Life is very long

There will be time, there will be time
for a hundred visions and revisions
before the taking of a toast and tea

Eliot's been on my mind ever since seeing the strange sweaty man with "Life is very long" tattooed on his forearm, supposedly from "The Wasteland" but actually from "The Hollow Men." Eliot, oh Eliot, with your bizarre faux British accent, with your learnedness and your allusions, your meaningless-meaningful word-sound collages, and sorrow. Melancholy, after all, is ever the popular tone, controlled suffering the pose, poetry more elaborate than prose.

Responsibility

Contemplating another withdrawal is at once exhilarating and anxiety-inducing, not unlike crane-climbing late at night, not unlike tugging off a shirt or skirt for the first time and wondering whether to be proud or ashamed, no, not unlike those things at all. And yet I suppose the consequences are greater when it has to do with obligations unmet, responsibilities intact, so many hearts yet unbroken, or broken and painstakingly mended.

What to do? What to do? The worrisome refrain is the chorus of the day, the month, the year. What to do? What to think?

What is this thing called life? This haphazard game of shortsightedness and regret? What is this thing that I hear of, whispered, half-muttered, mumbled and grumbled--this entity called Responsibility? It is such a long word. I do not think I can understand. I have not the ability to.

Echoes

What quiet whispering is this, what private ache, what hollow pain, which tells me to write, to read? To look again for the poignant sorrows, the eloquent hysteria captured without hope, recorded with only the faintest traces of truth and an unsteady faith in the power of words?

I can no longer write because I no longer read. I no longer read because I question the value of thoughts and words, words, words

scrubscrubrubadubdub

Having the experience is only a tiny part of it; reflection and then the distillation of said experience alongside the reflection (preferably amusing or enlightening) into mere words is a much larger part of it. It being the telling of a story, the assumption of the elusive character of interesting-and-i-am-my-own-person person.

Have wanted an excoriation. The scrubbing of pumice against dead-skin-cracked-grandmother heels, or steel wool on chemically paint-stripped ugly wooden furniture. Have wanted to feel clean and clear of the past, of mind clutter and attic-brain dust. Of mistakes or impressions of mistakes or hallucinations of impressions of mistakes. What's holding me back? What's holding us all back?

Needing to write...something

"You cannot have certainty and you don't need it." --Psychology Today

Can someone live by that? Can every moment be rife with possibility, heavy and thick with it? Unaccounted for, unforeseen, unpredictable. Possibility. If we surrender the battle for certainty, we lose the security embedded within it and the shelter wrapped about it. So, we surrender a battle we could never win. And, we gain...everything.

I asked him how he knew psychiatry was what he wanted to do, and he replied, dropping the mannerism of doctor/psychiatrist/counselor/suave-gray-tailored-suit-van-der-Rohe-Barcelona-chair-sitting man, "I didn't know...In medical school, we did rotations and you find what fits."

Then, what hit me and resounds still: "It's not a perfect job, but it's not a perfect world."