Messes

1. Today was a very long day. Up at 6:something with anxiety, rolling on four or five hours of sleep for the foreseeable past, and a week’s worth of snow-slosh to traverse while still breaking in my new (painful) boots – these things make a long day feel longer. I forget about gloves and scarves occasionally, so when I have to hold another heavy bag for a long walk, I’m forced to toggle the hand that holds the bag with the hand that stays in a warm pocket. The trick is to focus on the warm hand rather than the cold one. (I’m too stubborn to acknowledge the life lesson.)

2. The first and last cars of the NJ transit train are “designated quiet cars”. I’m always pleasantly surprised that I’ve accidentally sat down in one of those – you don’t know how much you need silence until you get it. That was the case tonight on the way home. As I sat down, I opened a little bag of kettle chips which was maybe the second thing I ate today, but as I bit the first chip, I remembered they are the loudest thing ever in the history of the planet. I had to either forgo my chips, or gather all my bags and move to another car. I took the third option – annoy everyone and eat the chips. About three chips in, my diet coke spastically jumped out of my hand and poured itself all over my jeans. And coat. And the wall of the train. And the window. And the seat…and the floor. I just wish there had been any apparent reason for it, but I just sat and stared at the mess for a minute before wiping up everything with my coat sleeve.

3. I create a lot of messes.

4. Some nights, the end cap to a long day is a power song on the final walk home. Tonight was a hunched, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, eyes to the ground, slow march – I was aloof, crunching the slick, creme brulee ice layer that covered the snow. I thought of all the messes I’ve made and how I’ll eventually die with probably less than half of them figured out or untangled. There is not always a way to glance up at the ledger and correct an error, sometimes there’s no fixing it. As tears welled up, I thought of an old cartoon where a baby penguin cried ice cubes, which made me think – how cold would it have to be for my tears to freeze immediately. Some things to consider: the starting temperature is right around 98.6, but the amount is so little that the kinetic energy would dissipate quickly. Also, tears have salt and other stuff, so would that require a lower temperature? Probably, since all the shop owners I pass on the way to work throw salt in front of their shops so the snow will melt. Also, if there’s an equal and opposite reaction to my tears freezing, does that mean that I’ve warmed up the atmosphere in some minuscule way? I wasn’t really sad anymore, and my sad sloshing had led me home.

5. “One  dreadful  glance  over  my shoulder I essayed-not long enough to see (or did I see?) the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes. Screaming, I buried my face in the folds of my Teacher’s robe. ‘The morning! The morning!’ I cried, ‘I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.’ But it was too late. The light, like solid blocks, intolerable of edge and weight, came thundering upon my head.” -C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

Stuff.

1. I’m really sad about Paul Walker. What a pleasant guy in a bunch of entertaining movies. He was not my favorite actor by any means, but it seems like he was well loved by people who knew him outside of work.

2. The pastor at the church we’ve been going to is not a creative type. And that’s completely fine with me. He’s a jock, he gets along with jocks, and he makes jokes about art sometimes. I’ve spent too much of my life wishing I was someone like him. Today he made a joke about how he wasn’t going to ask if there were any artists because the non-artists would want to claim that they were artists, and the real artists would get pretentious and say that if they called themselves artists, they wouldn’t be artists anymore. Roarous laughter. This kinda hurt and was also not very funny, but I’ve learned that the bar for what’s funny is lowered significantly at most churches and that most people are not creative types. So they will, by default, relate more to his sentiment than to mine, which is that art tells us in the most direct and relatable way so much about the values and beliefs of every culture, past and present. Belittling what you don’t understand is juvenile and transparent.

3. I might be projecting a little though – someone I admire called me pretentious recently in jest. A few times actually. That also hurt, probably worse. I don’t know how to say it, but there are times you know someone’s not kidding. And he’s an artist. Maybe I am pretentious.

4. I’ve had a personal trainer for about 6 weeks now. I’m understanding now how far away I am from fit. Even 6 weeks in, even on a good day, I’m still just learning the baby steps. You really have to do so much more than you think to get from couch to fit. It does get addicting, though. But don’t expect a geek to chic transformation anytime soon – I don’t think I’ve gotten to the point of noticing really anything yet, except that it’s getting easier, and sometimes I feel better.

5. I wish I was rich and could quit and move back home and have everything exactly how I imagine it would be in my head. Don’t you? But wait, Heather and Norah love it here. And Maryn kind of does in a two almost three year old way. Shit, you mean my decisions are affecting other people?

6. One time when I was 17 or 18, in the middle of a heated argument over the phone with my dad, he asked me if I was gay. I didn’t answer. He told me that we all have bad things about us. I really hate him most days.

7. “Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.” Salinger, Teddy

8. J.D. Salinger created a trust around certain unpublished works so that they would be released over a five year period between 2015 and 2020. The idea was for a posthumous release, and the motive is speculative. He hated how his work became iconic, as if it didn’t all come from his hands, the hands of a man who works and is wrong sometimes. That’s why this is confusing to me – posthumous releases make that situation ten times worse I would think. People will read so much more value into his words knowing how final they are. Some of the works to be released (or maybe just one) will be more information surrounding the Caulfields of Catcher in the Rye, probably his most famous work. I don’t know if that means it’s a sequel or a backstory, or if it’s a long or short story, but I’m very excited. I don’t want this to sound like a negative impression of Salinger releasing new work – I’m tremendously thankful it’s happening.

9. The sun is so far away. And the seasons change, and the days get shorter or longer in a very precise, predictable, cyclical way – a constancy necessary to support life I guess, or we couldn’t live here. The planets in our solar system are spinning around the sun at different but consistent speeds and orbits, kind of like an atom’s electrons around its nucleus which inhabit different orbits at different speeds, but the consistency of how many electrons and the speed and path at which they travel determine what element they represent. And all of these structures that look very similar, even spiral galaxies that look like water draining from the tub, are held together by what’s called the Higgs Field, which theoretically is here to stay. Otherwise everything would disappear like *that* (pretend that I can snap my fingers and that I just did), because it gives matter mass. I guess in that sense, there’s new evidence that there really is a fabric, and we really do exist on it together, a bunch of spinning particles collected together on a spinning planet, revolving around a violent, turbulent sun in a spiral galaxy in an expanding universe through in immovable fabric that creates mass. I guess what I mean is this: I wish the days weren’t so goddamn short in the winter. The shorter days make me feel further away.

10. “Some of them are starting to sink now. In a few minutes, the only place they’ll still be floating will be inside my mind. That’s quite interesting, because if you look at it a certain way, that’s where they started floating in the first place.” -Salinger, Teddy (regarding orange peels dumped into the ocean)