Love Language

And now conspiratorial
Seems every word we share,
Words which from any other
Would elicit 'I Don't Care.'

Seen objectively I think I, and probably you, have arrived. We are actually living the dream. By which I mean, if Anthony Bourdain had done an episode about my town, and had come to my home for a meal, I would get that feeling when I watched my scene that I get every time I watch him interact with anyone: basically, that the simple and complex rhythms, culture, and desires of any individual are beautiful and do not require anything else to make them perfect or whole. They're complete and interesting and worthy of love.

Jon Bentley is A thirty one year old father of three, who spends his time working with families wracked by mental illness, and shares his own experiences with substance abuse and depression to offer hope and insight to them. He loves the ocean and would love to move closer to one, but money has always been tight, and his son lives nearby and moving away from him is just not something that's gonna happen. When the kids are grown though, he and his partner Ally talk of living in an RV and criss-crossing the country ad infinitum, or buying a little land in Argentina, where he can make his music and she can grow organic vegetables, herbs, and whatever else she desires. Jon's father is a teacher and poet and his mother is a meditation instructor, democrat, and Mormon. Jon joins her for meditation twice a week before hitting the gym, and he and his father have been sharing their writings for decades. Today Ally has made us her grandmother's pumpkin soup, cooked inside of the actual pumpkin....

Now seen subjectively, it's more of a: bored, annoyed, horny, ashamed, hungry, too full, try to be mindful, reading, stupid boss, lazy co-workers, oh that was a good thought I should write it down, why are the people closer to us, harder to understand and be patient with? Is that because we ourselves are our biggest mystery and that mystery dissipates the further away people are from us emotionally? Hungry, tired, push the kids more, be more understanding with the kids, be nicer, be more assertive, think less, ashamed....

Yeah, not a perfect analogy, cause Anthony had that way of speaking to our time that highlighted lovable things and there's something to be said for looking for the beauty in everything, but yes that's not really objective. But if we wanna open that can of worms, how could anything be objective after being filtered through a brain grown from certain genes, but not others, fed with certain beliefs, but not others, colored with certain experiences but not others etc etc.... and if true objectivity is a meaningless phrase, perhaps I will choose a new view for myself. And it might sound like a tweaked Golden Rule. Think of yourself as you like to think of strangers, or something like that.

Once when coming down from an overdose and sitting with my mother in the ER, she said something about 'of course you can choose what to to believe, Jon'. She was referring to religion and I thought this cynical at the time. I thought, you know, that for belief to be real you can't choose it. And as far as that sort of belief goes, I've never gotten much farther than ' the universe knows what it's doing and things will be all right.' But if you swap out the idea of 'truth' and replace it with 'helpfulness', I can get behind that, Ma.

Hours and days and years playing with a yo yo and hacky-sack, and still I believed that a high could last, that there's something to achieve, that new energy can be created, that hedonic adaptation need not apply to me, and also, thinking that without this belief, the game would not be worth playing!

So this inflation of bigger, more, higher, louder, which as a novelty was all right, but which also was inherently numbing and degrading and destructive and made me forget that the whole thing that excited and energized me in the first place was the SUBTLETY. the nonchalance. The humble condescension of sharing your bit of mastery of the given (and embraced) parameters, ostensibly reluctant while subconsciously exultant

The parched glissando of moonglow.

I was tempted to call 'resonance' a valid measure of goodness,

You know the conversations where you can tell they're not feigning interest and the connection seems genuine. Resonates.

Until I remembered Glen Hansard's caricature of a lovelorn Irish busker, rending hearts and vocal cords on a sidewalk. No reverb, no resonance, dead audio, or even a lone old-timer holding fast to marriage being a thing only a man and a woman are entitled to, as she and her words are swept under the tide of a tolerant, sound-proofed mob,

So that bucks my theory

And again, my attempt at a fixed idea is quickly made irrelevant, and I'm reduced to silence... momentarily

This was supposed to be a happy poem

When the wind blows from the west, bringing the salt lake's smell, and the clouds are low and heavy, and perhaps a gull passes overhead, hurrying to shelter in the relative warmth and calm before the rain begins, 

There is an ocean nearby, just on the other side of the Planet Fitness, and the one horse town I never left is no longer hemmed in by the cost of living, the familial responsibility, or the sprawling succubus of modern Mormon culture,

And I think of the last scene of some required reading, where she walks out to sea and smiles when she realizes she has gone too far to make it back to shore, blind Paul Atreides gone into a coriolis storm,

Remember my own vain attempts to return to the wild

They were not skillful, sober, or quite unreturnable, and I will not repeat them, but I bow to the desperate last-ditch drive that I obeyed, diluted, impotent, sincere

Before returning to write self-pitying poetry and to forge more links for my heroic and ponderous chain

Pronoid Synchronicities

The dream was mostly about a giant refrigerator

Which held tons of food but was not cold enough, so brand new jugs of milk had flecks of mold floating in them. Dutifully I crawled under the monstrosity to where the cooling elements were.

Side note: My utter lack of handyman knowledge was made clear to me, as apparently my unconscious understanding of a refrigerator is that there are fans underneath a box blowing cold air upwards... this is how the food stays cold.

In any case there were too many fans plugged in and the circuit kept tripping.  I tried to space them out and find new outlets to plug into, but never got far. Brand new food was going to waste and my family and I were suffering for it (wasted money, eating potentially spoiled food).

I woke at 4 this morning and hit the gym as I had to be back home in time for my wife to get to work by 6. I've recently started re-watching episodes of Sherlock (why did I pick Sherlock?) to make the treadmill more bearable.

On today's episode, Cumberbatch explained that he only keeps things in his mind that are really important. There's finite room in his mental hard drive so unnecessary things (in his case the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun) have to go.

Yesterday I deleted my music app to make room for a game to entertain a fussy 1 year old at a work appointment. So during breakfast I did not have my algorithm-made personalized playlist and had to use youtube and actually decide what music I wanted to listen to. Stone age...

Anyway, I felt like listening to Mason Jennings during breakfast and learned he has a new album out. It's called 'Songs From When We Met.' I haven't finished the whole album, but I like what I've heard so far