The Sad and Unending Truth of this Life
For as much as we want to believe it, communities will not save us. Try as we might to reach out for compassion, romance and truth from another hand - we are still only a reaching hand, in the end.
In the end, we go through the hardest moments of this life when we are alone.
This sad, sad life.
We look back constantly, in a state of childlike wonder and amazement. We think 'it can never be like this again' and we mourn those July days of Westport ice cream, grassy and dandelion-ridden fields, flowered shirts and brown acoustic guitars.
But like the band says the words, "we are fated to pretend".
We grow up and we get good at faking it. We go through the motions and live a wooden life of puppeteered moves and calculated decisions. Our finances don't bring excitement - they bring us larger concern and worry. And for a while, we think we can get out of the funk.
We bring a child into it. We conceive a version of our selves back into this sick, demented world.
We become intertwined with the wires and broadband data of the internet and we treat it like a real, living, breathing friend. We embrace it. It rarely lets us down and we use it for all that we need. It is there to serve us.
It's cheap. It's fake. It's instant.
I have 8 Bubble Witch Saga requests on Facebook. I don't even know what the fuck a Bubble Witch is - let alone, how she rides on a broom if she's made of fucking soap and water.
Seriously. Horse shit.
We create false worlds of digitally pixelated farms and we take tiny resources of mouse-clicking stock for an LED-grown harvest. We live in the warm light of our laptop screen. We dwell there. We bathe in its comfortably incandescent glow.
I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world.
Yeah, I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.
Like the makings of an early spring morning, we see the condensation on the inside of our lives, and we pull the covers of complacency up higher. They engulf our hearts and make wombs out of our ambition.
If you really hear Jesus talking to you, then get out of those rotted, board and batten pews and get out into the street that scares you the most. Stand among the needles and the HIV and the dirt. Don't sit around in your turtlenecks and knits, inside a comfortable building with a large window and year-round AC, and speak a language that no outsider can understand.
If you really want to be like Jesus, drop it all and do it. Be prepared to be raped by the world - just like he was.
Sure - you can wish for friendship, understanding and acceptance from all facets of your social streamline, but in the end, you are a consumer - awaiting a plastic product.
As sure as the moist cookie crumbles in my mouth, and takes me back to summer nights of my youth, licking the dessert off the roof of my mouth, I am there. Tasting it. Letting the sugars soak into my being. Feeling the sun like a warm ray of condolence from the heavens. The sun finally lowers into a bath of warm gamma-rays from the truth of the sun.
But one day, we will get it right. We truly will.
If we embrace it - if we let the slow, cold dark in with open arms, we just might make it through the night and see a brighter day. A brighter day that only lightens for your eyes and no one else's. We all need to hit that moment where the straw breaks the camel's back - for at our boiling point, we see other revelatory things illuminated that were dark before.
And we will take joy, and one day, we shall know that there really is no 'we' - there is only I.
And I'll be alright with it.
Time Shifting
These days are going by in a flurry of light, sound, schedules and clock-staring. It sounds like a cliched conundrum but I really do have very little time for anything.
Time to sleep. Time to eat. Time to pump out production.
Time to make hay while the sun shines.
I've started interning at the CBC and really, I do like it. Great people. Great experience. I slept a lot this past weekend (which would explain why I'm awake now) and I had some good down time.
But...
My guitar collects dust.
My ideas for films sit in a rusty, steel idea drawer.
My desire to write or be creative dwindles in the lure of basic function.
My hours are absorbed.
My minutes crumble.
I do what I need to get done. I move from point A to point B...and then back again.
The work week is not ideal. I know it's real life and everyone says "it's something you must get accustomed to" but damn - does it ever stop? Leaving early and getting home late? Watching the day burn outside while you're corralled in a bullpen?
I'm having a hard time transitioning from the lofty, surreal student life into the professional schedule. There's a disconnect.
Have I come to where I want to be?
We'll have to find out.
'Hopefully, we can jump the rift
and watch the rivers of responsibility finally shift.'
Ushering In The Spring
There are rows and rows of things to come. Nothing in this life is certain. All we have is a raveled up mystery - and we do the best we can with the knowledge and time that we have.
Tomorrow, I'm starting a new venture. This whole year away has led up to this - internship. Placement. Connecting with the job world. CBC. Real world Journalism. No more bullshit.
This is the big time.
Tonight, I stepped out on to my parent's back deck. This house is vacant. It was the place where I grew up and yet I feel so distant from it. I try to connect with the bricks and the mortar and the trusses, but I can't. The spring, it seems, is here. At a balmy 12 degrees today, I drove to the grocery store and saw my brother there. I couldn't see him in the sunspots. I had on a vest and a short sleeve t-shirt - and I was almost too warm.
I lit a mini-cigar and took a swig of scotch. Yeah - I have to get up early, but I don't care. This life is all about routine and getting up early. We need to break the routine.
I have the house to myself this week and Sarah is away in Jamaiica. I have time to recollect but I'll be busy as a bee.
I recently connected with an old, teenage friend who has been a good friend to me for many years. I am continually reminded that the friends who want to dig deep with me and be in my life are the ones who show up - bottom line.
The weather reminds me that new things are afoot. Soon enough, all of this crusty, brown/white Ottawa snow will be melted and in the sewers - and people will have to deal with all of the garbage buried underneath.
Slay The Anger Dragon
Sometimes it comes out - this spiteful and unsightly beast that tries, with all of its might, to get the better of me and turn my view to a downward gaze of seeing red and taking revenge.
It can be righteous - but most of the time, it is just unfounded at every turn. It burrows its way in behind the framework of my thoughts and takes up arms. It tries to trick me into thinking it's pure - it turns a disagreement between two friends into a slanderous rage.
It is an energy waster and a user of resources.
We think we are so justified when we get angry. We think our opinions are from the heavens and that our status-structure of other people is properly balanced.
But it's not a fleeting thought or a quick blast - it begins to take over our thought process and influences our actions.
The scars we carry with us tend to turn inward, after a while, forming callous scabs on the insides of our beings.
We must cleanse. We must get it out.
We must confess.
The beast will always be the beast - that is its nature. It will exist and writhe in fiery pits of fear and it will do its best to encapsulate our energy.
But that doesn't mean it can't be slain. That doesn't mean that we cannot, armed with the arrows of honesty and the swords of peace, sever it out at the knees.
We may chase it a long, long way - we but must slay it.
Or, in the end, it will slay us.
