scruta

When faced with two clear courses of action – the right one which will make me happy, and the wrong one which I know will make me unhappy – why do I choose the one which will make me unhappy?

For me, it is a fear of the unknown, the horror of Happiness and Risk.

Happiness is a woman. She is earnest, but her memory is poor. She forgets the details of anything that happens to her almost immediately. She lives life in the present, but unbeknown to herself, her impact on the future is greater than she realizes.

Her lover is Risk. He’s her soul mate, her male opposite. He is also earnest, but his memory is also poor. He sees things only in the moment, but his actions impact the future profoundly.

Sometimes these two are incredibly happy, strolling through the halls of my mind, greeting the residents of its various chambers as they come out to admire the stately couple. Risk is treating Happiness well.

Other times these two fight, throwing chairs and bellowing at the top of their lungs. The residents of my mind barricade themselves in their chambers, refusing to come out even during the greatest of emergencies. Risk has betrayed happiness.

For a long time, I shut both of them from my mind, not wishing that they should disturb my thoughts. But my mind became a dark and dreary place, and all of its residents were sluggish and unsmiling.

I knew before long I must let these two wander the halls again.

And now I am ready to let them. I’m filled with new hope.

Why you ask?

I remember the forgetfulness of Happiness and Risk. Even if times are hard, neither of them will remember these trials, these betrayals of the past. And just like them, neither should I.

A lesson to aspiring artists:

You know about the golden goose?

The story is only half true. Yes, it did lay golden eggs, but they looked just like regular eggs on the outside, only the insides were made of gold.  In order to get at the gold, you had to crack the outer shell on a pan, just in case it was a normal egg.  Most of the time it turned out that the eggs were regular old eggs, which were never made for being put on a pedestal, only scrambling and frying.

Further, the farmer who killed his golden-egg-laying goose was foolish enough to think that after laying one – just one! – golden egg, the goose was just chalk full of golden eggs. He never thought about all the normal eggs that came before…

The mind of a person with ideas is a party constantly unfolding to reveal hidden relationships, some comic, some tragic: Who knew that you felt that way too? Who knew that we could get on so well? Who knew you could combine this music, these words, this food? Who knew that sexual fantasies could incorporate a palm frond so actively? Who knew that the world could be compared to a balloon animal? Who knew that you could make a night of shopping cart bumper cars? Really? A palm frond? et cetera, et cetera.

This process of unfolding is often aided by the presence of alcohol and dramatic lighting.

On the flip side,

There’s always a flip side.

+++

Don’t forget it,

But forget it when you need to.

I was walking home tonight thinking how wonderful it can be to be alone and utterly at peace. There always used to be some kind of pain sitting with me before, waiting inside my mind to grab at me, but now it’s gone. Gone into the darkness of this city. Leaving me alone, born anew.

I saw a ferret run across the road. I didn’t know that they lived in the big city. It was a wonder that that kind of animal could live here at all. I wondered if it was the only one.

Well, I guess there’s two of us…

What do I owe myself? I’ve come to the realization that I don’t owe anybody anything. What? Am I not somebody, too?

I can imagine that walruses find their tusks very useful, but they appear to me to be nothing but rather useless appendages for asserting a needless dominance, something that one ridicules. I mean look at them, huddling together on an outcrop, stewing in their own feces. You’ve got big teeth, buddy. Good luck.

Of course, they probably look at our overdeveloped brains with similar derision – that is if their tusks don’t get in the way of their thought process.

Yeah, buddy. I’m talking to you.

I no longer worry about the ending of the sun.

When the solar system’s radiator blows a gasket, if there still are people on this rock of ours, I’m sure that they will be all to ready for it, having chosen from long ago to remain for the cosmic fireworks.

They will accept their fates with a kind of nobility, savoring those few seconds of brightness before a shockwave sends them to oblivion.

I know this feeling all to well. This is what its like to be a poet, witnessing the beauty of the universe from afar, even as it comes at you with tremendous speed to remove you from it.

You do not change; the world does not change; it is always as it is.

At best, it unfolds like an endless origami puzzle, and you delight as each section becomes part of the larger whole, dazzling you with what lay before you the entire time, but you never knew.

Last night I had a dream. I dreamed that I saw two acquaintances of mine from high school walking through the crowds of a strange city that was the combination of two places: Shanghai and a high school in Orlando that I played at during a band trip in my freshman year of high school. There were sprawling complexes with towers reaching 40 or 50 stories, giving way to sunny courtyards amongst one floored buildings interconnected with covered walkways. I caught sight of my acquaintances in one of these covered walkways.

I’d like to say that these two people were my friends, but as time as shown, they stand only as acquaintances. Whenever I’m at home I never make an effort to contact them, and they never seem to inquire about my whereabouts. Still we are always happy to see each other when we cross paths, and might spend a few hours doing something if it’s convenient. You seek out your friends; acquaintances find you.

They told me that they were heading home, and that they would like to show me something if I had time. I said okay. We walked through the meandering city – half-Shanghai, half-Orlando – and it quickly petered out into the sparse suburbia of my youth, as if the city had never been there. We entered a small, but pleasant house situated on a hill, isolated from the rest of the community. Inside, one of them took out something and presented it to me.

It was a musical instrument with three sets of two strings each, the way you see strings on a mandolin. However, the fingerboard was fretless and curved slightly, much like that of a violin. As I picked it up, two more sets of strings appeared around what suddenly became a larger fingerboard. It was at this point that I was sure I was dreaming. I tried my hand at playing it, wielding it like a strange guitar and found myself enchanted.

Time passed as I doted on the instrument, and we discussed its merits. Then one of them suddenly became frenzied, as if there were an emergency. I tried to get him to articulate what it was, but he said we had no time and that the two of them had to go. The other one seemed to understand the urgency of the situation without question, and they began to walk out the door. I asked them if I could tag along, and they said yes, albeit with a kind of reluctance that disconcerted me.

We left, walking at such a pace that I couldn’t make sense of my surroundings until I found that we were at the edge of a barren expanse surrounded by an officious looking corner of fence complete with barbed wire and stern warning signs. The two of them approached the fence and began to dig, and I did too. Soon we had dug underneath the fence and found our way to the other side, standing in the great expanse. I could see nothing on the horizon except mountains far off in the distance, nor could I see an end to the fence in either direction I looked. It seemed to radiate from that corner off into infinity, like imaginary 90 degree angles from geometry class.

Suddenly we heard noises far off from the other side of the fence, threatening, undeniably human and approaching. I said to my acquaintances that we should go back and they just looked at me and said, “We can’t go back. It’s too late.”

Then I woke up.