silly adults

romanticizing childhood. 
It's human to immagine what you can't have is better than what you do
(I think it's why we've survived for this long,
you know, it makes us work)
but just because your brains didn't hold much of
the sunny days when your clothes
were so adorably small
for posterity,
doesn't mean
they were as wonderful
as your editing minds make them out as. 

Now, I dont have much to compare to,
but as soon as I do,
I'll have lost the first reference point
and on.

reading Fifth Business

Introduction

All right, I admit it- I've gotten to be an old person.  When I was a child, my best friend and I would run around (when our legs were still good) and laugh at old people who said things like "when our legs were still good."  it made us happy to laugh at something together, and I don't regret making fun of old people with Annie.  I don't mind it when children laugh at me- actually, it makes me happy.  I love remembering what it was like to laugh a child's laugh and hear her laugh with me. 
She was just beautiful then:  I never was.  You would think I would be jealous of her, but I loved her too much.  I still do, although we don't laugh as well now.  She stopped being beautiful.  Our faces are covered up by our oldness.  Which is kind of why I'm writing a memoir.  Maybe the wrinkles can fade a little for me. 
Usually people begin their stories by introducing some wonderfully oversimplified theme- some lesson it has taken them their entire lives to learn.  I'm not going to, but not because I haven't learned some hard lessons.  I wish I could save you the pain of learning things firsthand, but that never works, so I wont bother.  I just want to wish you a happy life and tell you about mine. 

PS- I hope dearly that nobody's making you read this.  I know schools make odd choices in books and this may once be in some English teacher's curriculum.  I don't mind that, but I worked really hard living and living to tell the tale.  Please don't have a bad attitude about listening to me- humor an old lady or skip it. 

It's hard to be a man.

Being human is tough. 
We have these big brains that overthink everything
and we have all of these selfish desires and then this guilt that makes us feel horrible about them
and we want to be famous
and rich, and one-up everyone around us
and stick ourselves somewhere for others to ogle at,
and we like ogling. 
Brains and overcooked sex drives and we grow hair in funny places
and we're easily distracted. 
Being human is tough stuff, if you want to be good. 
It's in streams of thought like this that I wonder why we're animal at all.
I mean, couldn't the intelligent life forms have been trees? 
For once- trees! Or protists- long streams of algae that could sway out our ideas to each other. 
I'm a human, an animal that communicates by vibrating parts of my throat.
Algae can't scream at its neighbor, or build a castle. 
For some reason, God's image was put into THIS thing. 
I'm staring at my arm-
God shouldn't have such thing as an arm,
that would be silly,
muscles up and down His legs and skin stretched over His spine.
We're quite the creation,
but why these bodies? 
What's He saying?
I ask my left kneecap. 
It's a pretty left kneecap,
but what does it mean? 

Wisdom?

It doesn't really matter what you come into certain films and books with-
the mystery novels, the spy movies with scantily clad women and lots of guns,
the sci-fi romances, the horror flicks. 

I don't really care about understanding those movies either-
that's not their purpose. 

The ones that make people think, the ones that make people cry,
the ones that make people give money to charities and get handwritten letters in Nigerian French...
those are the ones I want to understand, but I am incapable. 

I'm missing a point of reference, I haven't read the introduction to the book.  I don't get the emotional allusion. 

Sometime between today and about five years from today, I will have gained what adults walk into those movies with, the breath they breathe on the first pages of books.  I don't know what it is, but I will soon.

Do I want to?

(the little things)

i can imagine having a discussion with an old friend
or a guy in a coffeeshop
and we won't completely understand each other's words
but they will ask me what
what are you writing?
and I will just hand it to them
and maybe point out through the corner of my mouth that i'm not very good
or original, but i dont really care about either of those things.

and they will flip through my little book
and for some reason, i wont be embarassed that they are reading it all
in my handwriting.

they will ask what it means
and ask why dont i look at the deeper thing
that it points to?

all i want to show is the pretty finger pointing
and the vector
i don't care about what its pointing at
because that seems pretty obvious.
patterns are pretty obvious,
but freckles? 

They might personify our new "infatuation" with Natural Beauty
or DNA and RNA and high seratonin levels and what it is to be a Man,

but all i wanted to say was
i like your freckles
they are pretty.

we're all so caught up in meaning
and something that resounds
globally.

i like the notes.