legacy at the speed of sound

yeah. i know like most things in life i've got it twisted up in a way which defeats the purpose. and i know the things i have to say aren't the kind of things you post in a place like this, but i don't mind so much. i'm just sorting things out. and when i go through my things, i look at every scrap of paper, every receipt. and i save nearly everything. most people would say i make a mess when i clean. if you know me beyond whatever can be imagined using only the entries in a blog - you know that this is me. i often fall into fits of metaphor and verbal catastrophe. i often skip through mental ghettos making little sense. but i do it passionately. how much more so when i'm speaking to myself! i guess i just like stitching quilts of seemingly random thoughts. little squares of fabric cut from the same bolt stitched back into the whole. i also like how words sound together. sometimes many words together. sometimes just one or two. it's like food. sometimes a statement requires the complex architecture of curry. other thoughts are as simple as celery. both have a time and place. this? my blog? yeah - it's more like indian food. probably not even good indian food. but my mind is definitely not celery these days.

anyway, how words sound together is sometimes - certainly sometimes if not most times - more important to me than the meaning forced upon them...though a pairing violates the prescription of every grammar, a novel lexical marriage is somehow procreative. "be fruitful and multiply," the command went. i've got the fruit part down. and this? this is my multiplication.

new ways of seeing, new visions - realities are born from forbidden semantic trysts. a view can be just as interesting, maybe even more so, when seen through dirty windows framed in chipping paint. it's inductive. it takes work, effort to see. you have to want to see. transparency can actually blind you from what you might otherwise see if you were actually trying. passivity can whitewash the world's tiger-maple. so with words, sometimes it's critical to make your point in a crowded scene, one obscurred by the soot and dust of so many years of neglect. and sometimes the dictionary is of little use. the meaning isn't often superficial. consider this practise.

so. this evening is a friday evening and i'm spending it with Dalwhinnie Scotch and Jeff Buckley - two good friends. the only two good friends who aren't busy with something else tonite.

and i'm realising that sometime over fifteen years ago in scotland, my scotch was made. strange. i've never been to scotland, but here i am drinking it. a great-great-great something to me - my mother's mother's father's father's father came from over there. the sometime Earl of Lennox just outside Glasgow. maybe he was buried in a wooden box. maybe became the soil, the grass, the field. maybe he's in my scotch now. what an odd, ironic circle that would be.

and then there's the late mister buckley. when i listen to him sing or look at a picture of him, i know what the word beautiful means and when to use it - again, the dictionary was of little use there. he's dead. dead at 30. i'm almost 30. his beauty is like a pressed flower found in an old family bible. it's a new and different beauty to the one who finds it than was appreciated by the one who placed it there. it's never the same when the life leaves. and if the one who placed it there goes back amid the pages to see the treasured beauty, it's not there. the matter which once formed the flower is there and still holds its general shape and rumors of the original color, but the original beauty is gone. the beholder's eye either sees through the pressed bloom as a sacramental reference to a memory and resurrects the original beauty in the mind or it closes the book in disappointment. i didn't put the blossom in between the pages. i bought the book and found what someone else thought was beautiful. and it is, still. but i wonder what it was that first rested on the page before the book was closed. i can only imagine.

so i'm listening to a dead man's voice. that's a relatively new thing. we can't listen to abraham lincoln recite the gettysburg address. we can't listen to jesus preach the sermon on the mount. we just open the pages of a book we inherited and view dried flowers in bewilderment, imagining the unplucked beauty. i wonder, will someone listen to my voice after i'm dead? it's hard to wrap my mind around. you can be gone from here - dust from dust - and echos of you persist - bouncing off canyons you yourself never saw - echos above the age of consent. you have no mouth to keep shut and the waveforms of your last cellphone conversation pogostick about the universe. you - disembodied - absent - like someone that got off a train. when it's your time, it's your time, they say. but what is it like to turn around, to look back as the train plows onward...with your voice...your image...your ideas and words? the letter you wrote sitting in a jail cell in birmingham? it's a mitotic parting of the self with itself...the whole into halves...or maybe just a half and a half not. whether you believe in life after death is inconsequential. part of you lives on with or without your consent.

what would i leave? what would go on when i step off?

maybe this.

and what would i take with me? what can we take with us?

Jeff sings a song called "Satisfied Mind"

How many times have you heard someone say,
"If I had money, I would do things my way."
But little they know, that it's so hard to find
one rich man in ten, with a satisfied mind.

Money can't buy back all your youth when you're old,
a friend when you're lonely, or peace to your soul.
The wealthiest person, is a pauper at times
compared to the man with a satisfied mind.

When my life is over and my time has run out,
my friends and my loved ones, I will leave there's no doubt.
But one thing's for certain, when it comes my time,
I'll leave this old world with a satisfied mind.
But one thing's for certain, when it comes my time,
I'll leave this old world with a satisfied mind mind mind, mind mind,
satisfied mind.

thoughts on solitude and fateful circumstance.

if i were blind, would you be more attractive to me? if you were blind, would you want to see my face with your hands? would you bother to ask or would you tire of what you could hear of me? would you shut me up and urge a new, sensuous communication of stealth ballerina fingertips and goosebumps?

if both of us were blind, would we go to presbyterian churches just to hear the organ? would it thrill us like sitting in first car of a roller coaster does now? would we dare sit in the first car of a roller coaster...if we were blind?

if i were deaf would i recognize hands like i do voices?

i wonder what waking up feels like when you're deaf-blind.

i wonder, if i were somehow paralysed, how magical things like walking or brushing my teeth would seem. i'd find myself jealous of dogs and spiders.

surely there are things i've never felt which others have. and surely there are things i'll never feel which others can. am i blind? deaf? i must be. to something. but what? i suppose my wondering about what it is to be blind and deaf betrays a blindness to blank and black and deafness to utter silence. i am blind to blindness, deaf to deafness.

think of how much less obsessed we'd be with our weight, our bodies, our highlights, or the whiteness of our teeth...how many burdensome preoccupations could we just let go of if we never, ever, ever again looked into a mirror or saw a snapped shot of our candid, unmade selves.

i suppose this happens to people whose cars collide tragically or those who survive an aneurism, those who find themselves born suddenly into new circumstances which redefine life and themselves.

it would be a kind of threshold where you step reluctantly into a new life. where even the reluctance is retrospective as you wake having entered before deciding to knock.

you'd let go of pride and surrender your independence to those who care for you - some familiar some completely strange. there must be a time when you still have to choose it. either let go of your old life, and embrace the new, or cling to a memory of old one with the citing inalienable rights which are now alien and then i suppose you swim up a psychological stream trying to retain what you knew yourself to be. and you either acquiesce and discover your authentic self stripped of its stoicism and security, or you grope miserably for the mask again.

people who've lived in the midst of war must know this. you'd never see me climbing a tree to collect robins' eggs for breakfast or boiling shoe leather and tree bark...at least not while i had options. but there comes a time when your options narrow - when the choices fall like leaves until only a few or maybe only one hangs before you. does it at that new moment seem beautiful against a bare tree? does bitter then melt into sweet?

if so, can we not now choose for ourselves what is sweet and what is bitter? can we blind ourselves to the well clothed tree and focus on a single leaf as though it were the only leaf, - the leaf which circumstance demands we pluck as ours - and own it?

could we celebrate that lone leaf as though it were the precious last and we with Fortune's favor have found it before the wind?

or

must everything we see and experience be framed with a periphery of seductive possibilities - none of which can promise anything - all of which bat their lashes and pose to flatter their best side.

must we starve in arrogant deliberation under the assumption that there is grass on the other side?

always almost.

running restlessly toward rest and never more than halfway to happy.

i wanna live till i die...

i know that like everything else in life - time marches on and one worry passes its baton to the next. i very easily buy into the illusion that i am in control and if i just do this or that thing - everything will work and if i somehow drop the ball - the whole act will go sour.

i want so very much to "get ahead" to "do what's expected of me and do the 'right' thing" to "make every minute count" to "get the most out of every opportunity" to "make whoever wants to be, proud of me" and sometimes, i think all my striving - the effort that so often ends in a quizzical moment of quick-change disappointment is....

well, it's like when you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and you try to inflate the value of your dollar by piling the food higher than your appetite can acommodate - and then - instead of eating and feeling satisfied - you eat and feel sick.

sort of defeats the purpose.

sometimes i think that's my approach to life though...i want to get the most out of every second and in the end - the quality of my life is reduced to that of an all-you-can-eat buffet: food in drag. cheap, made-up, and seductive when dimly lit. calories piled high only to be purged in the body's natural revolt. how many calories is my statistics class?

it's a hard lesson, but i need to learn to pick my "restaurants" for quality not quantity. i need to search out the places that use fresh, organic ingredients delivered in healthy, modest portions. i need to invite only friends to sit with me. we need to take our time and really appreciate the flavors present to each bite. i definitely need to balance what's on the plate in front of me with the room i have to put it in. no more toting metaphorical styrofoam boxes packed with economy-minded leftovers for a "later" that never comes. the only later that most of those wishful leftovers ever see is that moment of frustration when the fridge is cleared in one epic sweep and every forgotten moldy thing surrenders its space to the new gallon of milk and carton of eggs that won't fit otherwise.

sigh. is it possible to learn these lessons and put the wisdom into practice and better the will-be memories you have yet to make? or are these the things that you are left to reflect on while staring at the wallpaper you never would have chosen for yourself in the room in the nursing home where you live until you die.