Not really a rant, just a clearing of the mechanism:
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You push a button and a whir, click engages. Lights from somewhere within come on, and you realize the machine is on. It's humming and somewhat warm. The muscle memory has been invoked, and a certain stream of consciousness has already been moving along, serenely, somewhat wantonly, without your notice and somewhere out of eyeline and earshot.
The problem arises when the direction of the machine is no longer in line with your tunnel vision. The road signs ahead point to a wayward path. You don't have a map, and your inability to gauge the distance left to ponder does not give you much hope of achieving your destination.
What little direction you may have had is lost in finding yourself gummed up in the gears and sprongs as they manufacture some sort of journey, a juggernaut of a voyage that has no real meaning, and no real end in sight. Though you'd begun with some sort of notion of where that marker was hailing from, you can't attest to its intention, nor as to its purpose any longer. You've long since given up the ghost in the machine's whereabouts.
But the thing that niggles, that creeps and worries you—it's not the big things looming in the dark. Instead, it's little shadows, the furrowing and the burrowing little splinters of dark. They wriggle themselves into your conscientious, feeding a small frenzy of doubt and insecurity. And you wonder how they came to be so very important in their inconsequentiality.
If only they could present themselves in the light of day, when the machine wasn't so very quiet and furtive. When time didn't stand still amongst the hedges of earthcrust. And instead, you had a soupcon of bravado...shaping your will and giving you meaning, beyond that steaming, chugging monster you call your life.
I like it. It makes me want a candle emoticon, if ya know what I mean.
Thanks, Nigel--it came about when my son wanted to interview me about 9/11...and I had to show him the LA X's article where his dad was featured on 9/18/01...and told him how Oprah flew us out because of that article. All started because of my MA thesis the LA X's found that I wrote of Aghan Dari...so very fucking weird.
Life's so very fucking funny, sometimes.
Goddamn I need a ciggie.
Nice, Jenne, I like it.
Thanks, Luna!