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| march 2006 |
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| Gratitude | 12:02am wednesday, 29th march |
For the most part, we none of us are thankful that we do not wake up to utter horror, every day — me included. Though in my case, I suppose I should be. Right during the time of my great epiphany, I remember that the parents were making me get up early every day and attend daily morning mass, at 6:30. Which was not the bad part. Right after that, when my parents left me alone in the house, I would sit on the front steps and smoke a cigarette — and the angels would have at me. Mostly Archangel Micha-el, but there were occasionally others, or Jesus Himself would let me have it; all in cartoon form, and I admit it is a sad excuse for horror, but how I dreaded the mornings, back then. It would be so early, and I would be half asleep, all the way through mass, and I would hardly think of what was going to happen, but there was always some unnamed thing that was inevitable in its coming, then, and there was nothing at all I could do about it.
But time forgets things like that: even as I write about it, just now, I do not think on gratitude that I do not awake dreading the dawn. These things we take for granted. As I put it somewhere, we are not thankful simply because we have had the protection of Heaven from the first. It takes a certain discernment, in fact, to tell us how God lets the sun shine on both the wicked and the just — why would it be otherwise? But I write this here, for perhaps some of us understand better than most what it is like not to take such things for granted. Just like my mornings assailed by angels, many of you must have had circumstances where Heaven’s protection failed. And I suppose it would be easy to be bitter that we have had it as rough as we did. But in my idea of us, I have it that we had enough in us that we were driven down so low that to get back to sea level, we have had to rise above many things. How strange that they will never know of what stuff they are truly made of. Not like that.
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| Night Falls 7 | 5:14am saturday, 25th march |
Night falls, the quiet is too quiet, and I want to scream — but I will do nothing.
Night falls, and I wonder where all the birds have gone, and what they dream of when they sleep.
Night falls, but the fire in me does nothing to light the way, merely drives me incessantly on.
Night falls, and I am comforted by the darkness — the immovable object surrounding it all.
Night falls, none to imagine that they know why things happen, though often a pretense is made.
Night falls, and I climb inside myself, to see if there are any controls I have missed.
Night falls, surely a sign that every day tells that there will be an end — but by fire, or ice, or old age?
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| Ghosts | 1:21am tuesday, 21st march |
Occasionally, they’re still there: out of the corner of my eye, something rushing past, and when I look, nothing: ghosts: or the mark on the wall that always seems to be a mosquito just landed there. Little distractions in my thought, when certain types of lyrics appear in the song on the radio, always about me being damned, or being saved — all eternity summed up in a few notes. Dreams I usually don’t remember, nowadays, not like when the madness was going full tilt, but there was one recently I recall. It was an old one, that I am back in school (college), and I forgot something in a class; usually, it has been that I have forgotten to go to a class for the first half of a semester, but this time, only that I had forgotten one assignment, and that even if I fail this one class, with my grades from the semester before, I will still graduate. And there is the feeling that I have, that I have crossed some threshold, that I got a passing grade somewhere in a great big test called life. Yes, it’s only a D, nothing to be proud about — or is it?
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| Surprise | 1:55am friday, 17th march |
The girl with the stars in her eyes looked at me in surprise,
as if there were something there, inside me, that I had never seen,
and she turned me around, to take on the world, just as I was.
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| Going | 12:40am monday, 13th march |
Things have been going extraordinarily well. I don’t know if you remember from a while back, that I was learning Ruby and Scheme, but I stopped researching those two languages, and I have been learning Lisp instead. If any of you ever have the desire to learn a computer language, Lisp is the one to learn; as one esteemed hacker put it, it will make you a better programmer to know it, even if you never use it. Simply put, it is the most powerful (programming) language in existence — and you might note that no one ever says that about any other language. So, I have been reading a lot of stuff about everywhere I can, and it’s been quite a trip. This all relates to the research I am doing in artificial intelligence. The goal, at this present time, is to figure out how, given an increase of information in a system, to decrease the complexity within that knowing system. And I have been having a grand time trying to figure out just how this may be done.
I guess the one place where I am not quite as satisfied as I could be is in the finding the mate department. This last weekend, I breathed a sigh of relief, having been a weekend off from having to go on any blind dates. There was one chick last weekend (where I saw two, one on Saturday, one on Sunday, and this has been the normal pattern for me) that wasn’t too bad; and some (most) of these dates, as I have written before, have been absolutely horrible. There has been only one whom I thought the elders really hit it out of the park with, but it turned out her mother didn’t like me, so that fizzled. The chick from last weekend — eh, like I said, not bad. But you know, I’ve always been a romantic, and I want what the movies talk about, even if it really doesn’t happen in real life: magic. Is this too much to ask? Don’t answer that. Because I don’t really care if it is too much to ask. Somewhere she is out there for me, I have this feeling within me that she is. I just have to convince the elders that they should have such patience.
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| Sunshine | 12:44am thursday, 9th march |
Things go too well
for me to wax truly poetic;
who reads the words of the happy poet?
Mostly, people might desire to
smack him across the face
and force him to go on about how depressing
all these things called living imply;
be miserable like the rest of us.
So rare the verse
about the glee of sitting still
and not feeling
as if he need justify his existence;
where is it written
that the meaning of life
is to find happiness? Too obvious.
But I cannot scrape the dregs
of the emotional barrel
every single moment — it is too exhausting
to feel so much all the time.
Let me float, just a few moments,
a non-manic euphoria
that comes from having done
a hard day’s worthy work;
that makes you feel like a human being,
when so often you have felt
as if you were a convoluted alien
thrust upon an alien world.
I don’t care if I’ve earned it or not,
because I can argue either way;
no questions, please:
you’re scaring off the sunshine.
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| Flight | 5:14am sunday, 5th march |
I have forgotten that I once wanted to fly, when I thought, what good is a halo, when you could have wings? I guess it is that whole idea of wanting to be “high” — all that the word implies. In my going, I have seemed to come close to having at least some dreams come true; and I shied away, for it was too strange a feeling. It was as if I was not to be grounded anymore, that I would be plucked from the everyday of gravity, and set thrown through the breeze. And my Lord has been patient with me, and I found excuses why it was not to be; it all seemed to work out that I would continue on my journey, for that was what I truly loved. But I suppose there will come a day when I will cross that threshold, and like the fledgling, be dropped from the nest, whether I choose to take wing or merely to fall. It is as the saying goes, I guess: may your wildest dreams come true. That’ll teach you.
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| Little Things | 12:32am wednesday, 1st march |
Little things happen along the way to me. I believe in God because in these things that have happened, it would be irrational not to. For example, my prayers get answered. No, not all of them, but enough of them, and that really makes you think. And then there is the music. God has talked to me in music — not in so many words, out of the thin air, but piggybacking on what is playing; I’ll give you an example of that. In the song “Just the Way You Are,” by Billy Joel, there are the lines, “What will it take till you believe in me / The way that I believe in you,” and it feels inside me that God (or more precisely, Jesus) is the one who is at that moment asking me that exact question. And when this happened to me, I was filled with such hope, such religious joy. This is what it means to be saved: not in some distant dying day, but as one goes through life, that you never ever walk alone, no matter where you are.
Jean-Paul Sartre was the one who said that modern man has a God-shaped hole in his heart. I know for myself that I didn’t do any growing up until that hole was filled by the only thing that can properly do it justice — I was seeking something that I didn’t know what it was, and didn’t know that I was even looking. And when I happened to find it, I realized that it was That finding me, for there is no path from man to God, only the other way around. Now, I for one try not to be annoying to non-believers, and my apologies if you’re offput by this post; but one day you may understand the feeling of faith. And if you don’t right now, I know it is merely because you have not yet been called — I hated this stuff, too, before I was found, who was lost. There is another quote I will end with, and I forget who said it, but it is that faith in Christ does not lead to eternal life — it is eternal life. Heady stuff.
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