(Which is to say I wrote this while more than half asleep last night…)
Her pupils scream the dialation of inebriation as she drives back from another college party. The muscles in her hands are relaxed as she adjusts the wheel to change lanes. She doesn’t feel herself slowly accellerating into the night and then she blinks too long through that red light. Her ears don’t hear the crescendo rev of the engine. They only throb with the phantom ringing of loud music and impulsive laughs as her car ploughs into the loving husband who was out only for an emergency diaper run and maybe a can or two of formula. Glass shards shoot into his eyes that haven’t yet been sent the signal that danger is happening. His neck snaps one way and body another as the car he hasn’t finished paying off crunches him thin. His blood, once a tissue, now is the liquid that paints his face the color of war and heralds his last ride into darkness. The weight of tangibly feeling his loving grasp loosen on his family- this is way too soon- tilts his head back to his last gander at a diurnal sky that burns into his eyes and slowly fades into never another new scene. God says, “I am only in their hearts for the ride.”
It could be the truth no man has privy to, that those blissful moments aren’t devine at all. He could preffer the
lonely ones, when those fortunate souls drag out their thoughts in agonizing scrutiny. Love, love, oh antagonizing love!
Behold that wrenching grip of the heart that guides men far from their untroubled gamboling in their mother’s wombs. It’s not about the emotional jerk offs and their impulsive excuses but the real deal the ones who wake up on the floor after tearing their minds apart until they are no more than a subatomic accumulation of noncommittal lives and cereal box treasure. It could be that He doesn’t want you to be happy. He wants you to be quarantined by your own desperation, refusal of compromise, phobia of routine, lack of deliberateness and meaning. And once you’ve reached that point, it could be he wants you to experience it, truly appreciate it, and never leave. It is safe there, in that limbo of faith in the unsubstantial.
There is something acutely beautiful- mesmerizing- about that raw urgency, that youthful desperation. We focus all our vigor and vitality into self-definition and impulse. We triumph when that flame in our eyes leads us towards something we can accept. We fall to our knees in bitter disbeleif when it leads us towards heartache. What of it? Screensaver, revert to game face. Approach it in a month or so when the storm has died down a bit. When you think you’ve found a clearer head to operate inside. When you can accept the forced complexities without question and try to find something to anchor yourself so you don’t float away, and not just any anchor will do, mind you. These days there are no roads, just a whole wide world of pavement. I move five steps north by northeast, now thirty miles West, now I am never alone but we are always alone. We are emotionally parsimonious for the sake of future dreams. We are always afraid, but we act anyways, we show off our bodies, we starve ourselves for attention, we try to be good at something so someone will find us charming. We see only the importance of seeming erudite and sexy. Be it that God praises our selfish talents. Be it that he guides our insatiable hunger for pleasure and our inability to live for the potential of our actions.
Of course, God is man’s metaphor. We are the ways, the truths, the lives and we’re all burning on the inside, picking up our deux machinas and walking anywhere but where we’ve ever been. And this is the challenge, not to be the hands and feet of a metaphor but to be our own, recognizing six billion little flames are all one wildfire, that our roads are all along a completely paved world, or that the pavement must be torn up and laid down again and in some way new. Except they already know this, they’re just trying to keep from drowning, so they think up some simple exit and build towards it, throw their entire being into it, their hope for getting out of bed. Yet it is only a temporary fix to buy them some time. The real question they lie awake at night trying to avoid is “what will you do when this bought time is over?” Someday freedom is going to hurl itself like a grenade and will you be prepared? You hope so. You refuse to abscond into the world you were born into. You test yourself, hoping to prove your will’s equanimity in the bleakest of storms.
Still, I, the same yesterday, today, and the rest of my life, am but a blind chameleon, matching only the colors in my iridescent mind’s eye, walking only with knots in the soles of my feet, defying only tradition and punctiliousness.This is what it means to be alive, to be here today It’s not worth being afraid when you live for the full extent of the purest intentions. As you sit meditating these things on the promontory of your mind, ponder this: Like our gods we all need to move from this where and this now. There is hope and life in the absence of stagnation. Let us ride together, your hand in mind, my “where” in you and all these other unlovely thoughts can find their own way home.
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