Ranting and Rambling

I’ve just solicited Cris for writing topic suggestions since I seem to be at a writers block impasse.

I’m scanning the apartment for ideas… dog? No. Rubbing alcohol? Nope. Young Frankenstein? I don’t think so. The pleasant texture of Cris’ green fleece blankey? Maybe.

The sensation of it against my skin is quite sweet and mollifying, ala softly cooed lullabies. It’s verdant chromatics urge the mind via the eye to primordial reminiscences, to a time of primary and secondary colors, to an invertebrate era of slitherings and coilings and unfurlings in the muck. The crude stitching of the hem, sewn haphazardly as though by a dilettante seamstress/er (that is funny), reminds me of my own ridiculous if endearing attempts at cut up hippy dress pillow making. Those were the days.

Good man that he is, Cris has sent along a few ideas for possible writing fodder.
One: The best moment of your life.
Two: The coolest person/place you’ve come to know.
Three: The best out of body experience you’ve had.
Four: The best dream.
*note: The syntax and abbreviated spelling oft used in text messages for space efficiency have been changed to an arrangement more suitable for prose of the Candice variety. The intended meaning remains intact.
*note: That was gay.
So let’s start with suggestion numero uno, as it instantly invokes a memory very close to my heart.

Uh, wait no.

It’s quite a task to examine the plethora of pieces that constitute the tapestry of a life, and say, ‘this is the best one.’ Good moments, bad moments, ecstatic moments, devastations are all fluid in the mind. The subjective status of an event in your mind is so based in context, of not only the situation in which it occurred, but also, and possibly more importantly, of the vantage point in time you are in your life, looking back at it. What can seem at the time to be a calamitous affair in your life, can ripple into repercussions that change your life for the better, get you out of, no matter how uncomfortably at the time, a very bad situation, teach your something that will resound resplendently throughout your life. Also, the opposite is true.
Love turning sour, even violent. Love that you discover was never love at all. A pill you popped. A risk you took. A risk you didn’t take. I don’t know.
The point is the importance of perspective. The point is a Zen koan. But I’m guessing I’m being too nit picky, and completely ignoring the obvious implication of the suggestion, which is to say, at what moment in your life were you the most awe struck by revelation, the most in love, the most in love with life, the most affected, but mostly, the happiest?
I couldn’t choose one because there is a best moment for a variety categories. I cannot choose my overall favorite. It does not exist.

So here’s a list, in no significant order:
The way my heart jumped/fluttered the first time I saw Cris, how I’d never felt that way in an instant, and now I realize that I loved him from then.
In the lake at Pace Bend, at night, the glow in the dark football, with Cris.
The lunch break on Owen’s birthday boat trip around Kho Phangnan, on that little beach, when it started to pour that frigid rain, and I went into the sea, alone, and floated.
The first time I heard Dayvan Cowboy.
Eleven years old, playing soccer in the parking lot, in the rain.
Eating at that Mexican restaurant in Renton, WA with Toni and James, and meeting that other part of me, that superior, that eternal part of me.
Spending last weekend with Cris, alone.
The night Sarah, Tiffany and I rolled, watched that miraculous sunrise by the hot tub, and went to Bull Creek the next day, completely fearless, saying ‘Fuck it!’ Doing anything we felt, back flips off the rope swing, swimming fully clothed in the perfect water.
That night on UT campus with James, at the fountain, at the clock tower.
The first time I saw the Milky Way, in New Mexico.

I can’t even think of anything right now. Now I’m just starting to think of times in my life I’ve loved, which have been a lot. If this exercise hasn’t been a good writing diversion, it’s at least been a good positive light shedding microscope through which to view my life, helping me to get my head out of the cracked dirt of my negative desert, and realize that my life is teeming with magical moments. Over all, it’s pretty damn good.

All these ideas about the necessity for goals, ambitions, accomplishments are for naught if you aren’t enjoying your life. If I had to choose, completely outside of the context of societal expectations and definitions of what it means to be successful, between the chilled out life of a happy vagabond, drifting, going with the flow, creating an existence of small magical memories, and that of a ‘successful’, celebrated, decorated, accomplished, revered who ever, but missing out on all those things that make life life, I’m think I’d choose the former.
When you die, your achievements die with you. Unless you happen to be one of those people who have ineluctably altered the course of human history. Then your accomplishments get to die when a cataclysmic comet strikes the earth, wiping out any evidence that humanity ever existed. Or if not that, then when the sun blows up. It’s all for nothing when you try and envision the ‘grand scheme of things.’

All we have is our tiny mite of a life on the giant self swallowing snake of the all. We have a century if we’re lucky (or very unlucky, depending on how you look at it). We mean nothing. Your Master’s degree means nothing, your car mean nothing, your 4th grade Spelling Bee championship means nothing, your National Geographic collection means nothing, all the books you’ve read, the buildings you’ve built, the asses you’ve beaten, the clothing you’ve procured, it all means nothing. It is all transitory. The only person it matters to, is you. And the only way it really matters, is if it made you happy. If it enriched your life experience, if you get a flutter in your guts when you think back on it, if you did it because you wanted to, because you truly loved to.

Oh my god, I’m so preachy. But seriously, who am I preaching to? Myself? Well maybe I need to fucking hear it from time to time.

Maybe I’m taking things too seriously.

Who put this ‘do something with your life’ idea into my head? You can’t help but do something with your life. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you’re happy.
And duh! Nothing is impossible. And not like ‘you can do anything.’ Like, nothing doesn’t even exist. There is always something. And by nothing being labeled, it becomes something. It is a paradox.
We won’t get into that.

As a quick aside, Curry is the cutest thing that’s ever existed, she is laying on her back on the floor, spread eagle, vajayjay black and pointy, mouth hanging open in a maniacal dog smile, chewing on her makeshift nylon rope leash. When I peeked over the chair to see what she was doing, she just froze, eyes bulging out, and stared at me. Filarious!

Watching cheetahs run on tv is exhausting.