i can't breathe through my nose, waiting for the avocados on my table to ripen. lying down only makes me cough, so i sit here on this squeaky green-padded wooden chair in my dining room, where time is milked slowly staring at fruit. too much self-involvement quickly gives way to an unattractive form of life apathy. we seek ourselves, but in the wrong circumstances what we find can be tiresome.
succeeding many of the important phases in my adult life, i've become bedridden with flu or kidney stone or walking pneumonia or something undiagnosed to slow me down. sickness is supposed to be a gift at times, reflective and shedding of emotional molt. but my impatience to be in movement complicates the potential zen. stillness for me has always been best touched at blood-pumping levels or after voluntary methods of exhaustion. today, the energy of sickness is a surrender i've been ill equipped to derive full meaning from.
getting outside of this, then. you had that epiphany about opposites on the airplane, how everything is composed of them.
i will talk about paris, the meaningful precedent to this particular bug because, importantly, while there i was introduced to my own human form again.
nothing happens without cause, even spontaneity. somewhere awhile back, i was taught by one young woman the vital importance of romantic love and then by another its very same uselessness. following these imperfect attempts at spiritual union and bearing their varied consequences, my curiosity eventually became replaced by a spectrum of experience in matters, missteps, struggles, bliss, freedom. but first, things went dark for very long periods of time and i'd felt overwhelming waves of hurt and creatively directed my pain in every artistic direction i knew how and when it was still sinking me i learned other expressions. standup comedy was borne out of saving my life from a ruined garden of romantic love and this scary activity was one of the things that worked. from a dark hotel basement on vermont out into the strange and dysfunctional world of laughter and public honesty as medicine across this love-letter city, my healing began. it was rarely funny but it was brave and it didn't feel that way at the time but it was brave and it happened because i wanted to get here, standing and walking without conversational crutch or a need for reflective identity. here, something did change, and it diminished a tenderness but gave something resolute in the fluidity.
nothing is sudden, it only feels sudden because we are obligated to forget all the long forged attempts at progress in order to meet this new present with accumulated ability. i'm still a shitty comic and never know if i'll do it one more time or a hundred but it was a tangible part of the equation i can outwardly relate for this explanation. truth be told there were and are millions of devices to promote a functioning for me including this big one, this, but what i'm saying is that through the pain and my best attempts at managing to survive all the imbalance, i was capable of learning and knowing a unique beauty. i was able, for lack of a less obvious realization, to stand.
both feet under me, it felt like a good time to walk through paris.
