The comfort of strangers.

I met a stranger on a train and found myself in the unusual position of narrating my life to this person.

My thoughts, my embarrassments, my little victories and tepid regrets. My life, as I remembered it, my life without corroboration, without affirmation, free from outside embellishment and only as I remembered it. It was my life all the same, and who's to say that the punctures in my memory did not reflect the validity of the actual account? The actual account. It bounced around in the back of my head, dislodging other impertinent thoughts and leaving a vacuum in its wake. It stirred up a couple other dormant recollections, eventually easing itself to the front of my brain. Another manufactured memory, another untraceable account, answering only to its maker, its embellisher, and its embellisher realises that he has already forgotten the lies he told.

All I ever do is think soulful thoughts on long grey trains I thought to myself soulfully as I sat across this stranger on the train. The stranger listened, with what seemed like intent, with what seemed like vague interest in the volubility of my accounts. I've often wondered why I glean so much comfort from strangers and I have come to the conclusion that it must be due to the unreliability of friends. Friends are great of course, some you love more than yourself even, but friends betray impartiality almost all the time. Their eyes turn, their pupils contract and dilate as they chew on every word you feed them, your version becomes their version even before the sentence has left your lips. A statement as bold as this on the nature of friendship is not without repercussions and I already feel the pangs of cowardice stirring inside me. How sad it is to gain comfort from strangers when all you're really running from is the familiarity of friends.

Objective memory. The more I think about it, the more mythologized it seems to be. After all, objective memory stems from objective truth and the more I search for the truth the more I find myself grasping at straws to build straw foundations. Perhaps it is meant to be grasped at and never fully obtained. It sounds a lot like knowledge but with the marked difference that the procurement of memory does not enlighten, in fact it does the opposite, it blankets you in the darkness of your own inadequacy. All I ever do is think backward while I move forward I thought to myself as the train hurtled along an unknown route towards an unimportant destination. It is said that character solidifies between your twenties and your thirties. How ironic then, that as your character solidifies your memories become more and more soluble as you try desperately to anchor them to an ever inflating sense of self.

The train stops and I bid the comfort of this stranger goodbye. Strangers have no baggage, no obligations attached to them, strangers are whom we seek when the company of friends is stifling and the thought of being alone, unbearable. I walk along the pier as concrete floods my brain, seeping through the thoughts and memories which have so burdened me and replacing them with a lobotomised serenity. All I ever do is take soulful walks along the pier I thought to myself soulfully as I walked unhurriedly down the pier.

the greatest thing

My head hurts. Tedium sets in as days dissolve and months drift quite unnoticed. Perhaps the years would care to stay, but they, yes even they abscond, frightened of being found out. We run the risk my sweetheart told me (beside a lake, or a stream, or a mere puddle) of wanting what we don't know. I slip silently into the day, a little rougher around the jaw, a little more jaded in the eye. I revert to faux-contentment, for what I lack in comfort I make up in routine.


Never settle we declared. A promise imbued by youth, encouraged by the single, arrogant notion that it was the world which owed us something and not the other way around. So we skirted on dreams for a little while, making our fair share of mistakes along the way. A life isn't worth living if you don't mess some parts of it up eh? was the adolescent rationale.


And now, now I feel myself growing up - actively, rapidly, scarily. I see you through my eyes and my eyes alone. I wonder about your thoughts, how similar they may be to mine and how long they'll stay that way. I envision your future - your loves, your thoughts, your face - and that alternates from filling me with a resplendent warmth to feeling a little fucking weird.


I dream in vagaries. Perhaps I want only to dream in vagaries.


We exist in the lives of others. And I am certainly not my own. 

Because in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. 

the skip

James Fenton, in the most honest of my opinions, is one of the greatest living poets around. Here he is reading The Skip during a tribute to the late Christopher Hitchens.


 
   


The Skip by James Fenton

I took my life and threw it on the skip,
Reckoning the next-door neighbours wouldn't mind
If my life hitched a lift to the council tip
With their dry rot and rubble. What you find

With skips is - the whole community joins in.
Old mattresses appear, doors kind of drift
Along with all that won't fit in the bin
And what the bin-men can't be fished to shift.

I threw away my life, and there it lay
And grew quite sodden. `What a dreadful shame,'
Clucked some old bag and sucked her teeth: 'The way
The young these days ... no values ... me, I blame...'

But I blamed no one. Quality control
Had loused it up, and that was that.
'Nough said. I couldn't stick at home. I took a stroll
And passed the skip, and left my life for dead.

Without my life, the beer was just as foul,
The landlord still as filthy as his wife,
The chicken in the basket was an owl,
And no one said: `Ee, Jim-lad, whur's thee life?'

Well, I got back that night the worse for wear,
But still just capable of single vision ;
Looked in the skip; my life - it wasn't there!
Some bugger'd nicked it - without my permission.

Okay, so I got angry and began
To shout, and woke the street. Okay. Okay!
And I was sick all down the neighbour's van.
And I disgraced myself on the par-kay.

And then ... you know how if you've had a few
You'll wake at dawn, all healthy, like sea breezes,
Raring to go, and thinking: `Clever you!
You've got away with it.' And then, oh Jesus,

It hits you. Well, that morning, just at six
I woke, got up and looked down at the skip.
There lay my life, still sodden, on the bricks;
There lay my poor old life, arse over tip.

Or was it mine? Still dressed, I went downstairs
And took a long cool look. The truth was dawning.
Someone had just exchanged my life for theirs.
Poor fool, I thought - I should have left a warning.

Some bastard saw my life and thought it nicer
Than what he had. Yet what he'd had seemed fine.
He'd never caught his fingers in the slicer
The way I'd managed in that life of mine.

His life lay glistening in the rain, neglected,
Yet still a decent, an authentic life.
Some people I can think of, I reflected
Would take that thing as soon as you'd say Knife.

It seemed a shame to miss a chance like that.
I brought the life in, dried it by the stove.
It looked so fetching, stretched out on the mat.
I tried it on. It fitted, like a glove.

And now, when some local bat drops off the twig
And new folk take the house, and pull up floors
And knock down walls and hire some kind of big
Container (say, a skip) for their old doors,

I'll watch it like a hawk, and every day
I'll make at least - oh - half a dozen trips.
I've furnished an existence in that way.
You'd not believe the things you find on skips.

the love you love

It has been and always will be to me, the littlest moments. For you spend a great deal of your life in the mundane, the routines, the waking up, sifting through objects, rubbing against people. Characterized by the tedium of being ordinary. Humming about from one day to another, cycling from one event to the next, naturalizing the same thoughts on barely dissimilar days. But it is also perforated by blinding moments of clarity, shifts in perspective that never seem to remain still. I never feel like I can remain still as I grasp at these sudden moments of importance among all that is unimportant. And to recognize what you love and what loves you, would be terribly important.

-

Note: Pizza base has to be made from scratch. Defrosts just don't cut it. No rush, plenty of time to practice after all.  

into dust

Talk is rhythm and your silences are carefully measured, working like punctuation among stream upon stream of words. I have an excellent memory and although it sounds self-gratifying I assure you it is anything but. I remember almost everything worth remembering with the utmost clarity, re-feeling layer by layer until it takes a vivid form. But I wish I didn't. Memory is a creative process and I often wonder if I am truly remembering or if I'm simply creating from a template of stored images. I'd grow really excited and ask: Do you remember when? and then stop because I know you don't. You'd look at me funny, grin a little perhaps and then rub the spaces in between my knuckles.

Do you remember the first time feeling _______? Scary isn't it? Terrifying and exhilarating at the exact same point. It gave me such a rush but I felt like throwing up after. So where did all of that go? Dormancy soon gives way to decay. I would stay up at night wondering how you felt, tracing the watermarks on my ceiling. Hyperventilating in naivety and optimism. I would think until I fell asleep and when I woke up I would think some more.

You were a dream but I couldn't sleep much longer.

Angela! Holds a grudge! Over.... nothing.

The Walkmen are slowly but steadily becoming one of my favorite bands of all time. To commemorate this pleasant little revelation I sifted through their mumbly, sometimes incoherent lyrics to come up with my very own list of favorite Walkmen one liners. Some of them sweet, some of them regretfully bitter, but all of them sharing the commonality of being stark and heartfelt. The process of choosing was basically me listening to a particular line then stopping dead in my tracks(ha) and going Oh Shit I really love this band.


When I used to go out I'd know everyone I saw, now I go out alone if I go out at all. 
- The Rat, Bows+Arrows

It's dark, oh man, driving through central Michigan, listening to the country station and wondering where I stand. 
- The Witch, Heaven

Could she be right when she repeats, I am the lucky one? 
- Juveniles, Lisbon

The music's loud in your room turn it down, there's a neighbor who can't take it anymore.
- New Year's Eve, Bows+Arrows

And I sing myself sick about you. 
- Song for Leigh, Heaven

Throw me a line, the windows are shaking and so are my bones, the world's going round, throw me a rope.
- I Lost You, You&Me

So take my hand, all the players in the band they can always find, always find some number that we know. 
- Canadian Girl, You&Me

There is still sand in my suitcase, there is still salt in my teeth, I kissed her in the window she covered up her face. 
- Donde Esta La Playa, You&Me

You don't love me just the kissing, don't trust the facts trust the fiction. 
- The Love You Love, Heaven

and my personal favorite at this moment,

I was holding on to you for lack of anything to do. 
- Angela Surf City, Lisbon

Mortality

There is an unhealthy preoccupation over what happens to us when we die. What's stranger is that we don't often dwell on the eternity that preceded our existence but instead devote an awful amount of time and thought to where we go after we die. How would you comfort a dying person? is a question I've asked myself over and over. With absolute clarity I should hope. There is some value in false comfort and reassuring the dying that there is some infinite wonder waiting for them. But it is infantile at best, and I find it disheartening that childish assurances are lobbied around the hospital bed without a shred of mediated thought. But the question remains, how would you comfort the mother/sister/brother/friend/father dying right before you? By telling them that the life they lived was enough, that they need not fear the unknowable and that there is nothing more they should feel they need. That a life lived with people that love them honestly and deeply should more than suffice. That I feel, would be an unbeatable comfort. For the ones that love you the most don't reside above you, nor do they shy away when you need them. The ones that love you will be before your very eyes - to touch, to feel, to appreciate one last time. A beauty far greater than anything that can be promised because its tangibility is finally clear.


No such thing as heaven for you then? is another question I ask myself. Far from it. I reject the heaven of fairy tales and logistical inconsistencies, the heaven teased to you by the gullible and easily impressionable, the heaven which demands unconditional love and regulates that through fear. The heaven which I believe in is here on earth, in the people and in the loves I love. That for me, will ever be enough.

-

I am terrified as I write all of this down because it unmistakably signals a staggering loss of faith. Yes, I am afraid and it would be more than easy to fall back on the stories I was told as a child. But I feel that there is so much more to be discovered if I allow myself to be governed by knowledge instead of fear. Perhaps I've lost my "faith", but in its absence I've gained insight.

time's arrow

You see with increasing clarity the life you lived
As you walk backwards step by step
You understand as you grow younger
That change is a symptom of desire.

The wrinkles iron themselves out
And the value in your head seeps back
Into the muscles a pumping vessel
Reinvigorates a youthful flicker.

But time's arrow rewards as it takes
And the insights are struggling embers
Doused by youth and rekindled
Stuttering only with age.

And into love you stride
For what burns bright must be purveyed
And from love you recede
Relieved but at once more afraid.

Ashamed of regret almost
As if regret was against your nature
No point you tell yourself
As you confuse comfort and condolence.

So once more young and once more unafraid
Till time takes a measure of you away.