Journal : OpenRoadWorks

The funk that grabs me now is the same funk that grabbed me last year at this same time in January. It seems that the year-end holidays for me are a time of romances unrealized that wander in my head, brought to teasing reality at the year's start, and then put away by circumstances undecipherable. I am left standing still as the world circles, human traffic moving about me with its purpose and certain urgency. Frozen, I feel like a man in the scene of a freeze-frame movie that sees the speed of his environment rushing in a blur about him as he smiles contently at the result. My smile is wan and light, reflective and bemused at the fates that tussle with me in cruel joke. Music plays in the background. At this moment, it is tripped-out EBTG; earlier it was Elliott Smith (a troublesome story in itself, his disputed knifing suicide last November a reminder that the delicate melancholy of his songs was heartfelt and hardly manufactured). Music fits the mood; I see myself as t...

Sitting in my room, music filters the sound of raindrops that pitter on the wooden deck outside my window. In the distance, I hear the horn of the ships that traverse the bay; every so often, the oncoming bells of the cable car mark the turn of the hill from Columbus up Mason Street. I am reflective because I am thinking about a girl, someone who I like and who likes me. Still, little is meant to be, distance and circumstance conspiring to leave me empty but for a moment's reflection on the possibilities of our connection. Alas, the chance is remote - we live in different cities on different coasts. We are barreling down different paths in slightly different ways - and yet we are stongly and vaguely similar. This leaves me confused slightly, a state of inexplicable lack of explanation. I should know better anyway - these things never quite make sense. Still, the rain falls.

Some days, there is not much to say. The day has been filled or planned, and nothing is left to consider except the act of living. There is the moment, and it passes into the next moment, and so on. Through this procession, life passes, and so do the days. Perhaps, though, there is room to consider the activities of others, those with whom we have not talked in some of those days, those with whom we have not visited in more of those days. They have lives that pass equally and discard moments as surely as us. I want to call them, visit them again, so many of them, just to say hello and find out what they are doing. The act of living that consumes me deserves their thoughts, too.