2001-12-09 - 11:01 p.m.: oolong

Today was nice. Not wonderful... but nice. Started out like an episode of "Leave it to Beaver".... whole family piles into the minivan to attend "church..." whole family takes a wagon-ride to the middle of nowhere to pick out and purchase ready-made natural pine tree to be prepped and propped in the family room, loaded with tinsel and cheesy homemade ornaments, electric lights... and eventually divested of its baubles, then chipped or cremated. A laugh-out-loud sort of obscenity.

I shouldn't say that, though... really... because it's supposed to be one of those things that I store deep in my annals of childhood memories to be accessed when I'm old and gray and longing for something to reassure me that I did, in fact, heartily enjoy my life. And I do... I am... but not in that way. Not... those things. What am I saying?

I guess it's just that... when I'm nostalgic... it's never for those things that one is *supposed* to be nostalgic for. I resent a lot of it... for no particular reason. I think it's because its those things... those Walton-esque excursions and happy-gather-'round-the-camera moments that seem most staged, most... I don't know. I'm being bitter and cynical. I miss the times when I'd be invisible... maybe sitting on the floor just below the adult field of vision... playing with shoelaces or vaguely listening to things I wasn't supposed to hear... or running around outside with no particular intention or destination... inventing games too dumb to endure... looking carefully for unicorn or tiger tracks in the backyard, just in case one happened to wander through, by mistake.... things that I can't pinpoint in my memory.... but actually *shaped* me. Shaped my expectations and desires.

But I suppose if I'm fair and honest, I'd have to say that today, just like any other day, deserves to go in that bag as well. Why discriminate?

I was working on "decoupage" today... it's drying right now... and it's just struck me that that's what I want to do to my life. Decoupage it. I want to tear out the most beautiful parts, soak them through with polyurethane and paste them up somewhere... fix them in place forever so that they'll always be accessible, shiny and like new. So that *I* can be the one who runs past *them,* laughing. Sometimes I feel like my life is slipping past me... in moments... and I'm so worried about catching every single one of them that I don't manage to grab any at all... they're gone... laughing. I don't feel *changed* by the years that I've lived... I know I have, it's ridiculous to think otherwise.... but still. I don't notice it. Like I'm alive AND dead. Like a tree. Solid and unmoving.

Oh but then other times I feel like a breeze...restless... insubstantial... grabbing at solid things... unsatisfied.

So I guess there's really nothing more to say about that.

I just started "Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk. Quite funny so far. And I'm still reading "The Conformist" by Alberto Moravia. The latter, though... I don't know how it'll end, of course, but I get the sense that it's one of those books that end rather badly... where the hero's aimed for a truly disastrous situation, which he only just manages to avoid at the very very end of the novel by means of a truly miraculous coincidence, or revelation, or salvation... divine intervention.. whatever. Like the author's daring you to think about what would've happened if the unbelievable didn't. Which, if you're a realist, is all too easy to do. Then you have to think about why the author saved his character so narrowly... and you wonder if maybe the author loves the character the way he is, and wants him to be able to be himself without being confounded by the reader's needs and expectations... and you end up feeling guilty for wanting a happy ending because maybe that wasn't the best thing, under the circumstances. Oh geez. I guess I'm thinking about "Of Human Bondage" by W. Somerset Maugham (I think)... I was SO pissed off at the ending of that book that I nearly threw it away. The rest of it... I loved. I forgave the author for defiling his character in such a monstrous way only by attributing the end of the novel to the author's own psychological need for closure. Because, in that book, there really wasn't any way to end it gracefully, without condemning the hero to a life of restlessness and dissatisfaction, or death. How distressful.

But probably it's not that sort of book at all.... it just has the same sort of delicious damp way-in-the-back-of-the-library-rotting smell to it. Mmmm. Like a book of magic spells would smell. Like hands and whispers and (friendly) spiders.

The tricky thing about music is that you can't write sound. Not easily, anyway. For instance, the song I'm listening to right now consists, lyrically, of a long, drawn-out "huuuh." But it's SO BEAUTIFUL! So... just imagine that this "huh" sounds reedy, whispered from the back of the throat, with a slight, desperate gargle at the end... melodious but a little sad, a little off (in a mostly-minor key).... hmm.

I don't think I'll do a deep dark secret OR a dream tonight.... I've written way too much already. Lazy, lazy. :o)

Goodnight!

inward...outward