Do you ever feel like you’re missing things?  Just walking by people on the street, when you hear a passing line in their conversation?  Maybe they are top-notch people having a fantastic conversation.  I always imagine they came from someplace with an unforgettable atmosphere, and they will always remember that place as they piece it into the story of their lives and all the places they had lived, and that they are going someplace where something really unexpected is going to happen and it will turn into a great story.

I feel like I am missing all the lives I’m not living.  What is happening elsewhere in the world?

When you see someone walking down the street, you always assume they know people.  Their friends, the people they meet up with and share their life with, are somewhere else, and that person will eventually meet up with them.  But what if there was a person who didn’t know anyone else?  They were a person that fell into a very specific pocket where they lived life without knowing anyone.  If there were such a person, no one would know about it.  Because everyone who saw them would think their friends are someplace else, just like we always do.

That’s what makes connections hard.  We always assume that everyone else already has a life, so there needs to be some special reason for why the lines between our lives would be crossed, and we would suddenly have more than a diplomatic connection too.  It is a curious thing how friends are made; really if you ever try very hard, you won’t end up friends with someone.  Somehow your friends just happen.

Do you ever think, maybe I would be great friends with the person I’m standing next to, I just don’t know that?  It’s like if C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien sat next to each other on a train one day, awkwardly glancing at each other a few times, before they each got off at their stops, and then they never saw each other again.  Has that ever happened to us?

There are lots of things to wonder about, like the daily life of Chinese farmers, people who raise goats in the mountains, people who live on islands and see the beach everyday, and everything else that happens in other countries, since the story we get in newspapers is never the story we would feel if we were there. 

It’s a horrible feeling to have missed something. 

Princeton: Come now, Frederick, what do you think of talking?

Frederick: Talking? What do I think of talking?

Princeton: You heard me fine. What do you think?

[Pause. Frederick thinks.]

Frederick: I certainly do have thoughts about talking. But I don’t think I’ve ever spoken them, so that my words were literally recoiling on themselves.  To talk—and to assess that one is doing so!

Princeton: Well, if these thoughts have been waiting in the dock ’til now, I’m sure they’ll be glad to finally be free.

Frederick: Talking is a necessity only for the right kinds of moments.  I find that most people talk as though there is some game they would be losing if they didn’t.  I’ve never shared their assumption, and there are many people I’ve often wished would suddenly realize it and wander off in some direction other than mine.

Princeton: Ah, what a miser you are! I was hoping you were going to present a more gilded first-look at the act of producing our auditory children, the words we speak.  You almost make me tremble in my boots at your silently calculated fury.

Frederick: Oh, well I like talking to you.  You seem to get it.  Every conversation with you seems to have a purpose.  I never get bored during our talks.

Princeton: Why thank you.

Frederick: What do you think of talking, Prince?  As long, that is, as we wanted to keep on with the delightful effects of our self-referential analysis.

Princeton: Ah, how splendidly you phrase that!  Speaking of delightful effects.  And that, my gloomy companion, sums up my sentiments as well I ever could have.  Talking allows us to invade reality at the mere ‘flick of the wrist’, as it were, and it seems almost insane that the power is actually our own.

Frederick: Insane? What do you mean insane?

Princeton: I mean we all find it would be surprising beyond degree if an animal began talking to us.  But what is so different about our ability to talk?  Is it not just as astonishing? 

Frederick: I think the talking animal would be surprising because it had never talked before, and then suddenly began talking.

Princeton: Perhaps.  But again, perhaps it is still so that people don’t really find the pure joy of creating ideas in the air at will every time they go to do so.

Frederick: I will grant as much. Do go on, I find your enthusiasm quite entertaining.

Princeton: A show to you, am I?  Very well, then, I’ll continue.  You can see I do like talking quite a bit more than you do.  And it is not only for the very fact of talking, but the sheer improbability of speaking correctly that makes it so much fun. 

Frederick: Grammar?

Princeton: No, not grammar!  Grammar is only to keep the plebian class under some sort of necessary control, but so many people think that they become kings if they know a bit about it.  It’s really not the point.  The fun of talking is that we don’t know what other people will say, and then how we’ll respond.  So we are routinely and continually posed with situations in which it is uniquely improbable that we will say just what we should and as we should.  It’s the quick find-and-capture of the exact words we want that make a successful run while talking so very extremely exciting.

Frederick: “Very extremely exciting”?

Princeton: As you can see, that run was far from what it could have been.

[Laughing]

Frederick: Indeed! 

Princeton: But now we come to the point, the place in the woods where the two roads diverge.  There are two kinds of people in life.  Some think that talking is the natural way of things, and that silence needs some special reason for happening.  Others, such as yourself, are the opposite. You find talking to need the special reason.

Frederick: I would say that is precisely it.  For me, silence is the sweet and savory default.

Princeton: Yes, while I on the other hand am quite the talking-kind.  I am glad that by happenstance you find pleasure in our conversations, but really I don’t have much control over that.  Often I have no idea where things are going to go, and if I think of something I go just on the whim of it.

Frederick: Yes, but you still assume things about talking that make it so conversation never heads off the right track.  Some people will start conversations about minutiae, and have no tendency to steer it towards anything worthwhile.  It was as if mere noise was the point.

Princeton: I do sympathize with you, dear Frederick, if only ever so moderately.  There are several ways a person’s own words can relate to him or herself, and some ways will more naturally turn themselves into good conversations than others.  Some people brazenly bear themselves honestly through their words; others use words to hide.  Some people create themselves and become truly alive when they talk; others slowly cease to exist by saying things just because it is—or rather because they think it is—expected of them.

Frederick:  Now that is some sweet and savory music to my ears.  This is very illuminating. 

Princeton: I’m glad I’ve finally hit my stride.  Alas, we mostly can never tell what a person’s words mean to them.  If we guessed, we’d probably always be wrong.  But if the conversation ends up a good one, I think it is safe to say they have a good relationship with their words. 

Frederick: This is illuminating, Prince, but tiresome.  And all this time we have been erring on the side of talking, as if we could debate verbally how valuable is silence!  Let us then give him his time, and see what the worth of a good round of talking is next to the serene and unbroken world of silence.

People say they are in a ‘serious relationship’ if they are committed and thinking about marriage.  But I like silly people, so the sillier a relationship is, the closer it will be to marriage.  So I might say, “At that point things got really silly, but eventually it didn’t work out.”  And then I’ll tear up.

Why do people say they are ‘serious’?  I can imagine a couple at a fancy restaurant, and the girl solemnly cuts her steak, and slowly lifts the bite to her mouth.  Then the waitress asks if they’d like to see the dessert menu, and the boy turns his blank gaze upon her and in a single tone whispers, ‘No.  We wouldn’t.’  Then he turns back to the girl and she says, ‘Today I found a ten dollar bill in the street.’  He murmurs, ‘Mmm’ while staring at his water glass.  Then a single tear falls down his cheek.

‘What’s up with them?’ another server asks.  Their waitress responds, ‘They’re in a serious relationship.’ 

UNLEASH THE SILLY IN YOUR SOUL.  GOODNIGHT.

Sure being legally blind is bad, but just imagine being illegally blind.  Then not only are you blind, but you have to live your whole life on the run from the authorities. 

Four out of five experts agree, intelligence is sexy. Many conclude from this that the fifth expert wasn’t intelligent.

I had a planner. All I wrote down was the day I was going to get rid of that planner. That’s all planners are good for.

The safest place to stay on vacation is at a moatel. The ones with alligators are a little more expensive, but I tend to think it’s worth it.

Sometimes I have deep conversations on the phone at coffee shops because I want to share my life with someone else, as well as with five random strangers around me.

I feel a meaningful connection with other people in the elavator. They are the people with whom we rise and fall.

Drowsy time. Goodnight!

There is a sense in which we are all hidden – who I am, beneath what I say, is something only I shall know.  In another sense, however, we all helplessly give ourselves away with our actions.  What we do is what we thought worth doing.  The devotion of your life cannot be hidden.

You cannot just open up - say, to someone you met that day – and say, ‘Here I am, this is the core of me.’  Your words may tread water, but they will ultimately plop down into the abyss.  Where you have gone, the people you have seen, are all a part of who you think you are.  We wear many masks through many experiences.  You cannot take one mask off in just one scene and say ‘This is me’.  One must know of all the masks, and then it must be explained to them who was underneath each and every one of them. 

Every book is written for a particular someone to read it.  It is that someone, that specific perspective, that will unlock and understand it.  Many times when I read something and don’t get it, I think maybe I was the wrong person, rather than it being the wrong book. 

Maybe it is the same way with God.  What did the Saints see?  What specific perspective did they take to things, and what did they find?  Experiences are locked.  It is up to your perspective to unlock them.  Otherwise, you will live in a world of untouchable mysteries, only aware of their presence, but not their content.  You will not even have the emotion of missing them, only a vague feeling of suspense, that if you had known them, you might have missed them.  But unless and until you actually know those experiences, you won’t miss them.  You can never be another person, and miss their beloved the same way.  In that way you will miss many experiences, but you won’t miss them at all.

The most intimate encounter you can have with someone is them lying on their kitchen floor, in their pajamas, wrapped in a soft thin blanket making squirrel noises as they open the fridge murmuring, ’Oooooo me so hungyyy’.  This is the essence of sharing life together; how could one conceivably become closer to someone after that?  Indeed, I have never stopped being good friends with someone after that moment in the friendship.  I encourage you to try to have that moment, and then unbecome friends. It’s not possible.

The idea of police officers is such a negative one.  They go around looking for problems.  It’s a very glass half-empty kind of idea.  To counteract the negative effect of police officers, I think we should have reverse police officers who drive around trying to notice people being good citizens.  If they notice you merging to let someone onto the highway, they will pull you over and give you a reward.  They see you picking up litter, you will be awarded a $20 gift card to Best Buy.  And so on.  It will be just like real Community Chest cards.  I think this would make the world a much better place.

If I were a judge I would probably daydream a lot. And then I would snicker to myself about what I was thinking just when key testimony came out in the case, and it would seem very inappropriate and awkward, and I would come to, and try to look serious and make everyone think I hadn’t really laughed.

When I watch movies I like to think of all the movies as one story, and so each person is really the same person as they were in all the other movies, but this is just a different part of their life.  So Matt Damon was saved from being killed by Tom Hanks in World War II, and then he went on to rob casinos with Brad Pitt.  After that he decided to sign up to become a hit man for the government program Treadstone, but he got amnesia in the Mediterranean Sea and had to run from Treadstone all over the world while trying to find his identity.  Wow.  What a life.  I think he definitely ‘earned it’, Tom Hanks. 

So Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t really die at the end of Titanic. He just entered another dream state. 

Remember that it’s crazy there are any human beings at all.  I’m off to see what adventures the evening has planned.  Farewell, explorers!