And the fish can do it...

I know, alot of posts of late.

How to reconcile different wants and desires amongst friends and acquiantances? How to miss people in a healthy manner? I wish that I knew a better way than not making eye contact with people; pretending things are fine is the opposite of truthful. Or, natural. There's this song that I listened to with great frequency my senior year at tufts--a year drenched in endings. It's called, "Have you forgotten" by the Red House Painters.

"We listened low to kasey kasem's radio show thats where friends were nice and to think of them just makes you feel nice..."

I feel happy, but so heavy. Weighed down being the sole owner of an idea. That myself and another COULD be such great pals! Could learn so much from each other! But, NO....I hate speaking in generalities, so i apoligize. I'd like to say something new, or, at least, something that could be argued. All I can come up with is that feeling anything, anything at all can be a beautiful thing. A slow, sad, spinning thing, as it is for me now, or the quick spring of a yo-yo as I felt as late as last week this time. I'm not ashamed to need people. To fight for that connection.

"Nobody's nice/when you're older your heart turns to ice."

A fellow co-worker's wife is having a baby. Such a joyous affair, such a life changing event. I see myself alone on a mountain looking forward, nothing but air hugging my back. A lake or ocean within view. The accomplishment of that climb. I wonder, why angst is so associated with teenagers...the irony that their life is so simple in comparison. No one tells you that once you climb that mountain--you then have to climb down.

"Have you forgotten how to love yourself...Have you forgotten."

Sure, sure, maybe. Maybe some of us never do. I've always thought that I could be friends with anybody but someone who was insecure. It thwarts the body and numbs the mind. Such an obvious thing, no? Try your best, do you best, what more can you want of yourself? All these nature images now, I'm watching a movie in the third person. Me leaning against an oak tree. I've always loved oak trees--loved the feeling of wrapping my arms around one, that hard security. There was a tree, in Ireland, along the Corrib river path that I frequently reached out to. It held me. How I need that tree now--

BUT YOU KNOW--NO-- if my old improv teacher were in my brain, she'd scream her mantra--HORNY GAY! And ask me, is anywhere better? Really, is anywhere better than you? Here? Does it really feel better to stand over there, to play over there? That first day of class, I'd move around the stage amidst the people, trying to find a 'better' place to be, a better partner or character. The first day, I quickly realized--there's nowhere better. Nothing else, is better. You as a person are continually in the thick of it, digging. Convincing yourself otherwise will only distract you from the great goal of finding yourself, finding any meaning at all. Furhermore, it's only after you realize that you can't find an easier way, that you force yourself to dive in and amidst all the muck, find something good. Find something extraordinarily real.

Sometimes I think that my whole life, I will try to support arguements of emotion by citing art as example. How empirocally preposterous. But, earnest. And, amusing. Por fin,Mary Oliver's poem Dogfish:

"...I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while. .....

....And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

*
And probably,
if they don't waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it."