What is it about a phrase like "image resounding" that leaves me feeling correct?

You write out all your brilliance and then you send it away! [I wish there was a way to save this. But also, it couldn't be so absolute or precious if there were. To look up right now, the fingers of the branches are touching gold.]

Oh my goodness, breathing is still so good, and with this ever the case, I'm doing fine. It's like how putting on clothes feels unfailingly like playing dress-up every morning, and it's like the wrenching details swimming in the image of the trees that sway and creak. Every time i bump my elbow the sharpness demands a grin to frame the string of profanities to follow--which in turn are funny as hell, justifying the silly, stupid pain. Argh! I have to get myself out of this happiness, just long enough to write something down--something real/true/alive/or of worth? Yeah, right. At the very least, something that will earn me the joy that I already have, but for no reason i can imagine deserving.

[What about all of this? It feels distinctly/potentially like something. The warmth on my neck and arms, the possibility of goosebumps, (right) here. Pretend to believe in consequence.]

So close, teasingly. There is something about this...in the background, simultaneously forth & back, playing in somebody's vision always--playing with their senses but through them also (and thus limited?), finding existence there.

There's a rainbow curtain flapping in a window!, having been put up with intention and interest. And a room to be gathering people as the hour presses up against 4 pm. And a tiny red spider challenging an insect in the midst of cleansing herself there, and even a bearded boy with gently set eyes who's not thinking about me. Ha! It's how the stuff that's not happening is thus in an active sense, for to be replaced by everything that is, or making way for whatever could be. (It's just people doing stuff, all the time. And things, and life too! It's not good or bad so easily.) It's poetry in bathrooms and art on an underpass. A bug playing around in a philosophy class. Why now? Suspended energy of objects at rest?

[It's okay. I think I was an interesting experience for you, in all of my fumbling newness and clumsy enthusiasm.]

Forever!? Why forever? That's the word I don't like--why does everything have to be reduced to forever? (LIFE! LIFE and such. LIFE in capital letters!!) Like a moment--an also--at last. It's not a matter of fact, it's a matter of something all together different. We need to see it differently--the proof of reality, being just this breath.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (2/19/07)

Dis-dis-dis-turb-ed.

[Such a confusing distribution. The ups, the downs, the shades of oranges and brown, or white to match the landscape. It's not certain that there is even an end to the stupidly-random lines of wall. They're pointless, these numbered ways of getting in my way. Paths open up to me cruelly, only to corner me without the merciful intention of finishing me off. Only a monster bent on the destruction of thoughtful minds could have designed such a worthless and endless edifice.]

[The intricacy of the folds and bends beneath me strike out as envious in the worst way. As they double over themselves in search of some order, the cold cement leaves nothing to be desired for the once lively wood that shelters it. And yet, the illusion of beauty is complete in all of this complexity, sure to convince any passer-by into believing it to possess reason, so unfathomable.]

[Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (2/15/07)]

Stubbed a toe, hurt like a bitch.

There are so many forces of how we feel for each other. Between attraction and compassion and curiosity and good will; generally, but genuinely, liking one another; having memories and experiences and time in common, or merely mutually reflected thoughts that won't need attending to; responsibilities and commitments dedicated to one another (the following and followed through are equivalently heavy, if you will); as protective or sympathetic or empathized with; any number of these combinations to form countless shapes of what love might look like. That line dividing how we feel about someone else, and how it is they make us feel--i don't think it exists.

(Though it's still worth considering.)

There is this feeling of gratitude--of indebtedness that cannot be articulated, let alone undone--in which we dwell by virtue of existence alone. Life, this world we have for our experience as a thing that will not be spent by any one of us; it is our unification of sorts, or else the basest of all common ground. There is a sense of willingness without shame or lasting doubt. It is a matter of knowledge, decided upon. As in the person within the friend you chose to make; how you wanted to understand their eyes but not those of the faces before.

What's so wrong about belief for its own sake? Why should the value of the pursuit of an irrevocable truth outweigh that of the ideal of contentment, when life is this finite and neither are guaranteed?

(Our guarantee.)

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (2/12/07)

Life or death!? Fuck that. It's life AND death, all the time.

(listen, listen, listen, listen...here's what we are so far.)

Glance. Last quarter and a bonafide philosopher. Partitioned all up and on purpose:

Two slices for two jobs; sometimes grateful, slitted eyes of (officially) fallen families; a part already off somewhere like London--blushing for the cliche but determined anyway; a tinytiny part wanting to wonder 'what if', but shutting it the fuck up; my spiritual side alone and quiet, my mortal fate bent over and cackling; a big heavy chunk for classes; for to grin&leer&sail&write&blank&fuck&sculpt&laugh&trip up, apparently; a memory like the spin of potterizing; a fantastical slice, dedicated just to sleep!; kudos for analytical thought; a stench like stale shampoo pretending.

Do you know what i mean, jelly bean? All there is to do is to walk slowly in between them and sing loudly. But i want you to believe me when I say these things. (God knows why.)

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (2/10/07)

A momentary stay against chaos... Civility! Join the circus.

What if I called you 'finished'? What would you take that to mean?

My first impression is that you don't think in these terms, as probably I shouldn't. Such thoughts don't last long anyway. And while this fact ought not count against them (for what does last!? not even the definition of the word), it still does. Maybe if they faked it better...

[Speaking of thoughts--I think I'll use my teeth next time.]

"Whenever something changes it's like it was always that way for me." I don't remember how you used to talk to me, or what I must have been thinking of. Evolution is a process of deletion.

There's a woman-shaped Arrowhead water bottle now. Can aesthetics really reach so far? What the fuck.

I found a flimsy, aluminum ring underneath my desk at work, where the power strip sits. I like seeing it on my ring finger, like it's being used for good at last. I wear it on my highest knuckle, just below the tip. I think it will remind me of something, once I remember what. At least I know I've forgotten what your hands look like by now. Maybe there's something to say for that.

My class is about to start. It's called 'Philosophy of Biology' and it will go on for three hours. I'm wondering how you'd like it.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (2/7/07)

Awareness is the opposite of conviction!

We just watched an owl outside of Oakes College, now we've only the students to look at. (The level of reciprocal scrutiny has laxed, somewhat.) But then!

She stayed perched in a redwood--huge, the both of them--and looked on as we were passed by. (There was a boy talking on his cell phone; a guy riding his bike and singing loudly in key; and a kid on a bike that finally inspired our owl into her next hunt, focused on the movements of a fog of moths descending.)

Just now I think I saw a couple. They walked into this place and ordered something to go, sat right there and waited for it, then left without speaking to each other at all. He held the door open for her on their way out. I don't know anything about people.

When I walked by College Eight I thought of a girl and how she belongs to my distraction. I thought ugly, stupid things on accident--only so, in that they were selfishly-bent, and tiny-people narrow-viewed.

But things aren't so small or easy as 'whose bed?' or 'how often?' The truth of the thing is in what they talk about by default, and when being habitual for each other became obvious and preferable. The truth is the life of things, not the stage they're played out upon. And that little grinding going on in your stomach? You have to grow out of that, call it mistaken.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (1/24/07)