How I'm feeling today...

The office building is a corporate redundancy, red brick with a glass entrance and black trim. It reminds me of a low security prison or mid-level rehab center – welcoming exterior with red mulched flower beds sprouting speckled green conifer blooms and brightly colored tulips but a drab and muffled interior. Two heavy set women sit at the front desk, April and Cathy, their outfits mysteriously coordinated each day. If April wears a navy blue blouse, Cathy has a camisole that is vaguely similar. Each morning one of the women looks up from their computer as I walk past, flashing a bright, sickly sweet smile. “Good morning,” one croons, emphasizing the long “o”. Their smile follows me as I flash my badge at the sensor and enter the glass door.

I imagine a vapor lock exhaling as I let the door shut behind me. Beyond this point, please conform. Speak softly, refrain from eye contact with members of the opposite sex, and above all, be conservatively appropriate. My prematurely-aged cynicism oozes from me like an odor. I climb the stairs and go to my desk, my head peering over the penitentiary gray cubicle walls; orderly subjects all in a row, dutifully absorbed in the eerie glare of computer screens hide behind each. This is my life.

I’ve come to loathe the question, “What do you do?” How do I answer exactly? I count minutes.

Looking for some inspiration?

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 They are the engineers of the superseded.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

An Awakening?

I have lived a stationary life. While brief, intermittent geographical hop-scotches have occurred the majority of my life I have remained within a two hundred mile radius of the small town I grew up in.

Yet throughout this stasis I have had a continual yearning to wander. At times it is a dull ache, easy to suppress, while at others, piercing hot in its intensity. And I know now that this feeling will never leave me. It is as much a part of who I am as my stubbornness or my laugh.

Since my childhood I have had the strange notion that I will not live a long life. I remember having anxiety attacks - "spazz attacks" - as we called them, where I woke up at night in inconsolable fits - unable to control my actions but aware of everything. Only later did I recall the dreams that preceded these episodes. Huge, all-encompassing tasks at hand and only a brief amount of time in which to complete it all. It was the confrontation of infinity with brief, wondrous mortality.

The sun and moon rise. Seasons arrive and flee. Sand falls.

Time is short for all of us.

This notion used to terrify me and sent me straight into the arms of organized religion. I found little solace in such a sterile, formalized, self-denying view of the world.

I am certain of very little except that I am me and that I have but one life.