30 october

At various points in my life, I have been the kind of person that strangers on the street will stop and tell to smile. “It can’t be that bad, let’s have a smile!” or “Such a pretty face, but so much prettier with a smile”, and so on. Is this a kind of person? I never really thought to wonder until I wrote that sentence. I guess I just assumed so, or hoped so. Otherwise, it’s just sort of sad.

When you consider all of the people in the world smiling, you wonder what they’re thinking about. How many of those smiles are purely selfish, how many are generously humanitarian, how many are…

Tiring of this fiction/nonfiction/contradiction/philosophiction, I turn away from sentences structured by form, by norms, warming to the feeling of reeling in lines with fish at the end, pretending to pull them close, but the program is catch and release! The rainbow beasts fleece the clouds, allowed to swim once more toward unremembered shores, hurrying through destinations and beyond maps, collapsing distances and resistances. These are the swimmers, the winners of races and the triumphs of action. Watching, we close our eyes and surprise our minds, we raise the blind and reach the deaf, the treble clef and other infinitely beautiful devices, catching mice in their uncertainty and turning back to the fields to do battle with plows and weather and hired hands. We are the warriors against expectation and we are the doers without, even as we seek. We are the wonderers and the wanders, we are tired and we wonder why we speak in the first person plural even as we are only one. We gain strength from our language even as we dissect it with impunity, with specificity and dreams of sense-making to come.