Roses and beams and candy-appled everythings

Tonight is December 20th. It was a brisk Saturday, which I predictably spent indoors, cleaning the walls and floors, decidedly unsocial. The time has passed slowly. But I'm not complaining, for Christmas approaches again, bringing its cheer once again to all of us. The roses now exist only in greenhouses, supported by the sunbeams that morph inward to the flowers' light-hungry cell structures. I find this way of the world's workings a great and wonderful thing.

I am listening at the moment to a song called "Prove It," by a band called Television. The song is more than just a bit dadaist, but the chorus has this tidbit worth the quotation:

"Prove it, just the facts
The confidential
This case, this case, this case
That I've been workin' on so long"

The song is about chasing some thought so far that you get lost along the path it leads you.

I haven't much to tell, but I feel like I have a lot to say, to the point of deluge. I have spent much time lately wondering why this is, but I don't think I have come to any worthy answers. I hope this trait is atavistic, and that I will pick up my pen soon and never put it down again.

The truth is I do not tell much of anything. I fancy myself some great enigma, and perhaps I am. I have always been honest, true, but I have become uncomfortable with the facts. It's not their reality that I distrust; it is their barrenness, their lack of contextual and relative grip. I turn instead to emotional honesty, and thus circumvent both truth and falsehood on a path that was built for the candy-apple-colored marching bands as well as the dark, chambered dread of a glucose-draining gothic sensibility. I communicate in images, and teeter that walk of insane hyper-surfeit cumbrance. Even now I am doing it!

When I was young, I was a talker. In fact, my youth was one of surprising garrulity: Words flew out of my mouth like atoms through a particle accelerator. My parents must've thought me an outlier in any statistical measure of speech patterns.

One day, when I was 7, standing in the half-kitchen of my home in Orlando, something happened which I think changed that, however slowly. (Okay, the specious quality of this self-analysis is certain; perhaps I am projecting in imagining the significance of this moment.) Dressed in a red sweatshirt, which my mom had made, I was looking out the window into the refractive embrace of the late afternoon. The sun outside had never been brighter, and at that very moment, it was sinking through the net of the basketball hoop outside on our patio. I was speaking with all the usual rapidity, about something or other, oblivious to the annoyed exasperation around me.

Finally, gently, my mom said to me, "Joel, you're talking too much." The command implicit in this was met with enthuastic relief by my sister. I defended myself with some weak argument, contending that I had a lot to say. My mom replied that we all do, but that we don't always need to say it out loud. With blankness etched on my face, I asked what that meant. I was politely informed that it meant to confine my words to my brain, and let them tumble in there like the clothes in the dryer.

With a look of eureka on my face, I comprehended her, and them, all of my family. And nothing's been the same since then, or ever.