I met him in the courtyard at dusk, where they weave the tents at Sukth –  wanderer who had come into his own. The olive tree had been hard-pruned along its central branch and only the tips were in leaf, gray fingers stretching to light, but you could see the ne growth, a haze of turuoise rust. Roots had blistered the sea-pebble paving into a mound like a verruca.  I thought of the black ceramic bird my mother notched in the center of her pies, whose yellow beak cracked the crust.

He had a cello in his hand. The grain glowed peat-swirl brown of a moutain tarn, but plum-maroon under the f-holes as if someone had been at it with mammoth blood. The spike glittered between one round stone and the next. Take this, he said. I’m giving it to you.

I looked away, at marble grooves framing the half-dome niche where a tap hangs over the copper cup chained to the wall. I ran my finger down the neck and scroll.

I imagined lifting a handle stuck to the lip of a broken amorpha face down under the tree, like history keeping a lid on rising roots.  Every choice is a loss. The past is not where you left it. That corridor you didn’t follow, the gate to unknown woods, shadow grin of a winding stair, the door you never found time to open – they whirl within, cracking the floor. I met him at twilight where they put up the tents at Sukkoth, a wanderer who had come into her own.

And I am lying. People try to talk me into being interested in all the things I’m interested in. And I try to play along. But midway through the conversation, I sigh.  When I say I don’t care these days, it has a very strong flavor. Metalic. Battery acid. I don’t care.
About what music you listen to.
Whether you know anything, about anything.
About literature.
About family.
About compassion.
About whether my behavior was just or consitant, with anyone (except that one girl)
I’m not going to find it.  I guess I found it, and threw it away, or something. Or cooked it and ate it.  Because all th things that people say they are looking for, I recognize, kind of dully.  If I do respond, I say “you won’t really get a lot of fulfillment out of that.” So, I’m keeing mostly to myself these days.  I want you all to have a good time.

Surely some would consider it banal: the bitter and the sweet.
” You can do whatever you want with your life, but one day you’ll know what love truly is. It’s the sour and the sweet. And I know sour, which allows me to appreciate the sweet.”

Ok.  It’s sour, not bitter. But the point is, Brian gets the girl in the end, and David gets disfigured and kills himself.

” You will never know the exquisite pain of the guy who goes home alone.” Says Brian, as inverse foreshadowing to David’s going home alone, with a broken face. Alone.

I watched that movie 100 times or more, drunk and weeping. It summarizes my world view exactly: sooner than you know, your life will be horribly fucked, or, just normally fucked – you will get older and alone.  Everybody will.  So, we must behave differently. More seriously, Take the sweet and hold onto it.  Fight to hold onto it. This life is not a story board.  Its real, and the outcome is death.

This makes my commitments to people very very serious. Too serious for those who believe in endless summer vacation.  But I’m warning you – you’ve already wasted too much time, if you really want to learn to play the piano.  It takes longer than you app users can EVER imagine to actually learn to play the piano.  You will never know the exquisite pain of the guy who goes home alone.

Of course, I’m not really talking about playing the piano.  It’s a self-centered activity, and, remember you are already going home alone.

The way you don’t go home alone is to court your soulmate.  I’m warning you app suckers – it takes longer than you can possbly imagine to learn to love, and to be loved in return.

David gets cryogenically frozen, and opts to have an eternal “lucid” dream played in his head, of a forever-life with what’s-her-name. My dream exactly. Not with what’s her name though. But Cameron Diaz breaks into the lucid state. And, she is the one who is truly in love with him. What’s-her-name hooks up with Brian pretty quick, and rejects smash-face David. So you tell me – what is that message? Who loves whom? Why on earth is it even an option to accept “defeat” when the one you love is right there? I think that’s some kind oo miguided Puritan anti-wisdom.

Songs kill.  Songs that contain the secret messages – the ones I missed. Or not. Because the songs remain as dinosaur bones. Clues to what happened in the past. That’s what we tell ourselves.

But songs, songs, these are not bones.  They are flesh, and they are spirit, my spirit and your spirit. Until you leave. Then they are bones of your spirit.  Clues.

What does it feel like when you lose your hand in an accident? Your severed hand lying in front of you.  How do  you feel? You feel the sense of peermanent loss, in waves. Not a steady acceptance of loss.. no.  Waves of self pity, that have the flavor of childhood, when you turned to your mother with your existèntial sorrows. Why do sparrows give off that feeling when we discover them dead? Why do we see our own loss in God’s losses?