Inevitability II

"When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool." - Achebe

********************

One day, hundreds of years from now, we will all be tired dogs on front porches; the air will be thick and soft; and we'll lust after some semblance of cool wind with our little wet noses.

********************

We can only hope.

********************

Only those who fear silence should fear death.

Murphy's Law

I just don't know if I can take it any longer.

Pandora's Box

Of all the things we lose when we feel as though we have lost everything, we still have hope. And of all things, hope is the most injurious, depraved, and tragic, the most unfortunate.

"It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets." - Dickens

********************

Having just renewed my prescription today, I had to think about my life, unfortunate as that may be to do. I hate having to rely on medication to make me feel normal. I don't even know what normal is anymore. How can I? I didn't feel normal before, and now I have nothing on which to base my idea of normality. And the fact that I have to live the rest of my life taking this medication and feeling this way and seeing doctors to make me feel "normal," to keep me sane, just plain sucks. But I suppose the alternative would be worse. At least now while taking this medication, if not for my own benefit, I can possibly make better the lives of the people I love and whom I keep close to me since they don't have to deal with how I used to be, at least not to the same degree.

The past few days I haven't been able to sleep, and I've noticed that I haven't needed to. I used to like this feeling, to be able to stay up all night and day and get things done I wouldn't be able to otherwise. But now I know why I feel this way sometimes, and what will certainly follow. And frankly, that scares me to death. Sometimes knowing what will happen in the future, even the near future, is more frightening than not knowing. Then again, there are instances when knowing what will happen in the future can be relieving. There is, of course, one thing about the future about which I wish I knew now. I still have my hope, but we all know that hope could ultimately lead to more pain. But I can't give it up. It's the only thing that I have anymore.

Happiness

"I'm upset.
Happiness is not a fish that you can catch.
Imagination can't resist
this laziness
that pins you down. Get on your knees.
Everyone you meet today
is feeling useless and ashamed." - OLP

And indeed there will be time...

"Do I dare
Disturb the universe?"

********************

Settling for good enough is not good enough.

Ich will dich erfreut machen.
Ich werde dich erfreut machen, egal wie lang es nimmt.

The tragic truth...

Love conquers all things except itself.

Maybe I'm just tired..

No matter how much they depress me more than I already am, As Tall as Lions might very well be my new favorite band. (Along with, of course, The Spill Canvas and Copeland). I just can't stop listening to ATAL.

Some of my favs--
Kickin' Myself (acoustic)
Maybe I'm Just Tired
Love Love Love (Love Love)

http://www.purevolume.com/astallaslions

And I'm pretty excited about this band's new cd. Even though I doubt I'll have the money to get it when it comes out, not having a job and all.

http://www.purevolume.com/inkwell

********************

Purple and black. The past depresses me. The future scares the hell out of me.

Long Line of Leavers

For the second time in my life, I heard voices. Well, one voice. It said the same thing I heard when I first heard it in high school. I'm here alone, so it was quite odd.

And I'm beginning to see things again. This can't be good.

********************

For some reason, I started thinking about two people tonight that I haven't thought about in years. One was from Ohio, the other from Texas -- the only two funerals I've ever been to in my life. She was a friend's mom with cancer. He was a friend and only fifteen. Being in the presence of the lifeless body of a person you knew quite well when alive has to be the strangest feeling in the world. It seems odd to me that a dead body looks nothing like the body of someone sleeping. If there ever was any proof that there is such thing as a soul, it's when you look at someone who is suddenly soulless.

"Thank God I'm back in my car, and drivin' home, and drivin' home.
'Cause the air was thin and so cold back in there.
It was my first time, won't be my last time.
And the questions rise, expectations fall in light of it all.
There aren't words to say; words aren't remembered, but presence is." - CC

Near the establishment of the hour...

The earth shall inherit the meek.

There was silence. Bright silence. There was nothing anyone could say, or wanted to. That's when we knew it was over.

Providence

Fate and destiny are excuses to be lazy, reasons not to do what one has to to get what one wants.

Inevitability

"There is nothing certain except the unforeseen."

"The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is unchangeable or certain."

-B. Francis

Solitude: sweet absence of faces...

As unlikely as it may be, if a person were to be born blind and deaf and mute, without the ability to feel anything, but could breath and be fed through a tube, would they really be alive? What the hell would that be like? Could the person have thoughts? And what would be even more interesting to think about, what if someone cured that person of all their problems and the person could see, hear, and make sounds, could finally feel things, but only for one day, after which the person died?

The Unbearble Lightness of Being

Damn, I love me some Kundera.

********************

Why do I love cemeteries so much? Riding my bike by one tonight, I couldn't help but slow down and look at some of the graves. What's the point of these things anyway? People visit these graves and mourn their loved ones for a while, but eventually those people themsleves die or move on, and the graves and headstones, like the bodies years before, are left there to rot and be beaten by time's all-encompassing ugly mallet. Sure, if I were to lose a loved one, I would want to visit their grave and mourn. But, really, what's the point?

Anyway. In the back of this cemetery were a long row of graves with tiny headstones, all of which were children's and babies' graves. Now, that is depressing. Not just that these infants died and never experienced life (or maybe they were lucky enough not to have to); and not that these infants' graves were in the back of this cemetery, tucked away in over-grown weeds; but what is truly depressing is that this is proof that a person's life really doesn't matter. While I didn't see any graves old enough (the oldest one I saw of these infants was from 1950), if a baby were to die during birth, say, 100 years ago, they'd probably be dead now anyway. The world went on after they died, much like it would have gone on if they were to have lived and died later. Nothing really would have changed had they actually lived. The world would essentially be the same. The people whose lives they would have touched would probably be dead. The world would be no different had they gone on to live *coughcough* full and meaningful lives. Sure, they could have found the cure for cancer, but what would that really matter? The people they would have saved because of that cure would die eventually anyway. If the people they would have saved would have ended world hunger, all the people no longer starving would die one day as well. And it would just keep going on. And the world would still be the same: a long series of sunrises and sunsets, of births and deaths, all of which ultimately mean nothing. Kundera, of course, being the beautiful genius he is, put it best:

". . . the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing."

"Einmal ist keinmal . . .. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all."

If nothing else, cemeteries fascinate me because of the fact that they are a sort of tangible proof of what Kundera says. Nothing we do in life really matters, and there are the graves of forgotten people to prove it.

********************

I still plan to invent the time machine some day. It really doesn't matter when I do it, just as long as I do it before I die.

********************

I really need to stop watching Hitch.

It all comes down to this...

If there's even the slightest chance, I can't say that I'm wasting my time.

********************

People living in the woods? Clothes hanging on strings tied to trees. Empty water and beer bottles, trash bags, shopping carts leaning upside down against trees without wheels. People actually living in these woods with make-shift bed-sheet and plastic-tarp tents. Shady men walking into the woods with even shadier women. A bike trail ride next to said woods and strange people. I thought this kind of stuff only existed in movies. Odd.

********************

Usually, when a person says he's losing his mind, it means he has had a temporary brain fart. When I say I'm losing my mind, I really mean it. Each day my memory is a book of photographs, filling with snapshots of every second and everything I do and say that day. As the day goes on, photos are taken out of that book and burned. By nightfall I have a handful of photographs with which I would have a very difficult time making any type of comprehensible story. And why can't I ever remember the definition of a word that I've known most of my life? Or even more importantly, why can't I ever think of a word when I want to? Losing one's memory is a depressing inevitability. I just wish I were older and could blame it on old age or Alzheimer's.

********************

My life would make a very odd movie. Boring, but odd.

The Quiet Things that No One Ever Knows

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease." - R. D. Laing

Life is only a distraction from our greater goal.

If I carried around a penny for every time I died, literally or metaphorically, I would be the richest man on earth, with the biggest bag of pennies on earth. But I've got to tell you, I think that last penny would really kill me.

What's left to lose...

"Never deprive someone of hope; it may be all they have." - H. Jackson Brown Jr.

"A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past." - Eric Hoffer

"Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them." - Updike

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell." - Edna St. Vincent Millay

Rage, Rage

It is certainly a fact that no one really reads poetry anymore. And it is also a fact that the American school system is, to put it mildly, horrible. And on a rerun of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, I found these facts to be once again confirmed. I'm not sure how old this episode was, but that's irrelevant.

For the $125,000 question, the contestant was asked something like (I don't remember the exact wording here) 'what poet wrote the line "Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'? I didn't see all of the answers (by the time I turned it on, the contestant already used his 50/50) but the last two answers left were Elizabeth Bishop (I believe) and Dylan Thomas. The fact that the contestant had to use his 50/50 for this one was already disconcerting, but what bothered me most is that someone would have such a hard time answering this question. He was really sweating in that hot seat. Also, how could this be the $125,000 question? $16,000 I could see. Maybe even $32,000, but not $125,000.

Like I said, no one really reads poetry anymore, so the fact that he probably didn't read the poem for his own intellectual benefit doesn't bother me much. But what does bother me is that our school system is so horrible that someone wouldn't know this, wouldn't have studied it in high school, at least. I mean, come on, this is perhaps the most famous villanelle of all time. This is the villanelle to which almost all villanelles are compared. Seriously, how sad is that? Really?

Unfortunately, I suppose our school system went gently into that good night long, long ago. On behalf of all poets and English scholars everywhere, I send my apologies to Mr. Thomas. May he rest in peace and hopefully not get too many splinters from all the rolling in his grave he, I'm sure, is doing and will certainly continue to do until something changes in our stupid, ignorant, illiterate country we so proudly call America.

"My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out."

"A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."
--D.T.