Benblog

Walden

My prejudices against the east coast have yet to be fulfilled.

It is quiet here, and rural.

There are no billboards.

The highway has ponds by the side of the road.

And the service and work ethic, so far, seems like something you'd expect in the south.

I think easterners think of themselves as fast paced. I think, at best, they're just frenetic.

As much as I'll miss the midwest, I look forward to being a transplant.

And maybe bring back some of the contemplative spirit of the transcendalists, so needed today.

The Sum of All Fears

The thing I realized I fear most is dying without reaching out to fulfill even the existential exercise that I have destiny.

Can

I dreamt last night that Tracy and I went to visit a couple of the remaining members of the German band Can. They lived in a large, university ghetto, with a land lord who was upset, selectively, about additional people crashing at their place, thinking she could otherwise get more rent.

They lived near a huge rock that required climbing down facing outward from the rock face to get down parts of it. I actually simply fast forwarded over that part, as Tracy deftly made her way down, assuming that I could use a rope at some point. Or that I probably would not have climbed up a rock face so difficult to get down.

I wonder what it was like to be in Germany as Hitler came into power. If there were people who simply pretended they didn't know, or ignored everything going on around them.

Down Dopplegangers

Tuesday morning last week I woke with a start. There was another person in bed with me when I woke up in the morning. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, and was at first comforted that Tracy had come home early, but realized that she had not.

Each night, the pillows conspire, to make me a cruel soft effigy of my love. I sometimes brush up against her hips in the night, finding her line, or curl my hands around her arms until she fits the way she always does.

I've begun to let her sleep in, when I go off. And shut the door softly behind me.

By evening, by my bed time, she is gone again, the fluffing worn off, the air returned to equilibrium, until I fill myself with her again that night.

Mortification of the Flesh

Doing to excess is one way of reminding the body that we are but transient voyagers within this bag of water we call self.

I am reminded, whenever I drink too much, smoke too much, go too far, that the brain itself, that center of our alleged self, is water, a swinging door to the flow of basic elements, combined, nothing more than that. Our own being a swinging door to the breath of the universe.

The Aging

Now, several months of inactivity have left my shoulders atrophied. My belly growing. My breath fainter.

Getting older snuck up on me, not with gray hairs, but discovering the challenge of crossing the breach, reclaiming the margin.

It's easier to slip away, harder to swim back.

I am hoping that with the increased struggle for fitness, I will discover the requisite wisdom the young body does not have, does not need.

If I could only go back and talk with my younger self, give me some words of advice on maintaining the machinery that we'll ride together for the rest of our time on this planet, I wonder how much he would heed me, as difficult as it is to heed myself these days.

The Ninth Habit

I did something I've never done before - blocked off my entire day for specific activities.

It was amazing.

Big rocks concept works.

The Post-Partum Xmas

We just got back from the Congdon family Xmas, held late due to due dates and the complexity arising from that incarnation.

I hope we can do this every year, just as the winter seems long again, to gather, and remember what brings us together. What can bring us together. The possibilities for sharing light, the one thing that makes all of us whole on this planet, even the dwellers in the deepest, darkest parts of the sea, depending as they do on the layers of ecology above, or the thermophilic archea in the hottest parts of the earth, relying as they do on the steady orbit around the sun.

For now.

They perhaps are the only creatures who may not stir now again with worry, wondering about the planet's demise. Their existence may understand, perhaps precurse, and supersede, eventually, the spinning of the planets.

But we bags of water, filled with our superstitions and worries and Gods of the age, we can sit and play board games, play piano, argue about politics, make our trifling worries into wars, as we rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light.

All Night Movie Night

It's amazing how a small room change can open up a space. In the space of two euchre games tonight, one of them incomplete (and I didn't even protest, despite being down 8-4, having coming up from 0 points - just the sort of tension that makes euchre such a phenomenal scoring schema), Tracy came home, moved the entire study around, in addition to doing three loads of laundry. I told her I should go walk the dog so she could install the closets in the bedroom. She really does multiply sometimes. It's insane to leave and come back after she has achieved her ninja work focus.

I watched both As Good As It Gets, and About Schmidt, which is a masterpiece, a Ulysses for our age.

But the room makes it. The den is now a den. This house everyday becoming more a home. I can't remember ever staying up all night to watch movies, except perhaps when I housesat for the Kornbluh's, who had cable.

She even lets me stay up and watch movies to climb into bed later, shirking my pre-bed warming duties for one night, letting rubber husband, the hotwater bottle I got her, do the first shift.

New Traditions

We put our tree up a couple weeks ago, a four foot balsam fir in the bay window, which Tracy's 14 inch angel topper would have dominated. So we did our white bearded, red hatted garden gnome, looking forward to spring. It makes more friggin' sense as a legend than old Santa Claus, and why shouldn't some of the invisible helpers in the world have shovels instead of wings? How come angels are holier than garden gnomes? Seems more in keeping with the simplicity of the season than gaudy white and gold.

This is one way, for me, to recapture the wonder of the long nights of winter, the anticipation, trudging through the snow day after day. It's always amazing to me in that context, thinking of those seasonal transitions, how many of them are associated with smell, as if the olfactory memorey is the loom upon which we weave our most colorful memories. Being in church for midnight mass, capturing that sense of waiting and wondering.

We pretend in our minds that our ancestors were somehow more superstitious than us, that they would worry about whether or not the days would get long again. I believe the ancestors who made it possible for us to live were, in fact, the ones who operated always with hope. That rather than functioning out of fear and irrational need (although you gotta eat), they HOPED that the sun would come up again, and celebrated when it did.

Other traditions, even if they did not have the mathematics we have today (someday, people will make fun of us the way we make fun of those who delayed the Copernican revolution so long, at least in the west), knew. Maybe they only knew in their hearts, and that faith gave them a god to thank, and that is calculus infinitely more incalculable than science.