“I cannot love you.”
“Why?”
“I worry about you.”
“What?”
“If I think about you, I think about sad things.”
“That hurts.”
“You choose the hurt. You are defined by hurt. Hurt makes you feel important. Hurt makes you bigger than you are.”
“I’m not sure if I agree with that assessment.”
“Do you know why?”
“What do you think I’m going to say?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I’m going to hit you if you make me say, ‘Yes.'”
“Hurt is who you are.”
A complicated mess
There’s a certain beauty to being alone. A comfort. I wake up with me. I went to bed with me. Whatever I was missing is the same at 4:30 am as it was at 1. It’s quieter now. The kids went to school a little earlier and were yelling. Kids are weird. They’re perfect or atrocious. I like the way life feels right now. I like the way kids sound. I like the motion of the moon across the sky. I like the birds that aren’t endemic. I like you.
Things change though. Love becomes hate. People don’t change, really. So what changed? Perception, most likely. If I could give anything, I would go back in time to the place that was gentle. The place where you found easiness. This fucking complicated mess is a complicated mess. I still love you. I still love everything, And it’s a complicated mess.
Steep, calamitous, and quick
I’m not sure if the correct term is meta, or post-modern, or post-whatever. But this is definitely aware of itself. I’m not sure why I torture myself. Thinking about you, about us, is like playing with a sore in your mouth or a loose tooth that hasn’t yet given way. I like to be aware that it’s there.
I know you think about our things. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. I’m also pretty sure you have come to some very different conclusions than I have.
Yours and my fall was steep, calamitous, and quick.
I was your best friend on August 1. We slept together for the last time on September 5. But by October, we were arms-length robots. My knowing exact dates shouldn’t surprise you. I’m not obsessed anymore than I normally would be. I just have one of those memories that you loved me for, and then hated me just as strongly for.
Ewa Beach
My memory of here is that the place was hot and humid, and it is. Perhaps my ten-year-old sense of reality had not experienced enough data points to make a sound declaration. Ewa Beach was hot. Kailua was not.
It’s calm outside and the state of mind I find myself in is more tolerant of the heat; Hawaii is never really hot. Texas is much hotter. And unlike Phoenix or Las Vegas, it’s not a dry heat. And no year gives respite. There is no such thing as “the year without a summer” as there was in New England. Every summer in Texas is hot. Every Spring you have by then forgotten just how hot 21 days over 100 degrees is. And then you get weird anomalies, like pins pushing through the cardboard protection of seasons. I’ve sweat my days through three digits in January, and one digit in April. I watched incredulously as the National Weather Service in Fort Worth issued a winter storm warning when it was 86 degrees outside, then watched it drop to below twenty before the sun was fully gone.
I love watching the weather. I prefer inclement weather. Weather is a convenient and easy metaphor. But that’s not why I like it. Here’s a stretch. I love the weather for the same reason I love baseball. Everything can be measured, everything is measured, and every measurement is subject to immediate recall with the correct resources and effort; every measurement, even at the quantum level, matters.
I can tell you records in both, and you won’t care, but they exist independently of you or me. Esoteric and beautiful, they act as a beautiful gateway to codifying understanding.
Cocaine Buddha
Money. If that’s what it’s all about? It seems such a waste of time. What does money give you? One minute not worrying about needing more. It’s like happiness. The fleeting moment that leaves you, at best not happy, at worst? Unhappy. Happiness felt by money is fleeting. It is the emotional equivalent of cocaine. You always know how much you have left, then it’s gone. And that dopamine-fueled search for more. The Buddha was right. Don’t want it and you won’t need it. Absence causes suffering. And for the record, I’m not confirming or denying my first-hand knowledge of cocaine.
Apophenia
That is the human tendency toward connection of unrelated phenomena where none exists, toward creating patterns, even when none exists. Trying to bring order to chaos, is what separates us from being an animal. I suppose there are other things, but other primates don’t seem much concerned with the correlation versus causation debate. Bonobos will go down on each other, and chimpanzees will rip your face off, but neither group seems too concerned with voting districts or feminism.
The rate of divorce in Maine correlates almost perfectly with the rate of consumption of margarine in the rest of the country. And that’s not even the strangest example of almost perfect correlation. The number of letters in the winning word of the national spelling bee and people killed by venomous spiders. Almost perfectly the same. The point of talking about this? Many people find a cause and effect here. Don’t eat margarine or your cousin in Maine gets a divorce? Her marriage is doomed. Don’t spell long words, or you might kill someone with a spider bite.
These examples are ridiculous. Life is ridiculous. And the same impetus that suggests to a certain element that mass killings or 9/11 or Kennedy assassinations happened for a larger purpose, will also suggest this ridiculousness. It’s part of the human condition. These patterns that exist or don’t, that are recognized or not, that are true or false. To anyone that believes them, they are as real as God, or as oxygen in the air, or as subatomic truth or infrared light. The argument, of course, is just because it cannot be sensed, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. A negative proof shifts the burden, right or wrong, to the skeptic. And a lack of evidence becomes a virtue, not a deficit.
I think we all know better. I do.
Against all odds
In terms of evolution, ants are very successful. So were dinosaurs. So are crocodiles. Bacteria are absolutely the apex. Humans are an anomaly. The fact that I care what you think? The cosmic or even geologic odds that this might happen are statistically zero. I’m feeling how Iʻm feeling against all odds, against the concept of odds. So there’s that. Short version: you can’t possibly empathize, but I’m not making up how I feel.
Paraffin
Put your hand 3/4 of an inch above the flame of a candle. Immediately, it hurts. Don’t move. Watch the burned wax turn black to paraffin. Its melting point is only 99 Fahrenheit. less than half a degree above your “normal.” More like urine than lava. Then, it stops burning. Black tendrils. It turns out what hurts is subjective. This is a metaphor.
Lick the bottom
You have to lick the bottom, so you know what it tastes like. You have to lose a lot, maybe everything, to know what you had meant anything at all. This existential struggle? Everyone goes through this, some just can’t articulate it. Who with a contemplative mind has not contemplated forever? Who hasn’t feared the idea? How many ants or roaches did you kill this year? What do you think their afterlife fate is? What do you think yours is?
I used to go to parties and realize what hour it was, and realize there were only so many hours left to try to have fun. That’s how I’ve been looking at life lately. If I’m lucky, I have 30 years left, and that’s far less than I’ve already been here. Are you ready? I’m not.
Inherent conflict
How do you finish telling a story when you can only think fifteen seconds at a time? How do you create a narrative when three minutes of contemplation is exhausting? These are rhetorical questions when I’m lucky. Writers write, right? But what if writing, what if every thought, is embroiled? I have no third act, and I don’t know if I ever will. I can’t get past the conflict. The conflict defines how I live; it defines who I am right now, who I’ve been for a while. The conflict or nothing is how I feel.
I saw an old friend last night and he was in chains over how he felt about a relationship he was in. I felt like I was in a zoo, watching something that had no personal resonance. I told him I was the same way for a while, after the last time, but after what happened, I decided to turn it off, and so I did. With me, it’s always been all or nothing. And for six years now, I have chosen nothing. I have broken the alternative so many times that it might not be an option to go back. I can tell the story, but I can’t live it anymore. Too many things get broken.