January 28, 2002

• Ecstatic, the world undfolds, stretches out, breaks apart
  Disintegrates into vast and limitless
  
  Pained, the self rises, a totem to a clan of experience
  Unified, galvanized, purposeful
  
  Big-M Mind and small-m misery.
  
  Watchful eye sees it all. Who sees? Who feels?
  What is misery in the context of what is ecstatic unfoldment?
  
  Toss stone. Ripples. Frog croak. Poet write haiku.
  
  Toss stone. 1. 2. 3. 4.
  Pick up stone. 5. 6.
  Return. 5. 4.
  3. 2.
  1.
  
  
  A longish while back a woman named Hilary confessed that she’d been interested in me for a long time – for about as long as I’d been interested in her. Two ships passing in the night, not getting the signals, not sending the right message. My epic insecurity, her married status. Irony of ironies, I found out she’d been going through a divorce the few months in the interim. How differently things might have been. Dot dot dot. Well, in this case, probably not that much differently, come to think of it, but still. I finally understand what Breszny means when he sings, “Kick in that open door.”
  
  What do I regret about her? I regret that the only way to learn it was to do it, and there’s not a lot of point regretting such a thing. I spent a week and a half in this woman’s private hell, and ended up getting called dispicable. What’s the meaning of dispicable in the context of emotional, psychic, and material assistance?
  
  There’s a Neil Finn song called ‘Truth,’ and the chorus is: “Truth/Is worth more than pride.” It’s one of those obvious things that you never remember until you read where someone else said it, or hear it in a song. The sort of thing that applies to truths you’re telling about someone else, but not to the truth someone’s telling about you.
  
  The truth is that beauty and ecstasy and pain are inescapable, no way to argue or charm your way out. They all bring each other to the melee, too. Pain and beauty and ecstasy and everything else you find in Pandora’s box. They gang up on you in slow motion, over time.
  
  Then there’s hope. Hope and love are the two most abused four-letter-words in the English language. We force hope at gunpoint to promise us something we might never get, just so we can feel better about the present. I mean, there’s the kind of hope that comes from seeing that something is working, but that’s not hope. That’s more a kind of certainty. You know that your work will reward you with what you want, because you can see it. It’s right there. The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t imagined; it’s actual photons from an external source striking your retina. In contrast, there’s the hope that ‘everything will be OK’ or ‘will work out’ or whatever, and it’s this sort of hope that I wish to shit on in this ‘blog.
  
  I had that latter kind of hope about Hilary and her private hell. I had a plan in my head that didn’t account for, well, uh, you know… the reality of the situation. My hope was to find an eccentric genius friend and perhaps romantic overtones with whom I might be able to commiserate, to make plans, to egg each other on. The light at the end of my tunnel (as opposed to my propped-up hope, which you just read in the preceeding sentence) was that she’d get the restraining order against her husband, that she’d be able to change the locks on the house, and then I could say a polite farewell and get the fuck out of Alameda, California, drive north two states’-worth as quickly possible, and then drink a bottle of scotch on an empty stomach. The reality was even worse than that, but that’s what hope is like.
  
  And yet it’s just one of the many back-and-forth points in the ten-point turn required to put the giant limousine of my own being into the tiny parking place of whatever relationship reality the universe has alloted to me. I’m trying desperately to see it as a skill, instead of merely banging my head against a wall, but it’s not easy.
  

  • 8:30 pm
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