Stuck inside of...

It takes longer than 6 months to appreciate anything. 

A new relationship. You're thrilled for a week, maybe more. Then the sex gets common and you have to talk about "issues" after what should have been a simple dinner with friends. You curse how mundane it all suddenly feels. Then as time wanes on, a practically imperceptible shift occurs--you notice things you didn't before, you kinda like it when she pops your zits now, the thought of leaving tugs you closer to her, you feel an investment gurgling inside of you. 

A good book. Oh, to begin a new book! A new book that isn't garbage, that is. Hell, I'd take the book over the woman...6 times out of 10...well, maybe 4--but to start a new book! And by the time you reach the 80s you're thinkin' about how long it'll take to get to 200...until there's only 30 left and you wonder why you didn't pay more attention. You scramble to read back through the parts during which you were thinking about that girlfriend, trying desperately to re-absorb them and to no avail. 

A fine instrument. You can't bear to return it to its spiffy new case. You want to caress her, to hold her, smell her--the wood, the brass, the ivory...and when your fingers get tired and your eyes want to shut you put her in the corner, maybe pick on her a bit the next week, until Netflix, or your books, or your women, become more and more appealing...until you hear the song no one has heard before, it is there, YOUR song, and you pick her up and pick her for hours on end, throwing your head back into bliss's dark oblivion, wondering how you could have ever given this up...

It isn't quite the same with moving to a foreign country and then facing the curses and cradles of home. But semblances linger. 

I am just getting to know this town, this strange place, this Suratthani of Suratthani of Thailand.  I've spent the last 5 months cursing it, in general (once the sex got common and the protagonist got predictable, if you will), only rarely letting a smile break across my lips to shatter my haughty rigidity re: teaching ESL, Thai culture, and all the ways in which my life lacks... 

(the jingling of the forlorn broom salesman like Sisyphus eternally trudging up and down my street in hope of a sale that will never come is not helping my perceptions--I'd prefer the caterwauling of feisty street dogs with their balls strangling their discernment between flesh and food, love and destruction...)

And from this seat, with 2 more weeks left in this dump, I can only feel fondness for it. My feelings, of course, require absolutely no analysis: we could use any number of cliches to categorize my present store, and it all just sounds like a violent cuckoo clock ringing in every corner of my life, reminding me that unless I get it together, I'll never be satisfied. 

I think that boy needs more tenderness though. So let me put it like this:

I griped in Virginia. 
I gripe here. 
In 15 days, I embark on the journey that has absorbed all of my desires, the bet that's used all my chips, the basket where rests all of my finest fruit: I'll be climbing volcanoes and swimming with sharks in Indonesia. I'll be exploring the mountains and rivers of Vietnam, a blemish (crater!) of our pock-marked (scarred!) past, the object of my obsession for over a decade. I'll be puttering around northern India in ruins and palaces alike, not a razor in my rucksack nor a pair of boots to clad my ever-turning churning wheels, to climax at 15,000 feet in Nepal's Himalayas on the symbolic birth of a man who's legacy has made some REAL dents in the History of Man--Christmas, you blubbering fool, out with it! But ah, to speak any less extravagantly surely would not could not do or give due the justice my overwrought expectations truly deserve!!!!

I'm scared. 

I've created a reality in which my happiness utterly depends on thrill. I've constructed a paradigm of constant change, adventure with the wind at my back and the sun on my face--but the wind, my friends, the wind, it can blow dust. It can cease to blow. And the sun--it burns. And what happens when the sun sets--every day? 

I'm scared because I'm scared. Premature griping has gripped me and it ain't something I can see a shrink about or take a pill for or just improve my bedtime communication with my significant other to remedy. No, this brand of prematurity is utterly INSIDIOUS my friends and faithful readers, a sort of tumor buried so deep within the linens of my anxieties that to remove it would perhaps shake the fundamental systems by which I manage to survive...

Basically, this is what's going on: I am plagued by a sheer inability to remain in the present. Always racked by past nostalgias and future dreams. But it is this perpetual discontent that keeps my engines running, that keeps me on the go, that motivates me to get through the day so I can just taste the next one...a simple equation:

inability to feel gratitude + fear of feeling anything but joy = discontent = lack of commitment to accepting the doldrums of humanity = thrill seeking = discontent = cycle  

How can I be so candid? Only because there is hope.

Yesterday I drove. I drove, a long way, alone. The sun hit me. And it was hot. It burned me. But I did not curse it. I smiled. The wind began to howl as the sky turned black. And I simply let it continue to carry me forward. I revered the droopy palms, sad that greed in the name of their oil has destroyed rainforests, but still proud, still brimming with beauty--beauty that I saw, that I could see.

And don't it always seem to go that we don't know what we've got til it's gone? So ought we put up that parking lot just so we can know paradise? 

No. Because with paradise paved, we can only know of it. How about instead we choose to know paradise today, now, in those who we contact in every way...and instead of being too young to know where we're going and too old to go back again, let us notice life's in-betweens, and I'm not talking Mobile and I'm not talkin' Memphis, I'm talkin' the walkin' blues, the walkin' bliss! the living breathing brand new companion who saunters into your saloon when you most need him and least want him--

give that fucker a hug 'cause partner he's all any of us have really got.