Lines I’ve been apt to sing recently.

And I wasted another year waiting for the words. For things to be more clear. And now I’m so afraid if I find the words to say, have I lost you anyway?

And if my parents are crying, then I’ll dig a tunnel from my window to yours.

Only love is all maroon; gluey feathers on the flume.

Can someone please call a surgeon who can crack my ribs and repair this broken heart?

No mountains to climb, papers to sign. Offer your heart, I’ve given you mine.

We set out from home early one morning. We, my love and me, walking along. We, birds and the bees, trees of the forest,w e started as one, something went wrong, we ended alone.

You make me new, you are making me new.

Our stepmom we did everything to hate her, she brought us down to the edge of Decatur.

Put it out there, ask for it. Adamantly passionate, with a fist in the air like an activist, y’all need a little bit of happiness.

Does anyone recognize any of these? What have you been singing?

“Just as in the desert individuals must travel in large caravans out of fear of robbers and wild animals, so individuals today have a horror of existence because it is godforsaken; they dare to live only in great herds and cling together en masse in order to be at least something.”  -SK

I’ve been coming to term with spiders this summer.  I can stare at them for longer and not be so upset.  When I found one in the mini van, I even helped it escape.  It has been a summer of reconciliation.

It’s a very weird, blue, windy day.  Like the whole earth is a cottage by an infinite ocean.  I was walking outside and I felt like ancient nomads must have during their travels, like you are connected with everything, like you’re part of the wind and the earth and the history of things.

I feel like I have been scaling things recently; like I found a new plateau in life I couldn’t see before.  I am sure this has happened to many people as they get older.  Things you used to worry about don’t seem as important any more. And there’s not really a way to explain why they’ve become unimportant to another person.

It’s a good day the day you find out you’re nothing.

The other day I was looking at pants in a thrift store and one of the sizes was 34/34.  When I saw that I thought of when Gandalf is looking for the history of the Ring and reads ‘The year 3434 of the Second Age…’ 

Some girls I’ve talked to don’t think there’s anything wrong with pornography, and I think there’s something they’re not quite getting.  But other girls think any person who has looked at pornography must be a monster, and I think there is something they don’t quite get too.

Last Friday I talked to a hotel desk clerk for almost two hours and he had a lot of things to say about life, and he said most of them without using any words. I asked him how he knew so much about life, and he just said, ‘Listen.’ Then he added: ‘People never listen.  But if you listen to people, you learn a whole lot.’

It is very relieving to be nothing.  When you are something, it takes effort to maintain it, and you have to maintain it to everyone you know, otherwise the image you have of yourself will crack, and you will be very sad.  Only people who know they’re nothing have any security in life.

I was reading The Problem of Pain the other day and Lewis presented the reasons he once had for being an atheist, and then he went through all the metaphors he sees for how pain might be a good thing, and how there once wasn’t any pain, and it struck me that it was all so complicated, and I felt for a moment like I did before I hadn’t had any of the thoughts he presented in the book, before everything had unraveled itself.

Someone told me that babies have to sleep so much because there’s so many new things to interpret, so much to take in. I feel like that must be the same reason adults have to sleep at the end of the day too.

In the thrift store I began thinking about someone saying they only buy things according to their own style.  But ‘your own style’ would still be assembled out of items that had some sort of perceptual status in the minds of others; thus, you can’t really assemble a style all by yourself.  You are always depending on the way others view things.  It may not feel like it, but there are reasons you don’t wear togas or armor or monk habits.  

The things you do that no one else will ever know: now there you may have the possibility of ‘your own style’. Without an audience, you might just start to exist.  What do you think about when you’re all alone?  

I love that people are secrets, I love that words can unlock things, I love that ignorance means a life of surprises.  Don’t open lines of credit for yourself; find your blindspots. Life is here and will be all summer.  After that, I guess we’ll see, but the world is turning blue and I find my yearning is growing every day.

The first thing I would do as president is make meters accept pennies. And Canadian quarters.

I’m always afraid of getting stuck in elevators, so I keep a pack of cards with me just in case.

Some people are really lazy and don’t like walking. In fact they even make parking spaces really close to buildings for these lazy people, designating them by a person sitting in a bean bag chair:

 

One time I was in a group of people and the leader told us to raise our hands if we were a man. All the other men raised their hands but I thought of the Emerson quote ‘Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist’. Then I became very confused…so I didn’t raise my hand.

I would make a really bad doctor because I always mix up ‘anecdotes’ and ‘antidotes’. The patient would be groaning in pain and I would be panicked and start saying, ‘So one time I was visiting my sister up in Rochester…’

 

Right now if I want to take an un-shower all I have to do is drive somewhere in my car.  Which means it’s a great time for a road trip.  Everyone have a super weekend.

This post is a long drive into the middle of nowhere.

 

Because that’s what I felt like doing in my car and is what I do all too often do in my thoughts.

 

It is so easy to fall behind with other people. A new perception dawns on you – but it has nothing to do with the present discourse, so you leave it out. It never comes up, and you forget about it entirely.

 

You have no idea the fantastical forms you take in the minds of others.

 

It is odd that every situation is a new one; I always feel in entirely unfamiliar circumstances. This is true of life and existence. In life because every circumstance is slightly different – or much different – than the one before. And in existence because I wake up every day as a human, and I have never been a human before. One may say that I have been a human all the days before the present one. But that is to define a human as existing in a single moment in time – suppose being a human meant living as a human being from start to finish, from birth to death. In relation to eternity I have never been a human before, and this gives me the odd feeling as I wake up – ‘still here, this isn’t a dream.’

 

Am I behind in reconciling to existence? Or are others behind in not realizing the impossibility of reconciliation?

 

It is not a natural thing to realize you exist – you have to continue to prove your own freedom to yourself.  Drive your car to a park, stand in the middle of the park and shout ‘I am the greatest of dinosaurs’. Drive home and as you walk inside it will be impossible to not realize that you exist. And when you realize your freedom what you end up doing takes on an added significance, the fact that it is being done by a being conscious of its power to walk away, to do anything else.

 

It would be a beautiful sadness to live in worshipful wonder of who someone is.

 

On the fourth of July God made long interstates of lightning stretch out across the sky.  

 

Sometimes I feel like everywhere I go there is nothing but criticism – people in the news, people at work, people in the church, all unhappy about something, teaching unhappiness as a doctrine of life. It makes me wonder, why is this the norm? Why is everyone always tearing things down? But I realize it because the opposite cannot take the form of a criticism. The opposite of criticalness is to enjoy each moment deep in your being. It is harder to notice happiness than unhappiness. These uncritical people, these artists of existence, are out there, and they quietly and wisely ignore the chaos of unhappiness to be found everywhere. But they have no way to communicate their knowledge, no direct way to say ‘You should not be unhappy’ -for then they would have entered the world they see no value in.

 

It is sad but beautiful that each person’s life is deeply their own, and that you cannot force anyone else to be happy.

 

You will find many melancholy things if you desperately seek the truth.  But you ought to seek truth nonetheless.  For in doing so you will also find how deep the joy at merely existing can go. 

 

Suppose there is much sadness to be had in life – would it be merely enough for your God to hush up the sadness, give you toys to play with when it is all over?  Or would the only true kind of happiness be a transformation of these sad truths, an inclusion of their redemption into something beautiful?    

 

It often feels in thinking that I have come across something true, a fact about life as a whole. This experience is had by everyone. But when I read conclusions by thinkers and writers of the past, they often strike me as very strange interpretations of life and its happenings. From that writer’s perspective, however, it must have seemed so.  But the claims we make are about ‘life’, as though life were an objective thing and we were responding to its truths. We aren’t just saying these things seem true, but that they are true. This makes me wonder what life actually is, what are the bedrock mechanics of the thing that appears in so many different forms to so many different people? When you take away all the different words and thought-devices and colorings of our personalities onto what we see, what is there that is actually going on, what is the thing that me and everyone in the past and present share? But when I think about this everything seems silent.

 

Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m’effraie.

 

A drive to the middle of nowhere.