Dammit

I guess I'm just finally feeling what people need to feel to be people. People come into our lives and set them on fire and we "burn with the beauty," become bigger, brighter, more. The people come and then they go away again. That's part of life. We let the change take place. We trust one another, we trust ourselves, and we respond to life as it comes with it's new people and changes. And all of it's good. And all of it is worth it. And it will always be painful, because how else would love taste so sweet to us when we get it at last?

The day we decided this, it was a clear, shining day. Today is cold and wet and clouded. The earth's been washed and the wind is blowing it dry. We need days like this for the rest to matter. And so,
today
is
a
beautiful
day.

Hooray to have loved, and to love still.

Visions

Recent travails with my first pair of contact lenses has reminded me of one of the themes of my life which I know I shall have difficulty expressing.  Instead of trying to explain it anew, I’ll quote a very short story I wrote years ago and supplement it with a few expoundings.  It’s called “Sight.”

Stevie Villarreal has just slapped me in the face. I don’t know why he did that. Granted, I just pitched a pebble between his pointy shoulder blades, but not so very hard that he should need to come over and strike so crassly.

It must be because I made him look lesser then he feels he should. Such a breach demands swift and exact and stinging punishment. Otherwise, to him, he’d stay that way.

We had stared at one another, inches apart, wrestling in our eyes. There was a trilling flash of green and he reached to me and lashed me. I winced, obviously, but didn’t look away. Even if my glasses are gone—and they are; even now flying across the classroom—breaking the gaze now is to fail utterly; to lie down, take the kicks and die, right here in my seat. Being up there in the eyes says it isn’t done. Here I am. You can’t make me into what you are.

It’s easier for me to stare like this without my glasses, because then I don’t see Stevie staring back.

Far be it for an author to dictate “What It Means” to his audience, but among the ideas behind this is sight—what it is to see a thing as it is.  

There's a splendid quote by Madame Curie that I'd like to think absolutely true: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood."  But it’s difficult, isn't it, to qualify whether or not anything can really ever be fully comprehended and understood as it is?

For me, just because I believe I am seeing something for what it really is does not automatically lessen my fear of it.  Obviously "believing" a thing to be real, and the fact of it's actual reality, can be--and often is--completely separate from one another.  And, interestingly, as I have observed here in this short story, fear will also evaporate when my perception of the thing is obscured—the fine lines blurred, the fangs blunted, sharpened edges dulled to a fluffy cream.  

So:  Is impaired sight a benefit, simplifying matters to what they really are?  Or is it a retreat--a distortion of reality into something less threatening and more manageable?

I have no idea.  Intuition suggests that it’s important for me to wonder about this, but like most things I suppose the only sure thing I’ll ever settle on is the ambiguity of it all.  I still have difficulty answering the question, when others put it to me, of why it even matters, and aren’t you wasting time?

Perhaps.  But if it’s pointless, I probably wouldn't know it til I voiced it.

Ready the Crimson Faces!

This first post is dedicated to Ande Payne, because she initiated the thought of blogging, which I appreciate because sometimes I write things that I think someone ought to see.  Words never read are sad little things.

Replaying for me in my mind recently have been some of my more famous embarrassments.  

-I once sneezed snot all over my hands and face while sitting with a group of early-morning seminary students about to eat breakfast.  

-In third grade I delayed visiting the bathroom until it was too late.  Standing at the head of the class at my teacher's desk, my pants flooded.  Mrs. Foresburg looked confused.  I was pissed.

-Running at seven-year-old top speed, I smashed directly into a concrete pole while a goose simultaneously laid an egg on my forehead.

-With smirking faces, two fashionable girls in a higher grade approached me as an eighth-grader  while clad in my embarrassing running shorts in front of a large crowd at a track meet, claiming to have met me at "summer camp" the year before.  I had never been to anything of the sort.  I didn't know what to say.  "I don't remember you," I said.  They wouldn't stop.  Their large and muscled guy friends strutted up and said things.  I felt trapped and I knew the whole world was looking at me like a doomed gladiator.  I walked away and sat by myself with them still shouting.  I looked up at the sky and envisioned planes carrying atomic bombs from of the clouds, long falls, explosions, and me sitting safely because of paid tithing.  I came in last in each of my runs.

The first three were embarrassing anomalies, but the fourth was a way of life.  Luckily I haven't had many truly embarrassing moments in a long time, mostly because I don't care as much what people think about me (emphasizing the AS MUCH part):

-Adam Pingel and I stood next to each other a particular day last semester for an improv rehearsal.  The group was about to play a counting game that required us to grasp hands.  As we did, our director began making a few more preliminary comments and everyone dropped their hands to wait.  Adam and I had inexplicably linked fingers, so that as we shifted our attention away from the game, our hands remained gently interlocked.  We stood for a solid minute in unconscious romance before some unseen force whispered in both of our ears---we looked at one another and exploded into laughing.  So awkward.  So funny.