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.

Greeting whatever comes next

The night is begun, with the temperatures already approaching an ungodly low. It is barely 6 p.m.; the sun has only just been pushed past the horizon. And yet it is already below 20. For you metric-practicing readers, that is a stark -6; and for the dubiously-extant scientist who might read this, that is a moderate 267 Kelvin.

I came tonight to tell you of some sudden thought that struck me, a thought about the dichotomous natures of human motive. I wish to tell you my thoughts, but as always I don't think it's worth relating. So rather I think I'll keep you up to date, and inform you then of what I think.

A new semester has begun at Boston Campus (I have here linked the school's website, on whose main page you can see me). Mountains of stress accompanied the week, manifest in the multitude of lesson plans and dictating once again to the oft-mutinous kids the importance of their attention.

On top of all this, I have begun to have dreams, of the nocturnal kind, with vague and frequently confusing imagery. Truthfully, sleep has left me, and in its void only a stoniness lays beside me. The solitude of sleep is in its reprieve from the noise I hear daily, that sound I can't escape, like a cryptic conscience with a bullhorn. Deprived of this, I distort strangely.

The only time I ever drink coffee is if I need the caffeine. Yet this week I drank coffee daily.

Such tiredness can make one cranky. I am not given to such outburstings, and instead tend to become even more quiet. As a result, I become more unhappy. This is okay. As must happen, unhappiness leads to reflection, and ultimately, hopefully, to action. I discovered in my time that my thoughts, whose liquidity I have always joyed over, have become illiquid. My mind, my reason, have somehow become solid, and intractable.

If this seems boring, I apologize. But this was fantastic to me, an awakening. I had forgotten myself, in (mis-)adventurous whimsy. Left behind among the rubble and ruin of whatever troubles I concerned myself with understanding, my mind sat undisturbed and vacant. Why? Why did I forget the instrument whose melodies had always sounded so sweet to my ears?

And this brings me to my point of understanding the dichotomy of human motive. I have long seen myself as sincere, as honest. The motive for all human action flows out of two desires: love and pleasure (or to escape their inverses). Whatever may have been my ideas about coming here, and whatever they may still be, I have acted largely on the side of pleasure. I don't mean pleasure in the Biblical sense, which might conjure up images of strange, awkward sin; I am far too simple for such ideas. It has been a period where I have unwittingly attempted to restructure my character. Now I find it is vile.

Except for my sincerity. Here my honesty has been the subject of shock, and even of ridicule. Even as this weird fact frustrates me (I understand the ridicule of ignorance, but ridiculing sincerity is insensible to me), I am thankful for it, for apart from it, I might be left to whatever impulses I could indulge here -- whatever impulses I don't want to follow.

What melody could lead me from my bed?

Once again, and as often, I have retreated fretfully into myself, to adjourn the proceedings of my life, and let all hang open, facing inward, to fall on itself. The past few weeks have found me not unhappy, but introspective, and desirous of a calm, quiet place. Maybe this is who I am, I wonder, that I should pull out from beyond whatever circles include me, forever following what fleshy and flowery things appeal to me.

On Thursday, the teachers, staff, and I all culled together a Thanksgiving, spearheaded by Alana's mom's appearance. She flew from the States to visit Alana, and to spend the holiday with her. What had been planned as a small and light celebration turned into a festival, including the whole cadre of my school's staff. It was an airy night, the conversations floated amicably by in increasing pitch, and I spent the time with a plate in front of me, chowing down the potatoes and turkey (slathered in gravy, of course, like any self-respecting southerner would eat them). It was calm and blissful.

The night ended early for me, unfortunately with an exit immediately preceded by ill-chosen, though not ill-intended, words with Loren, and a questionable comment about the resemblance of leftover turkey to that old image of the famous Zuiyō Maru's decomposing basking shark. This was a moment where I was reminded that one of the downsides of your thoughts being mostly a series of pictures is that you sometimes choose analogies full of unpleasant imagery.

I went shopping afterwards. Friday was the end of my first full semester here, and for all my classes we had finished our textbooks. Interestingly, despite what was meant to be a relaxing day of snacks and games -- as opposed to book-learning -- I was stressed. The reason I had to go shopping so late at night was so I could purchase the snacks for these various classes. If you're wondering, I had to provide for approximately 20 students, so I bought these things: 5 things of drink, a couple dozen cookies, a bag of potato chips, nacho chips and cheese sauce, and a box of truffles for my youngest class.

When I got home from shopping, I went nearly straight to bed and slept soundly through the night, only to be disturbed by my alarm early. The day went as expected, full of stress and vigorous attempts to complete all that was doable under the oppressive thumb of linear time. I managed, for the most part, a success.

And when all was over, I murmured a farewell to the office, and I walked out. I took my time on a soothing walk through the wet cold, with my fingers stuffed in my coat, my music playing in a serenity around my head, and my thoughts in a distant rut, channeled through the familiar cosm of symbols and glorified abstracts. I sat and wrote in my journal, and remained stuck. The rush is over, I thought; life, new, is familiar again. The sounds climbed into an awkward, bombastic frenzy: horns in my head; and some silver saxophone in an atonal roar. I walked home, and registered myself once more as an individual in this world. And then I was content.