The door in the blog

Packing up books and pictures makes me nervous and sad.  Memories of moves and goodbyes stall the process and directionless anticipation revs my emotions, even though there is no move, no change but letting go of old rooms and making emotional room for new. 

Matt finally sent my sniping, bitchy self to Walm.art. 

On the highway on-ramp, a homeless man held a cardboard sign. "Hungry. Desperate. Help."  I saw him and glanced down at the sticky, gross center cup holder where I normally toss change just as the light turned green and a huge glass of water spilled on the floor of the van.  I'd set it there with no lid or holder. Its tipping and spilling was the most obvious, preventable event in the world. Like hunger. Or desperation. I couldn't pick it up or pull the car over or do anything except accelerate onto the highway because I was eating an ice cream bar. Chocolate dark chocolate. With my left hand.

The needle of my speedometer, when I check it, stayed buried below zero, even as I accelerated past fifty for the merge. Right at that moment, the cable snapped and I wanted to cry because I'm on my way to Walm.art eating ice cream and he's hungry.  Mothers in Libya screamed in my head and the tall pine trees lining the highway berated me about heavy metals and poisoning and global warming.  Must I eat for pleasure, not hunger, and drive about, killing things with my careless, blind consumption?

You wouldn't believe why I was driving to Walm.art. The irony of it would cause a blog supernova and there would be nothing left of this site but a sucking black hole.  It would bust the top off of the irony meter. The little door of this blog would open and a bald dancing circus man with curly chest hair and a handlebar mustache wearing a wrestling suit would wheel out with his huge hammer and his tall iron-o-meter bell.  He'd smash that black-as-night, heavy-as-death hammer down on the platform so hard that the metal riser would send the bell flying off of the top and into the sky where it would knock down all the stars. Like dominoes.

It makes me want to beat on the metal side panel of the world screaming, "slow down!"

"Slow the hell down. You're going too fast. Don't you know the speedometer is broken?"

Fortunately, there's no speedometer on life and stars can not be displaced by mere mortals. Trips to Walm.art end and children are still there when you get home and there doesn't have to be a point. Even if there is a point, it's acceptable for it to be an ironic point. Isn't it?  Maybe the point is to see the homeless man and care about the trees and hear the screams.

The trick is to let it all matter without drowning in it. Every single needle on every single pine, trembling like whiskers in the wind. Otherwise, none of it matters, and that can't be right, now can it?

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Comments are closed. And yes, the nursery and the Snow White room are bare now, after making me smile for six years.  What tipped you off? My teenage angst about the endless pointlessness of it all? ;-)