Between

Things have been rather quiet around here lately because things have gotten rather hectic in the head. Real life is screaming really loud and it can be difficult to sort through the piercing cries long enough to sit down and ramble out a few words, especially when real life has tasks and chores and concerns and other obstacles with rusty, corroded edges that skin your legs as you meander by.

Someone should really buff down those edges.

Things have been quiet around here lately because things have not been around here lately. These things are namely me. (I suppose I could argue that things haven't been around me lately, but can one be a moving centrifugal unit? Wouldn't that create a world of chaos where all other sentient beings thrown into this plenitude of existence are constantly pushing against each other's opposing space bubbles? I suppose...brings to mind monads...and the world is chaos...but I have managed to digress sans elegance.)

What I mean to say is that I recently spent the week between my last final and the beginning of grad school in the state of Georgia -- and the week escaped me. I couldn't stop it. The damn thing spun too fast. If ever I was centrifugal it was in relation to last week.

There were many happy moments of music, drinking, experiments in child psychology, and an incredible, phenemonal dinner of delirium that won't be soon forgotten.

Then, all of a sudden, I was eating a Jumbo Chicken Burrito, sipping Sangria and saying my goodbyes on 05.05.05.

Yet this time I was ready to go. Not because I don't love my friends. Not because I was anxious to get back. Rather it was because I didn't belong there.

This dawned on me darkly while driving somewhere between the eighth and tenth hour of the return trip. I've been trying to sort it out since -- sketching it out in my little black book in the hopes of turning it into some resplendent piece -- but it has managed to remain somewhat grizzled.

There's probably a reason for that -- and I should just get down what I've gathered so far -- and allow you to make your own inferences into why I might have arrived at this supposition.

There is a town in Georgia that lies on the map approximately halfway to Atlanta from Athens, and, thus, approximately halfway to Athens from Atlanta. That town is called, for some odd reason, Between. It is neither here, nor there. It just is. And perhaps that is where I should go for to do my living.

From what I can recall - the day of my awakening was brilliant. Nearly perfect. Blue skies, sunshine, not too hot, not cold at all. The kind of day that sickens people if they are forced to watch it pass from the interiors of some personal Bastille. A day of romantic romanticizing, jubilant jollies and dreamy daydreams - all of which can be accomplished without the presence of such a day, but prosper in an environment that fosters such fancy.

In plain speak, it was a perfect day for thinking.

As I drove along, crossing into the eighth hour of a planned 11 hour drive, I was getting plenty of thinking done. There were certainly distractions to be had. NPR's Day to Day was flowing from the stereo, other cars were around to be avoided, the Ohio landscape was stretching out to the horizon - but the day was just too bright to be ignored. Too damn cheery. The day was becoming an intrusion. It was the antithesis of my own feelings.

Wrapped in that sunshine, my arms extended onto the steering wheel, my feet pressing and releasing the gas and brake pedals with no real harmony, my body began to disappear - and I began to sink. I sank into myself, I suppose -- and the brightness of the world seemed to pour down into my blackness, two streams spilling into a great vacuous shell. From my vantage point I was able to observe the deluge from its two entry points merge and fall, spilling down from above, the light of the cars and land and sky and world segueing into dissolution. (I wonder now whether this is the same point at which another's intuition and/or empathy begins to fail.) Perhaps the most marvelous part of all was to watch as my own reactions rose into the light, manifesting themselves as something akin to flitting butterflies.

Watching those golden Lepidoptera rise to the mouths of the cave meant that I had become something of a third party to the whole process. It was the first feeling of comfort that I had felt in quite some time. I was alone -- with great distances not only between myself and others, but between myself and my self. There was none of that charge of expectation, that electrical energy that surrounds one when in familiar places. That energy was now a cradling wind of reality that billowed about in the cavernous depths - touching everything without selection.

Perhaps this distinct disconnect, this self-awareness is the aim of meditation. But the immediate difference is that in meditation one is attempting to control thought. Here I was simply observing - almost being struck by thoughts, much like the bugs meeting their timely ends on the grill of my Ford Focus.

And what thoughts come? What surfaces out into the world and eventually overtakes me - from either the week past or from conjectures of what is to come?

There is a recognition that I had lost a lot of what I had taken with me when I first moved. I had forgotten details about certain people - certain mannerisms had managed to recede into what they should be -- nothing worth remembering. Certain frailties in relationships -- or even relationships that had managed to mingle themselves among those ugly little beasties -grudges- had all scattered and run for cover once I had escaped their area of communion. Since my return they had on occasion come out to remind me of their existence -- but upon realizing that they were no longer relevant - simply shrank away in shame. Those are the details I had lost -- and with that realization - a particularly amazing member of the legions of golden lepidotera flitted by with this quote emblazoned upon its wings:

"The devil is in the details."

The quote brought me closer to the surface long enough to hear Ridley Scott on NPR declare that, "Someone once said God is in the details."

There were moments in the week when I was hit with those sudden remembrances of lost details: some which certainly should not have been forgotten - but losing many of them had made life just a bit sweeter. Could it have been selective memory? I can't say. But to be in a situation where they suddenly drift in and distort the picture of reality you are struggling with is disconcerting to say the least.

In the end, standing there at the bottom of that cave as my body drove for Michigan, I came to a realization that seemed rather timely:

I am neither here, nor am I yet there. I am in between. I am constantly between. Upon leaving Atlanta, it was to begin school, and upon beginning school it is to get a job, and constantly there will be something to set at either end -- so that I may remain between. Always between.

So...
That's that. I'm gonna be setting up another blog as a repository concerned with class notes and whatnot -- stuff not likely to be of interest to very many. I'll drop a link along the way once it's done. I can't be sure how much time I'll be spending here...Although I do have a couple humorous moments from the first day of class that would be better suited here. All business there -- all funny funny here.