door and eating my cat food, it has also committed an act of war.  There are a few dead ones laying on the road leading to me house. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t laugh a little inside to see their awkward barreled bodies laying bloated in the road with their pathetic little feet sticking up in the air. I just love the smell of dead skunk in the morning.  Salutation Pending  Johnny R Draper 

I remember the scrawling’s upon the walls, Of men’s and women’s bathroom stalls. What lay, left behind in the porcelain throne, Was only a bit cleaner. The grain of soft metal, Were hot water falls, only through,  And in the imagination, precipitation,  In a field of twisted stick figure angels,  Proscribed to a swirling flush and brush strokes divine. And I read, as I painted, over these words, Of these profits and prophetesses, Trolling over their etchings Of the obscene; the antics of their blessings void.

I read somewhere once that Goths are people who are darkly inclined and tend to like spooky stuff. If you are so darkly inclined then you’re are apt to wear black make-up and have a septum piercing. You might read horror stories and wish that every day was Halloween. In fact, the make-up style does indeed make every day Halloween for you. There is even a test you can take to see if you are a true Goth but, I don’t feel that a test is necessary. You are either Goth or you’re not.  If you are so darkly inclined you might would find yourself with a strange collection of things that others would find odd or spooky. Your personal collection space might be filled with lots of little Knick knacks to take pride in brooding over; medieval torture devices, gargoyle statues, pet spiders, and all sorts of darkly inclined collectibles.  One in particular that I am fond of, whether darkly inclined or not, would be a strait jacket. I have always had a fondness for this garment of the clinica...

To find peace in some act or activity, whether voluntary or involuntary, is to take comfort at a personal level throughout one’s body and soul. Involuntarily, driving from one place to another with purpose, you might take comfort in finding that the trip was without fraught. Voluntarily, a “spot” of tea and a good book might provide this euphoric comfort.   Some, like myself, may take comfort in a hard rain on a tin roof at night that offers a peaceful sleep unencumbered by the ambient noises of nature within the night, providing that this storm doesn’t develop into some tempest that carry’s away the roof taking comfort with it. To accept that the earth moves away from the sun seasonally, is also to take comfort in a warm fire which provides the secondary comfort of fueling said fire while travelers to your door take comfort in seeing the smoke rise from your chimney.  I myself take comfort sometimes in removing my glasses to provide my sense of vision as well as the oper...