How weird to be 82 years old and suddenly (that’s stupid, nothing is “sudden” at 82) to realize you’ve found something that you should have known years back. More than years: from the beginning.
I don/t know what that thing is. Maybe it’s honesty. I’ve pretended to be honest most of my life, but that’s the biggest lie. What I thought was honesty was a sideways shift of pretend. So it may be something else, but it’s something open, inviting. From someone who has seldom been inviting.
So what does such crap mean? As usual, I don’t know. Been listening tonight to hours of Lucinda Williams (do you know her? she’s country, not what you might think of as country, in the sense of blanded-out emotion strung on a telephone wire; no, she does it, the real honesty).
I’m sitting here at the uncaring computer, typing, knowing in my scattered mind that what I tap out will never be the same as tapping at that Olympia typewriter in the ‘70s, when I typed and the machine answered with its clicks (computers don’t answer, they lie silent or snicker).
I seldom admit this,
especially now, but I want to do something monumental. I mean, something so enormous that it will never be forgotten. This is particularly unsubstantiatable because I believe that a) I’m too limited to do it, or b) it doesn’t matter, or c) there’s nothing monumental in the universe, or d) (most likely) that life is a lie that can’t be particulated into a breakdown that tells us what matters and what doesn’t.
Tomorrow morning I’ll likely (almost certainly) wake with mental pain – the certainty that if I don’t get up I’ll lie there and suffer paralyzing negativity without reason, but if I do get up it will be just another day that will flop along with nothing to distinguish it – or worse, that distinguishing means nothing.
Oh, that’s not as negative as it sounds (is it?), just that the world’s flowing like a malignant plasma down humanity’s last-possible mountainside. We’re not at the bottom, no – we’re our own chosen obliteration.
Too often I think that’s exactly what it should be. (Oh, I’m a bad person. Or one too realistic to be here.)
lickhaven 