We Should See Other Blogs

I will proceed to explain the title of this post, if you’ll allow me.

The best feeling I can think of is meeting someone it seems like you’ve known your entire life: how was she not there in all the memories I have? Someone who, when it comes down to crunch time, will hear out the worst of those memories and its cascading repercussions, but also hear out the best and smile along with me as if it was her own. Someone who loves coffee almost as much as I do to the point of a beverage being how we met in the first place (a boring, altogether charmless story Hollywood would be ashamed to film). Someone who I can relate to on so many levels, emotional to physical. Someone, in the last analysis, to be there.

The worst feeling is a settling understanding that despite the seeming perfection, I am not simply her friend, nor she mine. She is someone you know well enough to see the reciprocity. The only difference being – no, the defining difference being – that she doesn’t see how lopsided this will become. Or, she sees a difference of opinion where I see an unfalthomable gulf. She is someone who I connect with on every level except that most important spiritual level.

I ask myself what to do as realisation dawns. For a moment I question my resolve, even question whether or not that absence is as important as I thought, and at the time it seems such a small thing, such a tiny obstacle. But I know how this plays out, at least I think I do. A stand must be made, and I must be the one to make it: the cascading repercussions of giving in are lessons I am supposed to have learned.

Then I say things to her I know will seem proper later. The drama is over; I’m stage right again. My friends will proceed to encourage me. Former lovers will say sooner is better than later. And I will say tonight I am frighteningly alone: I miss her. Not her potential, or her ideal. I miss her.

Some voice within me says, be calm. Be rational. Be mature. I pray, and the prayer connects me to the God I must believe is behind these movements. I am not alone, not really, but I still miss her.

Maybe the best song ever. Or close to it. Watch:

To Charlotte. An Elegy.

I’m not a bricklayer, darling,
and I’ll never build you a house in the sky.
I probably won’t make you happy
when I promise to be there whenever you cry.

I’m sorry it’s not complicated.
I wrote you this song in the back of a book
with words you won’t find too confusing:
the sentences there if you’d hazard a look.

I won’t lie – the future is awful.
And no, it doesn’t get better than this.
But if you want, I’ll come over sometime
and we can stop the world with a kiss
or two.

I’ve got a heartload of nothing
but a blessed disease that is killing me still.
I’ll probably find ways to lose you:
a notch in my arm for another clean kill.

I won’t lie – our future is awful.
And no, I never get better than this.
But if you want, I’ll come over sometime
and I can stop your heart with a kiss
or two.

I used to think I was worth it.
I thought I had something to give.
The illusion broke with my spirit,
as these days I’m not so convinced
of it.

Okay, last night I had one of those dreams where nothing in particular sticks out except one strange moment, which has been with me all day long. In this dream, me and this girl I very barely know (who will remain, for the benefit of our possible future fledgling friendship, nameless) were sitting on a couch all comfortable-like until she asked me if I liked her.

Now, this is odd and I know that: as the moment progressed in the dream my mind was rationalising what I would say next. I distinctly remember thinking to myself that if I say no, I blow the romantic possibilities for sure; if I say yes, I probably ruin the friendship eventually.

I don’t remember what came next. But I’m pretty sure I said no. That’s what I think I’d do now.

Earth is sighing asleep above me tonight,
massive, always falling toward the roof:
it paints my world whites and greens
and whorls of cloud where my silver lays passive.
There’s a commentary on not needing
to breathe here, somewhere, but this
evening is immense in thought and
that one will come in it’s own time.
Here, in the cold, in the dark,
I dream of you.

I would like to take moment to thank God for perogies, and their constituent ingredients.

Is it true? Is it not? In any case, drinking 3 litres of water makes me weigh more. Maybe being happy also makes me weigh more.

In any case, I worked thirteen hours yesterday, and during that time I realised that there is only one way to live with the past, and that thing is not trying forgive yourself for it, although that may be important depending on your respective pasts.

It’s why I don’t keep love letters. I just don’t. In a move I will call the best of my conscious decisions ever, I shredded all the love letters and paper momentos I had, and got rid of all the rest. This was, I think, in 2003. I’m not sure of that, though. Why keep them? Inertia, maybe. Sentimentality, probably. The fact that they were underneath a whole bunch of photos and I had forgotten them, yeah moreso.

But the fact is that I had forgotten them. I had put them away, not ready to get rid of them, but also not wanting to see them; it was as if I was trying to forget her, and one day, I actually did. Unlike the movie, she never came back. In the face of six years – only six years! – I can say I’m truly and thoroughly glad she didn’t. I would have caved. And it would have been for the worst.

Maybe those six years have taught me not to look back too often. The future has enough complications without agonising about what was, what could have been, and what is not. More to the point, there are emails I should not read, pictures I shouldn’t pull from the trash, chats I shouldn’t peruse, tones I shouldn’t obsess about, and places I simply should not go.

I’m not one to give advice, considering how I suck at life a lot. But if you’ll allow me to say this, I’d appreciate it: live boldly in the future, no matter how it scares you. Let your past flow through you and your fear of letting it go. I won’t hold out false hope – what is gone is almost always gone. But you don’t know that for sure. Maybe your future includes your past. But you won’t know that until you get there, will you? And the odd thing is, even if you proceed in the hope that it will, you’ll find that sometime, somewhere it’ll have let you go, or you it.

And remember to work out, fatty. You will be happy, somewhere along the way; not the placebo happiness you might know so well. Really happy. And you will probably weigh more because of it. That is all.

• First off, I had two of the strangest – yes, two – dreams I’ve had in a long time. The short of it, we had a potluck dinner at what I can only describe as an amalgam of every house I’ve ever lived in; I was in line for the salads when I found all the good salads had been eaten, and the last person to get any of said good salads was the very person who had butted in ahead of me several minutes before that. Needless to say, I was pissed, a screaming match ensued, and it was of course my father.
• Second dream, I was going on a road trip into what seemed like a very rural Arkansas-type place with two faceless people who didn’t say anything for the entire trip (at least that I can recall). One of them gave me money to get pancakes, which I did by going to a vending machine which mixed batter and cooked the pancakes on some sort of oily platform – you have to remember this is my dream, so the maching was actually quite complicated, the pancakes rotating and flipping – until they came to rest on a plastic plate. Then we ate them. Now I crave them.
• One of the thing I think defines us most as human beings is how we react to situations. Or, let’s be honest, how we fill the time. Really, what is “bored” other than another situation to react to? Which is why we let our friends change and mould us (if we really care about them), as they become rolled up that definition of who we are.
• So much stuff, no place to put it. Why can men not wear purses?
• If the price of gas keeps on rising (hey that’s a Bloc Party song) I’m simply not going to be able to afford owning a car, or at least driving it. That could get a little sticky, as my church is 40 minutes of racecar driving away from me.
• For a human to function properly, there are several things that he must believe to be true without warrant. For example, he must believe that his reality is – in a word – real. He’s not a head in a vat connected to a machine controlled by a mad scientist, but is instead a physical body in a physical world. He must also believe that there is truth. Everyone does. He must believe that the things he does matters. And finally – I’ll go with Plantinga on this one – he must believe in God. [Editor: please excuse the rusty epistemology.]
• My musical diet right now is pretty much Modest Mouse and Derek Webb. Yummy.

I pushed myself harder longer than I ever have before at the gym today and rewarded myself with some protein. Funny thing happened, though. Me and Dawn both hit the exact same number of calories as I glanced over at her display (I know, it’s bollocks, the numbers are approximations); I thought it was interesting, she thought it was mundane, like looking at ones’ clock at a certain time and finding that significant.

Of course, these things seem significant sometimes, and maybe they are in the context of memory; reality and statistics would dictate that a person glancing at a readout or two readouts will eventually (and probably often) find something of pseudosignificance or some random synchronicity.

I think the two bigger questions here are these: does my observation of synchronicity and application of some significance not contextualise that probability? That is to say – I know that these things happen, but the fact that I noticed it and thought about it should change the moment’s significance, whether or not I’m mistaken in applying that very significance. I took notice. That event has meaning. Even if I made the meaning up, my observation of the moment has changed its significance.

What would a world without conscious, sentient operators look like?

Secondly, or thirdly if you’re anal like that, can any moment truly be called “random”? All co-incidenced are planned, according to scripture. But here’s the crux: if a moment appears random and one reacts as if it were, what’s the difference? Even if it wasn’t random, treating it as such changes its’ significance in another direction. Hmmmm.

This is my place of employment. Parts of the video are quite loud, as the white noise is a little nuts around here.

For the record, Steve, the “random employee”, is married to my cousin and did not recommend buying our last grinder. He likes to show off his bicepts, which I have tenderly nicknamed “The Other White Meat”, and “The Other, Other White Meat”. Apparently he didn’t think I was actually going to put this on my blog. He would be so very, very, very, very, very, veh-eh-eh-eh-ery mistaken.