#164

It may be that the darkest secrets we possess are unknown to us, that to even approach them in thought is to shy away. Sane people do not, after all, ride their horses off the edge of a cliff just to see what is at the bottom. 

Gravity will take you there nonetheless, if you let it. But what kind of person lets it? It seems to me that these secrets come to you, fall upon you from above or rip the ground from underneath you. The bottom of the cliff comes to get you. Your horse takes you over as you desperately yank at the reins of an extremity beyond self-preservation.

Perhaps those we call the insane are simply those who know the most secrets, and are not able to keep them. Seems to me what distinguishes those we call sane from the insane is merely secretiveness, what one knows to keep hidden.

*

Hm. Spooky shit. Kinda grim. 

To bring it back to ground a bit, apropos of nothing, every time I tell a secret I feel that I have done a crazy thing, and madness lies not far away, probably interested in my scent and thinking about a meal. I keep a lot of shit to myself and I still think I spill my guts way too much, in way too real a fashion. 

Some secrets can change everything. Picture a mountain range the size of the Alps shouldering out of the depths of the Pacific in one gargantuan violence, displacing lord knows how much water and disrupting lord knows what percentage of every current in the ocean, and creating an entire new ecosystem for plants and animals and people to fuck in and fight over. Some secrets are like that! And some secrets just explode like you never even imagined, the Yellowstone caldera going fully critical in the space of a second.

You never really know till the thing is said, you know? But to flip that coin has something of madness about it. I have a tricky relationship with reality as it is, and my temperament is precisely that which is curious enough to let gravity find a way to take me to the bottom. That kind of curiosity is certainly flirting with insanity, more so when mixed with another crazy thing I can't control, which is hope. 

*

Pretty good day, all told. Laughed a bunch, cooked some food, got two books (also seven yesterday), and took a jump with both feet. That might have been kind of a crazy thing to do, but after all, the hope is that at the bottom, the water is drinkable, that facing your darkest secrets is a trial one can master and when you climb out the other side of the canyon, you're looking at new territory, something huge and unsounded to explore.


--JL

#100

One hundred is not important to me. But! I think the end of double-digit posts is wild; a brief, frenzied infancy. It is wild that the posts will be three-digit posts for a long time to come. Feel no pressure to write anything special for such an occasion, though. 

Matter of fact, the only reason there's a post at all is I really don't like going more than three days without putting something up. I'm tired. It was negative twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit this morning as I walked into my seventh straight shift. I have really used up a great deal of human energy over the last seven-day period. A great variety of expenditures in a great variety of fields. Many returns and gains, of course. Life. Exhausting in its quotidian richness. 

Oh! And I don't have to work that eighth day. I am okay with that.

*

I said this out loud to my coworkers, duly warning them that it was going to be pretentious: one excellent perspective is to take as much comfort in paradox as in tautology. 

*

See? I think that's the optimal amount of sparkle and palaver required celebrate the hundredth post, though, pray: no one pretend that I am any better than a fool, that I am ever more right than I am wrong or more knowledgeable than I am ignorant. May peace born of what understanding we may foster reign over all humankind, and may we one day come to know one another as we really truly are.


--JL