Monthly Archive for August, 2007

I’ve had some beef with the con­straints of time for a while now, and age for that mat­ter. and our love, for that matter.

1.1 Obser­va­tion:
Last Thurs­day I was rid­ing the MAX home from down­town Port­land, los­ing myself in thought and near-sleep, and gen­er­ally feel­ing pretty shitty. There was a large woman hog­ging the seat next to me, squawk­ing loudly with another woman (her mother?) about bor­ing things. The younger woman’s child-son was with them, star­ing out the win­dow of the train and dan­gling his feet below chair. He was cute. As I dozed or dazed off in the dark sub­way tun­nel, this hap­pened (like it does every day):

On the MAX from Jennabee and Vimeo.

Before I could even react, the lit­tle boy next to me looked back from the win­dow where his eyes had been glued and said “whoa.” His mother looked down at him, sur­prised, with a silly look on her face and said “What?” She had missed it, they all had…they were talk­ing too loudly.
“Yeah man,” I said to him quickly “whoa.” And he smiled.

Every day my breath is almost taken away and my eyes well up with tears from this unlikely moment of pure and severe expe­ri­ence. That explo­sion of light and quiet. It’s like birth. Or sex. Or church. I always feel silly after­wards, embarrassed…like birth, or sex, or church. And that lit­tle boy is the first per­son I have ever seen notice it.

1.2 Hypoth­e­sis:

I sort of hate the way time works. It has always seemed like a cruel joke to me that we can recall each detail of the past, which we have no con­trol over, but that we can­not see what may come in the future, though our every deci­sion affects it. This pow­er­less­ness has left me rather depressed with the grim prospects for our tries at truly empathiz­ing with one another.

Why is it that all of my clos­est friends are my age; look a lot like me; act a lot like me?

As a true believer in human good­ness, I think that if we were able to fully grasp the effects of our deci­sions across time and space, our actions, and our world, would be much more true. Or pure. Or what have you. As a true believer in human con­nec­tion, I know that I would really love you, if I could see all of you.
I’ve been look­ing for ways to look into your eyes and find myself able love their bright spots for the way they evolved from your baby blue, to the way they will one day dim into a yel­lowed grey. Try­ing rec­og­nize your vice as the inno­cent child­ish habit it evolved from, and the messy recov­ery you will one day have from it. I want to really see you, you know, so we can be friends.

Some­one once told me that they thought heaven was this sin­gle moment where you were able to see EVERYTHING across all of time.
With every­thing laid out it front of you–every cause and effect since and until all of time–you
u n d e r s t o o d,
and you loved it all.