The Slope

There are two things on my mind. One's good, and one's sad. Both are about life.

The first is a movie I watched called Cash Back. It's British and has Oliver Wood from Harry Potter as the main character.

There's a lot of nudity in it. It's about beauty though, and claiming the moment. It's pretty Bohemian, but it's definitely an inspiring movie - inspiring in the way I like it to be. Not in the Seabiscuit or Radio way, where they might as well put it in the "inspiring" genre, but something that lulls you in and makes you care about the characters, and then tells a human story.

I had to put that one first, because the second makes it seem trite. Someone that was a good friend of mine in high school, I just found out, was diagnosed with colon cancer in June. Apparently he has a fairly high chance of survival, but it's just so strange. Anyone past some certain point in life, I would think, would sympathize with this sentiment - but it is not quite scary and not quite sad to me...but just an altogether wordless feeling, to be confronted with death in such a real and immediate way.

I don't know if I've written this before, I may have, but it's worth repeating. It's both horribly tragic and terribly interesting that we should grow to know that we are - and to build relationships with people, to have love, and to have things we build, and accomplish, and overcome - and die. If we live long enough we will see everyone we love die, and die ourselves. And this is certain. That we would pass thru life like a blip on a radar screen, like a vapor, and we know, we know that everything will end. That we could understand this, and still slip toward it completely unable to stop it. Humanity is actually a tragedy.

These Voices In My Head

Ernest Hemingway, again. Apparently he liked bull fighting. As immoral as it was considered, even in his own time, he found he liked it.

He wrote he has an interest in suicide. He compared something like the nobility of the bull, and the tragedy of their death even as a sure thing, with suicide. I think that's what the comparison was. Books on CD tend to wash over me, giving the continuum of the colors rather than solidifications of facts and events.

Where was I?

He has a voice, on this book on tape - literally, and in the more Euclidean sense. His writing has "a voice." This isn't new. I've even understood this before, but I never identified it with myself.

These emergent properties in this experiment. Not the right use of "emergent properties," really, but they're emerging the more I write, and their properties of my writing, and writing in general.

Last night I finished a story. About 6 thousand words (we've been going about 6 days). Apparently we found out some time ago that in the middle of every story, whether the story is told by a character, a picture hanging on a wall, or an invisible narrator, there is always always a persona, telling the story. Apparently when this sort of philosophical revelation came about writers experimented and tried to write stories without this voice. I'm not sure, but I think they were unsuccessful. We can't separate the is from the who, no matter how we try. We want to personalize things.

My story has a voice. I mention Hemingway because as I listen, the voice that's emerging from there is sincere, and caring. He's talking about something he cares about. The voice that emerges from my story is witty, I hope, empassioned, I think, and often times sarcastic. I imagine a greasy old New Yorkian wearing a gristle-stained apron, sitting in the corner of a diner, smoking, and telling this story.

If I can talk about my feelings for a second (Hi, my name is Kevin, and I write sarcastically), I wonder if this isn't because I'm not quite comfortable with what I'm doing yet. I remember when I first started "acting." Yes "acting". I often times played the character angry, even when it was unnecessary. It was easy. It was masculine. And it was defensive. I wonder if I might be doing the same thing here.

Defibrillator

The last of the psychedelics boil in my blood. I am Sheeva the God of Death.

But really, what is percocet? Aspirin with a sprinkling of THC? I doubt it even goes that far. The lights remain lights and the music continues to enter my brain only through my ears, unfortunately.

These days, they grate by. Like the door in a horror movie. For now, though, the killer's already in the room and he's just swinging the door back and forth for effect I guess.

I'm tempted to hang all my paintings sideways. My furniture, I've keeled on the diagonal, almost all of it. It looks pretty strange in my bedroom, but at least it's interesting in a way that makes the word be able to describe itself. At least my furniture is doing something, and not just sitting there asking to be sat on. At least these rooms, they convey something. It might be just an aversion to fengshui, I'd show you the Chinese characters, but it seems I'm yet to install them on this computer, so great are my studying, maintaining, and prostrastinatory sins.

This is all an exercise, by the way. This is probably the first of the marshes a writer encounters that slogs him or her down and grabs for one's neck - writing when not particularly inspired to do so. I'm sure there were days when Beethoven didn't want to touch a piano, or when he sat down at it he just kept playing chopsticks over and over and hating that he was so un-genius-like. I refuse to believe there's truly something that sets apart Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein, and Aristotle. "Evolution, Morpheus...evolution. Like the dinosaur." We're all carved from the same wood. It's the same dust and god-breath what flows thru my veins, and if I'm naught but 2% estranged from chimps, from a genetic standpoint, some garbage about the way Da Vinci's brain might have been organized differently, I find rather unimpressive, to be frank.

But then, I'm young, and foolish, right?

I for one would rather never learn I have limitations, except for my ability to fall off a cliff on to a spike and die.

That's just good breeding.

I Break This Peace

Maybe truth is too broad, perspective would be a better word. Just the truth of our situation. I don't know why it works, but when our place in this world can be distilled - and all our lives shrunk down and given perspective, it makes it so much more bearable.

All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

The end of Eclipse on the dark side of the moon album by Pink Floyd. Full lyrics in that link.

5 For the living know that they will die;
But the dead know nothing,
And they have no more reward,
For the memory of them is forgotten.
6 Also their love, their hatred, and their envy have now perished;
Nevermore will they have a share
In anything done under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 9:5-8

You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.

It is no evil for things to undergo change, and no good for things to come into being as a consequence of change.

Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

There is only a kind of comfort in this. This isn't a friend telling you, "It's going to be okay." It's a funeral saying, "You're going to die." It's Indian ruins saying, "What seems so large and so important will be gone one day." It's a worn gravestone saying, "A life can be forgotten." And then you yourself realize that you'll be forgotten, and one day your grave will be worn down so it's unreadable. The United States will dissolve. And all these relationships and companies and wars and pain will blow away.

for dust you are and to dust you will return

For some reason, there's comfort in this.

Interrupted

I used to live in a suburban city in Southern California. With the exception of an Uncle and Aunt and cousins dodging fires, after 19 years of life there, I have no reason to go back - not in any sort of permanent basis at least. The rest of my family and some friends live in the desert capitol of Arizona, and I was born there, but it's also not my home. No where and at no time will I return to the same high school friends up to the same old antics, and I'll probably never frequent the haunts of my childhood.

It seems romantic to be free with no ties, but it's also very strange.