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.

What We Talk About, When We Talk About Love

I thought this was so perfect. Just perfect.


Not To Trouble You

by Leonard Nathan

Not to trouble you with love, I mean
those adolescent dreams of great, of greater,
or of greatest loving, let alone
the crumbly personal kind—compared with, say,
the public good or harder thoughts of death
obliterating thoughts of love, or after-
thoughts of love outgrown or love undone;
and not to be ironic either, not
to forget we come into the world alone
and leave it so; and not to be claiming more
than you can give, uncertain as I am
what I require: something like love, I guess,
whatever it is we've done without so long,
so faithfully and with such tenderness.

And these, compliments Graham Greene to Vivienne Dayrell-Browning, as he courted her in over 1,200 letters, poems and conversions to Catholicism:

"Darling, it's wonderful when the person one loves most in the world encourages one in what one loves next best (even though far less). … I've never met so complete a companion as you. Those winter evenings you describe seem to me the only thing worth having. It's companionship with you that I want & just that sort of companionship …

"And the whole thing would be an adventure finer than ordinary marriage, because it would be two, not merely fighting for each other, but for a shared idea. Darling, it sounds fantastic, but the fantastic is often wildly practical, as when Columbus put out from Spain. And I remember you wrote once that you did love me, though it wasn't in a way I understood, but, darling, it's a way I do understand, & it's the final because there's no reason why it should ever end, which is very different to the other. I wish to God (& I mean that literally) that this dream could come true."

Oh god it's wonderful/ to get out of bed/ and drink too much coffee/ and smoke too many cigarettes/ and love you so much/

I was writ large, like a queen or a saint

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is Please don't go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

And I think in the end this was the question
that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,
the Greek ships at the ready, the sea
invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future
lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

By the Hammer of Thor

The craziest frickin’ day of your life.
Imagine that.

The craziest. Frickin’ day. Of your life.

That commands attention. That warrants worry. Or, in the very least, at least in the case of a d. Graham Kostic and I, it propels you to shell out $40 for a 5K Warrior Dash, replete with mad cap obstacles (see: chemical maze, the hell fires of Armageddon, jankety old car lot, and post-apocalyptic Magic Kingdom Main Street mayhem).

So Graham and I arrive with our matching race shirts. Graham provided the inspiration and initial design template. I botched said design, went rogue, and created these gems (keeping in line with the catch phrase theme, ‘IN IT 2 WIN IT’).

Graham and I weren’t so much IN IT 2 WIN IT as we were in it to have our photographs taken. With each photograph we aspired to become the face of the website. It’s just good math. We are in matching t’s. We are SUPER amiable to all the surrounding runners (save the times Graham would try to raise my mildly competitive spirits by pointing to a runner nearby and loudly asserting ‘We’ll definitely beat HER’). We were the Warrior Dash pep squad, so it stands to reason that the hour plus 5 k’ers that kept pace with us would appreciate our efforts to raise Warrior morale. They respected our need for interval theatrics.

And that’s just the first lap.

Here’s a sampling of what followed:
I almost lost Graham to the chemical maze. Barrels of chemicals EVERYWHERE. And some had spilt. TWIST!

I had a hell of a time trying to climb the never ending series of mounds. If I had vertigo it would have set in because that was an endless vortex of loops.

The suspended wooden planks were no more than 1 foot wide! With my big monster feet I had to gingerly tip toe across the planks. The crowds behind us were wild. Graham seemed to have no trouble. He took it slow to placate me. He’s a dear friend.

There were rusted out cars. A whole field of them! We were expected to hurdle them. And we did. We also sat in the back of a bus for good measure. And shade.

And wouldn’t you know, but positioned right before the façade of a super cute town lay a long, deep pit of murky water. We were nervous, and far from prepared, but we counted down and ran through. There was some back splash and I found it particularly adorable when Graham asked, post-murk, “Am I dirty?” The best being a Warrior, who had long usurped us in ranking, returned to the murky water obstacle to reclaim a shoe he lost. And he found it. What a hunter! He also found a bonus box of rusted nails. In the murky water. Where people oft loose their shoes. Oh Monster Mash!

Move on to the hell fires. Graham and I were certain it was all for show. Like a warm Disney production, but were we ever fooled. Those coals were piping hot and we were expected to leap over thick, hot flames. Oh doctor… Thankfully I have freakishly long legs and Graham is very limber. We moved forward without sustaining burns of any form.

And on to the mud pit and the grand finale. It looked harmless. I could not deduce why everyone was crawling when they could just as easily walk across it. I put on a great big smirk and cased all the goons we’d soon pass as we approached the mud pit, but were my cheeks ever red! There was barbed wire near the base of the pit and we HAD to crawl under it. Graham went belly first, like a true warrior, whereas I tip-toed around and tried to stay as mud-free as possible. I finally conceded and ate dirt.

We moved forward, hand-in-hand to the roar of the crowd screaming “IN IT TO WIN IT”.

And I guess we did. Just that.