LustingforNightmares

tumbleweed
2017-04-10 19:36:47 (UTC)

Leaning


"Miner At The Dial-a-View" by Grandaddy

I found your house and I saw your car
But I've no idea where you are
From the dial-a-view

Tire scraps on the federal roads
Look like crash-landed crows
From the dial-a-view


April 10, 2017 Monday 8:42 PM

There's a small lake by my house. It's man-made, I think. Someone told me that once but I can't remember who. Anyway, it's fed by the creek and then it trickles off into a waterfall, which turns into the Gorge (a place known for 1: swimming and 2: the number of deaths that have resulted from people trying to climb up/down the steep rocky walls). And then the creek continues.

The lake is named after some place in Greece, I think. The same goes for my city. "The ancient city of—oh, wait, no. This one's in New York." I may have mentioned this, but my neighborhood is kinda surrounded by cemeteries. There's two separate cemeteries that a person could reach just by walking a couple blocks in either direction from my house, and then there's another cemetery (much nicer than the other two) way off in the back by the edge of the woods.

The lake is by the cemetery closest to my house, which is also the smallest (and most boring) one. I used to cut through it whenever I walked home from school even though it probably didn't shave much more than a couple minutes off my commute. Gah! I keep going off on tangents. I walked to the lakeside today, which requires taking a path wedged into the side of a sorta steepish dirt hill that drops off from the sidewalk. The lake isn't that pretty. It's gotta bunch of dead, whitish trees sticking straight out of the water and the shores are always covered in soggy dead leaves. But, like. I just enjoy water, especially glassy water, and since the sun was setting everything was very nice and peaceful.

It was pretty warm out today, but with the sun setting everything was cooling down and I stood on the shore watching the sky's reflection in the water, listening to the chatter of the bugs n' birds (mostly geese). The sky was all pretty. It had these big purple clouds and some nice pink ones. At first, I watched the actual sky, but I found the reflection was a lot prettier—more vivid, somehow. I also spent a lot of time watching the reflection of shoreside trees in the water. I liked how the image kept shifting???? It was like a glitch??? In real life???

There was some guy fishing there, which I didn't notice until I heard the sound of splashing water. Way down the shore, he was just standing there on, like, a log or some raised bit of ground sticking out into the water. There was a silver fish thrashing at the end of his line. I looked at his reflection in the water and it confirmed my whole reflections-being-more-vivid thing??? His blue jeans were wayyyy bluer in the water than they were in reality.

I think there are a lot of fish in that lake. They'd brush the surface sometimes and it was always really obvious because suddenly there'd be big round ripples in the regular smooth bits. I also watched some geese fly across the lake surface, really close—I think their wings skimmed the water. I wonder if they enjoy that or something. Why not just fly a little higher? Does it take more energy? Ah, whatever.

God, everything was just so beautiful today. When I climbed back out onto the street, I saw the moon. It was huge!!! Probably because it was near the horizon. It was all yellow and misty like in picture books. I dragged my parents out to look at it with me. We kinda had to stand in the middle of the road to get a good look, though.

Mom was on the phone because she found out her friend died of liver cancer two weeks ago. They hadn't spoken since November. My mom found out some hours earlier when she'd been driving me to a doctors appointment. She started crying at a red light and it was really, really awful. I cried too, but more because I hate it when my momma hurts and I feel so bad that this happened to her and because—death is just weird. It's permanent. Which makes it bizarre, because most things are NOT permanent.

Momma felt so guilty. She kept talking about how she tried to call her friend but she wouldn't pick up. She said, "I should've visited her in the hospital... I was the one who..." She didn't finish the last part, but I think she was going to say she was the one who was supposed to understand. She had cancer, so she knows what it's like.

Mom told me that people called her every day when she was sick.
"I should have called my friend every day."
"I keep living day to day, I need to pay attention to people!"

Listen, I know these sound like plain old words but my mom was crying so hard. Probably harder than I've ever seen. I wished I could take away her guilt and pain and just. Loss is a horrible, horrible thing to feel. It just keeps hurting.

Momma, momma, I love you so much and you are not selfish. You are not selfish. You are not selfish. YOU ARE NOT SELFISH. I want to say that for the rest of my life but I think it'd probably lose meaning if I tried doing that.

BACK TO THE PRESENT:
1) I am listening to Grandaddy and I like them a lot.
2) I have a headache that I think is fading
3) I should work on my scholarship applications.

Oh. One more thing. I had a long talk with Brock today, along with a kid (actually a senior lol) called.... I will call him... Dan. Daniel. But probably Dan because that's easier to write.

I like Dan. Dan sits there and listens. He smiles and makes jokes. He seems happy, or at least secure enough to live with his unhappiness (unlike SOME people—*cough cough* me). He is humble and careful with his words, which is how I can tell he is smart. I want Dan to be my friend, but it may be too late.

Anyway, my conversation with Brock was about... the mind. The self. I dunno, we kinda expanded and ended up covering topics ranging from cell biology to entropy to spirituality to addiction to quantum physics to neuroscience to humans' capacity for empathy, etc. etc. etc. For those of "you" who don't remember, Brock is a social worker, not a scientist. Most of the science stuff was coming from me.

It started with me saying that I believed the mind was smaller than the brain (or the same size as the brain). Brock said he believed the mind to be larger than the brain.

Brock has this idea that the mind has to do with the connections we have not just within ourselves but outside of ourselves, and that this in effect leads to a "greater than the sum of its parts" type thing. I was like ???? I understand the whole connections thing, but I don't understand how that makes something any bigger than it is. So I argued that that everything is contained in our brains anyway; what he was describing seemed to me interpretation of sensory input.

Eventually, we got into spirituality. Brock was talking about "western" styles of thinking, which consists of breaking things down into components and somehow that blinds us from seeing the whole picture??? Ah, whatever. At some point, we were talking about entropy and I used the example my dad uses on me to re-explain it to both Dan and Brock. The example was basically a broken cup. There are many possible ways a cup can be broken and very few ways it can be whole, therefore it is more likely it will be in one of those broken states. Chaos, chaos, chaos, etc.

And then we, like, ended up on the subject of love and how we process it. Brock was talking about how sometimes, we will love the idea of someone and it takes work to love the real person. We have to detach ourselves from the idea and just focus on the love itself (this just opened up a whole new line of questioning in my head, which included: when do you know focusing on the love isn't right anymore? I mean, at what point is it right to let go of a person in that case? And what is the point of it all?).

Dan said something like, "You know how you were talking about the cup and how it's easier for it to be broken? Well, is it easier to let go of your idea of someone than it is to hold onto it?" I liked this question very much. I thought it was very creative.

I went off on a sort of half-formed tangent (as did Brock, I think—not at the same time, of course) and I ended up saying (tentatively) something about how maybe we're just loving new ideas of people. Maybe we keep trading in one idea for an updated version, a less perfect version, as time goes on. Dan had a mind=blown expression. I can tell philosophical conversations with him would be a fuckin' bomb.

The conversation was like two hours long. It went from lunch until I had to go to ninth period.

It was kind of a highlight of my day. That and Liv bought me food at the Student Union (which is the local university's cafeteria type place. It has the best food and it's kinda open to the public). Also, Lily was lovely, as usual.

I might be going on a hike with Laney and Liv tomorrow, which should be nice. It's supposed to be 80 out.

Okay. Goodnight. I'm still happy! I feel such peace. Sometimes I still feel very far away, but it's not a cold feeling anymore. Nice, nice, nice.

I wish I had a better sentence with which to conclude this entry.

PS:

Also, I forgot to write about it here, but the President is kind of scaring the fuck out of me. Well, he's scaring me as much as a kid can be scared by world events (which is very little because, damn, we see Real Life Death and Destruction on TV all the time and it's too much, it doesn't feel real).




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