so, so and so close

I just finished a mix of songs I am giving to Melissa. This is the second mix I have made for her since she left for treatment. The first I called "now" because I made it as off-the-cuff as one can. This one is called "immediacy" because that is the only thing I have craved while she is away. I just want the satisfaction of being near her. I just want to feel close.

I was listening to the cd and I think I made it too somber. I was trying to compile songs that make me feel close to those I am listening with. Perhaps I feel closest when I relate with people's troubles and frustrations. Or when they relate to mine. Melissa and I are going to feel inscrutably indivisible when we are near one another then.

everybody, get outside

It never fails that having my friends from Cincinnati visit for even a short evening engenders all manner of grave nostalgia. Nostalgia can be quite destructive if even for the most brief moment it is fully indulged. Because it is a faux joy. A memory of joy. It isn't present and it isn't lasting. It is pleasant but it can certainly, at best, distract and at worst obliterate the fullness of living that is attained when attention is paid to the present and the hope of the future.

All this calls to mind the first time I saw the movie "The Wrong Guys" starring Louie Anderson and Richard Lewis. Several years ago I walked in on my mom watching it some Sunday afternoon on one of the local stations. She usually watched the worst of movies on any given Sunday afternoon. The beginning credits had just begun and there was a voice over by Louie Anderson. I recognized his nasal passage of a voice from my religious watching of "Life with Louie," Anderson's Saturday morning cartoon that lasted eleven episodes in the mid-nineties. As I watched the movie the camera eventually zeroed in on a very nostalgic and also very unhappy Louie Anderson sitting on the front porch of what turned out to be his mother's house looking at old pictures of his boy scouts troop. I asked my mother what this movie was about.

"It is about what happens to people when they don't know how to just let go."

That is mostly correct. Louis's character gets so nostalgic that he gets his old troop buddies back together for a camping trip to the mountain they couldn't "conquer" as young scouts. They run across an escaped conflict and the initial plot gradually disappears but it is an amusing movie nonetheless. Something about my mother's cynacism tainted the way I watched the entire movie. In every scene I looked for traces of regret, self-loathing, and slovenly - all the things I associated with poorly lived lives. And these guys were miserable.

"People shouldn't live in the past" my mom said. It certainly is alienating to live in the very self-obsessed fantasy of your precieved "good times," the halcyon days of yore. Thank God it is a mighty pleasurable thing to reminiesce for most of us but that grace has not reminded me of how grand life truly is as much as it has caused discontent and selfish restlessness.

If I am unsatisfied may it be for future ends not tied as opposed to what has be sealed for years and cannot be exhumed.

Mmm, memory - "she's a crazy animal when she screams"

I never thought

I just emailed A.J. Jacobs. I must be insane.

dance and dance

Melissa had a group therapy session today where the participants were asked to choose someone they would like to dance with living or dead. Her mind was compelled to dwell on me and she began crying fiercely and had to leave the room.

I miss my incomparably beautiful, sensitive, glorious partner.

She is so full of emotion and love and passion that the mere thought of dancing with her clumsy husband sends her into fits. What new mystery is this? I don't understand but I guarantee you I share the sentiment in that I cannot contain the verve that violently gushes whenever I consider for the slightest moment the unfathomable impact her love has had on me.

Thank God for your existence, Melissa. Thank the living God for your livingness. You have so much of it. I have never been so inspired by a single person.

It's always sunny in Omaha...

except when it is cloudy, of course. But as I was walking towards downtown I once again realized how truly dwarfish our "skyscrapers" are. We have two buildings that jut slightly over the heads of the "lesser" buildings and structures but I honestly find it hard to be terribly impressed by them. One First National Center stands a whopping 634' and the Woodmen Tower, made moderately famous to those unfamiliar with large insurance companies by director and local hero Alexander Payne's movie About Schmidt, is a hardly notable 478'. As I passed them today I didn't have to crane my neck or strain my eyes to see their top floors. I thought about how I would feel perhaps a larger helping of local pride if there were immense monuments declaring something to be proud of.

Although this derth of height helps keep a definite humble air about town, even with the fact of being eighth in the country in both per-capita billionaires and fortune 500 companies, it also helps the sunshine reach the wide city streets and numerous neighborhood parks. So when the sun shines it pours all over every cove and alley in Omaha. So in retrospect I am quite shamed by my lack of attention to things that actually matter in making a city truly great. Tall buildings are probably more of a hinderance to helpful pride and happiness as they separate rather than bring community. Even these relatively short buildings distracted me from noticing elements far more lovely than any edifice could afford.

where in the blue, where it's new

I read a book this week in the shortest amount of time I have ever read a book. Two days. It probably took about 7-8 hours altogether. I do not read so very fast and this was a very short book. To the tune of only 129 pages with each individual page only amounting to about 3" x 5.5" and the margins were also quite substantial. So I am not sure how much pleasure I can take in this feat. But that is okay because the content of the book was quite humbling. It was C.S. Lewis' fantasy about the inhabitants of Heaven and Hell called The Great Divorce. It was a truly remarkable read and without a doubt has deeply affected my view of the two places.

It kept bringing to mind this collaborative song by The Chemical Brothers and The Flaming Lips called "the golden path." It is about this guy who is in a sort of dream where he is confronted by "demonic forces" while navigating "a supposed golden path" to "silver mountains" in the distance. There is a part of the song when he decides to stand up to the "specter" who is tormenting him with questions about how he might have come to die and what to do now. He cries out to God - "Help me, Lord. I've found myself in some kind of hell." But then he feels foolish because he "doesn't believe in a Heaven and Hell, world in opposites, kind of reality." But he trudges on toward these mountains where he hears singing (Wayne Coyne to be precise): "Please forgive me, I never meant to hurt you."

And this is very akin to the journey many of the characters in the The Great Divorce found themselves on. The only difference is that the song's poor soul is all alone save a few ghoulish roadblocks. In the book a host of glorified spirits descend from the mountain in order to discuss with the inhabitants of Hell the obvious benefits to living encapsulated by love and joy for all eternity as opposed to, well, anything else.

the good times are killing me

When I was much younger and had only been writing poetry for a couple of years I wrote this poem called "listen." I entered it in a contest in ninth grade to get put in this collection called The Ohio Anthology of Youth Poets. It was chosen to be among hundreds of other dilettantes in the publication. One of the last lines in my poem, a line at which I know cringe miserably, has taken on actual meaning to me. I can't help but believe I originally wrote it for the immature and yet common writerly notion that it sounded very much like something I would read in what was my understanding of "poem."

If these are the best days of our lives,
I want to be listening
to the songs of yesterday.

(the line breaks are what I think they might have been. I don't actually remember)

Even though this is terribly cliched and seems to me like a reinterpretation of something I misheard when eavesdropping on my grandpa and father discussing my dad's childhood and old phonographs it actually popped into my head while listening to the Modest Mouse song "The good times are killing me" and the sentiment seemed to be the same. If this is as good as it gets and I am miserable (which I am not currently miserable, I am actually extremely content and jovial) then I don't want to detach from "the bad times." They musn't have been that bad after all. Perspective is becoming more and more obviously crucial to me. And I am becoming that true perspective can only come from truth. From honesty. Especially honesty with ourselves. Honesty that even a grand, spectacular day doesn't have to the end all and be all. We can hope for better days. And we can be honest with ourselves that the dark days had glimmers of some kind of heavenly light within them. Maybe a song.