"In" and "Of"

I'm going to speak for you if you don't mind.

You have friends or family or a husband or a wife or a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a dog or...someone else you need to keep close to; someone else you need to care for; someone else you need to help to be happy; someone else you need to debate about life and laugh about life with. Every waking hour of your day is not enough to do enough to keep the dynamics between you and them strong; to maintain a connection that nourishes your collective souls, hearts and minds.

You live in a house or an apartment -- a world of your own, built by you and maintained by you. You need to clean the carpets and wipe the counters and replace the light bulbs, but you also need to perpetuate an atmosphere of positivity, partnership and love between those walls...the walls that you have to paint once in awhile. Castle or prison -- it's up to you. It's all up to you. So much is just up to you...

You have an auto-pilot muscle running your body, and that muscle is getting older, as are all of the other ones from toes to forehead.  You need to eat well, which requires shopping, planning and thinking. Then, cooking. You need to move so that when you are seventy, you won't be the tin man needing the oil can. After a certain age, gravity starts pulling you toward the grave and the fight is on. And time is needed. And time is running out. Time extended needs time spent.

Deeper Fun

Once, I wrote a piece about wedding receptions and about the idea of being forced to have fun -- about how distasteful I find that. (And boy, was I sorry about the title, after the number of unsavory sites that linked to me. There must have been a lot of disappointed mouse-wielding perverts out there that week. They must have felt like they had been "Rick-Rolled".)  Anyway, I was thinking about this again, only with a sharper dissection knife.

The great Gene Krupa

I don't like to dance. I have nothing against dancing or against those who enjoy the activity -- I just don't find it fun. Now, here's the problem: People who enjoy dancing enjoy it so much that they want everyone around them to enjoy it. If you claim that you don't like to dance or that you do not want to dance, the people who like to dance (as sure about the universal joy that dancing brings as the missionaries were about the salvation they were bringing in to the South American jungles regardless of the heedless destruction of indigenous culture) try to pull you onto the floor. It is, to them, their duty to show you the fun you are missing.

Roller Coaster Arabesque

Yes, it's true. Even in an amusement park, atop the crest of a roller coaster pre-drop, I'm thinking metaphors. For instance: roller coasters, themselves, as examples of the way people seem to look at life, at least in terms of what is interesting to them.

I like roller coasters. Always have. But there have always been some that I had no interest in riding because, it seems to me, there is a fine line between being scared in a fun way and being scared in a losing control of one's bowels way.

For instance, on a family outing to a mega amusement park the other day, we rode a wooden roller coaster called El Toro. We also rode Kingda Ka. (The latter's very name annoys the crap out of me. I don't know why -- it just angers me to say it.) Kingda Ka is a metal spike up into the sky which shoots straight up, drops straight down, once, and reaches ridiculous speeds of somewhere around 130 miles per hour.

The Corpse in the Garden (A Parable)

"The Death of Socrates" by David (click for source)

There once was man who was confused.

He saw that everyone around him was in agreement about something; they all agreed that they should "live life to the fullest". The people were unanimously pleased with this idea. It made them feel good. It gave them a purpose. Now they knew what to do: live life to the fullest. Simple. If they did this, they would be happy. So everyone in the world set out to comply and to find happiness.

But, as I said, our hero was confused. He tried to follow this enticing popular wisdom, but realized he had no idea how to achieve such a miraculous, life-validating thing. This made him sad, because everyone else seemed to have run right out and done it without so much as a thought.