Keeping It Moving: Lately, I have been sick.
Lately I cannot place commas correctly.
Lately I am afraid.
Lately I fear new and old activities, for they may come to dominate my life.
Lately, it is 5:24.
Lately I look up flight information.
I wonder if wanderlust is an actual condition. Apparently, my brain has been wired for quite a few such tendencies, so why not this one?
Why should I desire one thing, one lifestyle, and not another. Is this psychological? Biological?
To Google!
Well, it is certainly not Google-ogical, as that lead nowhere. And I have no time to go nowhere.
But am I positioning my thoughts too steadily on physical wanderlust? Am I positioning my thoughts too much, in general?
No, no. Not enough, actually. Delving beyond what I know to be "wanderlust."
Beware of anything that comes too readily to mind.
What of cognitive wanderlust?
What of that glazed-over travel which occurs in the mind, suddenly, and takes its sanguine, puckish place between what we are determined to give attention, and what tempts that attention away?
Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi jokingly says, in his quite and (let's admit it) unusually amusing TED Talk, his extensive boredom has been involved in his success. Always trying to engage, and never feel the Boredom. Always awake. Always roaming with his hungry heart for something to muse.
Frank Sinatra confessed to chronic sleep troubles--insomnia--which he claimed to be caused by a similar proneness/proclivity. (An otherwise decisive little lass, I just cannot decide. I like them both, proneness and proclivity.) It has been some years since I read the quote, so, to paraphrase, "I cannot sleep, for I am always worried I will miss something."
Could this be one of those flaws, as Barbara Streisand, with her nose, I could bank on?
"Cognitive Wanderlust"
Or is this another proud gloss to dignify my wandering focus? If so, I am not entirely ingenuous in the endeavor, in the constant struggle to become aware.
It is as though my mind is shaking its hips. I feel this savage ineffectuality, and the passionate* anxieties it ignites. Then, if it does not seethe within you 'round the lock, if it does not burn you every-so-often--and in all the worst places--it is not passion you feel, but some infinitely shallow angst. And angst is simply intolerable. I cannot stand feeling so riled with sentimentality. Just ridiculous. It makes me. just. ridiculous.
*This word, passion, by the way, demands more sincerity than my baby-faced 21 years is willing to communicate.
Let this go on and on. And on and on and on, away to somewhere. Because this is facing nowhere. And although, at times, I eagerly bound off into nowhere, this is not one of those committed, fearless days. This is The Other: one of the seemingly-eternal, swear-to-God significant, illusively profound days of awkward, clunky caprice--like grouse in summertime, waiting, waiting, waiting in oblivion, to be gunned down for game.
When will death come (for this conceptual grouse)?
In Tavi Gevinson's Editor's Letter--like, a year ago--the prodigal pubescent admits: "This past fall, I started diagramming every lyric Stevie Nicks has ever written. I gave up, of course, but this is how far I got…."
This is very comforting to me.
The nice thing about wildly taking up random, self-indulgent, strangely satisfying, so totally and decidedly tedious tasks is that you can get them up from nothingness, throw them to the old, filled journals, and no one will call it 'giving up.' They might even commend your egg-headed failure. And orthodox failure is very in right now. I can smell a trend, you know, on only its faintest fumes.
Lately, it is 8:32.
Lately I cannot use commas correctly.
No comments:
Post a Comment