Madman across the water

Always starting over, but somehow I always know where to begin.

The concessions that are required of one who wishes to truly start over escape me just now. I'm north-bound, just beyond the inviting Charlotte skyline. I've just begun to unwrap the emotional bundle I've just been left with. More and more the moods seem to strike me as an afterglow, a sort of numb sensation, an alarm going off sounding me out about how I used to feel, or should feel. The sun today is inviting, though it is a fool's invitation, fools like I being the ones to answer. Life's just that, a series of call and answers, it takes real guts after a while, to have the courage to face the sound, sometimes the phone rings all day.

It occurs to me how heavy today is, in my place along this sunny highway, where it's chilly for this time of year, my thoughts are miles away, and lifetimes become me. I've been lucky today, my sunglasses (being ever so dark) make people more polite, and make me less so, side-ways glances let me stare, keeps the world out, keeps the world impersonal, keeps everything just so. I have an eccentric sort of curiosity, one that is ever-intent upon the past, I like to keep the present at arm's length, I love my aloofness behind the glass, my thoughts within are my own, all the world without.

Were a kingdom mine it'd all be for forgetting, things remembered would die a coward's death. All things before would die, lest there be remembrance. There is no pain like things which once were, the future for it's ambiguity is still something that can be cured, or bleached, or avoided. The lot of days that were- those are what will kill you, despite any splendor- are an infinite void, the pot is flush, memory, a generous and exacting dealer.

But that was a lie, an infantile ambition I must now confess, any censure of memory, for my own part, would be foolish; even I can admit that I am as stubborn as I am anxious as I am willing to make any mistake for love. Any trespass once forgotten would only return to me, then, I know I would make the same mistakes, and I would learn the same lessons, and the tautology would be wrought with past misgivings ad infinitum.

And for the rest? That was a lie, but this is not, there is no single direction to this confession, no. Not now, here within this all too real exercise in theoretical impossibility, even now, this expository, this treatise, this thought paradigm is constrained, contained, driven by, derivative of, and juxtaposed against and all about time. For all things great or small, young and old, was or nothing at all, time is the father, time is the gate-keeper, time is the siren song, and the rocks against which all desert ships must someday break.

"It's better to burn out, than it is to rust," is not a romantic ideal, it is a warning. A badge of the wounded, the scar of realization. Self-immolation, on the grandiose level that is life is the ultimate fuck-you to the great father, an absolute and resolute of no-confidence against the concept which governs all things. Conversely, rust is an homage, rust is an admitted weakness, an affliction even the strongest must suffer, provided they consent: ashamedly, or unabashed- kings and kin, street-rats and urchins, we all wear the mask. Rust is the coat of arms of years, rust stands in the place of something once great, a great fortress of steel, shiny and proud, ready to out-shine even the sun, a feat in youth which once was so, is no longer, by days under the sun, all things rust and fall away, by time all things which once were are un-done. The sharpest sword succumbs to rust, in it's place a dull reminder of some fallen warrior, so too for the mind, so too for pride, so too for all things, save memory. Though to be certain, memory is it's own vice and in itself it's own disease.

And the wheels roll on, I pile along down this same highway, a week's journey now to this place; a direct line running through many different points, and mindsets. When I think about it though, I realize it runs back through a year, directly really. It's rambled along 34 just north of Austin way past mid-night, was seen vanishing over the horizon above the Pacific Ocean at Seal Beach, was found again in the Gulf of Mexico where the beautiful white sands whisper sweet nothings, and call every son home to something resembling bliss. But when I think about it again it's always lead me home, all of my thoughts emanating from one, irresistible, compass point straight back through all of my days, a direct result of the first instant I can remember anything at all. Before that instant there was nothing, before this day was nothing but time. Even that thought has been swallowed by this one moment, this perpetual instant of presence that is the present, we have been brought by birth to the brink of this irresistible grasp. And as you read on, the tick tock of the clock sticks in the mind, not unlike the feeling of waves over the body, like it would feel to wash away consciousness. So we may continue this parlance, a premise of my feelings; whether you heed this warning is in-consequential, this is a death rattle, the perceived degree of pre-maturity depends simply on your degree of perception, depends on your scope, and the eyes you use to look through it.

When I am home, many years from now, it is possible that I will shine a light into the darkness, and find some hope I abandoned there, maybe by the water, some deep, blue, body of water greater than anything I can picture in mind. Perhaps we'll be fishing, as a metaphor- this new-found resolve (which is to be the progeny of hope) and I- and not catch a thing, like Emerson said. I'm certain I'll embellish on certain past moments in my life, and omit various other points of time. Contentment sometimes being simply to shake a pole and let the water ripple, a little tally for existence; the more curious of fish will know we were here once, the sanguine among them though, well they'll swim on. Streams run in both directions for them, you must remember, and I've always been jealous. It's odd really, how such an interesting predicament is afforded to such a simple creature. A chance to come home again, a return to the place of birth, to swim back against the currents of time to where it all began, to bring life, but also to bring death. At that point though, I guess it's not really a choice, just another step in the dance of life, on such a grand scale time is but a song, the whole affair plays out fatally before a cosmos unaware of it's own existence. I like to think I'm that noble, but I'd rather be fishing, me and my new-found, prodigal, hope.

I like to think part of my life will be that way, the things I've lost; my love, my loves, my hope, these things will all be returned to me, if for no other reason than I know I've given so much of what I can find to take their place in the interim. But I don't claim to believe life is fair, or to have ever step foot in the halls of karma, for all the places I've been, if ever a place should happen to exist, it escapes me even now. But no, I reject those fallacies. Those are bed-time stories for the type of people who would like to believe in them; some say they'll always be asleep, I think I believe that, it gives me this feeling that is something resembling comfort.

But comfort is not a thing that keeps a man warm at night, love however, for all its poisons, is, however. As is hope, the absence of which gives a man to the often all-consuming condition that is chronic over-thinking, the more terminal stages being thoughts like these, but I'm not dying, just gathering a little rust. Perhaps this is a cautionary tale of sorts, maybe it's a blue-print: man as omniscient fool, man squanders bliss, finds salvation in the realization that he knows nothing, and will never be happy, sounds about right to me. That people should learn from my mistakes, that they may see that, sometimes even a rolling-stone will gather moss, if only for the simple reason that not all fallacies are un-true, there's a real lesson to be learned, and it's about time, and somebody should remember that. Many places I've seen, and I've travelled through all sorts of epochs of thoughts, even now my ethos is ever-changing (hell I even know what she means when she says she looks at things from both sides now) but that's only because there's a place inside me that's empty, and I don't think it was empty before.

But just now I have the good fortune of looking up, and I see the Blue Ridge Mountains stretching out beyond my sight, reaching back to before my years, and re-acquainting themselves with more familiar times when they were strong and the earth was young. That's the way I like for them to be, I would like it if they felt that way. And I remember things I have never seen, these erstwhile giants having sagged greatly from heights to which they'll never return. Their youth spent long ago, in a time before man, their great heights given to the progression of years, generations of man have lived and died here, have taken shelter and sustenance in and of these hills, all things wear on down through the years in this way. Yet even as they are diminished they remain, and the earth welcomes them still. For what they've lost they have a home to which they'll return.

It is the same for these many years until and since, they still are. Just as I still am, maybe that empty feeling isn't emptiness at all, simply a need for something more, maybe a desire for heights I once knew, or feel somewhere within. This void a sign of a greater being, growth not unlike the rings of to a tree, with new branches to shake off the rust; and a wanderlust to seek out distant peaks, maybe make some tomorrows my own, maybe find some greater part of the earth to fill my soul. It's been so long since I've been fishing.