Sep 20, 2014

Halfsies

I booked a room at a halfway house.  How long, they asked, are you checking in for?

18 months, I replied.

Halfway houses are strange.  You admit that you have a problem, but you don't give into having the problem completely.  You declare yourself halfway cured.  I'm halfway on the road to better.

I'm only halfway broken.



(No, I don't really know what the word halfway house means.  I assume it means what it says it means.)

The Other

Self definition rooted in what you are not.

Cry forever. Run until the end of days.

Cry forever. Run until the end of days.

How do you make friends that want to gel in the sunset too?  That want to loll in meadows and read and write angry treatises about the sky beyond the horizon?  Where the stars come out and we all have so much life to live but I don't know where the pen stops.  If I just sit back and let the choir pitch drown me out -- is that living?  What is this life?  It feels so anchorless, there are to many possibilities and not enough directions that will weigh me down towards the grounding that I feel I need.

Our time is now. This is a part of it.  Confusion, pain, scars, anger. This is a part of it.  This is all that there is of it.  This is all that there will be of it.  (So many letters written. So many emails unsent.  So many words not spoken because of ... fear?  Because of uncertainty?  Because I don't trust my own sly, slinking motives that meddle in all things.  And a growing uncertainty about the darkness that births itself, each night anew, in the center of my breast.

There is a hole that I've been keeping.  Have I wanted to keep it open?  That's open for debate, but it's open.  It's huge.  It's eaten me alive.  Like a piercing that took too long to heal, You can see through me there.  There's nothing there.  Nothing.  I don't know what else to fill it with.  Maybe nothing.  The hole lives on, scarred and pussed, with smooth edges that bely the weight that it has.  It pulls down on the corners of my mouth and weights heavily on my chin.  There is no lightness in my gaze. Just empty sad. Empty. Sad.  Empty.

The sun is setting on today.

I am so afraid that my dreams are but false prophets of an age that will not come.

They are naught but small passing blips on an infinite sea of rudderless, unmanned sailing into the dusk.


(Gazelle on the horizon, slinking lion beneath the ladder that stretches up into the stars wide and high and tall like hope, and forever out of reach).

Sep 15, 2014

Equality

A: The equation has changed.
B: What do you mean? Equations don't change. They're equilibrated.

A: It is no longer equal.
B: You must be mistaken. Perhaps what you're trying to say is that you've changed the equation that you're using to solve the problem. The problem space changed.

A: It's the same equation. But it doesn't equal out any more. I'm putting in the same digits as last week. It's coming out differently.
B: That's impossible.

A: I know.

Sep 5, 2014

Dockumentary moments.

I went to see No No : Dockumentary tonight. Our CEO knew the film-maker, so he bought tickets for everyone that wanted to go.  As the director's first feature-length film, he knocked it out of the park.

I had never heard of Dock Ellis before our CEO gave us an opening to watch this film.  I was quite struck with how charming and full of life the man was, as a character.  Throughout the movie, and the stories that are told about him, we're told who he was, as a man.  He's alive, he's irreligious, he's a gifted ball player.  He was well loved, and his loss was a great one.  Watching Dock, we not only get an into his personal life, but also an rare peephole view to the culture that was the Major Leagues in the 70's.  The drugs, the management structure, the racial tensions, the 70's were a time of big changes to a classic American pasttime.  Dock Ellis was at the forefront of those changes.

Most of the film was constructed from footage of Dock from games, photos, and a long interview he did with HBO from 2005.  We see his life reconstructed through interviews with those closest to him - his ex-wives, his sister, his teammates.

Watching them reminisce I couldn't help but wonder about memories.  They're fleeting things.  Does pulling them back up into the present, as each interviewer did, re-write them not just as that moment in time that happened, but also forever defining the moment that was spent in remembering?  Those few seconds that you spent reliving the past, in a way, redefined the past by bringing it into the future, or your present, with you.  How much of future rememberings will, in some way, be influenced by the time that you spent remembering it now?  Pieces of experience that get mosaiced one, on top of the other, like tie die washes on the same heavy canvas.

When these people who knew Dock Ellis are gone, what will be left of him?

In a way, memories are temporal.  But the outcomes of those memories are what we live with.  The trajectory that we find ourselves on is in some way an outcome of the memories that we carry with us -- in a way our day to day is a reflection of the compounding of the moments that we have lived up until this very one.

Dock may be gone, but the lives that he has touched, they go on.  Forever with his memory built into the fabric of them.

us

‪some days I remember the lies you told me and i laugh at both of us‬ ‪at me, for wanting so badly to believe you‬ ‪at you, for having t...