And Michael, The Time Is Now.
Or, I Hope It All Works Out Like You Want It To.
So many sad things, that’s just one on a long recent list that loops and elongates in the chest, in the diaphragm, in the alveoli.
—Ada Limón1
Recently, I’ve picked up a tick. While I’m walking, I’ll rotate my key-chain, letting the fobs and keys fall into my hand, before doing it again. It is a somehow comforting motion. Inertia, suspension, collision, all in one semi-fluid movement.
Recently, I’ve been struggling with how things haven’t worked out the way I wanted to…but also how, in a sense, I have to put the work in and figure out, beyond the noise and buzz of living, what I actually want.
Lately, I’ve been bemoaning how the miracle of being is so often subsumed by the chaos of having to exist as a human being in this particular moment. Not that I mind the chaos, or find it exceptional, it is just a lot of work and one does worry about other people. There is so much going on, even more than before, and now, unfortunately, we are now aware of most of it. This isn’t an argument for ignorance, by the way.
The issue is knowing things. Or having to know things, or feeling that things need to be known, but also not wanting to really know them. Our technology has outstripped our capacity to understand its ramifications. I would argue this happened over a hundred years ago and that since the invention of the telephone things have just exponentially snowballed until our conception of reality itself is basically in peril, because our brains still don’t quite get how we can have an image and sound in front of our faces, without it being exactly real. We might know it on a conscious level, but on a basic, biological, neurochemical level, our brains don’t actually get it. Things have moved too quickly and our ability to understand the environment we have created through our excessiveness is receding rapidly into the distance.
We want things to be immediate, and they are, but knowing, knowing seldom is. In moments such as these, I reach back, you can't you can never be sure/ you die without knowing.2
There’s nothing so wrong with reaching back through the archives, all of them, to find things to hang on to in such moments, what else is there to do? Yes, yes, I know. I’m not defending my inaction. It is indefensible. It has been indefensible.