Nietzsche, an author I celebrate a great deal in my own writings, elaborated, too, with abandon – and thus, exhaustively would extrapolate; and when he couldn’t be burdened to expound on aphorism, he at least had the good decency to fill his pages with them, copiously, one after another, a body count of past ideas and writ index of the dead ‘sense’ that may never really have been all that common but now made ready to the commonest of folk, in words.

I think if you have the gift of any memorable wordwork, you owe it to any and all of your listeners to sift it through and mill it out to a gaseous form and disseminate it across all planes of it’s possible experience.

In my own case, I expand on an idea because I have no faith in myself to make my point in short.

But even if I could, I would have it such that I’d never be accused of boiling it down and evaporating the extraneous.  Explication is not art, and I hate and hate the word ‘wordsmith’.  I am not banging together and burning these thoughts, face to the fire, cackling mad through a heatshield, tongs and hammer in hand, a clear and endgame for the ore’s design inhabiting the mind.

Expression, at all, artistic or otherwise, is a sort of tragic restraint, like a dog pulling at his collar and leash so hard that he chokes himself to death.  What wild, unchecked, foolish assumption we make when we feel understood at all in speech and in word, what amazing leaps we take with our faith, dancing it around the room and having our way with it – it’s a very specific sort of debauchery, and one we seemingly cannot live without on a word to word basis.  The facade is entirely complete and wholly pervasive.  It is everyday, perhaps, for the idiot, but I promise you in honesty, I don’t understand anything but the most facile and shallow scrapings of your meaning.  All I get of you is the little erosion of your yesterday that I scrape off my whetstone, having caught you in passing with the slightest of slights and chipped off a sliver to take with me as I continue on.

We bang and bump into one another, spend days and nights and even, sometimes when we’re truly fortunate, mere seconds together, and a real human moment of a real human sense of comprehension of another’s caterwauling remains a painfully rare occurrence.

Brevity ‘cannot possibly’ be our answer to this problem.

I will never assume that I am heard, and never assume that I am understood, and thus I will write and write and sing and talk, be a friend and befriend more still, love until I ache and condemn until I ache, until my bones are bleached by the sun and like most my ideas as well, my body has taken to rot. I want to die, some day, having stood for something, having spoken for someone.

The creation of a thing, even so much as a word, a pressure of breath past teeth and tongue, to speak, utter and congeal together from the sludge of mongrel mastery of one’s language – this act, it is the very avatar of Wonder and Awe, and we take it for granted, first in our use of it, and second in the preposterous belief that we ‘use’ language at all.

The concept of a wordsmith, and I said I hate and hate it, is something I’ve been called when calling was to be done, and it is a truly absurd notion.  We are nothing of the sort – instead, I suggest, we are ALIVE, and to endure such a state is necessarily to struggle to be heard and to convince ourselves that anyone else we bump and bang into as we suffer our souls is anything more than a strange paralles of our own understanding of the viciously undependable state of affairs we host our affair with.

Language is one such passage into this fantasy, if we’ll permit for a moment it to be called by it’s other name.  Love is another, pain another still.

We are alive; thus, we mewl like animals, and assign what meaning we can to the animal babbling next to us.

Consider, especially in those moments when you read one, read a word and, just for a second, it sounds a little odd to your ear, or looks a little odd to your eye, or you learn something about it, another meaning, another way to pronounce it, what it really means and how you misjudged it, how they make you laugh and cry and doubt yourself at the worst of moments, when we recognize where it came from and see how it fits in with our own circle of trust and library of options… when faced with all that, consider this: the words live as we do, each one bright souls of their own, and we, quite rightly, owe them our lives.

They are not the ore – we are.  Through their lense we shape our understanding of every second of every day, storybooking every moment of our experience.

The words smith ‘us.’

I, in contrast, travel only from idea to idea, regardless of on whose side of whose line on whose map I happen to, on a moment to moment basis, reside.

I can’t quite understand just quite where we differ – when she writes on her own blog of the various travel experiences she had before we met, it’s very much an exposition and exploration and excitement of her mind just the same.

But when she returns, she speaks and writes of that which exists, and she returns with evidence of the fact, photos and memories of comparable experience, a communicable soul of the place inhabited, even for a while, and she promises sweetly that you, too, might tread where her adorable little feet had once tread.

Her dirt is your dirt, if you so fancy it, and you could go walk those paths too – ask her, and she’d happily draw you a map in green crayon and place in your hand a good compass, and push you just so to get you moving to where you definitely ought to visit.

It’s terribly inviting, seducing, and inspiring.  With her, I’m often moved to action, having been whisked off with her to Honduras, across the country on a long, long drive, down to see family, over to see others still.

Just this weekend last, I felt the unsettling consequences of choice creep up my spine, and on a lark, we drove out to another city four hours away, swinging down the highway at great speeds, staying overnight, all because we could, right on the tip of a whim.

Adulthood is a bit of a strange beast that way, especially at it’s onset – which, hmm, seems to take years to set in, but curiously only appears to have firmed up and taken purchase overnight.  And yet we can never quite point our finger to which night, exactly, that it appeared.

But overnight, you have all the freedom in the world, and nobody to stop you from exercising it.

Perhaps you’re now an adult when you no longer think to call anyone when you decide to skip town.  Or a fugitive, I suppose, might satisfy that criteria.

One in the same?  Irrelevant.

Every time I travel her way though, in her fashion, with bags and plans and tickets and vehicles and a watch, those damned, blasted tools, everytime I take to my heels, my heels to the wind,  the wind taking the plane, the road under the wheels, transporting, translating, processing my transfer from here to there, I can only stand it for so long before I need to escape back to the world I designed, with things around me that have actual meaning, and people around me who speak in tongues that don’t sound like babbling and about whose facticities I’m vaguely aware.

I think most of all, I find the moment itself as we decide to ‘go’, the most exciting.  And it all becomes downhill from there.  I think this is the case for me because that moment, the decision-time of the undertaking, that resignation to a plan and the first steps to carry it out – that’s the moment we share in our respective travelling, and I do love to share it with her.

But a drive is a drive, and a flight is a flight.  Breathe this air or that air, sit in this chair or that chair.  Eat this food or that food, see this form or that form.

I find the senses rather tedious without a great personal meaning attached to the thing being sensed, and because of it, I’m deficient, I’m colourblind to the collective experience.

I eat out almost daily, a luxury and a freedom of consideration, but food means nothing to me at all, it’s a chore and carries with it punishment should I rebel against it’s chains, pains and madness, a fury and truculence that spoils all of my moods should I fail to spoil my appetite.  But sitting down to a fresh loaf of bread and tearing out the soft, white innards reminds me of sitting on hard cloths seats in the back of my grandfather’s Jeep Wagoneer, listening to my father and my Nono talk about work.

And now I’m travelling, back to when I was that size and the seatbelt fit me like a blanket, when my feet were so small that my shoes were weightless, where everyone was taller than I, but by virtue of noise and personality alone I fancied them equals nonetheless.

When my grandmother sat at the breakfast table on Sunday morning and the smell of bacon and cigarettes flooded that large kitchen of the house that has since been totally remodelled down to the brick with an unnatural gate out front and a now-distinct absence of life about it, notably only in contrast to the beautiful, vibrant souls that used to inhabit it.

And I’m moved, the same way that cancer, spite, jealousy, miscommunication, betrayal, economics, mistrust, and worst of all, WORST of all – TIME, moved out from that place where the Jeep used to park, moved out from that place all the love that used to inhabit it’s four walls and every nook and cranny, with the odd-feeling wooden doors and brass handles, and the large bearskin rug and hand-made bar in the basement, with the locked door of mystery that my cousin and I curiously tried to pick, where I lived for two summers, where I challenged my aberrant uncle with veiled threats and watched my drunk aunt drive her fist in the wall and SCREAM in my face, not looking at me, but through me, as she re-told and re-lived an old, painful memory.

And here’s where I’ve travelled to, and I’m moved to tears, and I haven’t left the spot I sit.  I don’t have pictures or proof, I have only a very precise, unflinchingly honest recall of my time there, but it could have been time spent anywhere, because every place is special when it’s special to a boy.

Ten years from now I’ll write of this moment now, sitting in bed with my wife, click-clacking away at the keyboard, wondering where I’ll next travel to in life, wondering where I’ll go with her next, be it her trip to our honeymoon and great adventures and photographs, or my trip into tomorrow and the day after next, stealing away nuggets of incalculable meaning and value to my soul and recalling them in the highest of definitions, defined perhaps only to me in my own babbling tongue of the thousand voices of my mind, my own chorus and army of librarians, cataloguing my life so that in those pages of my history I might learn anything at all, endavouring to continue to endeavour to become something worthwhile, something worthy of the beautiful moments I travel to on an everyday basis.

Translation is no sort of alchemy or magic, it’s a passage, always a movement, from here, to there.  She translates herself and I translate myself; her from home X to place Y, and me from thought to words, words to wheels, wheels to paved tarmac, always firmly on the gas, lifting off, landing abruptly, always taking in everything, no camera needed when I paint the memories by hand.

She mentioned she wants to go to Iceland for our honeymoon.  Every day is my honeymoon, because I know someday, someone may ask me about these days, how it feels to be newly married, to be a new adult, what changes, what stays the same.  My travels are all, are all in my mind, and my souvenirs are the oft-shed scales and skin I shake off as I go, remaking and reforming all that I’ve been to see about who I’ll try to be when I next set off.

My best travel story is the one where I found someone amazing to travel everywhere with – specifically, everywhere that “I” actually travel to, maps be damned, fuck the compass.

Specifically, in happy translation from now to every tomorrow ahead.

No questions about this one; it is written, that I cannot change and I will never forget it, but nevertheless: no questions at all.  It is, it speaks, and it’s voice is enough:  or will have to be, all the same.  

My best writing was never read – I expect this piece to dutifully adhere to that tradition, and should it become insubordinate and garner some audience, I’d ask that we respect it and leave well enough alone.

-~-

Typically in the nowaday should I write anything but fluff, I get calls asking if I’ve got mad or if I’m suffering some sort of crisis.  Life is a crisis.  Sometimes I’m just feeling honest about that fact.

This is kenosis, and questions are not necessary here.

There is no just reciprocation of the acts of the heart and memory by the ghosts who haunt us and carry away in hand as they go whole sections of souvenir, parts and pieces and strips of the wall’s paper, great axe-gashes in the foundation of our personality cleaved clear from it’s block; our ‘us’, our best estimation of all that we love about ourselves and the worst of our hate; that sad ichor with which we, in broad, equally brazen strokes, slather on and thus affix together, resolutely, the very bonds of our resolve – these stands we take (even when we stand sidelong with a buckling spine and one shaky leg), all those battle lines and lines drawn in the sands of whispers and promises and lies, it’s those determinations, made, determinedly, to never again allow such hurt and rape and love.

In a word(s) – when we should think of anything, the thing of thought apparently owes us little due for the consideration.  Gifts inspire gifts, love begets love, whispers – even – can elicit some very soft tears, and thoughts…  the most deafening of our myriad favours to bestow – our thoughts remain ours alone, and they run through us like a second set of arteries, just as pervasive, crawling through our skin, inextricably tied to the function and commonplace activities of our heart, running us through with our our own recall, drawing themselves, quartering us, without so much as a sound, wracking us, changing us, bending us to their will, moving our hands and feet and eyes like puppets with invisible strings, puppets in a one-man, one-act play, with no lines and very little movement all the same, with no one to view it but a drama all the same, all the same, same thoughts again and again, rushing, twisting, churning us around and wrapping us in their firm embrace, holding us and our eyes wide open, open to the possibility of forgetfulness, teasing us with a sense of choice, and slamming the cage door shut all the same, all the same, one mind and one life and one trillion ways to live with these infinite memories and I’m to choose just one at any moment, rushing and twisting our arms to choose, to select of the impossible that which to make possible, swearing each choice will be the last one, the only one, the final choice to make, after which all else will be branching therefrom, and the ‘right’ path will always veer left, and all the same I’d veer left even if it were the wrong one.

In dreams and in thoughts, my breath still catches, cold, and I collapse, and this memory’s blood pooling over my hands, same hands quick clutching my chest, and that beating, quick-clutching (double-clutching even) thrum of the heart pounding and choosing of it’s plethora of choice to right to life, making the choice to remain alive as a thing itself worthy of choosing indeed, but reminding me, all the same, that the bloodline of a memory is hydra with many, many heads – with every one being an insurmountable opponent on it’s own, and each insurmountable head looking for it’s own, individual opportunity to spear itself through my jaw, haymakers shattering my cheekbone and crumpling me like an old canvas and earlier work, tossed away as foundational experiment, and remind us that we are slaves, uncommunioned, inarticulate in our minds and fumbling over and through our words as they build out from these thoughts, and we’re strictly unable to think past and remember anything but the same memories that chase us around the room as they please, howling and bellowing like a pack of wolves with five heads a piece, five parts of the same memory, five ways it could have played out, and five seconds of the way it actually did.

In a minute, in a moment, they exercise their option, these monstrous memories, and we are stricken again, without warning or celebration, lashed out at again and reminded, vividly, of a time that is not ‘now’, and reminded, painfully, that that time will never again ‘be’, and all the same convinced that we can NOW never change any of the all that we’ve already painted over and buried alive.

All I’ve ever learned of cruelty, I’ve learned from Memory; one shovelful at a time, burying myself alive, alone with my thoughts, convinced, completely, that I’m alone in my thinking.

We never heal from any of it.  We never hate what we loved, never love what we hated.  That which harmed, harms.  That which inspired, inspires.  I will never forget, never heal, never forgive.  I will never stop running, chasing, loving, trying, wondering, blaming, hating, or fail to cover and covet the precious as I find it.

And so in the world in which I live, where my mind is Warden, not tool, when I wander off that path, and I act against my heart, even in thought, with a thought or a dream, in the pliable space between the quick-ticks of time; spined teeth taste of my shoulder as the monster’s one-of-many-heads tears painfully my flesh with it’s bite, and in these vivid hallucinations, hurls me through the air, my skin stinging as the fresh air whips across the too-open wound, and I come to rest, injured, at the feet of a memory that’s now cruel, so cruel, so cruel, so cruel to watch.

And as I dream, I watch the insane, dancing scene of my past flavours of happiness, many-coloured and spaced out at great distance but all the same forbidden to my heart.  And as I watch, I ache, strained against the nonsense of this idea, all the same unyielding in it’s punishment, cat with nine tails, ten tails, fifty, all the same swinging it with horrid force and no restraint, all the same I see it as my restraint, my pulling of pulleys to wield me around in directions I would not naturally choose to go.

And the ache follows me like a weight, insisting with such heaviness that I suffer it until I admit that I love it, damning me until I admit that it’s holy.

But I can’t, and I won’t, so tear out my liver, so cruel but go on and do it, I’m screaming, do it for my doing that which I must, tear it out again, all the same, day by day.

You’ll hear me scream, and oh, how I’ll scream, right until the chords of my vocals crack from my neck and snap out like snakebites, the voice itself terrified of it’s howl and desperate to escape it’s brutal chore.

And in that screaming, hear these words, remember as I do when I cannot forget, how I used to write with such violence, writing promised to be unread, but written as if the words themselves would take to the wind if ignored, my slashing with adjective left and right, whirling about; HEAR these screams, make room, feel and remember this strength that I used to command at will.  Yes Warden, too, remind me of that, remind me of my weapons and their double-edge, remind me how “I” love and what that meant.

Make room for me and my damned ideas and twisted sense of reason, feel that FIRE that I used to throw around, that consuming, debilitating fire that both simultaneously birthed, bathed and brutalized my image, impression and impact on and for everyone I used to know.

An exorcism then?  Is that what this is or what’s needed?  Or just a rebirth of perspective?  All the same, haunted all the same, blind in the sandstorm, whipping about, never likely to be found – but never lost, all the same, ears to the wind as it flies, listening for an echo, never forgetting what it was to see my madness in a mirror.

A vagabond of soul, petty and poor and content, determined to be content with his thoughts alone.

I firmly believed that this is the way one must ‘be’ to keep principle first and at the front – if one’s ideas and one’s dreams of how life might soon become are to be of any value in the slightest, they seemed to me to be required to stand guard at the precipice of one’s priorities, and must not be ousted by whatever inclination toward laziness does try to creep in.

They must be moved from the forefront not an inch.

I saw the material existence of soup and sandwich and some of one’s own ‘things’ as something of an untenable but unimpeachable distraction, and so I moved for a firm policy of having little and none, save for only that which connotes ‘quality’, something good and of high status in it’s class.  A mongrel philosophy on the subject, no doubt, but the issue deserved no better.

And if I could not have it well, I’d decide I did not need it.  I felt I’d keep the shades of grey for my moralizing – consumer affairs, accordingly, can be allocated to black and white.  I owned very little, but that I bothered to own I ensured was of good quality – undiverse, yes, but discerning in taste and educated as to it’s value.

At the core, I felt that with a good woman and good word(s), that was enough, more than enough for me, as long as I kept to great quality on both fronts.

And how things DO change – and how sharp and biting it tastes when one tastes of one’s own evolution of perspective.  Unsettling, in a word.  So where HAVE I found myself now, with what gathered into my grasp?

I’m married now, I have my own little wife, and she’s quite splendid.  I did not settle in the least in this regard – I expected only the best of wives, and with time and some trouble, I secured her.  She’s magnificent, and every evening I spend with her curled in the crook of my arm, I feel rich and overburdened with great fortune.  I’ve written of her many times before – my feelings on the subject are no secret, and it’s no deviation from my ideal to love her greatly and value her above all else.

I actually just bought my first car too, it’s very luxurious with all the little fancy toys and blinking lights and screaming engine growls that make every other little car out on the road seem like it’s moving in slow motion.  It feels, when you sit in it, like your favourite sofa chair.  The radio always seems to play my favourite song.  It’s black and sleek and beautiful and it’s the only car I see when I walk through a parking lot, and it’s true, it’s just like your wife that you can’t stand to live without, it’s the only fish you you see in the sea.

Feburary 18th will be my one-year anniversary at my job, which I love as well.  I have autonomy, some decision making power, and for the most part, I have a great freedom to do anything I feel will improve our company’s chances of success, and significant latitude to employ my own strategies.  If you took that statement there, and posted it to your facebook, one wonders if it wouldn’t seem to be the most intense form of boastfulness, given the normal deplorable whimperings one tends to see amongst one’s friends, the little jabs and complaints and eagerness to lament one’s work.  I love my job, and I’m challenged by it, and most of that challenge exists because I’m given the freedom to challenge myself, every day, every week.

I’m now, in a word, rich – rich as before, just as before: but different, somehow more content, someway more satisfied and well still in keeping with my original vector, great pleasures in few things, few eggs in fewer baskets.

And it’s all so terribly scary as well.  The potential loss with so much more invested.  My gamble is not with money and chips but with a greater investment of self into my life, into my people and into my things.  I’m, now more than ever before, connected to the pulse that trickles through the telephone line veins of the world in which I celebrate and condemn, and the risk is invigorating.  For a guy who really never cared what he had, and only really cared who he was, I now find myself blessed with tremendous, invaluable gifts which cannot be quantified, calculated, amended for in case of loss or truly insured against.  Money didn’t buy me this facet of happiness; it was choice.  In abstract, perhaps a choice to generate some money, but still choice – what some and most take for granted, most would wonder why I chose to choose.

I selected, carefully, with great research, deliberation and an inviting touch of inspiration the path I wanted to take, and in desiring to have her and to be had by her, I learned of these other, excellent things that I collected as we went.

The tao te ching suggests that one can guard against assault and thievery all day, only to lose all that one guarded in sleep.  But there is no replacing my beautiful wife whatever, and I cannot accept a simple sort of vigilance.  I feel as though vigilance would do well to be reinvented, for cases just such as mine – and should I ever patent true defense, this often-offender would make a choice of it as well.

I’ve battled a lot of issues and heartache and morality in my writing, but at the core, I wonder if I haven’t become a little blunt.  I’m fat and happy and blessed with success of a sort, and I’m trying not to become complacent here.  What else could one become but complacent, when what evolution took place was from content ‘to’ content, self to older self, no wiser but perhaps still better for realizing better the possibilities of betterment ahead?  I know that children are next on the docket, and I have said before that my wit and my wonder and my wild-eyed fascination are fast dwindling, an all-too-satiated man becoming quite complacent with his absolute, solemn happiness.

What line does one walk when you speak to a child, how can one honestly caution against 20+ years of largely disappointment when one can only seem to focus on the last two?  Do I ignorantly tell them that time heals all?  For it doesn’t…  one just notices less the damage done as one focuses more on the building of tomorrow.

If I have any wonder left, I wonder…  what’s next, now that I have it all?  I ask with no boasting, I promise – but with genuine curiosity.  I was content before, always content, determinedly content.  But I’m content without determination to be so now, and I do wonder, what’s still to come?  What else will this fascinating life offer me, challenge me with, now that I spend my days left to challenge myself alone?  What will I now gain, and how might I now endure and suffer through a loss, despite my promised best efforts to maintain?

Just…  simply…  amazing, this life we live.  Every day, another fortune, a plundered present, strip mined of it’s excellence:  and yet another powerful reason to fear it’s quiet end.

I guess what I’m saying here is:  Don’t ever let anyone take even an inch, as best you can prevent it – it’s all very precious beyond any recompense.  As of this day I’ve lived longer than I have ever before, have accomplished more than I had ever dreamed, and have surrounded myself with the best people I’ve ever known.  I didn’t always realize that each day is, actually, a realized opportunity to live, to exist and explore, to enjoy and to introduce and to discover.

Don’t trade any of it, the world is not a bazaar for pleasant exchange.  Part of the pleasure is in the fight, the struggle to gain and gain and keep, to find the edge and screamingly leap off in mindless search for more.  Excess is the word here, to be MORE content, the riddle is simple in posing and commonsense in response – just refuse the one-step-back proposition, charge ahead with abandon when you hear those trumpets shriek; and charge ahead, just the same in silence, once you’ve found yourself leading the pack.

Not an inch, not a whisper; I love it all, I’ll give none of it back, and I make no apology for enjoying the most enjoyable of lives.

Thoughts on socialization, musing on happiness, and a scathing criticism of everyone who’s ever disappointed you and everyone who you’ve worse disappointed… about this work allow me to be perfectly clear, for once:  this one is for everyone and about everyone who ever might read this.  If I wrote something readable, you’ll see yourself as both the author and the attacked.  If you only see yourself as ONLY one or the other of the jailor and jailed, I recommend a hard look and a harder drink still, you very likely have real apologies to make, so make them without delay.

And so:

Is happiness really a sensible goal, or is it just the unintended by-product of life being lived in excess, appearing only in the moment-to-moment calculations, stuck tight between the lines but off to the side, viewable only in peripherals and peripheral to existence from the start?  Does it exist for everyone as it does for me squeaking out only in pittance and drops so small they sate often not an ounce or an oodle of thirst?  I used to swear I wouldn’t live to be happy and comfortable, and I find myself doing just that, trying with whips and chains to get my insolent little ducks in a row and walking single file and strict-held to structure.

Most times when time’s taken I think predictable vector just isn’t enough – I believe (if I’m to be believed) that one *needs* to take leave to relish in the everyday, but that everyday’s no longer a condiment that suits my taste at all.

She says she loves me because I’m passionate, but where is that passion?  I’ve got ten shades to this soul and mirrors enough for the lot of them, but all reflection shows not a one reflection looks anything like I’d designed.  Now, today and a few yesterdays back as well, I listen to people wail and lament, and offer little or nothing of value in return.  I endure insult and aggravation, and take it with a smile.  I see the people I love hurt and tormented, or tormenting each other, and it chips little flakes of my patience away, one whisper and soft punishment at a time.

If *my* comfort and happiness is the goal, then everyone has failed me miserably, because you wretched people with your wretched bleating drives me to madness and an endless, unshakeable hauling from to to fro a dour, moping state of smile.  But if passion and the taking of stances and making of strides is instead my more and most correct designation, then I’m failing everyone else in the most wild of ways, because I’m still game-dressed but on the sidelines, watching the whispers go by after all the speakers have spoke.

I wonder if what I’m losing here is the last strands of connection and care that still loosely persude me to stop dragging my feet as I shuffle along, to still pick up my heavy steps and still gingerly tread over and around these downtrodden ghouls instead of callously running them down.

But hey, let’s try for truth here, I can indeed see your point(s), sharp and wanting for blood as they do tend to be: without consideration, patience and understanding, or a care for caring at all, you ARE INDEED correct – the shortest line between two points IS INDEED straight through whoever the fuck happens to be in the way.

Put smartly for the stupid among us – don’t be amazed when the easiest solution for you is the hardest for everyone else around.  It’s not a zero sum game, but it’s close enough to resemble one.

Truth be told, your problems are indeed your own, much as I often offer to carry them, and I’m just not sure if I’d like to stay this course as the bellhop for the damned, juggling all this mad luggage around.  You’re a guest in my heart; you’re all guests.  Get your fucking feet off my sofa and have a little respect for the furniture I set out for you to lounge in while you’re here.  I’m not going to make room for your personal stands if you insist on standing on me.

At one point or another, arthritis sets in; disrepair’s blame lies with the user, not the used.  I’m getting fed up with these swollen knuckles and sleepless nights, saddened and scared by the pinnacle fact that these rare-oiled paws can’t creak closed hard enough to anymore even make a fist.

Love,

~ James

Are we nothing if we can’t count on anything, do we need our casual demands of consistency to keep on even keel?

I just asked my woman to marry me, and she said yes, and after all we’ve been through together, in the moment and those leading up, I fully expected her assent.  I married her the moment I first told her I loved her, and that’s a fact, but I’m a strange beast in how I lumber about through the world, and I know that.

Still though, when I take a moment to let this momentum settle, do I ever sit impressed at how presumptuous I can be!  What madness, to expect anything of all!

Offering only a sparkling bribe, I asked of her to spend her life with me, to bear and help raise our children, to partner with me for the longest of durations and to share our love with our community, to legitimize our commitment through this near-crazy ceremony, to continue to walk as we’ve walked, and talk as we’ve talked, and explore what our love can become…

How shameful to think anyone should expect another to commit to that degree their heart!  That’s a sort of love and a favour to be earned again and again and each and every hour, with each and every choice one makes that takes the other into their calculation.

It’s a royal strain of the self to prostrate oneself so thoroughly for another as I suggest, but by gods, be honest with me, what else is real love but an endless twist of two long strands of soul, arcing out in whatever direction they, those lovers, choose?

We is, we are, we live to compromise with one another so that we may love together.  Love does not expect, it does not condescend or demand, at least not anything of the other, but only everything of oneself instead!

Indeed!  Comfort in love is a misery of high order; I won’t have it, let me instead writhe endlessly to wrap myself better in her.

It’s not the best of confessions, but I expected a ‘yes’, and I got it when I asked for her hand.  But perhaps I’m not inked to the heart with assumption here, perhaps I might be allowed to put a better spin on things?  Let me be more honest still!  While I assumed, yes, I assumed, but I bet on her charity and her unbelievable capacity for caring and joy, I bet on her here, my beautiful girl, I expected that she’s full of a different kind of colour altogether, and while I’d do well to expect less and worse of the world, I’d bet anyday that she’s better than the rest of us.

I adore her so awfully much, and I’ve never been happier than I am now, coming out unscathed from a very scary question.  Blessed ignorance then, I thank that great veil for keeping me safe from from what was the terrible possibility of her very terribly possible refusal.

Thank you for not ending me, for not ending us, for allowing us to continue, for allowing me to live as I’ve come to love; as yours, all of me as yours, all of us as life.

Thank you, again and again, for you.

And thank you and thank you for loving me too.  I’ll try to be great, if you promise to be you.

~ James

We act with our loved ones as if to be supported, encouraged, validated and vindicated, justified and just-in-cased is and should be reasonably expected, that our friends and family and confidants shouldn’t have their own opinions of these coloured, bannered opines of ours we fly so proudly.

That to be a real friend is supposedly to be unaccountable to, in good thought and reasoned mind, in good action, in bad faith.

That to be a real parent or a lover is to be fundamentally un-considered when our husband or child draw rather jagged, unkempt lines in the sand with their backs against the wall.

I think to take any stand of any strength at all shouldn’t require a strut, and we should be eternally grateful and consider ourselves exceedingly lucky when we do find a bolstering of our ranks by anyone and everyone who should or might agree.

I think if we take that stand and find ourselves alone at the edge, standing on just the one leg, howling into the wind that we need whatever it is we feel we need – well, detractors be damned, it’s our stand to take.

If you’re going to change your life, and you believe it’s the thing to do with all your heart, you just go ahead and change it, and with that choice change the world, and you do it in an instant, without debate or dissembling, and you let the scar of that act draw roughly across everyone who stands in it’s path until it’s carved up your yesterday for a tomorrow you can stand.

My whole life I’ve been a proponent of intelligent action when action is called for, for endeavouring to make the right decision, choose the right path, to doubt yourself in a healthy way and constantly re-evaluate one’s position.  But when it’s time to act, to take action and take stands, I also say – ACT!

Rip it all up and shred it if it offends you, shelter it from storms if it pulls tight at your strings.  But indecision and stasis for the sake of another’s favour when one’s heart knows unquestionably what exactly one’s heart needs to beat…  that’s the most shameful human act that still qualifies as the act of a human, the most saddening of sights that human eyes can see and a unforgivable debasement of soul that I won’t stand.

But then, who am I?  If you let my words stop you, you’re lesser still!  Onward and upward, by god, onward and upward, you have living to do!

If you *must* scream, SCREAM!  If love, LOVE!  But if you do nothing, I ask nothing else; MY act, MY choice will be to deprive my eyes of your waste, for I have watched you waste away.

Every drag, every sip, every stumble, every slip.

“It is terrible to die of thirst at sea. Is it necessary that you should so salt your truth that it will no longer–quench thirst?” ~ Nietzsche

So please, and don’t let me ask you, just learn this for yourself – when you must act, you act; and trample to death one’s detractors underfoot without so much as a second thought.

~ James

Words can’t describe the mastery or the melee of the moment.  The intricate, unparalleled detail and softness in Caravaggio’s groundbreaking works were everything I had hoped they would be, and more – these haunting, imposing, striking figures seemed to pull at the canvas and stretch out off of the gallery walls – these were no mere windows into a moment, indeed, it was them, the immaculate individuals on the other side of the frame that looked through to watch us.

And what a sight we were, all of us crammed into the softly lit halls, coarsely scraping by each other as we trudged about like ants, nobody seemingly enjoying themselves at all.  Always we can’t get the good spot, the great angle and perfect enjoyment of the art, always we’ve seen it before in books because yes, that one is quite famous and oh, look how he’s posed!

It sounded like bleating: endless, half-muttered, honey-dipped bleating.

And that sound, that droning murmur of idiots talking to fools, so painfully juxtaposed against the other half of the congregation, the silent, artistically dead that shuffled from portrait to painting where their cheap headsets directed, just looking and onlooking, their impossibly drab appearances distancing them even further from their appearance at the gallery itself, distancing out and away from the moment and the lights and the intricately ornate frames, so self-aware that they couldn’t properly meet the sitters’ gaze, and forever onlooking the art with hanging heads and cheap looks from the side.

At least these ghouls knew they were ghouls – on one level or another, they knew they were ghouls.

And on that topic, I don’t know of any other genre but art where education is so perfectly detrimental to honest appreciation and understanding of the material.  Their entire experience is corrupt from the start, and these silent, sunken mopes pay gladly for the pox and privilege.

I find it taxing and exhausting to visit this place, and I do it as often as I can, which is to say, not nearly often enough.  Everywhere I look I am asked for and asked of and I’m stuck still with indecision.  To look at the Cezanne, or the Renoir?  The Monet or the Picasso?  If I can’t decide what to invest in, how did they decide what to paint?!

I’d like to paint the people’s reactions to painting, the faceless, wandering crowd overstuffed into the once-spacious gallery halls.  I’d like to capture that, the idle, wasted musing of people too scared to commit themselves to the work, too weak to empathize with the long dead souls captured in oil, too ambivalent to pick sides at all.

But I wander; my point is thus, and I told you that to tell you this, that I felt 10,000 different competitive impulses in that overbusy gallery, and here was my impulse and what I took away from that spectacular madness and wasteful crowd:

The final work, as one exits the special exhibition gallery, the final painting they wrap up the show with, was so expertly selected, I was moved and removed of my venom and ire, I was so impressed that the curator had selected what they had to be one’s lasting impression of Caravaggio’s work:

Painted without anywhere near the precision, detail, or intensity of his earlier works, Caravaggio’s technique here is rushed and impatient, inspired and relentless.

After a brutal, brawling life and career where the very idea of technical mastery was reinvented for his time… here he compromises, here he bends to the benefit of inspiration, and he submits to the muse that inspired this work.

The penitence here is not the sitting saint and his utterly remarkable pose and position, but the artist’s sacrifice of mechanics for the sake of his muse.

The cost of love is everything one believes, and nothing more – what a fine finale for such a collection, and what a finely missed point by many, I suspect.

~ James

We can look back on our anniversary over the 365 straight days that we chose to stay, to make a stand and to stand by each other, to endure the hard times and to enjoy the great ones…  and we can commit again for another day still, another hour, another second.

There are no rules in love, no contracts, no court of appeal, we are free to wrong each other and hurt each other with no real recourse or recompense, to lie to and betray each other with little defense to be seen to such assaults.  And yet…  left to our devices, those aren’t the choices I’ve made.  They aren’t her choices either.

She chose instead to make my life wonderful, to support me when I’ve taken risks or taken turns for the worse, to celebrate my success and to endlessly believe in me, to build me and carry me and treat me better than I wonder if I deserve.

I hope my choices sit well with her too.

We’ve chosen two years of love, two years of commitment through two very, very busy years.  It seems absurd to my mind that it’s only been two years, considering both how much we’ve been through together, and how much I still have yet to learn about my beautiful girl.

I believe, sincerely, that I’ve only scratched the surface of her patience and good will, her endless desire to do right and do well.  I believe, sincerely, in her.

I believe in us, and I don’t believe for a second I really have a choice at all.

If the price of love is everything, well, I pay it, and I’ll take out a loan if the rates do go up – it’s one vice I can’t afford to live without.

I chose you every day for two years straight, and today, I choose you again.  I love you, I adore you, you impress and inspire me, and I beg and beg and plead for you to not ever change.

You are the girl, my woman and wonder

And I’ll wonder forever if I ever can be

Half of the man that I see in the mirror

You’re nearer and that’s right where I need you to be

So just let me hold you, in my arms, your sweet charms, I won’t harm, I swear it, you’ll be safe with me

I’m here for an hour, a minute, forever, whenever you want me, whatever you need

I love you baby.  You make every day special, your kind of kindness reminds me why kindness matters as much as it does.  I couldn’t live without you, and if I have any sort of say in this at all, I won’t have to, I’d never choose to be away.  You’re special and perfect and I need you to be mine.

Thank You For You.

~ James

I vividly remember wondering wildly why my parents never had their friends visit like I did.  Now I can only guess, each guess more likely than the last.  One insecurity, one miscommunication, one hobby taken up by one party and not the other, one flirtatious glance in the wrong direction, one bad joke, one empty apology, one petulant argument, one failure to trust, one failure to care, to love…  these infinite, unchecked successes at being too, too human add up to an infinite failure to be decent in the least.

The love of my life recently returned a brother to me, a friend lost to time and the everyday for infinitely poor reasons, and I’m enjoying every minute of our now new time together.  It’s not the same as it was, but perhaps that’ll come.  Perhaps it’ll be better?  Or worse?  Exciting in any case to explore a future where one’s already been so prolific in writing one’s past.

Hope is so frightfully resilient, I fear I may never in my life be found without it, and it’s hard to hate our humanity when I know such very good humans.

I’m so glad she called, and so glad you answered, and I’m so glad we carry on now as we do, dear friend and family; brother and peer.

Love,

~ James