Standing at the precipice, I feel the weight of my body planting my feet into the ground. Like a tree, I stand, a man,the beast – a dog. Through the finger-printed, sun-glazed window, I look upon objects which I do not understand.
I bark. The door opens. I do not move.
I am domesticated.
The tree that I am sways in the wind. As the wind, my mind moves, it gusts, it chills, it fans the flames of the epoch; it is formless. I am the figment of my own imagining, and I tell myself it is all too real.
This morning I was standing in the subway car, and across the way, in train destined to move in the opposite direction, I caught the eyes of another. The trains, like leaves fallen from separate trees, following different paths, here they paused in their passing. In the brief moments before the two stationary, cantankerous steel beasts closed their many mouthes and continued on their paths, her and I looked at one another; we did not gaze… we did not stare, we looked. We looked because there was more than the 10 feet of physical distance dividing us; there was a byzantine path which insulated us from judgment, from the anxiety of being close enough to engage… and so we looked, we looked without fear of ourselves, of judgement, of the weighty implications of crossing the divide.
I do not think there was anything sexual, nor do I believe we elicited or projected any strong feelings from or upon the other… rather, we just looked.
There was something in her eyes, and my apparent lack of concern of my own facial expression no doubt presented to her eyes a similar visage: an honest face not looking for anything.
Our eyes and minds held one another, but what we saw was… well, that her and I, gender aside, I and I were one, another.
Hmmph, just some thoughts I had today. I had plenty more… plenty of concerns, and even a sense of– I do not know.
–
Another strong feeling which keeps creeping up on me is this idea of ‘what could have been’, but I do not here mean the nostalgic ‘what could have been’ of the past. Rather, I here worry about what could have been from the perspective of the future to come.
I see someone standing beside me, a man or a woman (where I am most mindful it is likely a woman, I confess), I consider starting up a conversation, of connecting with them on a level beyond merely being near them… beyond listening to music near them… beyond engaging in this mutual disinterest with them; I wish to touch them on a level which frightens me even now to think of it. Connection.
But, as I said above, I am feeling a worry… a worry that is a real fact of life, that one day I will be old, and I will be so near the great recycler of consciousness, where the body is broken down, and the mind is dissolved into the chaotic ether, into the great eternal void, and in this inevitable place of mind where I cannot do much, and soon I will do nothing, I know that I – that each of us – will think back to these times when we did nothing, and think ‘fuck… what was I so afraid of? what could I have possibly been saving myself from but life itself?’
And to think that one must arrive at this thought at the end of life… that to see this inevitable truth when one still has youth in reserve is to be tortured by the truth.
The truth is the moment, this moment, it is now.
This is not to say that you ought to swing some random stranger off their feet, and kiss them… but honestly… I fuckin’ dare you to live that life.
For the sake of not promoting a world where you are so assaulted, it may be better that I dare you to say hello, to smile, smile with your eyes and engage those friendly strangers around you.
Anyhow, just some thoughts.
Checkout some of this dope shit.
Pope Francis embraces horribly disfigured man
I suppose I do objectify women from time to time… well, time and time again.
Pictures from a Russian dating website… : http://imgur.com/a/RfG9U
And because I fuckin’ dig this Toto track…
Make for a nice back tat
NASA begins deepest ever probe of the universe
The rules of life are yours to cheat, to rewrite, to conquer
and so
rock the fuckin’ boat
Anyway, I hope you all have a great… Thursday? Shit, where has the week gone.
Peace,
– J
