I suppose I should stretch out in this space while I still have a chance. Tonight I am thinking about friendship, or the distinction between doing something with someone because you enjoy the activity vs. enjoying doing something with someone because they're them. There are ways in which a person is trainable, but it's not universal; that is, there are things that one will learn to appreciate beyond the period of time in which they're doing them just because the person they're doing them with is also doing them, and things which one won't. And then there are things which are tainted with the minor, niggling frustration associated with doing them even though one would really rather not do them except that the person with whom you're doing them wants to do them and that's great. My goal has always been to hew towards greater flexibility in this regard, with the idea that the more things I learn to appreciate, the happier I will be as a person. Then; to what extent does one's moral standing influence this? Is it possible to happily do things with one friend that another friend would find intrinsically detestable? Yeppers. Where is the center? Who eventually is the person doing all the fun activities, beyond the sum of the tidal influences of the persons around him?
Old questions. When one is asking questions like this it is probably best to sit in a quiet room and to attempt to rid oneself of all outside influences for a short period of time, quieting one's breathing until the long-dormant innermost core of oneself unfolds, and the whisper of the real you - the properly individuated you - can at last be heard, and it turns out that it wants to play video games.
(In the morning of the pale cave, I stride out into the blue field, flexing feet long and limber as isopods, attenuated gray pads sliding past the grass, the sun beating down on the tips of my semi-conical headpiece. The wind blows tones across my exposed bone flutes.)
My secret whispery self has actually been telling me to play bass and write down nonsense of late, which makes for a useful and exciting change. Hope it lasts! Hope it lasts more than friendships, at least. (Nota bene: my friendships tend to last for ages and ages because I need to see the way things turn out.) Journal is for bleating, and these days I am feeling the need for radical honesty, along with aching gums and a general desire for General Bean Curd, and radical honesty is murder on everything.
(Sweep of long, long legs through the grass. The more popular inhabitants of the pale cave have bone flutes that blow at proper intervals, but mine make a flatted fifth. i stay inside on windy days, usually, but there is more than I can stand beating at the inside of me today, and more than I can stand hovering unspoken in the crowded space around me, and it is more than I can stand to carom between the carpeted walls anymore, and so I am going for a walk, honking discordantly as I go.
Full five fathoms of blue grass. I walk down the hill until the hill itself curls under and I am in the nearest uncanny valley, where gravity curves sideways and the straightest paths are on the underside of the rim. I walk at 20 degrees off Z-axis for a time, stopping to pick yellow flowers that grow on the wall beneath me, when I hear faintly the baleful, reedy tritone that belongs to Dubbuk, standing somewhere unsheltered nearby. The most astonishing bit of luck. My blood quickens in its sponge as I turn, clambering over the lip into a more reasonable geometry.
She is standing underneath a sun tree, a pitiful thing whose outermost tendrils barely scrape the undersurface of the passing clouds. She appears to be writing in her journal. I must approach carefully if I am to remain unseen - these damnable blowholes! - and I cup my hands around my head to stop the noise as I swish forward, moving with the grasses' grain. By the time she looks up, I am upon her.
"Hi," I say.)
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- H. Duck (
eptified) wrote,