Do you recognize those times when life is overtly pedagogical, showing you something that you’re going to take with you like it or not, where you’re forced to glean instants into something more? I had around 6 days of this, like a knock back, a gust of wind slowing me, to remind me of what’s what and, well, to remind me there’s much to life. Near epiphanies, not transitory necessarily, but like lapses in a glimpse that doesn’t belong to you in the first place, a gift if you will, as if someone taps you on the shoulder and says, “but, look at this…”

I drank with a man who’d lost so much, more than I could even manage to understand let alone sympathize. I fathomed his soul welling and watched his hands wring in on themselves, wringing and wringing. It was as though his entire universe was a spasm of desolation all of which siphoned through his hands, and leaked from his eyes that pined. Then I walked and talked with poets and painters, kings and dreamers. There were moments of planned triumph and of victories had. Mostly though of hope. Requiems of hope. Walks and talks that inspired inspiration, that inspired a belief in something bigger. Then I watched an addict. Breathed her in, her musky intoxication. Smelt and felt the shell of one who once was. Felt her numbness and partook in the communal anxiety which smothered those around her. All suffered hurt. Then I visited a place full of wonderful memories now saddened…saccharine is the entropy of love. Closure and comprehension are not the same thing, but time passing and life are.

Tap, tap. “But look at this, these things matter.”

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell

Then I was talking with a friend about psychological paralysis were you corner yourself into inaction with the comprehension of every gestures, every sentences, every pictures, every etcs, incompleteness…not a fear of being wrong, but a knowledge that there is no right. A common scenario in modern life, and naturally a problem and impediment. Yet, yet, the little bits life offered me while on holiday disrupted the idea of this paralysis. Jolted it. Then it was a great relief.

Moral being: Taking time off is terribly necessary.

photo: New Years Eve ’06-’07; Tracy, Garett, Benjamin, and I (left to right) at the dbclay studios.

photo: New Years Eve ’06-’07