everything has a name

I love living in other people's homes and understanding this has suspiciously led me to want to own my own house more than ever.

Waking up in a bed, bedroom and house that does not belong to me is exhilarating. I remember having this feeling nearly daily when I was in high school living at my parents' house. I was still surrounded by my accumulations and trinkets but somehow I always felt as though I was not "home." My family was there, a great deal of my memories sprung from there, and it always felt secure and welcoming. But I felt like a constant boarder. And, to be clear, this was a very good sensation. It was undeniably inspiring as far as gathering my courage to leave and not be anchored too solidly by the weight of roots.

Being a guest also has with it a certain expectation of courtesy. You may come and go as you please but make your bed and keep the rock music to a reasonable level when others are in the house. I have never owned my own house but for some reason I see it looking like this. Hearing a housekeeper of sorts beckoning me to straighten up the office desk, help clear the table and put the toilet seat down. I don't think I will hear this voice as an overbearing feminine presence as in a tasking mother or overbearing spouse. But merely a genderless, formless nudging towards understanding of everything I think I have may not in fact be "mine."

Everything changes hands. Either to another actually hand or the soil-y grip of Earth. I just think the idea of owning a house that was purchased with money my wife and I have earned is far too overwhelming and the reminder of it would only cause me to consider the fading away of all things.

brandonpiercegeary

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"