2003-04-09 - 3:47 a.m.
I Can Be Myself Again
I am the only one stirring in the Union tonight with broken pop machines. I am enjoying the dark and empty halls that should be full and will be in a few days. I used to be disturbed by empty places built for many people, I used to make them eerie by filling them with the ghosts of the familiar crowd. But now I like this too.
People have left books open, jackets, cards, and crap. I wanted, as long as I was doing the out-of-my-ordinary, to remove this stuff. But people would come back in a tizzy and we would have some new silly Snack-Bar scandal that in a week would make me sick, so I decided not to. Then tried to get a cherry coke, also unusual for me, but the machine is broken.
Bare Naked Ladies are playing a wonderful concert for just me tonight. The green dress still makes me laugh and I think that I should by one to wear for ----. I wonder if he remembers? But then I would want him to come over later this summer for Kraft dinner, although he would never get the joke, and I dislike Kraft. They also remind me how strange it is that I can not go back home to Crescent City. I should be able to, it is more our place than theirs. They did not shape each island, pick up the sticks, and river rock, and relocate the river rock a half dozen times with the promise it would be the last, nor go about climbing stumps with Fargo, memorizing every inch, eating from every berry bush – thank god nothing was poisonous, giving names to “Holly Park”, “Fern Hollow”, Caitie’s Corner that I cleared and designed behind Dad’s dream shop, or dug the holes for the cherry trees our friends brought as a “gift”, or made tea from the clover, and imitation salads from the sorrel, or tasted the raindrops from the redwood needles, indeed they did not plant over 200 baby redwoods in the rainstorm, or crawled all under the house to do whatever it was I was doing back then, or picked up nails inside and outside every day for a solid three months, or painted the trim board to have the cedar wax wings poop purple alder berry poop on the clean glacier white paint, or climbed “my tree”, no, nor climb an alder in the wind storm for the sheer fear of it (I always regretted those climbs), or gone on tractor rides that my cousins thought were funner than Disney Land—beat that you dull people, and cultivated my Valentine rose or Baby Tears, can you see the “horses” in that old knotted stump, let alone the carriage they pull, or the ‘slide’ made for someone shorter than myself? Or canned several hundred pounds of tuna on the sink and outside cooking station, do you use our “hotdog stand”? Do you fire up the pellet stove for your dog when you go play in the shop on rainy afternoons? Or do you admit that you too are chilly? Please take care of that place. I only want to come get dirty in the yard again. Keep the house, I want the yard. The yard is untouched with unpleasant memories. All the things that made that place a Secret Garden and Our home. I just have to create my own garden one of these days that will be just as magical and wonderful, that will change whoever visits it, like the one I left behind without getting to say goodbye or thank you for all the friendships it fertilized.
Besides all this, I am having a disagreement with C. S. Lewis over his definition of Joy:
“… it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.” Surprised By Joy
Later.
