Coming Soon.

I am working on a new blog post of my thoughts. As soon as I decide on some thoughts that I can trust you all with. I'm not a very trusting person. I want to tell you things though. And I want desperately to ask you things. But I can't. I can't find an opening to start without betraying myself too much. I don't want you to know that I want to know. There is not enough dialog or conversation in my life anymore. I don't know. This is one of the reasons I hang out with Kym so much. I feel like I can tell her anything. I feel like I truly messed up somewhere recently. Maybe I'm just getting worked up. There are infinite things that you can go back and redo to get a different result, but there are also infinite things that you only get one chance to do forever and afterward you can only guess what it would have been like otherwise. There are some episodes/people/etc. that I sometimes wish I could undo from my experience. My uncertainty has multiplied recently. I thought things would be clearer now. Why am I cursed to regret so much? I feel like it is in my bones.


That doesn't change, of course, the happiness that I feel so often in the present. Like this weekend. Every moment I had a smile on my face I wish I could frame in a gallery. With few exceptions "everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."

A Dream

I had a dream during my nap today in which I got a text message from my (dead) Grandmother Bettie. For some reason though, it said her first name was "Obligatta" (version of oblige?) I knew it was her because it was a picture text and showed her standing behind a chair in which my grandfather sat and smiling. The message read something like: "Are you getting them all delivered ok?" (Them means my work, I think.) In my dream, I expressed jaw-dropping shock to the person who was with me when I received the message. As I was waking up, I had a little conversation with her in which she told me, along with one other thing can't remember, that she was in heaven. That is all.

Mede.

After midnight, we gonna play the tambourine. I don't know if i ever made it clear how thankful I am that I have not been thrown out of my family. Hopefully it doesn't change when the de facto situation becomes the de jure stance. I am struck dumb by the limitless unconditional love. Watched "For the Bible Tells Me So" yesterday. I think all my readers should watch it.

Hello out there!

You know, it feels like time for another blog. I've been reading some A.E. Houseman, and some Keats, and I really wish I had my Larkin anthology of 20th century verse. I want to write some more these days too. Unfortunately, I need to read my homework and research and write my papers. Which I'm doing well at procrastinating. I have a desire to be very passive these days too. I think I'd like to be a stay-at-home-dad. I'll have to find someone successful, I suppose. That would be nice. It is easy to understand why so many women let that happen to them. It is very alluring. Someone take care of the money, and you take care of the rest. Anyway. I better get back to work. Sigh.
In an unrelated note, here's a video of a youtube virtuoso. Ronald Jenkees. Buy his album.

Strange Moment

I was just reading Moby Dick this evening, and I came to the part where Queequeg gets a fever and ails to the point of death. He asks that a coffin-canoe be made for him by the ship's carpenter, and decks it out with all the trappings for a journey into the afterlife. Pip, the cabin boy driven mad by his abandonment at sea, [the boat he jumped from preferred to chase their prey over retrieving him] comes upon the scene where Queequeg is trying the coffin on for size, and [Pip] gives the following speech:

"Poor rover! Will ye never have done with all this weary roving? Where go ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little erand for me? Seek out one Pip, who's been missing very long: I think he's in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad; for look! he's left his tambourine behind;--I found it. Rig-a-dig-dig! Now Queequeg, die; and I'll beat your dying march." Then, after a comment from Starbuck, the first mate, Pip speaks again:

"Form two and two! Let's make a General of him! Ho, where's his harpoon? Lay it across here.-- Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Huzzah! Oh for a game cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!--mind ye that; Queequeg dies game!--take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; diead all a'shiver;--out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he's a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from the whale-boat! I'd never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all cowards--shame upon them! Let 'em go down like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame!"

And at the moment I read the repetition of the words "Queequeg dies game!" I burst into tears. It surprised me. And they just kept coming; for a good five minutes. I thought of all the noble deaths I knew. I cried at the thought that like the player king in Hamlet, I was crying "for Hecuba" as it were. I felt very pathetic. And I let myself cry for all the other things too. The vanity of human enterprise, all that other bullshit intellectuals are struck to the quick by. I cried because we all die game, if you use the rubric of Conrad Aiken's Tetelestai. I let myself cry because my life is not content now, and I may die that way. I cried to think of how unlike Hamlet I may leave this world, not heralded as a General, but simply consigned to mortality like everyone. Some of my tears (like these) were very vain and selfish. But I believe C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that there is nothing better for one than to have a good cry once in a while. I don't know who reads this blog anymore. Don't pity me. I am no different than any of the rest of us. Tonight was just my turn to be struck with the awareness of it. I feel better now I think.