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If this doesn't move you, you're already dead.

Passion

Excerpt from a book that a beautiful young woman recommended to me, Eleven Minutes, by Paulo Coelho.

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No wants their life thrown in chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."

Me either...

To know

I'm a man of mercurial tastes and fancies. Ideas slip in and out of my head like clouds skirting across a Buffalo sky. Plans are formed and discarded, convictions flame and burn in a moments time. Sometimes I feel like I need to escape to the farthest reaches of the globe, at others, to surround myself with those that I love. A future in the army, faced with certain death, all in an effort to experience the absolute certainty that comes with such an environment. To search out a grounding love, filled with the unnamed moments that stir the soul. All options I've considered in less than 7 days.

I worry that this is a trait that I will forever carry. It's not exactly a feeling that something is perpetually missing or a 'grass is greener' syndrome. More of a resistance to complacency. Does this make me constantly unhappy and unfulfilled? I think not, but then again, these thoughts will change again before this beer is finished.

Ah, such is life. Such is the soul I have created for myself. Such is...

Life...

Life is beautiful.

In Spite of Ourselves

The sun set in a yellow glob, the color of my suns when I scribbled them as a child, waxy red, orange, a conglomeration of texture and hues. The dark rushed in along with the winter chill. I sat at my desk and wondered what she was doing, a world away.

I awoke that morning with someone else: a thin, tattooed brunette who liked to crinkle her nose, sleep with her head on my chest, play fight and rode horses for a living. She was intelligent, recommended books that I had never read and could discuss those I had. She liked sex and was good at it. Yet there was something missing. That integral part of something. The fire the caught in your stomach, that defied gravity and had the simultaneous power to set afloat and crush.

I fell asleep thinking of Her while holding someone else. The One that slipped away, both from my own neglect and idiocy. Life is full of such 'hers'. We are a species of dreamers and romanticizers. I could blame it on Hollywood but that seems too convenient. The trait is universal, a shared blessing and curse. The ability to imagine. Imagination breeds dissent, breeds greed, breeds yearning, breeds the exceptional. Love is visceral imagination.

And like imagination, it largely goes unaccomplished and pending.

Always expanding.

--Currently listening to John Prine's In Spite of Ourselves