Forgive Me Lover, For I Have Loved You Wrong

When in search of all things lovely, please, do defer to these two:

See the cat? See the cradle?

Solitutde: A Sweet Absence of Looks

Depression, when it’s clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it’s known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there’s a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you’re depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don’t want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure.
-Jonathan Frazen

I'm still listening to hear where you are.
And certain these words are fleeting and unseen.

Today is a day to discuss with few. I can't concentrate. I can't sustain the hope so oft found in these entries. I'll likely delete this with humility, but for now I wish there was just one respondant with some understanding.

"You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange."

The subject heading seems a shame, as that's typically how I vet my dates. There's nothing better than to talk for hours about things you might sooner forget but seem so important in the moment of the telling. To get excited and ramble and drone and trail and offer up dangling modifiers and find common interests in a mutual disdain of cheese.

Then, somehow someone references a typewriter and you swell with swell pride and talk and talk and talk about how you love the jankety old things and you can't defend yourself, but don't need to because he's been smiling the whole time and just encourages your diatribe and yes. slow. That was a lovely night.

I imagine my grandparents had a similar conversation. And walked arm in arm past one of these:


I want to go to there.

I want for everything that I've already had. It doesn't seem fair, that I'm without, and lonely and longing. But, to be fair I have known wild romance. I've had epic romance, so it only seems right that I sit these plays out. It doesn't soften the blow. It just makes it more justifiable.

I am always enamoured of Robert Penn Warren, specifically his nod to the power of a woman's smile. But, because we're flirting with Milan Kundera (see: subject heading) today, let's focus on additional savory senses.

"We all need someone to look at us. we can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. the first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. the second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. they are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. they are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. this happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. people in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. one day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. and finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. they are the dreamers."
— Milan Kundera

I, too, want to go to there.

Your del.icio.us tag cloud could be mistaken for a come on

I owe more words, but for now let's revel in the beauty of Kevin Brown's:

Diagramming Won’t Help This Situation

by Kevin Brown

Grammatical rules have always baffled
me, leaving me wondering whether my
life is transitive or intransitive, if I am the
subject or object of my life, and no one
has been able to provide words to describe
my actions, even if they do end in –ly.

But now the problem seems to be with
pronouns: I am unwilling to be him
and you are unable to be her, so we
will never be them~the ones talking
about what they need from the grocery

store because the Rogers are coming for
dinner tonight; the couple saving for a
vacation, perhaps a cruise to Alaska or a
museum tour of Europe; the two who meet
with a financial advisor to plan their children's

college fund while still managing to set enough
aside for their retirement~and so we will
continue to be nothing more than sentence
fragments, perfectly fine for effect,
but forever looking for the missing
part of speech we can never seem to find.

"Diagramming Won't Help This Situation" by Kevin Brown, from Exit Lines. © PlainView Press, 2009.

When There's Nothing Left To Burn...

...you have to set yourself on fire.