The Edge of the World

I’ve been very quiet lately, just trying to get my head screwed back on tightly.  This is such a difficult prospect for me to follow right now.  I can’t get a lock down on my heart, for whatever reason.  Everything is fine; I am in good health and good disposition, but concentration right now is impossible.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on a small but interesting little project.  I have been purchasing these tiny Zebras, cousin of Harvey, the famous penguin (they are the same size and from the same people) — manufactured over ten years ago, and I’ve sent fifteen of them to complete strangers.  The last batch has gone out today.  I might buy one more batch, but I’m not certain of that.  I’ve always wanted a reason to bring people together.  How I’ve gotten this information and how I’ve been able to communicate with them, I will keep secret for now, but I will never stop being delighted by being able to bring people together over small things.

I don’t know what it feels like to get mail from a complete stranger, nonetheless a parcel, containing something just for you.  But so far everyone has sent me pictures, smiling little poses with their tiny zebras, giving them names and places to be.

Friends, there really isn’t much to life.  So take your pleasures as they come.  And keep them close to you.

and if the light just hits it right and if the light just hits it right it scatters and breaks like a prism and all these memories come breaking apart like light comes breaking apart and

This is the color and the shape of the fall.  If you could only uncurl me and unroll me against the sky, what would you see.  My skin is flecked with dots as if the architect himself had taken a tassled brush and flicked it against me, once, gently, far enough away so that they dispersed in a spray, a blossom, and became these funny little moles, these things, these tiny.little.things upon me which you could draw constellations upon.  And yet, I am still just a small thing in the world of little consequence in the celestial eye but of such large consequence to the immediate tangled mass of people we are we are we are

How the chimes of sweet laughter ripple through us all and at the same time how the shrieks and cries of people halfway across the world, fighting for something bigger than them and smaller than everything, this unravels us in a different way, the threads that make us and bind us and.and.and you have moles and you know sweet laughter and you eat and you laugh and you cry and why are you punctured on the sidewalk, leaking all those years in so few seconds this can’t be happening.

Neda, awake!  Neda!  Hold fucking tight!

You and I, we traipse across that evening sky, like that patient etherised upon the table when someone — I can’t quite see who, is pulling the fabric taut, stretching it to tearing point and the fabric, it is people and they have the same flecked dots and did you not know that somehow

we are still

interconnected

Hold fucking tight, Neda.  We’re coming.

This is the color and the shape of the fall.  This is the color and the shape of the fall.  This is the color and the shape of the fall.

And this is where we’re supposed to wake up.  But we don’t.

I am listening to the pulse of the world we know right now.

It seems that there’s a lot of people I know who feel trapped, for various reasons.  Don’t let that feeling consume you.  Keep your eyes peeled and your heart nimble and even if gravity pulls on you: Just hang on for dear life.

This includes you.

Everything is everything, Hallelujah, Amen.

Sorry I haven’t been writing much lately.  I feel like I have to keep apologizing for this.  I used to go from daily scraps of words here and there, and now to intermittent ones.  My mind is everywhere all the time now — between atoms and further out than you can imagine, past places I’ve been and things I’ve seen and every God-awful last detail just pops out at me in full color.  Everything’s well, but it’s really difficult for me to draw a bead on anything.  It’s almost as if my heart was made of a million glass beads, and someone took a hammer and knocked it into a thousand million different pieces, and each piece resides in a different corner of the universe now.

Can you help me gather them up?  Let’s take a net and drag it across the sky and if you find pieces of me, return them, so they can come together again.  Perhaps in a different form.  Swifter, stronger, lighter.

Yesterday was my father’s birthday so I went home to celebrate.  My mother went all out and cooked us a huge dinner, with filet mignon, which she cooked very well on our grill, along with the sweetest corn I think I’ve ever eaten, asparagus, baked potatoes, and lobster tail.  She somehow managed to burn the living shit out of the lobster tails, so the house smelled like burnt shellfish, but they ended up tasting all right, if not a little bitter.  There was even a tiny cake from the store which was quite delicious.

My parents were in a jovial mood and everybody was happy.  Sister’s over in Indiana, working, and Sweetpea sent her regards to the family, because she was working too.  Dinner was good.  After we ate, I gave my father his present — my sister got him Tom Jones tickets (I know, I know).  I brought my father a simple GPS for the car, and when we went out to the car all together to test it, he showed me something very strange.  There was a dead fish, a bluegill, sitting next to the driveway.  There was a second bluegill further down the driveway.  It had been run over by the car and was a mashed up fillet of fish and bones and guts.

The thing is — we don’t live right near any bodies of water that contain fish.

There aren’t any creeks or rivers nearby, and Lake Michigan is a mile away, if not more.  From what my parents described, they came home in a torrential downpour the night before.  My father saw the fish in the driveway, stopped the car in the middle of the road, and ran into the driveway to see if his eyes were betraying him.  My mother told me that she saw them moving, their mouths opening and shutting.  They were, most definitely, alive.

You should have seen my father retelling the tale.  He was entirely convinced that the fish had fallen from heaven.  He’s got a spark in his eye, the troublemaker kind, and he never stops believing in the impossible.  I love it.

Before I left to go home, both of my parents asked me to research on the internet to see if there were any other stories of fish falling from the sky.  Later, when I described the story to Sweetpea, she suggested that a backlog of water flowing through the sewers caused the fish to come up through an open grate, somehow ending up in our driveway.  I tend to believe that she’s correct.  Except that the road our house is on does not have a typical curb and sewer — the road is slightly elevated, and from what I recall, the nearest drainage ditch is pretty far away.

I like my father’s explanation a lot better.

[My coworker suggests that a bird or two had been carrying the poor fish and may have dropped them on the way to its destination.

But two?

A gift from God.  One that got run over by my father's SUV.]

I had an insanely intense dream last night, one that had a plot of sorts, playing out like an awful trainwreck.  Usually my dreams are not cohesive, messes of people and things I know, kind of like an odd blend of false and real.

I was staring out the window of an office in what appeared to be London, and squinting my eyes out on the dark street below I saw the green numbers “666″ written faintly upon the building across the street, in giant characters.  This did not bother me, as I do not believe in such things as the devil.  But then I started noticing that people on the street were acting erratically.  There were screams and sudden crowds as violence began to break out.  I made my way through the street, untouched by the spurts of violence.  Following me were similar people, trying to make heads or tails of the odd behavior we were seeing in every other person but ourselves.  My feet were bare and walking through the street was difficult, especially with people trying to hurt each other while wearing nightmarish masks.

We found our way together into a run-down apartment where a man proclaiming himself to be a professor handed us devices that were meant to ward off the infected people.  He trained us and showed us how to use them — we were to encircle the infected with our bodies, wielding the devices, which would then somehow neutralize them.  It would kill them.

I did not wish to do this.

Someone lent me a pair of shoes which kept falling off, as they were barely big enough for me to wear, my toes curled up at the ends.  And we made our way back through the streets, armed to the teeth, through dark alleyways, to the origin of the madness so that we could quell the flow of chaos running through the city.  We finally stopped in a nondescript street, at a bar, oddly enough, that was the source of all the trouble.

The name?

The Virus Bar.

We stepped inside, my stomach churning uneasily.  There was no way for me to know what sort of demonry lay inside.  And that’s when I woke up to a sense of relief.

No matter what happens today, it’ll be better than what was about to happen to me in sleep.

I’ve been on a Lottery kick recently and I wonder why I’ve been so fascinated with the entire thing.  I’ve decided that it’s not the actual prospect of winning the money itself (I only say this because the likelihood might as well be zero), but it’s more about the hope and the wanting I have every time I check to see if any numbers match.  I will spend anywhere from $2-$5 per pop and I daydream of what I might do with such a sum of money.  Sometimes I think I would just live out my days modestly, not working, but writing and cooking small things and sometimes travelling.

Or another scenario: Continue working and simply enjoy some of life’s finer things from time to time, but not often at all.  Maybe a nice dinner here or there, or a flight somewhere, First-Class (I’ve never been First-Class for anything!).  I’ve noticed that people are the same almost everywhere I’ve been, so it’s no longer the human landscape I’m searching for, but the variants and the places and that feeling of being completely untethered that I seem to love so much.  Of course, some of the money would go to my loved ones, like my parents and my sister, and I’d hope that then, my parents would stop nagging me about the decisions I make, the Sweetpea I love, or the career path I’m currently on.

But you and I both know that will never change.  My parents will always want me to have a different job.  If they could, they’d pick who I would love.  They’d make me have children right away, and live in a suburb nearby, driving a reliable Japanese car, growing old while never appearing miserable.  They come from a different world and do not seem to see how quickly the earth is shifting beneath our feet right.  The life they want is somehow the life I don’t want but at the same time, I still want them to be happy for where I am at every single moment.  They are always concerned about my plan for the future.

Is it wrong to feel happy?  Sometimes I feel guilty for feeling that way.  I am so happy for such small things.  There isn’t time to worry.  I’m afraid most of you don’t see things that way.

Sometimes when I’m looking at all the numbers I think that some of them look much better than the others, but even then, there’s no reason for it.  I just like the way certain combinations look, and I feel like they look better together than other combinations.  When I see winning numbers, they always seem dissonant to me and I never imagine myself picking the right ones.  So I let the computer pick for me, giving me a random set.

I know that I may never win, but that’s ok.  That’s not what this is about anyway.  You knew that.

Never stop dreaming.

[I've seen someone in my statistics coming to visit my site from New York City on a regular basis now.  I'm just curious as to who you are.  If you're willing to let me know, just leave me a comment.  I won't publish it if you do not want me to.  If you'd rather remain anonymous, that's ok too.  But sometimes I feel like I'm writing into the abyss, where these words will fall apart and never make a dent on anything.

So just know I see you, and I'd like to say hello.

That's all.]

I am back from Ireland, having arrived in Chicago last night.  I took the day off to recover, as the jet lag is fairly bad and I always need that extra day to recover before heading back to work.  Sweetpea and I had a fantastic time.  For her first time out of the country, I’m hoping she enjoyed it.  I have a good feeling that she did.  Truth be told, we could have gone anywhere in the world and we would have just been happy to have each other.  She makes me happy.  That is such a terrific and magnificent thing.

I was thinking, as the plane descended into Midway’s airport, how much the trees look like broccoli and how some neighborhoods have a ridiculous amount of above-ground pools, like perfect round sapphires, and I felt as if the heaviest things in the world could not move me.  When you are that high up in the heavens riding a sky chariot, you think that life is strange and marvelous and wonderful all at the same time, even if life is not easy, and that’s when things just sort of peel away.

I think that we on earth spend far too much time thinking about ourselves when we should really be thinking more about each other.

I’ve missed you all very much.

[Movin' on from yesterday
Let it pass you by
But the tree knows everything
Movin' on from yesterday
Gonna let you go and pass you by
But the tree knows everything
Knows everything]

Come Sunday, we’ll be off the the Emerald Isle.  Sweetpea is so excited; she wanted to leave, oh, say, a week ago.

My life is leaking at the borders and everything I know is blending together.

For years now, people have been telling me to grow up.

But the one thing they don’t tell you is that as you grow older, everyone around you grows more childish, more stubborn, more inflexible, more demanding — if that’s what growing up is about, my love, then I don’t want a single piece of it.  How can you grow up to enjoy the world when you refuse the richness of life as it is brought to your lips, because it is not exactly to your liking?

Growing older is not about growing bitter.  It is about growing better.  Being able to see a good thing when it comes along.  And being able to grab that thing and hold it close, and if need be, letting it go when the time is right.

Remember that and you will have the key to simple happinesses.

Boomerangs have always fascinated me, ever since I was a little boy.  It amazed me that you could hurl this object with all your might, only to have it come back to you.  I had one that I enjoyed throwing when I was young, until my father snapped it in half as punishment.  I bet I deserved it too.

Anyway, I was just thinking about lots of things yesterday.  It seems like a lot of people I know are not feeling so good lately, perhaps about their lives, or jobs, or anything, really, and when I see people feeling that way, I think of the bigger picture.  I step up and out and look back at everything.

At one point, according to the evidence we have, all matter was confined into one tiny mega-dense little thing.  And it exploded.  Time passed, matter and gravity and light swirled together.  Galaxies formed, full of stars and energy and gas.  Somewhere along the line we happened to come about too.  And that initial explosion, the energy from it is still expanding the spaces between us, and outward, even at this very second — into who knows what, out there, at the boundaries of everything we know.  Everything is continuously spreading apart, according to the red shift we see in light from those other supermassive bodies.

Now gravity, you see, is a pretty amazing force.  It is what binds us all together.  At some point, the expansion from the initial explosion has to stop.  That will not happen for many billions of years.  But when it does, gravity will likely take over, and all those celestial bodies that pushed so far out will come right back in, just like that boomerang.  They don’t know this for sure, but it’s been speculated that we will eventually all be smushed back together into that super tiny little point of all existing mass and energy once again.  I like to think that you and I were not only once part of each other; we were each other.

Who’s to say the big bang hasn’t happened before, over and over again?  Are we variants, or are we repeated in exactly the same way?

When I think that life is getting hard or I miss my friends who are permanently gone in some fashion or other, I think sometimes maybe when the boomerang comes back that those things won’t matter anyhow.  So it is a good idea to let go of all those hard bitter things we carry and just enjoy sunlight and good (or bad) coffee, books, stuffed animals, food, hugs, whiskey, and laughter.

You know.  The little things.

The ones that we’re always complaining about that we’re missing.  Which makes no sense because they are all right in front of you anyway.

You’ll notice I’ve become quite quiet lately, because there just hasn’t been much to say.  You might think it’s because I have become busy with Sweetpea or that summer is practically here or that –

It doesn’t matter.

People, regardless of how busy we’ve become, or how important we thought we’d be someday, or this and that and this.and.that, you’re all missing the goddamn point.

Perhaps you didn’t get it in the first place.  Tomorrow is not a promise.

Those spaces between us?

We put them there in the first place.  We will be the only ones to close those gaps.  It does not work if both of us do not reach across the divide.