afterimages

perhaps, after enough time has passed,
after enough memories have died
in abject martyrdom
and slow starvation,
you will,
at last,
be gone.
gone from inside of me,
gone from the things i do and say
and believe.
and then,
remembering can become
a choice,
instead of this impulsive affliction
that robs me,
still,
of breath and wholeness.

when we look at stars, we don't see them as they are. we only see their light. polaris could die tomorrow, but we would wake up the next day, and the next, and see it just as it was, never realizing that all we were seeing was leftover light from a lifeless source. 431 years later, awareness would hit, and we would finally understand.
i tire of looking at this dead star's light, tire of thinking how similar it looks to other stars in the night sky.
you are not as far as polaris, but still this waiting is so hard. it is harder because i know; i felt death walk past, and yet your light still teases me, taunts me, reminds me of the way you looked, the way things might have been.
but i have little choice. so i wait.
for darkness.
for peace.
for the hole in the sky to reveal itself as a hole and not the light into which i still can't look.

you were so beautiful.
the light is still beautiful.

but it is a hopeless vapor, and i will celebrate the day it is exhausted.

laughter is the best medicine?

i love used bookstores. not just because the books are cheaper, although there IS that. but sometimes, just sometimes, it feels like you're sharing something with someone, someone you don't even know. getting a glimpse into their life, their literature, and occasionally something even more intimate, their beliefs, hopes and dreams exposed for a few brief seconds, hidden in the pages of my latest literary find.
today, however, it also made me just a little sad.
the book, poking off hte edge of the shelf as though calling to me, was Shel Silverstein's "falling up".
i positively adore Shel. his poems always make me smile, sometimes make me laugh, and generally remind me of all the innocent and simple things that i share with the rest of the world, or at least the parts that really matter.
on the inside back cover, in pen, accompanying the picture of a child's small legs whose torso and above had vanished into the place where the pages meet, the following:

the end of the book
no use to look
for any more, my dear,
'cause if you try finding
some more in the binding,
you may just... disappear.

bye bye.

S.S.

and in the front, in the same pen, but different penmanship:

For sacha
I remember how you
laughed yourself sillier
and sillier...
Ed, '98

the first question i want to ask myself is not how this treasure came to find itself deposited with so many other common things on the shelf of a used bookstore. it's a relevant question, just not the first.
no, first, i would have to wonder.

what could have happened to sacha? what was it that caused this little girl who laughed herself sillier and sillier with Shel to say goodbye to something so personal? there are so many possibilities, so many questions, so many reasons it could be.

i sonder if she loved it still. if giving it up was difficult, one of those things that was necessary. i wonder if the few dollars for which she traded it and whatever she bought with them was worthy of such a sacrifice, or if it was even a sacrifice to begin with. perhaps she just "grew up", with all the ugly connotations that come with that affliction, and decided she was too old for it. perhaps she just stopped caring and hawked the book for enough scratch to score some of that fine, fine saskatoon meth that we've been hearing so much about these days. as much as i want to believe that it was with a few small tears and a little heartfelt reluctance that she relinquished it, i also want to believe that some things are never sold, and that pricelessness still exists.

i don't really know, but it makes me afraid. afraid for sacha. afraid for all of us. are we all so busy striving for adulthood, for responsibility, for our own greedy satisfaction, that we've forgotten how to laugh ourselves silly? do we now think it undignified? uncouth? just not done?

today, we take a lesson from david, who was more than willing to be undignified before his God if that was what it took. today, we take a lesson from Jesus, who told us that unless we come as children, we don't get in. today, we take a lessonf from sacha, who, i hope, has still retained that joy, that love, because the world needs it all, and if it can be sold for 7 bucks to a bookstore on 8th street, then we might be in more trouble than we think.

the poem she bookmarked:

dancin' in the rain

so what if it drizzles
and dribbles and drips?
i'll splash in the garden,
i'll dance on the roof.
let it rain on my skin,
it can't get in - -
i'm waterproof.

smile. laugh. dance on the roof in the rain. remember joy and love and life.
and share them.

of all the things i fear...

my friend diane pointed something out to me once, and it seems valid.
i'm afraid of my own happiness.

this, however, is not without cause, or even justifiable excuse.

in the absense of happiness, there is more room for hope. the more miserable one is, the more their life can only improve. when you're at the bottom, or seem to be at least, you are secure in the confidence that it can't get any worse, and that the longer things remain poor, the better your odds become that things will be better tomorrow than they are today.

this, however, is not true of happiness.

instead, when there is an abundance of happiness, there is the prospect of loss. there is the fear that at some point, this newfound joy will disappear. the odds that were working for you when you were miserable now work against you, telling you that it can't last forever, that balance must be, at some point in the future, restored.

and then, there is a new component that, in the wake of happiness, leaves you not only with the feelings themselves, but the new void, the lack, that comes from missing the happiness you lost.

in a smaller, less significant way, it's a little like a child living in a third-world country. if you're born there, you honestly don't know, a lot of the time, how completely miserable your life is. you know it's hard, and you know that you cry sometimes, and you know that you're tired, but without the basis for any kind of comparison, you don't really have any idea, and because it's your only reality, the only one with which you are and likely ever will be familiar, you simply accept it as the way the world is.
if, however, you were to be suddenly transported to canada, and integrated in a canadian foster home for a few months, maybe a year, whatever... suddenly, you'd be aware of so much more. and, don't get me wrong, the place you came from would definitely increase your gratitude for the place in which you find yourself. but with that gratitude would come, i'm almost certain, a strong lack of desire to return to your origins.
now, at that point, we take you and ship you back, and you resume your life as it was. instead of having food all the time, you're starving again. instead of an allowance, you're back rooting through the dump for things you can either eat or sell. instaed of the nikes and the gap jeans, you're back in rags. instead of comforters and mattresses, you're sleeping on a dirt floor covered with bugs.
when you wake up in the morning, walk however many miles you have to in bare feet, getting dizzy from the heat and the exertion, i bet there'd be some bitterness. because now you know how other people have it. that's how people in this country, despite being in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, can still be miserable... because we're so aware of all those out there who have it better and don't deserve it. it would have been better to never have been brought here at all, rather than to be introduced to an incredible life and then returned to a place where that life is no longer even a remote possibility.

anyway, what i'm trying to do, i guess, is find a way around all of this. a way to have good feelings without being terrified that they're going to go away at some point in the near future. a way to have good things without feeling a subconcious need to sabbotage them just to restore a life that's understandable. happiness should not be a synonym for anxiety.

but it is.

connect the dots...

examining humanity again... and it seems that there is something in these thoughts that is linked on some important sublevel just beyond my recognition... something about the collective unconscious of humankind, perhaps... i dunno... give it all a spin, see what you come up with.

it is not our greatest trials that tax us beyond our strength. in fact, we would be largely unaware of the power and potential of our strength were it not for these circumstances of greatest tension. they are the times that throw into starkest relief our resiliance, our determination, our vitality. without them, we would languish in mediocrity, and seldom be aware of how meaningless we had become.
but, in almost tragic irony, while it is the giant opposition that makes us overcome, it is the menial trivialities of life that often overcome us, consume us, waste us.
consider goliath... how confidently, how courageously david overcame him. huge, looming, and altogether manageable. then consider two other things... how it must have looked from goliath's perspective as an insignificant gnat toppled his might, and how mundane, by comparison, the things were which actually troubled david. he could handle a giant because it was obvious. but lust, depression, insecurity, abandonment... these things haunted him, sapped his strength, poisoned his life. a hurricane might tear the roof off a house, which can be rebuilt in a day... but a long, persistant wind will eventually erode a mountainside, and the will needed to live on it.
i love the challenge of a good fight, of a battle of wits, something to which i can rise to find myself more formidable than i might have thought the previous day. but meanwhile, i'm being slowly killed by all the petty necessities of this world... saving money, finding a career, fixing my car for the umpteenth time just to find it working just as miserably, trying to be myself in the light of opposition, trying so diligently not to disappoint anyone, working within the confines of the way everyone else thinks because that's the only way to get ahead in a society that doesn't really belong to me...
this. is the real enemy.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

rules are for those with no intuition. or perhaps, those who have not yet learned how to harness it's potential. children are told to look both ways before crossing the street. because they don't have the patience for evaluation, because they lack the interest in judgment, because they simply haven't learned the reason, so the rule must be given as a bandaid until the concept is understood. once they know that traffic can kill them, the admonition can be dispensed with. but we must not, as a society, live on this surface level... we must, at some point, abandon the lid in favor of the contents, or they will go bad in the back of the fridge. and people are, by and large, more reluctant by the day to abandon the easy comfort of a few rules for the effort of digging beneath them. that's how fundamentalists are born. that's how religions are destroyed. that's how philosophy and spirituality and understanding and free thought are ruined. we're living on guidelines, and forgetting why they were ever put in place. and every time someone does something without knowing why, just because it's the way to do things, we lose something.
i popped some popcorn the other night, and even within the already extremely comfortable constructs of the microwave and the bag, the guy at the table in the hotel kitchen told me to just press the popcorn button and it would take care of the rest. and it did. and the concept that, at some point in the future, all we'll ever have to do to get popcorn is press the popcorn button, makes me sick to my stomach.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

sometimes, everything i see seems so important. not just important, imperative. vital. common junk takes on meaning that it doesn't have... like the close-ups in csi, when they want to draw your attention to a specific detail that bears on their investigation. it doesn't matter what it is... a paper cup, a chip bag, a word on a poster, a few twigs scattered on a front lawn... it all stands out, everything screaming for my deliberate and individual attention.
but everything is certainly not important... and thinking this way serves as pure and dangerous distraction... when everything is imbued with such necessity, what is truly critical escapes in the shadows cast by too many figures on the stage. not to mention the sense of power it gives... seeing everything for it's potential instead of what it truly is... it's like knowing that everything in the world revolves around the strange hum you just heard from a sock on the highway... it's absurd, but compelling, and all but impossible to resist, because that current, that heady vibration, regardless of the items to which it chooses to affix itself in your eyes, is real, and beats beneath the very core of humanity... it's the thrum of the voice of mankind, it's the world's potential, and feeding on it makes one feel nearly omnipotent. a dangerous and stupid way to feel, but exhilirating when it happens.
i want things to mean something when it's important for them to do so. that way, and only that way, will i really make some kind of progress.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

sooooo... i'm not sure what any of that means, i'm just musing... although the bit about the popcorn really does terrify me... what if we all become like that some day? just press the "fill in the blank" button, and there it is? my lazy nature yearns for it, but at the same time, it's repulsive to every part of me that still thinks, which, on some days at least, is a goodish percentage.

anyway, have a good one, and perhaps i'll be back sooner than later, for once.