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. 

Drove home late tonight after four cups of coffee at Perkins with Alex. We talked about Caitie and he reinacted Prince of Thieves. Death, romance, family relationships. The external features of stories.

Earlier I sat on a bench at Dexter Falls as Paul and dad played basketball and thought about life as I read Kierkegaard. So many people spend their lives waiting, thinking in the future they will realize all the values of their life. But there is only now. I saw a boy running through the grass. That is what I was born to see.

I feel like I haven’t been in the words I’ve been saying recently.

Sometimes someone will say something to me that doesn’t make sense given who I am, and it betrays a misconception they have about me. I will think of an earlier scene in my life and think ‘If they had been there for that, they wouldn’t be saying this to me now’. But there is no way to straightforwardly explain that to someone. So you have to conform to what they think, or just say nothing. You end up many people or no one at all in a situation like that.

Some people stretch and stretch and stretch.

‘I think people feel a lot of drama quietly underneath their daily actions. Like there is a big story going on. It’s capturing that that I think is the real challenge.’ -at perkin’s.

Listened to Copeland on the way back. I’ve been trying to fight off my demons. Sadness is a choice, even if it is a choice of negligence.

We went over the perks and downsides of isolation.

What if I died tonight?

Everyone has a story that they think is their big difficulty, like resolving their issues with their parents. But really there is an even bigger story than that, the story of how you respond to that situation, whether you see it from eternity and choose to become holy. It’s hard to keep that in mind though. I forget about the big story and then I end up sad because I think my main goals are about how things go here on earth. But all is eclipsed by the story of you kneeling, praying, and getting up to live in his mercy.

I haven’t been writing recently. It all feels so…far away.

There’s this long white lump under my skin. Looks like a worm is under it. It developed while I was playing starcraft. It’s scaring me.

I’m not a very good big brother.

Drowsy like a daisy.

Howdy to milady,

have you been following me lately?

Have you been frowning, have you been achy?

Or living loudly, living greatly?
We live shrouded in maybes,

so no one allows me to be crazy -

we’re all as hollow as we are lazy.

 

Do you smile politely, thinking ‘I hope they like me’?

Drowsy like a daisy, dazed at all the drawings.

Alone in an alley, did you know to fight me?

Lovely like a lady, the lake of all our longings.

 

When it’s a crescent the moon is just a peasant,

like my thoughts when I’m knee deep in a pond,

and all my friends are gone.

The crickets in the thicket are singing his song,

I listen and wonder where things went wrong.

Why is the world brown, who moves time along?

Is the mud in the ground where my name is drawn?

What are the sounds of a place without a dawn?

Would you come down here just to make me strong?

 

I know you drained the promises from the goose that’s in the sky,

like how most people grow up without ever wondering why.

A pleasant sacrifice to the god of everything nice,

like when we used to think that the trees were dead –

but that’s more true of the me that’s in my head.

and the people that snuggle with greed as they go to bed.

But wouldn’t everyone just like to be free instead?

Do you think you would flee on your night of dread?

 

I turned magic into mud, sat in the middle of my blood.

The food of feet and fetters can’t feed us like the feathers

of birds who hear and heed all that’s in the heather.

But I can’t look up, not since my last retrieval,

and I no longer see which thoughts of mine are evil.

Like the disorder amongst the kingdom of the beetles,

silent in their waxy hate as they whine and wheedle -

and now do you run to the regal, or fight amidst the fetal?

 

Wishing we were more than statues that blink

in the eyes of those who are happy to think,

they know everything that we try to trap into ink.

Finicky, do you miss me? Will you come quickly?

Will you be finishing, do you feel wishly?

Like a moment that flees, or a fish that’s visiting?

A ladybug on a branch, an invisible glistening?

Something with wings that’s quietly listening?

Sometimes the restaurant where I work is open until three in the morning, and it takes us hours afterwards to clean everything up. Last weekend I was working late and talking to one of my favorite people there. We talked about life logics.

 

A life logic is a connection between different scenes in your life, an explanation of why you go to the different places you do. The problem is that sometimes you have competing life logics. One life logic might be that you want to get married, while is another is that you want to travel. One logic says that you are a creative type, another says that you should major in accounting. One logic says that you’re soft-spoken, another says that you always get what you want.

 

Competing life logics come to the fore when you are in a position where you feel like there are two logics predicting your next action at a specific time, but the actions are incompatible. All you can do is stand and stare, and feel sad that you don’t know who you are.

 

The year is over. Another yesterday gone.

 

I can’t wait for a time in life when there won’t be a regular part of the year where people you have come to love suddenly exit the scene.

 

Why do crying people part? Well, they have the one life logic, their friendship, but then they have the other one that says they should go somewhere else and be around other people instead.

 

But when old logics pass, you do at least get to see their beauty. I really don’t have a lot to say. I feel cramped up, like I’m trying to make it better with words. Or like this interpretation packages it up, makes leaving ok. I guess it doesn’t and the feeling is one I’ll have to walk away from my computer with. I think that’s how it is a lot of time; we convince ourselves we have closure, but eventually you learn that sometimes there just isn’t any. Anyways, it was a rough year.

 

But relationships are redemption. There are some people I don’t know how to say I’ll miss. 

 

I have many saviors.   

Some people say the night is for sleeping,

that it’s important for your health,

but health of the body is only one thing.

Those people did not see me in high school,

when I stayed up late and talked to God.

Now I’m in college and I still stay up late

even though God isn’t here any more.

Or he is and I’m just distracted,

and I keep looking over at him, 

with his sorrowful eyes and I think,

‘Someday’.

And on that day, the world will be itself again.

The snow glided down the windshield, slowly making its way into a future that would have no past.

“This weather always reminds me of being a kid,” she said hummingly.  “When I was a kid it felt like things were a lot quieter.  People said less things.  But when you went outside you could hear everything.” 

“You don’t hear it anymore?”

She did not say anything but looked out the windshield at my beige garage door and the snow sailing silently and safely to the ground. 

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“I would rather stay out here.”

“Me too.”

We sat in the car and waited.  Or at least now I see that I was waiting.  It wasn’t that it was cold, or that I was hungry, or that I only knew her so well, but I remember at some point I took off my seatbelt.

But I think she buried herself there; I left my coffin slightly open.

“Do you think we’ll ever be old?” I asked after awhile.

“No.” 

The evening grew around us until the snow was blue.  I could feel myself breathing and she looked very pale and just the faintest moisture in her chasmic eyes and the way she clinched her lips let me know she was alive.  I felt unsafe around her, in a good way.

“How did I find you?” she said.

I looked over at her.

“I mean, it seems like the same things happen everywhere.  People fall in love, get hungry, eat together, laugh together.  It’s all the same everywhere.  I wonder if we’re any different, or if we’re just like everybody else, doing the same things, we just have different names.”

“I don’t know.”

It was very cold so she turned on the car.  It shook gently beneath us and I could feel how cold my thighs were as they thrummed.  We listened to the radio for a few minutes but then we turned it off.

“What song is in your head?” I asked.

“Usually a sad one.”

It was dark and we had been in the car for hours.  The snow now liquified as it hit her windshield and I knew that I should go inside.  She said it was great that I came out with them, and I said thanks for the ride home.  Her headlights were pulling out into the street as I went inside and closed the door. 

Years later I saw that girl in a mall and I thought back to that winter, but that had been a long time ago.

I find every conversation, every time I’m with someone, to be a very meaningful experience. There is something so deep about it.

When you watch a movie and you see an early scene, it doesn’t really mean much. But as the characters go to scene after scene you see them stretching and taking flight from that earlier scene, and on and on it grows into something complex and beautiful. By the end that earlier scene seems to have had so much waiting in it, so many hopes and dreams latent in it.

You can keep your past constant or change it based on what you do in the present. When you walk the same way to work again today, you are keeping your past self constant that says ‘I always walk the same way to work’. If you move cities for the first time, you start to see your past life as one that had been waiting to move, that wasn’t settled down in a given spot. You suddenly realize the arc your life had all along, based on what you’re doing.

You can’t tell people about your past, because you don’t even know it yet.

‘Your life is what you try to do’ I told myself as I walked around the first floor of my house. I called Starbucks and they were open until 10:30. I went upstairs and asked my mom if she wanted to get some coffee. We never go out for coffee.

It was dark overhead as we walked out after it closed, but there was a commercial glow from the buildings all around us. The humming of the highway echoed in the distance. My mom sees this as the place where she moved to, I see it as the place where I came from. This road of businesses is the one we all would come to in high school, when we had no idea what was waiting for us out in the world. As I got in the car I felt sad that there were so many lights.

I was in a thrift store looking at books earlier in the day. It’s just nice to see a book and know you’ll never read it. One book was about the war in Iraq and how the military had made a mess of everything. But it was written years ago, and so much has happened in Iraq since then. That made me think about stories, and how it is up to humans when to start and stop them. Did it make sense to stop the story then? When you think about it, doesn’t it seem like there are an infinite amount of stories?

We think of ourselves as different people than we actually are. What you want to do is not the same thing as what you are willing to do. The only things you know you’re actually willing to do are the things that you do. Every other thing you think of doing might just be a part of who you imagine yourself to be, and have nothing to do with who you actually are.

I lose track of things, in my head. I know I’m not remembering much from these days. There are moments, hidden pockets lost in time, when God breaks my heart and I see how little everything matters next to him and his children. The rest of the time my head is in the world, and I can’t see much at all.

All of these things build up into each moment you experience. When you are with someone it connects to their future and their past, to all the stories that are going on with them, in subtle and undetectable ways. To be with someone shows you are willing to say ‘yes’ to their presence. Then as you talk every thing you say changes things a little bit from the way they were before. This overwhelming reality floods every moment and all I can think is ‘wow’ when I’m with someone. It is a deep moment that connects in uncountable ways to everything else there is.

But we pretend none of this is going on, that things don’t have that much importance, that it’s not crazy that there’s this huge complicated physical reality of houses and trees and stars and people. We pretend in order to numb ourselves, so that we can keep going without the emotion of shock blocking everything else out; but still, this emotion, ever potent, ever present, locks itself deep into the heart of things.