Come Back Here With My Life!

For the first time in more than 3 years I am separated from my wife, who has gone to California for 4 days. She is still a fairly new wife, being the third of who knows how many to come, and so the pangs of separation seem new as well, though experienced already in the dim past of other marriages.

When the woman leaves, it seems like she removes more than just herself. It seems that somehow she takes along a great portion of what makes the days special. The lion's share of the marriage seems to fall away like an unevenly cut loaf of bread, leaving the man with the crumbs which make him crave the slice.

Drive, purpose, initiative, not to mention a sort of tender tyranny, fly away with her, divesting the hours of any particular point.

And suddenly the floor, the tables, the sofa and chairs, the beds and the stairways are magically populated by all sort of things that should not be there--dishes, crayons, papers, bits of mail, dust balls in the corners, chunks of earth, broken toys, cups, cups, cups, and spiders; grocery bags, potato chips, hats and shirts and shoes--and the whole mess together altogether defies comprehension. I know not how this happened, but only that it must somehow be rectified by Tuesday.

Which is still three days away. No rush. By some unusual circumstance they may go away on their own.

In the meantime, I find that either the visit counter on this blog has gone kerplooey, or actually no one has visited here in three days. Can it be? It's a lonely feeling under the circumstances. And so if you really are there, please say something for heaven's sake. I feel like I've offended everyone at the same time--as if I possessed any such power to come up with such a perfectly comprehensive offense.

Paranoia sets in, you see--loneliness, silence, doubt, ennui--and the man is left to commune with the near empty vessel that he really is. Either that or talk to the boring-ass Chihuahua.

How Long?

I think I have not slept since I was 12 or so. What I have done night by night is something other than sleep. I have lain down for a moment, hidden myself, escaped for a time.

How long since a morning has simply come upon me, wandered in through the window at its own leisure? How long since it mattered what the robin and the bumblebee had to say? What has become of the kisses of my mother, of the ease of joy, of the daily conspiracy of every thing and every creature to remake the hours in all the fullness of purpose?

How long since life has mattered like that?

There comes a time--who knows how or when--that finds both waking and sleeping diminished, a time wherein what is merely memory is found to have superseded miracle.

And the loneliness is enough to kill.

My life becomes a continual hungering after that which has already been swallowed and digested. What food can there be in the world for the feeding of empty spaces?

Time passes, and does not make us wise. Time passes, and in its passage we become more and more what we have made than what we are. What is left of original essence is found in the teardrop, contained in the blank stare, wrapped up in the fitful dream.

To Blog Or Not To Blog?

Blogging seems to be a fairly lonely sort of business. One is alone with his thoughts, as is the case 99 percent of the time anyway in life, and the only difference here is that he is for some reason writing them down. Why? So that he can be clear about what he himself is thinking?

No, I don't believe so.

Why write then? Why blog?

One suspects that an audience is either anticipated or imagined. Perhaps it is someone loved. Perhaps someone lost. Perhaps it is a group of like-minded friends. Perhaps it is a group having something in common. Like MS, for instance.

Perhaps we simply want to speak, and to hear a voice in return. Society seems to become less and less a community, more and more a scattering of isolated fragments, buck shot, trying to remember not only what barrel they came out of, but what the original target had been.

We set our fingers to the keyboard, we direct our thoughts into hyperspace. We say, essentially, Is anyone there?

And we wait. And we listen very closely. And we think anew.

There are observatories devoted to listening to space. There are devices that listen to the nearest star, to the nearest galaxy, to the asteroid belt and the rings of Saturn, and to planets and solar systems that are no more than theory.

And what is the answer, what sound does it make?

It is the sound of one hand clapping, I suppose.