waiting
“Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
I’m sitting in my college dorm window. It’s an old building, first inhabited in 1913, and there is just room enough to sit on the sill and look out onto the commons. The partial quote from Godot “…birth astride a grave” is hammering away at me because I’m sitting here waiting for something to occur instead of doing anything and I must have student-things that need doing at the very least. But I wait. I look out the window at a lifeless campus. I waste precious time and I worry that my future self might one day condemn me for all this waiting.
That was decades ago. And the memory of this is burnished into my brain as if there’s a sheet of copper in there with an image of me in the window—all pensive like.
I am now that future self and I do condemn young me.
janus
This terror stands at the gate, regretting the past, warning the future. He will not be moved.
I’m on my kayak in the middle of the Caloosahatchee; the fog is so thick my bow fades into grey and I’m unable to see anything beyond the reach of my paddle. This is somewhat precarious but, in the moment, it feels like a cloud is embracing me and I’m comforted. Uncertainty, like freedom, can be terrifying. But it pulls us in, it wants us to use our own minds, it wants us to realize each other’s vulnerability. Uncertainty is a teacher. Vulnerability is a unifier. I think I feel my humanity when I’m lost in the fog.
ghost memories
Memories are sloppy ghosts.
I remember wanting to vacation in Florida when I was a child. I don’t know why. Was it the postcards I’d seen in the antique stores? My parents did take me once, or was it twice, it was never enough, and it wasn’t like the postcards. Those old cards were sad to me. They represented something wished for but never really existed in the first place. “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real… It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real...” ― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
recycled
All the water that ever was is all we’ll ever have. Unless, of course, we get hit by a giant asteroid.
Dinosaurs drank it, Neanderthals pissed it away. Shakespeare had his sips, then Napolean urinated on the battlefield. Mary Shelly took a giant swig, and Elvis peed it down the pot. The water we drink has gone through a lot. In 1897 Richard Emile Resler might have taken a picture of the waters off West Palm and wondered these same thoughts. Water is history.
grains
Fog is quiet and full of potential. Something emerges or it does not. The trick is to listen deeply, to see deeply, beyond what our natural senses tell us. Nearby, an invisible ship sounds its horn long and low. That figure approaching, what does it want?
“Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.” — Endgame by Samuel Beckett.
