pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IDLE AND BLESSED, OR, JUST ANOTHER A SPECK IN THE STEW 254. First day of autumn, my favorite time of the year. Our days are getting shorter, the air is getting crisper, the trees are winding down their busy food-making preparations and settling in for a long season of stored sugar highs, AND THE STATE FAIR IS COMING! Yep. The state fair. And Halloween. And trips to the mountains for crips apples. And rakes. And a blessed end to these one-hundred-degree days and the constant humming of our air conditioners. Go away now chlorophyll; seep into those branches and turn those leaves to gold! I like to think of sugar-loaded winter trees as taller, statelier versions of John Water's character Pecker�s annoying little sister, the Baltimore babygrrl who screams �Me want SUGAR!!� and stamps her little feet petulantly as her grandmother intones �Full of grace, full of grace� and pretends to have a talking madonna. (And please rent John Water�s PECKER if none of this sounds familiar, because it is one very warped and funny film.) But we were talking about fall, weren�t we? About our world�s sudden fine crispness. Autumn. Mary Oliver says she doesn�t know exactly what prayer is, but she does
Ah. Well Mary, I plan to spend as much of mine as possible outdoors�and fall, to me, means that I can do that again without getting out breaking into a sweat the second I open the door. And that's why my pal Rosa and I plan to play our guitars outdoors at the farm tonight. Meanwhile, Pottergrrl and I have been talking about death, which I guess is inevitable as we watch all these plants die around us. I�m not really afraid of dying, but don�t want to die in pain. She is terrified of dying though, and says she can�t always enjoy her one wild and precious life because she knows that sh has to die. I know it too and don�t exactly know why this knowledge doesn�t bother me in the same way. I mean, it�s not that I want to die or anything like that. I rage against the dying of my light as much as anyone, I suppose, have mourned others� deaths more than I imagined at this point and still miss people who have been dead for years now. And I go to the gym on a regular basis (even though my flab never seems to go away) in an effort to stave off the end and stay relatively healthy in the interim. Maybe it's because I don�t believe in a porcelain god with his eye on the sparrow, in some all-knowing being who is watching over me until he decides to scoop me up and place me on those proverbial streets of gold. Nor do I believe�or disbelieve�in previous lives, that I was Cleopatra or Edna St. Vincent Millay or Sylvia Plath, who died three days before I was born so I could possibly even make an argument if I wished. I am, however, fond of the notion that, since we are composed of matter and antimatter�which don�t disappear�that we simply change form while continuing to exist, and possibly with continued awareness. If this is the case, then I would like for my matter to settle into the shape of a green Pacific NW river rock, but know that it�s just as possible that I could wind up a speck of dirt stuck to some stinkin' cow turd. And yeah, I know that my matter probably won�t settle into any particular shape, but will instead mix with all of the other dispersed matter in the universe and I�ll just be a few Bird specks in some giant universal stew. That's okay with me though. The best response I can come up with is to say that I really do try to live my life as if every day could be my last and try to remember that it could be. (And you�d think that I wouldn�t keep dildos and erotica and sexy black blindfolds and other accoutrements that my mother could find in my house in this case, wouldn�t you? But you would be wrong.) (I do hope that my friends get those items out before my family arrives if I die before them though.) So anyway. I don�t have that many regrets either. Honestly. So maybe that�s part of it too. I believe I�ve mostly made the right choices for me and would make many of them again, even though the world would say that they were bone-headed decisions. And I have mostly taken a stand when it was important to take one, even when this was hard to do. And I feel very, very fortunate to have experienced a few brief moments that I recognized as perfection�so I know that, if I died in that instant, my life would have been enough. One such moment was in New York City, where I was on the back of my best friend�s motorcycle. it was fall and we were in jeans and white T-shirts and black leather jackets and I was so happy because we were finally together again. We were driving down to watch the Macy's folks blow up the floats on Thanksgiving eve and there was a major nip in the air. My neck was cold where the jacket didn't quite fit under my helmet, but I was surprisingly warm. And we could smell chestnuts roasting in the vendors� portable ovens. Have you ever noticed that the world looks different from the vantage point of a motorcycle? (Or a convertible, for that matter, only less so.) No roof blocks the tops of bridges, hides the skyscrapers� height, keeps the smells at bay, keeps you separate. And New York�s bridges are incredibly beautiful at night, especially when you�re on a bike and the sky is very black while the city is bright with lights�and all that water gives the bridges enough negative space to really stand out. The wind was hitting my neck that night as we rode, reminding me that I was alive and holding tight to my best friend's waist as we leaned our bodies into the road's curves together. We were driving those curvy Central Park lanes in the dark after playing guitars and singing on her fire escape and talking about life all day. We were happy. And we were together. And then a taxi pulled right out in front of us and, I swear to gawd, Filmgrrl laid the bike sideways to avoid it and I could practically feel my elbow touching the road and I realized, in that moment, that if I died in that instant, then I would die with my best friend after experiencing a day of complete happiness, that my life would have been enough. Hallelujah! Campus just called to say my laptop is repaired. No more typing on this crappy PC piece of crap. No more waiting to upload my photos to my Flickr blog. No more tiny small screens and illogical prompts. On happy day! Finally, I'll just note that Pottergrrl arrives tonight�(this is, gulp, becoming a regular thing)�and Shakespeare arrives Sunday night for tests on Monday morning, so I may not be at a computer much before Tuesday. I may have to come into work Monday afternoon though.
Ciao. 11:07 a.m. - 2005-09-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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