As my days march on, collapsing one into the other, into the other, into the other- I will not remember this Sunday. But this Sunday, like the ones before it: was doomed before it began. The fragile debt owed to this limitless space of doing things for a few dozen consecutive hours; it all emerges out of a place of great hope. Hope that things could be better for a little while. So this weekend I anxiously rode my bike (so anxious in fact, I flew off it) I felt the sun lay a thick sheen of UV rays on my arms and I closed my eyes to drink it all in. With this great idea that I could pack all this life into these rigid hours of play. That I would return to my bed, satisfied; satiated.
I did so, mostly. Not without first peeling the layers off piles of things once owned by strangers, pieces of their history up for sale at a dollar a piece at the San Diego swap meet. I breathed in the smells they had, the only indication that they are were once not owned by me, but by a strange I will never know the name of.
I suffer a mild paralysis on Sunday mornings to the idea of a day: unplanned. I need to be required, I need to engage with this unquantifiable stuff of life, during all waking hours. When, by illusory definition, nothing is required of me, I hastily call upon a number of tasks to ensure that I can keep up the noise. The slow humming of the ‘something’ that I need to know is always on. I think about the ease of late mornings that most people so readily indulge in. With that, I experience pangs of anxiety, strong enough to propel me through hours of running in one direction. I am never stopping. It’s a fear I have that my hours are finite and I’m not “making the most of” it all.
But isn’t it funny, these things that we’re doing? I’m collecting, collecting, building, destroying (just to rebuild), planning, worrying-worrying, breaking it up, counting it. Repeating. As if it all meant something, as if I could add it all up at the end and bring it with me into the stretches of nothingness, the intangible sky that spans out, uncalculated. When I leave my body, I’ll leave an unfinished list of things I ought to have done before the end of my day, and with that- a very real possibility that the world could end without my small troubles, holding it on it’s axes with its’ own quivering fingers, about to give out. If I could just memorize this laudry list, trophies, stuff all my photos with me and remember all the places I’d been so that when I die, it’d all mean something more. Something I haven’t gotten a name for yet. I’m pumping my body thick with it all. I’m spinning my wheels long enough to snap them both clean off- what good are wheels anyway when you’ve got legs. Wheels (as determined by my foolish fall this weekend) only get you into trouble if you don’t have proper brakes.
