The Flavor of Lunch

Days like this, I watch the taffy strands that connect me to days I miss stretch thinner, and I misremember street names. What was that one I happily folded up the umbrella and got soaking wet on? Oh. So small, so far away, and so romanticized. It wasn’t without a care in the world. I hate that phrase. I cared about a good many things, and many of those I wish I still remembered how to care about. Like trying to find your way back to a place you used to live. It’s familiarly alien. This street is it, or is it the next?

But one thing was true: the world seemed larger then. It was full of a lot of unsolved mysteries I would solve tomorrow. But not today, thank you very much. I got older though, and the world got smaller. Rather, I grew in knowledge, and the world stayed the same. I discovered new mysteries, but the world they applied to looked the same. It seems better to have known less in some ways. I step further from magic and further from surprise.

Days like this, I solve another mystery, and I know more, but I feel like less for it.

When I was younger, it was my greatest ambition to distill the beauty of life into some liqueur-sweet prose. I thought that I could see this funnel that took the mundane and made it over, rags-to-riches, Hollywood-style. They were there, the words. I had only to pluck them from the starry branches above. The bigger, the more obscure the word–the stranger the turn of phrase–the more delectable the fruit. And it was true in some way. Bite the fruit with your ear-teeth and feel the sun-warmed juice dribble down your earlobes. I had seen so many authors do this, and I ate up their words like ambrosia.

But I got older. It couldn’t be helped. And though the words didn’t lose their flavor, I began to notice the smaller ones: the ones I had until now passed over as bitter or unripe, as tiny or pale and not touched enough by the sun. And my fruit analogy burst before my eyes. Here were pearls. Small hard beauties. And yet more still. They were pearls with roots! Away from the rest, they atrophied and truly went rancid. But that was hard enough to do anyway. The pearl-like nature of them, too, passed away, and I realized that they were not anything. Even the fuller, sweeter words shriveled off the vine, and vine curled and fell off of the root and off of the earth. The words were phantom constructs all, hard edges forced over a gradient. Nirvana +1, minor victory. Word transcends self. There is no sentence, only English. And there is no English, only that which is conveyed by such primeval mutual grunting. Something as simple as “I” properly set free becomes an expression, a thought, a description, a story, a history, a symphony.

Try it.

Breath deep.

“I”.

All around me I see people turning more and more to fundamental Christianity. It’s not really surprising, given the way the world seems to twist beneath our feet. In the oxymoronic tumult of the waters of solid reality, people search for some solid rock, some thing that doesn’t change. Philosophy and metaphysics are beautiful things indeed, and in many ways led us to greatness. But I cannot follow these friends, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers. I don’t like their interpretation of God or Life or Purpose, full of contradiction as it is. Contradiction and judgement. And stern compassionless compassion.  They tell me I will burn if I don’t walk some narrow road defined in a book translated from dead languages and hand selected not long ago from many available sources. I tell them if that’s the God that they believe in, then perhaps I don’t want to be in his presence anyway.

In any case, if there is a Heaven, it’s the realization that we are all children in the playroom, some of us making rules the way some children do when the grown-ups aren’t around. Being children in the playroom isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As babies, we have little real responsibility but to experience and learn. Our transgressions toward one another are big and bold and the worst sort of evil at carpet level, but forgivable to the adults peeking in the door. But the one undeniable thing about the playroom is that eventually you grow too large for it, and you leave. You can peek in at the door, and sit amongst the children, but you aren’t really there. You aren’t lost among the neutral white and painted stars of the walls. You know why the carpet sinks beneath you; it is no longer a mystery. You don’t speak the secret tongue of the children. To break the metaphor, if you believe in things the way Christianity typically lays them out, then you’d better appreciate life and not stare off to the distant fuzzy doorway, because once through it, you can never go back. The playroom is the shorter, more mysterious, more unique part of life. If you believe in some kind of life everlasting and blissfully enlightened, and that this is your only time on Earth, then shouldn’t you live it up now? Soon you won’t understand or recall how a wooden doll kept you entertained for hours, but you’ll pang for it again. The playroom door beckons. Best to turn your back whilst you still can.

There’s another kind of bittersweetness. Giving up. Especially giving up something you wanted badly. With that comes a very strange feeling. At once you feel as though you’ve scrubbed your face raw in the cold water of some mountain stream. It burns with cold and cleanliness. But in the pit of your stomach, there’s a sinking feeling. It’s a dread you’ve wrapped up in some package, only some of it seeps slowly out into you. It’s that moment when you wake up from a really good dream, only to find out it was only a dream and nothing more. You lie there, staring at the ceiling for a minute longing for the dream, or at least to go back to sleep and dream it some more. Film score composers and lighting directors know that moment well. The composers score it with deep blue notes of regret, but overtones of hopefulness. The directors of photography light it light a new dawn: hard, cold, but slowly warming, with the deep blue notes of night behind.

A good while ago now, I wrote a phrase as part of a poem. Candy-coated barbiturate. It was intended (with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer) to describe the pleasure associated with depression. For me, at least, that pleasure is a very real thing. In fact, much of the character development in Fade has centered around it. There’s a certain stillborn nature to contentedness. A boat won’t capsize in the doldrums, but it won’t skim the top of the waves in that way that gasoline-fume-volatile adrenaline pumping way, either. Contentedness is cellophane, I wrote elsewhere. It is tight, clinging, and preservative. I want to be shaken up, and if I spoil a bit, so be it.  I’m not alone. It’s this desire for strife that makes spousal arguments blow up into yelling, spitting, hissing fights over something as stupid as salad dressing. It’s part of the reason (though I in no way condone it) that kids walk into schools with loaded guns and start firing. Most people succumb to the cellophane, or even see it as something else from the beginning: a warm blanket, or a well broken-in shirt.

Nothing engenders writer’s block like having a forum in which to write. Like this one. I was sitting here, thinking about the fact that all that beautiful nonsense I’d dreamt up the past had just floated away as soon as I cracked my knuckles and dipped my pen, when it struck me. At least I could write about not being able to write. Because surely no one had ever done that before. [Read with extreme sarcasm]. It’s like making a movie about making a movie. Inevitably, every indie film director will pat himself on the back, smugly confident that the most clever film one could possibly make would be about making films. 

I suppose this should be a place to let those half formed thought fetuses (feti?) develop into big, strong, burly-chested man thoughts rather than being miscarried in a bloody carnage across the floor of my brain. Problem is, I’ve gone into thought-menopause at the mere site of the PUBLISH button.

For no particular reason, I am starting a personal blog. I just thought it would make a good place to dump stuff that’s floating in my head whenever it comes up. We’ll see if the experiment pays off.

The name comes from Beth, who used the phrase in a sentence. It struck me that that would make a great title for some great literary work. Instead, it’s now the title of this blog. Take that, better authors!!