The persons of people

I've never been good with people. One-on-one, I can get along with just about anyone, make them laugh, pull a good story out of them, even enjoy myself. But add another person, and my balance shakes. The more bodies, the worse I am able to divide my attention. I try to avoid large group situations, I hide, or I stick with one person in the crowd.

At work, though, almost everyone is smart, interesting, and genuinely friendly. It's fantastic, but most of them are also very social and interested in networking, so I often avoid the myriad impromptu and plannef gatherings, which means that my introversion is exposed and I don't spend much time even the people I really like. I care. I would get to know them better. I just can't focus when so many others dilute my small slice of charm.

Now it's too late in so many cases. I just want to send out the sentiment, the knowledge that I care.

The air is thinner at the coast, as I imagine it to be at the top of Mt Everest. Perhaps it's not the altitude but proximity to heaven or the alternate. Earthly vales are stretched. Perhaps it's the beauty, casting fiction over the rest of the senses with its staggering bulk.

I watched the moon rise quickly over the coast range, full and miraculous. A sunrise I can appreciate.

Lately I overhear whispers from the other side, snippets of the goings-on. The streets are wet with rain there, as here. People rush by. Here I sit at my desk for hours, bruised by fluorescent light. There, giant lanterns beckon ponderously in the wind, and I know I will stop for a minute at the temple, searching for a cat to cajole. Red glow from vertical signs and grill smoke from tented alleys along the train station, two ghosts haunt the city together. I know where I am, here. But I want to be there, lost.

I am no transformative flow of river

"Its language is inadequate for the rapid complex syntheses achieved by the minor hemisphere." -- Jerre Levy and R. W. Sperry, 1968

"Our brains are double, each half with its own way of knowing, its own way of perceiving external reality. In a manner of speaking, each of us has two minds..." Betty Edwards, The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, 1999

I am still, an underground lake, but the experience flows through me. Ripples charge the surface til the water absorbs the movement without a trace.

Reading this chapter of The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain explains why I've observed the most beautiful autumn I can remember, but I can't translate any of it into creativity.

For all the hours here that move too slow

A song I love, whose lyrics I would hope to never be true, now rings clearly and insistent as a clock in the market square chiming twelve noon. I'm not sure that I can ever listen to it again.

Moments of Heaven

This has been the most beautiful season I can remember; no other autumn comes close. We had more sun than we've any right to in the month of October, and November is always the month in which to pay. The beauty has rendered me speechless. My brain is too busy trying to fit all that my eyes funnel in, and the visual never even gets translated into words.

Lately I've been mindful of my daily moments of heaven. Usually once a day (more often on weekends) a few things come together and result in a delicious, fleeting bliss. Today's moment of heaven happened as I drove home from work. It was warm out, so I had the car windows down, and as I waited for the highway meter a New Order song began, and as I accelerated with one arm out the window, singing, the rushing air traveled all the way up the sleeve of my trenchcoat. At the first breezy tickle, I knew: windows down, the full fall air, the song, the singing. The elements come together, and recognizing the confluence is the cherry on top.

Inevitably, the parts that make the whole begin to peel away, and the sublime is lost. But having that moment, appreciating it in its presence, and diligently awaiting the next one-- the present is suddenly more in the present, a sensation entirely new to me.

The weight of time

This morning was so many days ago that I can't keep count. I'm aging in syncopated rhythm, the heartbeat of an insomniac racehorse five years past its prime.

Control top

I don't like the attention. I think I know why. I am guarded-- cautious-- and I like to maintain control. That's why I can never let loose at parties, why I'm often the stick-in-the-mud. I'm cautious. I like to be reasonably certain how things will turn out.

Sometimes I hate this about myself, and I rebel. I think that I will let go and have fun. It's not enjoyable though. It never is. It's not me.

I think of it as a familial saddle, with each generation leap-frogging. We look after those before us, we challenge those ahead of us. I will keep my head down and do my job.