I am going to write because I don’t know what else to do.

We live in a culture of entertainment – movies, video games, Netflix.  It is very easy to overdo.  So what are the good reasons to let ourselves be entertained?

1. Empathy.

When you watch a movie you are not only entertained, you are forced to think about someone else’s experience.  Through movies we better understand war, drug trafficking, the other gender’s perspective on romance, etc.

2. To spend time with others.

Playing video games for guys can be an unhealthy fantasy-based addiction, or a way of doing relationship. 

3. To use for analogies.

Having a common culture with strangers is a good thing.  It helps you get to know them if there is something you have both already been a part of.  And the idea of using analogies also means that your mental terrain was expanded, that you became capable of more expression by the entertainment you imbibed.

4. Recovery.

Sometimes we can simply be up to no greater task.

 

Each of these reasons has its limits, but they each have something to say as well.  And now we can think in the case that none of these reasons really seem to apply, maybe there is something else I should be doing with my time.

Have you ever been urgently calling someone only to have the electronic woman that is their stock voicemail start talking to you in her slow, easygoing drawl?

You have reached the voice mailbox of …

(I know this is a voice mailbox. I know who I called. Please let it be a name, the numbers take forever.)

6……

(NOOOO!!!!!)                

1…….4…..

(Oh my gosh. The pauses. The pauses between the numbers. I could take naps between them.)

9……..6………1……..

(The number will end. There’s an end to the number. I know it.)

6………4………7……..

(Almost there! Last number! C’mon robot lady!)

………………………………………………………………..

(AHHHHHHHHHHHH! Let’s goooooooooo!)

…………8.

The wireless customer you are trying to reach is unavailable.

(I know!! Or did they turn into a deaf humorless e-woman with no sense of urgency??)

To leave a numeric page, press 2.

(What’s a numeric page??? I just want to leave a message!! LET’S GOOOO!!)

To leave a callback number, press 5.

(Let’s be real. This is the 21st century, I’m sure they have caller-ID.)

To leave a message press 1, or just wait for the tone.

(OK, the tone is about to happen. I’ll just wait for the tone.)

……………….

(AHHHHHH WHERE’S THE TONE????)

………………

(AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!)

Please leave your message after the tone.

(ARE YOU KIDDING ME??????)

When you are done recording, you can hang up, or press pound for more options.

(Is one of the options ASKING FOR THIS NOVEL TO BE SHORTER NEXT TIME???)

…….

Beep.

“Hey, bro. It’s Phil. Just wanted to see if you wanted to hang. Call me back, son. Lata.”

You know how years later you have no idea what tasks you were worried about getting done on a specific day, a day that has since dissolved into an emotionless un-nostalgic solvent that you stashed away in your mind’s darked locked cabinet of old beakers and lost experiments?

Here is what I’ve been worried about today.

1. Folding the clothes scattered on my floor and thrown in laundry baskets.

2. Cleaning the bathroom.

3. Walking to the grocery store to buy something to drink. 

4. Reworking the murder mystery so that people who weren’t there can go through it by themselves.

5. Continuing the novel I’m reading.

6. Writing down the things that happened last week.

7. Looking up words from some stories I read recently.

8. Exercising.

9. Cleaning out my car. (A considerable task.)

10. Getting a shift covered on Wednesday.

11. Going home to watch football with my little brother, whom I miss a lot.

Writing all this down makes it seem like a lot less, but add in thoughts about relationships in all the cracks, doubts about where life is going, and a twenty page hour-long wikipedia rigamarole that started with the page on what a ‘muddler’ is, and it adds up.

But I read a story that made me feel a lot, and afterward I looked out the kitchen window at the swaying shadow of the backyard tree against the garage, and I stood in the silence of the wind shushing the world, and I thought, the things I am now seeing came from nothing, and so have I come from nothing to see them.  Then I noticed the security light was on, and I wondered how that was possible if there was no one around to activate it.  Maybe it’s the tree’s branches, I thought.

Worryworryworry – beauty – worryworryworry.  Such are the lives we lead.  But in that moment, do you have someone to whom you bend your knee?  I wonder, is that all that separates people?

“Don’t talk to me of possibility. This is all there is.”

Would you have acted differently if you had thought an infinite God loved each person you talked to today?

Loves and sorrows – they all pass away. One lesson always being learnt is that, whatever happens, the heart must deal with a constant influx of feelings as the old sagas become mere memories, either nostalgic or painful.

People have thousands of emotions each day but they crystallize as icicles in public settings. We have to be silly and open and ask questions around them to start to make them sweat.

I leaned against my car in the alley and put my head down. The picture of defeat. They came up to me and asked if I was sleeping.

You are your own cinematographer. Whatever scene you are in, you direct the camera shot by choosing where to stand, what to glance at, how to pan your head across the room.

We necessarily create – what we say and do is something in the world, a new reality that we had our hand in bringing about. When you get up in the morning you must ask what it is you want to create. When you go to sleep you must question how you influenced things, what having you around did to the world.

Think deeply about people. I’ve started wondering why I don’t do this recently. When I watch Mad Men or read a book I try to make connections across different scenes and different things the characters say, to try to see something deeper about the person, something true that illuminates who they are. Some things that are true about you can only be communicated accidentally, because it’s something you would never say, or it’s something that wouldn’t sink in if you did.

The reason people don’t think deeply about each other is that it’s not what other people do. It especially is not what other people do about us. We notice that other people seem to not mind our presence, but there are lots of questions they do not ask us, and lots of places they do not go that would help explain us, so we must not be a very big task to them. Because all that would be very difficult and no one really does it.

Earlier I reclined the seat in my car and took a nap on a side street just as the evening was coming on. It had been very warm in my car so I had rolled the window down and I could hear cars passing every few seconds. My arms were crossed across my stomach and I was only partly there when a breeze rushed through the car like a spirit wind and I was suddenly in a place in my life I had not been for centuries; it felt cold, and I knew things I had long forgotten. It was the early morning of a cross country meet when the dew is still on the grass and the tents are getting set up and the sun is too bright to look at. But it’s chilly and you know the day silently holds a world of pain and battle ahead but for now it’s quiet and you feel both confident and terribly nervous, but it all feels good and you know it’s a good thing to be alive.

In a thrift store a man who was perhaps forty grumbled next to me about the way the jeans were set up. I gleaned from the old woman that talked to him from another aisle that his name was Roger. The woman pushed a cart with a small sandy haired toddler sitting in it and I saw him learn the word ‘elbow’. I’ve known the word ‘elbow’ for a long time so I didn’t think much of that, but when Roger talked to the little boy much later as they checked out in front of me and referred to the old woman as ‘grandma’ I realized it was his mother, and I felt a sudden shock of sadness that they were out shopping together so late in life, that I felt like I couldn’t be that close with my mom.

Maybe you will never know your deepest assumptions, like how you can never see your own organs directly. I’ve renewed the realization that deep in the heart of my assumptions is ‘me’, that I rate everything that happens against how much it benefits that body which is deeply my own. Whatever I have been saying and doing, there is a dark and musty cell deep within the structures of my life that directs me to think about what I’m owed, what I want, what will make me happy. Friendliness is sadly compatible with deep selfishness.

And so I walked out of the coffee shop where the barista had turned the lights out while I was reading, and I didn’t say goodnight because I was upset. A voice in me told me to let it go, but instead it became a scene where I became a little colder, a little less empathetic, a little different than I was before.

I would have acted a lot differently.

They laid down in the alley pool together. Not together holding hands, but just enough to have meant something to each other as strangers. A longer grip on the door on the way into work, a slightly tipped umbrella, a wipe of the brow while hunched over: we look for any sign in the eyes of a stranger that they might one day love us.

That cardboard box we wanted to save forever in the basement now has frayed edges, and we never remembered to find out what makes our coworkers sorrowful. Now their lives are as remote as newspaper columns, and I find a crow more chatty than my neighbors. Animals are the only ones who believe in my loneliness. I can only wonder if others imagine the same things I do when I think of the Roman Empire.

We try to invent more desserts, the myth that things will never end, and to complete something is very unhuman. We would rather linger in hell forever than to think that something could be over. I closed your car door and the vibration of the concrete curb made me forget the freckle above your left cheekbone. But there is no place for the erotic in society. We daily die in a thousand lies, all of them blank faces with silently sweating eyes.

Society was never to my liking and Gus said I call society that which is impersonal, but I never told him I let them be impersonal because they are not to my liking. We camped together in the Badlands once and now that we’re back we just pretend to have a friendship. My pretend friendships destroyed my ability to love years ago. You can only love if you can think, for joyful creation can have no night-time mistresses. If it were true I would pretend for you for years; as is I get swallowed by dark stagnant puddles that never knew your name.

Wet, everywhere, wet wet wet. People don’t think the sky is falling down anymore, but we fail to notice we die just the same. You never find out that you die, you always just knew; so we never even notice the sadness that comes with it, how everything is different. Our normalcy comes with not having been alive before we’re born.

Males think there is just talking or there’s being at war, and we are always miserable when we’re not at war. But I found you and discovered there’s something in-between; you taught me how to live, and rescued me from the belief that we’re nothing if the world forgets us.

I couldn’t believe in those who decided to divide up the world according to their thoughts, that through partitions we could one day find a beautiful unity. So we lie in this puddle and I don’t think in twos. The rain is dropping on our faces and we’re not holding hands, but I hate society, and something about you makes me finished in a sad way, a way that lets me know every stranger would love me one day. To mention the task is not to complete it. But I know I would never listen to a song instead if I could just come here and lie with you.

Do you know the storm winds inside? The night I made out with Betty Sue until three AM and James Dean came on the television screen in that musty apartment for the fourth time? I love my mother very much but I can’t tell her because she taught me you can only love people in your prayers. That is the same reason I love her and it is that farness that makes me feel at the same time an incredible warmth, a true and final love, and a heartbreaking distance, the one that made me listen to music instead of people.

So I know you are over there with entirely different raindrops on your face, and your childhood was set on an entirely different part of the planet, even if it was next door to mine. I feel sadly done completing the beautiful project of satisfied loneliness with you. In being apart I would find you more a part of me than if we were never to part. For you’ve given to me a warmth even in my anonymity, and it is around strangers your life finds its hold in mine. If only this puddle grew deeper we could drown in it, but even that betrays your childhood like an awkward and desperate future reminiscence never could.

These feelings inside are finally made complete through a love in death’s face this world’s temporal sky doesn’t understand. Don’t throw me a line and I promise I won’t throw you one either. We’ll be brave in a poorly understood unison, just like the saddest humans to realize they had never truly seen one another. But it’s this turmoil in knowing your love but a truthful admission of silence owed to you that lets me know that the closer we get to others the more we have to suffer.

‘Oh, darling!’

A man was given a grant by the king to build a home anywhere he liked in the kingdom. The man was joyous with gratitude, for not only had the grant been given, but the means and resources with which to build a good, dependable home. The man set out at once from the notary’s office with the grant to claim a place at the entrance to the forest to build his home. Everyone in his village had always said the entrance to the forest was a wonderful place to build a home, and the man agreed for his own reasons that he knew were solely his own. Thus, he set off to build his home.

As he walked along the tree line of the forest looking for a good spot he ran into a small bulgy man with well made clothing. He was not from the local village, but was a traveler from another place. He said he knew many people and had seen many things, and a good place to build a home was inside the forest where there was a clearing with a pond and much game in the area. Then not only would the man have the privacy of the forest but all the things he would need to eat and live, and he could visit the village from time to time if he needed to. This sounded good to the man, so he went into the forest to look for the pond so he could claim it and build his home.

When he had found the pond a voice came from behind him and the man spun around to find a short cloaked figure asking about his doings. The man explained he had a grant from the king and was going to build a house. The cloaked figure said that he had lived in the area for many years and recommended the man go to the foot of the mountain, which was truly a good place to live for the precious metals to be found in the mountain and the great thing it is to have a house so close to such a magnificent object of nature. The man was of a good build – suitable to mountain living – and thought this was a good idea, so he set off to find the foot of the mountain where he could build his house.

The foot of the mountain was not at all like the man had imagined. The man had expected a clear mountain, but this mountain was covered in trees. The idea of living both in a forest and on a mountain appealed greatly to the man, so he set hiking up the mountain to claim the land for his house. He found a clearing halfway up which seemed like a good place to build, but as he looked up toward the darkening path something told him that there was another good place to build further on. So he kept walking and by now had worked up quite a sweat. But he would find a place to build his home.

Past crags and ditches, gullies and crevices, bushes and thistles, trees and boulders, the man walked and walked and walked. There were clearings by streams and copses with openings in the middle but the man kept heading higher and higher up because he knew there would be a best place of all to build. Eventually the trees grew less dense and he walked on bare stone once more, and in the tiredness of his journey he realized that he was close to the summit of the mountain. He stood in a basin surrounded by rock walls that impeded his view, but twenty paces ahead of him was a slight incline that led to the mountain’s highest peak. He walked toward it, stumbling a bit, and crawled up it. At the top he froze and looked out. There before him lay all the kingdoms of the earth, a whole magnificent world he had never dreamed of while living in his tiny local village. His grip loosened and the grant, which he had been carrying excitedly, fell to the ground.

There he dropped to his knees, put his hands to his face, and wept. 

When you are young people wrongly conclude you have a beautiful soul from your good looks.  When you are old people wrongly conclude you don’t have a beautiful soul from your bad looks.

‘Yesterday’ is a myth we use to hold onto ourselves; but sometimes you should let go of the myth.  Let yesterday disappear, do not let it become part of your story.

We can make our names brand new.

We do not grow old by wrongs being done to us; we grow old by the wrongs we do to others.

Think: how does today fit into the story of yours that has many pages? When you point at it how will you be able to say ‘and this was the day I did this part of the goal’.

Our happiness is often general and directed at many things; it is through sadness we realize the value of something in particular. 

I had so many ridiculous conversations yesterday; really it was just ridiculous how different they all were.  Over breakfast we talked about whether ‘neat’ was the worst of all positive adjectives.  At work my friends divulged their abhorrence for strawberries.  Then at night on the porch we talked about taking responsibility and whether or not you should dislike people.  The medley of it all happening in one day seemed as silly as the four fellows I saw ‘cheers’ their chocolate milks after reading the nutritional information at UDF. 

You couldn’t have written the screenplay for it; it is all too wonderful and diverse and unpredictable.  Conversation is a terrific thing and you should be excited each time you are in one.

When other people surprise you, don’t smash them back into their old box.  Let the new settle in; let people grow.  We should be horribly sad how small we have to make the world in our minds to keep our mental stability.

I am really excited about today.   

We spent those summer evenings in outer space, in the field down the street, in our minds on a sloop tied to a dock where we were forced to sit and stare. We just sat in the sloop and we never went anywhere.

In the field your arms were shaped like a lozenge behind your head as the crunchy yellow grass cracked beneath our backs. I laid there not asking a lot of questions.

The stars shined like the deep solemnity of monks that we could never live up to.  Like visitors staying in our homes that never said a word, that we would never question for fear that they would leave.

“We are cursed with an infinite capacity,” she said softly.

She was sadder than I was.

“I feel either naive or brilliant around you.”

“It’s sad when two people get together,” she said with a slight touching noise between her lips. “Then you think, Oh there was that much more to that person. That much more that I couldn’t see of them.”

I was always far behind her moments.

“Someday people will live in a world with no pain.” I said this with my eyes narrowed, trying to see it, like I could if I squinted.

Her eyes widened with dismany and distance. “Pain is who we are. If you take pain away, you do not even have a human. That feeling, that deep agony, is what we are.”

“Some people feel nothing.”

“Despair is to forget.”

I wanted to follow her around to see if she was infinite, to see if she ever was used up, but I knew that only death would end the experiment. Maybe that thought was why I knew she was wrong.

“So many new people,” I said finally. “I feel like people eventually have this voice, like they’ve talked to a lot of people, and you’re just one of them.”

“I’ll never be as important as my friends.”

I knew everything I needed to know, I knew the height of the sky above my broken body, the distant memory I was to most people, the fact she was still here, and I wondered, I wondered as she might have wondered, is it enough?

“Why didn’t we work out?” I breathed weakly.

Some things you cannot say, just as she said nothing then. And yet she did say it, for the very fact that we could not communicate in silences was the reason.

Her hands were folded on her stomach, her thumbs touching just above them. I remembered everything from the parking lot that night before she left for college. As I listened to her deep silence the pain wrapped itself quietly up into everything.

It is sad to know about an infinite place that you can’t be let into.

But she was there on the sloop with me. There are things in our silences we can’t give to other people, but we can at least sit with them. I always imagined there not being a sloop at all; but then there wouldn’t have been a place to sit.  And in that thought I realize maybe I’m none of the people I imagine I am.

Even the skies look different over foreign seas.

Honesty used to be easier. There was a time when I could come to the computer and write everything down, and that would solve things for a time. Now it feels so empty, just writing things down. Isn’t there more to meet our feelings than just writing? Or is that all there is? The only home they’ll ever find is these paltry words?

I don’t like that artists eventually just keep doing what they find out ‘works’.

As you grow older you learn that a lot of the things that people older than you said you would learn you don’t actually learn. It is a weird way of talking, to say ‘When you’re in your twenties, you learn…’ or ‘When you get your first job, you learn…’ because that means the speaker thinks that everyone will learn things exactly the way they learned them. But I’ve heard people say they’ve learned a lot of things that I never ended up learning, even as I got to their age. ‘Eventually you learn that people are just selfish, and you shouldn’t trust them’. ‘Eventually you learn to just not care what other people think.’ ‘You learn that professors say things and they don’t really mean them.’

Not much of a guide to life. Even the guides to life are not much guides.

Sometimes ‘weird’ can be the most hateful word in the English language. Of course sometimes it is playful and everyone is laughing, enjoying each other’s differences. Other times it draws a line in the sand between the people who get to count as humans and those who don’t.

Where did your family go? Where are you now? Do you think three feet taller has any merit on the universe’s scale? Do you remember waking up from the last novel you read? Did you forget about the line between the things you’ve done and the things you’ve only heard about? Have you awoken to a smile from God?

Your thoughts read the world like fiction when you aren’t feeling anything.

In-between the things I say I’m hoping it will turn out better next time. That something major will start making sense the next relationship-move we make with our mouths.

I’m sorry I thank the Lord for my food and not for the person sitting across from me.

I’m bipolar. And I’m ok with that, sometimes.

There are many people in the world who are living life on low. We live life on high in our heads, but always have it set on medium on the outside.

Why did Hemingway kill himself? Was it a disease, or did he just forget everything, or was it the emptiness he felt in Paris all over again? Was he crazy? And if he was crazy was it his fault, or how does that work?

Every man should experience sadness for what he is.

One thing that you can only feel as you get older is the simple feeling of a lot having happened. You can’t have that any sooner than when it’s finally true. Not the real feeling anyway. I wonder what it will be like when I’m forty. I feel like when I’m forty there will be a time when I’ll be shaking someone’s hand, meeting them for the first time, and we’ll both be smiling and hoping to become friends when I’ll stop suddenly and say, ‘Who are we kidding.This won’t work. So much has happened already.’

It really only takes one conversation with someone to understand them in the rest of their silences. You catch the bus home with them and at home they get bored and invite you to go for a walk. Later that night you breathe in the cool park air with the stars hammocked in the moon above and you sit cupped in the squeaky chain swings as they say: ‘I like snow. I wait all year for it.Whenever it’s around I feel like I can talk to anybody with a smile on my face.’ And from then on you can step into their silences.

Some people’s silences are locked up pretty tight.

Having a child is such a terrifying thing. Childhoods are when you go from knowledge of nothing to knowledge of everything. What if you messed that up? Is there something bigger you could make a mistake about?

The phrase ‘well-adjusted’ is a very unhelpful one. Well-adjusted to what? If you just mean adjusted to the fact that adults have deadlines and responsibilities and the need for some manners, all well and good. But it cannot mean well-adjusted to the stars, to seeing out your eyes, to the fact that you can hurt other people. Well-adjustment there means failure, for no human should settle into those.

I look up and it still lets me know deep inside that there is so much more to know about what is going on. And it hurts.

The test you should use for deciding what to do in life is the ‘you didn’t test’. For this test you imagine yourself at the end of your life and as you are about to die an unknown person comes up to you and says “You didn’t _____” and you fill in the blank with the thing you are considering. “You didn’t go to China” “You didn’t write a song” “You didn’t love”. The ones that hurt you the most to hear are what is important to you.

I got horribly sick over the weekend and I felt ways I had never felt before and I had to work and I got angry at God that nothing made sense anymore. I got home at five in the morning and thought about writing but I knew that wouldn’t do anything and I felt I should try to forget it all so I climbed into bed. I was better by Monday but right before going to work I found that something I had been working on for almost a year had been destroyed and I got very upset. At work I was sullen and smeared across the glass. Then later I went to a concert at a house and there was a girl there with a harp and she played the most beautiful music I have ever heard and I started to cry during one of her songs, and I said sorry to God that I had forgotten, that I’d been such a fool.

I don’t know how to close this chapter, how to start the next one. So much happened in that house.

‘It is too much’ I sometimes whisper.

God is bigger than our hearts, and the wind may be beautiful. Things change, and in my fearful moments I think it is up to us whether they do so for good or bad. And so I pray for you to break into our hearts in these days with a whole new love.