It’s only nine. I’m right out of wakey.
I went to the pharmacy. Blew sixty bucks on stuff like vitamin pills and carmex. Aircon dries the air, and so does below freezing. All the moisture freezes up. We are doing lots of breathing, lots of thinking with words. It can dry you out.
We did All The World’s a Stage today as part of a pass. Honestly the speeches before about time decay and what fools are for – they are much harder. But I know how much weight will be on that one. It’s like To be or not to be, half the audience is gonna be mumbling along with me. It starts in the middle of a verse line, which telegraphs to me that it is coming on the fly. This is Jacques trying to do foolery, but his experience makes him sad so his foolery goes with his proclivities.
I know this foolery all too well, all too deeply, from my work with various strong medicines. This is the foolery that made the universe. Nothing or everything. Everything will go back to nothing. In the beginning was the word. Before the big bang what was there? Entropy? A universal being in nirvana state?
Noise, chaos, curiosity, light… All these agents of life exist despite and because of a defiance of the death state, the nothingness at the edge of vision that sucks and sucks at life. We are making a patch of light, and Jacques in that is the agent of the dark. It cannot all be pretty flowers and prancing sheep or we won’t be able to appreciate things for what stupid beauty they have.
A little red squirrel came and said hello yesterday in the snow and it was a wonderful moment of communion. We look at nature, nature looks at us. We look into the void, the void looks back.
Perhaps we will be pushed back to a less unnatural way of living before long. There are still millions of years before the sun takes us out as a planet. Within that time, if we persist as a species, we would have to become unrecognisable and live in ways we cannot fathom. Maybe there will be oil fields made of us. Who knows what will come but sure, this period we are in where even though we all have the same basic anatomy arbitrary differences are dividing us deeply. Stuff we’ve made up like economic and political differences. Stuff that is irrelevant but extremely charged, like gender and racial differences.
Here in Indiana I’ve seen nothing of the division that seems to be rocking America – social media is a very bad window on anything. It’s like London. London is more chilled now than when I was a student. Hackney used to be dodgy, now it’s just kombucha and sandals. Brixton was angry, now it’s food and cheap tut. Chelsea was posh high society, now it’s Botox and balloon lipped chancers wondering where they all went. The world moves how it moves and trying to frame anywhere as being in one state because it serves your narrative is mere hubris.
Anyway I’m tired.
My experience makes me happy, largely. Being sad is often a choice from privilege. Jacques is choosing to be sad and do nothing because there are other people in the woods with him who kill and cook the deer. He can think of the morality of mortality because someone else is doing the heavy lifting and putting food on his plate.
All of us reading this to a lesser or greater extent have privilege. I think one of the ugliest things is when people take their privileges for granted, treat them as God granted, as their right. There’s a lot of that in the world right now. Nobody is special. Circumstances and work breed opportunity. Some who are all circumstance disparage those who are all work. Some who are all work disparage those who are all circumstance. I’m both. I disparage those from extreme of either who gave created justifications for hating their opposites on the scale.
I’m so tired.
Don’t be dicks, kids.
AlBarclay 