What I am thinking.
what am i thinking?
A good friend of mine got married last weekend, and I was in his wedding. It was an honor to stand next to him and witness such an important moment in his life, but it wasn't easy to get there. Preston's wedding was in Durango, Colorado. I'm in Bellingham, Washington. Flights from my tiny airport to his tiny airport were immensely expensive when I was planning my trip, so I did things the hard way. I planned a 3-day trip where the first day had me driving from Bellingham to Seattle (~2 hours), flying to Denver (~2.5 hours), and driving to Durango (~7.5 hours), then the second day had me at the wedding, and the third day had me taking the same trip in reverse. I was tired almost the whole time, but I noticed some very interesting things along the way.
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I've worked my way out of the poems from the past years that I care to put out here, and have made my way back into the modern day. I wrote this poem last week. I was staring at the microwave as it did its little internal light show, wooing my leftovers with its predictable suave, spinning dance. Spacing out in the general direction of my rapidly heating food, my mind turned to that phrase I've heard so much in my life, "My body is a Temple".
In July of 2021 at some point, I was thinking about Jean-Paul Sartre. As a whole, I don't like his philosophy - much of it because I believe it's incorrect in basis, but some of it because it is circumstantially correct, effectively highlighting an evil component of humanity without showing the real potential for good. In his seminal Being and Nothingness, Sartre addresses the topic of consciousness outside our own, framing relationship with others as a constant conflict of who defines who, eventually glossing over a problematic implicit conclusion before going on to make soon-to-be famous points on freedom and authenticity. That problematic conclusion is that the only solution to the reality of other consciousnesses and their ability to define us, is to define them first.
In June of 2021, Jordan and I were invited to a weekend away at a friend's parents place. It was a generous invitation since when I say "friend", I really mean friendly acquaintance. Many other friendly acquaintances were going too, as were a number of legitimate strangers.
This poem wondered into my head in pieces in the middle of June back in 2019. That's the way it usually is. I'm walking, or I'm looking at my shoes, or I'm standing absentmindedly by the steadily heating toaster, and then a few words come to mind in some alluring way, and I follow them. I find that other words are behind them, or they aren't. Sometimes, it seems that after my little mental exercise of pulling the verbal string of handkerchiefs, I'm left with a poem. Sometimes not.
I wrote this in September of 2018. I remember that I was sitting at a steel picnic table outside my office building on my lunch break. I hadn't written an interesting email in weeks, and was not long before relaying my belief about the ubiquity of the great indoors. It was something along these lines: "An office building could be anywhere in the world, and it wouldn't matter as long as you were inside it. Their basic elements remain the same, even for folks like us at fancy tech companies, and the grandness or mundanity of their external surroundings are nothing. Their architecture is basically the same, inside and out, and they all feel like you're about to sidle up to a computer. If the weather is hot outside, cold outside, actively raining acid... it's all the same in the office, where you can count on a heavily regulated 67 degrees or so. It just barely even matters that we live in this paradise." My colleague was not interested by this groundbreaking truth.
I'd forgotten about this blog. It's been 5 years since I've touched it, it seems. I still write. I still spend much of my time outside. I still research things that pique my interest and dive to an unusual depth with them. Not three weeks ago, I spent about an hour reading about the Chicxulub crater. It was unplanned. It was fascinating.
I have remained the same in a number of ways, but I have changed in others. None of the pictures on this site look like me. My hair is less full. My face no longer bears the residual filling of childhood. I'm not exactly a bald skeleton, but I'm working on it. I've poured into my career in a way that was foreign to me 5 years ago. It's taxing, but it can be beautiful too. I want desperately for it not to define me, so I seek to fill the other aspects of my life to the brim, spending all the time I can on outdoor adventures and striving to be good to others. Neither of those aims is entirely successful. I'll put down a little bit of the poetry that I've written over the past years here some time soon. I suppose it's worth keeping. |
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January 2023
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