Sometimes I feel like I’m slowly disappearing.  I don’t know.  You talk to enough people eventually you feel like they’re not talking back at anyone.  Why do people like hanging out with someone who isn’t anyone.  I like assertive friends.  Assertive is the wrong word though.  It’s honesty.  I often feel like apologizing to people after I’ve spoken, like being me is actually a job I’ve been assigned that even I didn’t want.  I don’t want to be honest so I string out into a cobweb barely hanging on in the wind, until I have the far off look in a terminal patient’s eyes after their friends have tired of visiting, until they barely come anymore.

Being alone is a good feeling to have if you are actually alone.  To be alone but to feel like someone else is there because their name and picture are on a computer screen is a horrible tragedy, a robbery of the actual emotions of your life. 

The irony in most people’s lives go completely unnoticed because we don’t remember where we’ve been, what we’ve said, the scene when we never thought we’d end up like this.  It is not rattling to find yourself alone, but to find yourself with that feeling, with that thought once more, the one where you realize you’ve accepted certain failures in slow motion.  A young girl walked beside me as I walked back to work from the delivery car, and in a smile she made me realize everything that was wrong with me.  She asked me for a piece of candy and I gave it to her, and she smiled and loved me.  Because that’s how being a child is.  People give you things and you haven’t learned to check your hope, that you should flatten your emotions so that you aren’t let down all the time. 

Don’t be afraid of finding truths you don’t like if you’re all alone; only be afraid if you as a child shows up. 

Can you feel all the tension running through things, the holiness at night, the sinfulness in day, the want for your next conversation to make sense, to talk about things you’ve never talked about that you think everyone should talk about, the fact you’ve forgotten all you felt would make sense in the first place?  It is rare to have your own thought.  Most of the time I just have everyone else’s. 

Because somewhere along the way, I let the world start teaching me everything.  The world taught me to fight, to look out for me first, to think intimately about myself, like I’m an Oz on another planet dictating to this body what to do for reasons I don’t understand.  It taught me to care about my looks.  It taught me to feel good for knowing the inside knowledge of something, and to look down on everyone who doesn’t have that knowledge.  It taught me to try to “find” a wife.  It taught me to rate people by how well they do their job, by whether they would do things the way I do them.  It taught me to forget about people I find boring, that I would rather not be around, like those people don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, since I am the grand scheme of things.

I forgot it’s worth becoming good to not absorb everything I see and hear.  I dipped my toe in the water and the pond was made of ink and now it won’t come off and it’s very hard to forget about the things that you now need an excuse to unlearn, an excuse that can’t be explained in conversation, that feeling you get when you sit down with yourself as a child. 

I’m still trying to string this all together.  It seems so hard to connect things, they fly in from all over.  Most of the time when I’m thinking about how to think about my life I end up thinking I shouldn’t, but then I realize that I will revert back to however I normally think about life, and that current is one that tends toward nothing.  I try on a different personality with everyone I meet and none of them seem to fit.  Nothing ever seems to move anywhere, like we’re getting something done that matters; I wonder what would eventually make it feel that way, how it would be for God to invade a city that only thinks horizontally. 

I guess there’s a start, a start that puts quietly to death the life you always imagine living.  The perfect friend does not exist.  The perfect parent does not exist.  The perfect boss does not exist.  The perfect girl does not exist.  Stop waiting for the phantoms of your imagination to suddenly land in your life, to affirm the idea of life you always felt entitled to have.  Look around you.  These people exist.  And only them.  Everything else is just an idea.

God gives us the beauty of youth as a gift, but he makes it go away so we realize it’s not what really matters.

Words kick and scream inside to get out but they often die because the time wasn’t right and then life never gets lived.

The modern world gets tiring, how you are happy that a good thing has started to grow, but then it gets ripped away by a job or school in some other city.  Sometimes it feels like we set up the world today so we would feel hopeful until age 22 when our second batch of friends all move away.  You wonder how the man divorced five times can keep a straight face at the altar of number six, but how do you keep a serious hope when you feel a new friend growing in your twenties? 

I’m sad.  But sometimes you have to just say it.  Then it’s ok.  A big part of sadness is when you never even say it.

I know things about you right away, like how much you like it when people smile when they see you, or how good it feels when people say they miss you.  I really just hope for the day I’ll know for sure that lives are deep, and that I really helped one.  But with sewers this rusty and colleges where our childhoods drift into oblivion and computers that lull our souls to sleep sometime I wonder if I’ll ever be in a place where anything will be sure and clear.  But I write these things down instead of forget them, so I won’t forget them, because I know there’s a place where my hope should be.  Hallelujah, some nights these skies are clear and I find myself alone for just a moment and I hear you whispering to hang on.

Marriage is a really long party. To propose I am going to get down on one knee and say “You’re invited!”  Then she will RSVP for the party starting at our wedding and ending never.  It would say ‘death’ but that’s a little bleak for a party invitation.

I learned that our finger nails have a ‘nail bed’ and the ‘nail plate’ is the hard part on the nail bed. Makes me think the nail plates are sleeping and shhh we should be quiet not to wake them up.

I like animals a lot more than I like animal rights activists.

I never believed in Santa Claus so I never had to go through the pain of finding out he isn’t real.  But I did find out that koala bears are actually mean.  I’m guessing that’s about how it feels to find Santa doesn’t exist.

Sometimes I see houses being transported on the highway but I don’t understand why they didn’t just build the house where they wanted it to be in the first place.

I would like to be the driver in the car behind the house with the blinking lights and the oversize load sign.  Then I would feel very useful because without me people wouldn’t see the house and would run right into it.

I’m up! And it’s a nice day outside. And I’ve just gotten a memo that it will NEVER BE A NICE DAY EVER AGAIN. So I’m going to go outside. Good’day folks!

Think something. But then tell it to no one.

There is a purity in doing a thing for the first time that can never return.  When we learn that people like a certain thing we do, we can never be sure why we do that thing again.  Art is truest if someone lets it all out and has no idea how people will react.  They just said it or sang it or wrote it because they really felt it.  That is why we love little children.  They say things because they think of them and we love that these things occurred to them, and that they are not trying to woo us on purpose.  But a comedian knows his effects, and reins them in and spins them on us, and it is not worth as much.  There’s a purity that is only in the first time you do something.

Not talking is just as important as talking. I want people to connect with the things I don’t say as much as the things I do say.

I don’t want to have sex with you, I just want to have sex with your body.  It’s a very hard thing to actually have sex with another person.  It rarely ever happens; most one night stands are mere collisions of flesh.

Before you wonder if you had sex with someone, you must wonder what it means to be a someone in the first place. If we disappear as we live, I suppose you did have sex with that person.  But if we span time, you barely touched them at all.

Oh Laura. 

I used to want to be a philosopher, but now I believe that all good things are wild and free.

People know you are serious about your idea when you override other people’s desires in seeking after yours.  But does that mean that success only comes by trampling over the wants of others?  Is that the only thing that reveals gravity?

A thing that happened that no one will ever remember is the most secret kind of thing there is.  Most things end up secrets.

Most men are swallowed up in their quest for economic importance.

I told myself I should quit wasting my time.  But once I did I found there was nothing to do.

You imagine walls between you and other people that aren’t really there.

Sometimes I ask people what sort of things tend to be the most sacred to them: places, words, or things.  I walked home from my friend Larry’s house tonight.  He lives a few houses down from me and I didn’t even know it.  And then I realized it was a very sad thing that I can assume about most people that they don’t know their neighbors.

A loss of the sacredness of place.  Technology can connect us from wherever we are to someone who is somewhere very far away.  But then what place does place have in our lives?  Does it dim?  Does the color fall out of your memories?  Where are all your texts?  You remember where you were during that one phone call, but can you remember where they were?  Is one facebook message different in scenery from the next?  Where am I as I write this?

I walk past Buckeye Donuts a lot and see the same guys there.  I know their names and have talked to them.  Bob, Charlie, Paul.  They are always there, for years and years they have been there.  It is like a marriage for them; Buckeye Donuts and each other. That’s where they go. 

Where do you go?  What are the places of your life?  What scenes would a person have to see to understand you?  Is there somewhere you go to chop all your trees?

I think many people have at least two incompatible desires: The desire to be a part of a community and the desire to not miss anything.  But alas! If you leave and travel in your quest to not miss anything, you will miss having been part of a community.

I’m glad I have friends from those long ago places, friends that have stayed, friends that are worth bugging.