Skip to main content

Lingering

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 that freeze-frame man smiling, fading, then closing my eyes, feelings washing over me. Then, I fall into myself in a rush of sentiment that haunts my place. I am lonely, although these sensations are consuming.
Slowly, I am returning to myself - just like last year. I think that I will be fine, I think that I am ok, I think that I will recover in quick pace and resume the frenetic pace that has claimed me for the past five years. Even still, melancholy, this sallow friend, clutches me and bathes me in creative angst. I hear the words hanging in the room: "Do you like being single, do you want me back, do you want me back?" As much as I want to move on again, I am lingering.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Party Like It's 1999

A coworker sent me a meeting invitation to the end of the world.  Fitting.  I'm not sure if I should accept or not (suppose it depends on your views of the end of the Mayan calendar ), but somehow it reminded me of the Prince song on a related subject . Fitting as well that this coworker was not born when Prince extolled the virtues of partying like it's 1999 (side note: I did party like it's 1999 while studying abroad in Milan at that time, which was a heady experience with the coming of the Euro and all.  How times have changed, how the mighty have fallen...).  Time change, sometimes faster than we think, and our cultural references become dated.  Perhaps just like the Mayan calendar falling out of fashion over the last few centuries, until its end becomes a modern cultural phenomenon - or not, depending on your view of things. In either case, it's worth partying like it's 1999 regardless because hey, it will be Friday when this all goes down, and Fridays
Post a Comment
Read more

In Memory of Rose

Pets have an uncanny ability of ingraining themselves into the fabric of a household, so much so that their disappearance can cause great grief and disorientation to their owners. Such is the case with Rose, who passed from our household on Sunday. An older dog when we took her in to our home last year, Rose was supposedly the runt of her litter, a fact confirmed by her diminutive 5-pound Pomeranian frame - too small for her breed but too big to be classified a "teacup." This suited her just fine, however, as she came to embody a singular personality as a dog among people, often little acknowledging some dogs and appearing frightened by others just as a hesitant human being might act around jumpy canines. Rose embodied all of what defines unconditional love. She was raucous when we would leave the house and even more raucous when we returned, partly due to separation anxiety but mostly due to her sadness and excitement of being around us; she let us know her affection b
3 comments
Read more

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l
2 comments
Read more