December 13, 2012

• what we do with silence

  It only takes one line to get to know someone.  If you know everything in the world you let people know in the first thing you say.  True self-doubt cannot be masked.

  What if all fish were lost?  It’s all just water and water and water.  How do they find their way?

  I asked a girl ‘Are you going to remember this?’ and she said ‘What?’ and I said ‘This time right now’.  She did not think long before she said no.  I said that was crazy.  She asked why it was crazy and I said it’s because that meant we were standing in an empty vault of her future memories, ghosts in a place she would never return to again.  I could say anything to her and it would not matter.  But I didn’t, probably because I was thinking about how the present is a very impoverished place.

  But not always – sometimes you will be there, deep in the universe as it grows as a fetus, where you can finally feel a heartbeat, see the hope of its life – and you will think ‘Ah, this is what it’s for.’

  Until you’re driving home, and you realize that now that’s just a memory too.

  Time.  It’s the one thing you never stop learning as a lesson.  We maintain the false belief that this is the present and are continually being corrected.

  I like all the emotional shapes we can describe, the life we can tell about by saying ‘all my islands are sunk in the deep’.  But even more than that I wonder about the things words cannot scratch.  The places in us that stay that way forever. The people that died deep in their cages.

  I think of all the nights I didn’t sit down to write.  (almost tonight.)

  The idea of generations is beautiful and very fulfilling.  People like to have children because it is then so easy to say what you meant.  It can be spoken in the single word of ‘mother’ or ‘father’.  But what happens to those that are outside the continuation of generations?  They want to matter!  They want to mean something too.  But they do not have the tangible human being to hold up and say ’Look! I was in the world and made something great so I am a part of everything’.  So they will set about other projects: exploring, inventing, working.  And they will feel something good because of this, but there will always be a lingering tinge of sadness, something held back, an understanding that they were not fully part of the true mechanics of the world’s story.

  In the history of the world I wonder what the overall success rate of the words ‘Don’t go’ is, and I get sad that I don’t think it’s very high. 

  and ultimately it’s zero.

  What I have found is you can scream ‘GET IT RIGHT’ in your head all day long and still end up failing completely.

  I feel like there are people who like to know what time it is and people who don’t like to know what time it is, and this probably means something great and deep about them.  But I don’t think I’ll think about it.  Maybe it’s just enough to know which one it is and then to have fun no matter what. 

  I saw a raccoon yesterday.  That means it was a very good day.

  • 4:50 am
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