Life is smell and touch
Your kids in your arms, their heads against you and inhaling them
The sea on boats and docks with creosote
Your feet in yards against blades of grass mowed
Fires on your skin and lungs exploding memories like throwing glass in
It comes to you like this
Poor is mostly smell, you can smell it if you know it
That is what makes photos so weird, you can take a photo of almost anything and make it look cool but if you feel it, if you smell it, it doesn’t work
That is why we make love in the dark, we take away the feel and smell
We live in the world once and experience it a million times everyday
My wife is a conglomerate of theses senses, I don’t even see her, nor have I ever, it is too weak, to feel her it is different, like libraries of experience. My eyes are lagging and catch up later to the things I like, a most slow indicator of association
The things I remember
When we were over on Stuart, the best part was the smell. I could smell my father, in his sheets and clothes and cabin 3 years gone.
Maybe that is why we like fire so much, it just neutralizes it all like coffee beans at perfume counters, maybe because it is the original smell… we like to think we have passed into new things but we are more primal than one would expect
I smell the sea most and when I am near it… it just feels right
I smell good music, I know that is weird, but I do, when I listen to Andre Laplant’s Le Mal Du Pays I am driving on a road north of Kodiak and the ships and mountains and oceans and ice and rivers are in music, all I have to do is get out of the car and smell it, touch the air and instantly I am there. I take photos of it, but only to remind me of the other
Fingers down halls, and on lampshades and steering wheels-TV remotes, control in all these weird places. In many ways our eyes are dumb and failing to what it really is
The walks out to the point
My kids over and over and over again, I think I can see it now.
(chris do you have that video of my father?)
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