helio365isms

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. I’m not sure I can wrap my mind around completing this project yet, but I’m glad that I did it and I’m glad that it’s over and I’m glad that you’re reading this. I started this project a year ago today “in an effort to keep a record of a year of my life, and hopefully improve my writing in the process.” My friend and I did our projects in tandem, actually, which was sometimes a great help and sometimes just hilarious. (He also did a flickr version at the same time, for which I applaud him.)

There isn’t much more to be said. We lived, we wrote. We will live and write on. Here’s to us!

And to you.

Ever been in love? You should really try it at some point. I remember the last time I fell in love properly - something like two hours ago, it was. Yep. I was gathering my hat and scarf, making plans with a friend for later in the evening, when a man came in the door and made a beeline straight for where I was standing. I watched him approach out of the corner of my eye, probably rather conspicuously. The next song was starting. He held out a hand.

Me: “I’ve literally never done this before.”

Him: “Okay.”

He was tall, like I like them. Surprisingly buff. Almost imperceptibly ginger in the dim room. He didn’t really look me in the eyes after I took his hand; his breath smelled a great deal like tuna. And, most importantly, he led like a dream.

I fell in love with the dance right away.

He drew me in, let me out, guided the small of my back with a sure hand, and we danced until the space between us had diminished to the breadth of a finger. Maybe less. I fell in love with the space between us.

I fell in love with the way the song eased out of our ears. I fell in love with the moment in which there was no music but we were holding still holding the dip.

Him: “You said you’ve never done that before?”

Me: “Ahaha, yeahhhh.”

Him: “That was great!”

Me: “Thank you. I, erm, have to go now - I was actually about to leave when you came up.”

Him: “Oh! I’m sorry for keeping you.”

I hope that I said “Please don’t be sorry,” but I honestly don’t remember.

Outside, I fell in love with the air. I fell in love with my hat and scarf all over again. I fell in love with my home while I was chaining my bike up, and then with my bike while I was keying into my home and thinking about biking. I fell in love with my roommate when I walked in, and with my bed when I sank into it, and with pretty much everything that I’ve come in contact with since then.

It’s astounding how much I can love once I get going.

And that’s sort of the crux of the matter, isn’t it? Loving with abandon is simply a matter of taking the first plunge (or getting pushed off the first cliff while you aren’t looking, perhaps?), and, for goodness’ sake, why can’t that plunge happen every morning? Every action - this breath, and this one, and this one, and - is a plunge. Every sunrise is a plunge. Every end is a plunge.

I think that I am falling in love with first plunges.

I think that I am falling in love with falling in love.

If I do nothing else in my life, I hope that I will remember what this end, this plunge, and this love feel like.

Look, what I’m trying to say is this: people have done me wrong. People have done you wrong. And we’ve all been mistreated by things that aren’t even people - machines, institutions, inanimate objects (I’ve run into my fair share of doorjambs and table corners, okay?), what have you. But if we didn’t have these run-ins with the unpleasant parts of life, we wouldn’t be capable - and this is a fact, because our brains work in relative properties and not absolutes - of appreciating the pleasant bits.

The first thing I heard about Nietzsche was that he saw suffering as the most essential stage of life, and then I avoided him for a good five years or so because I thought that was the most miserly thing I’d ever heard. Sometimes I make dumb snap judgments. What Nietzsche actually said was that suffering is not an end but a means - to endurance, to strength, to improvement, in short, to everything admirable about mankind. He takes the glorification of suffering a bit far, I think, but the ideas it springs out of seem sound.

It’s more of a passive than an active paradigm, really; it has to do with accepting pain as an opportunity to refine the self. In other words, everything can be dealt with in a healthy manner if we simply think about it the right way. Happiness can help us get there, but so can its antithesis. We just have to take life as it comes.

It is raining apologetically. I hate it when the weather is apologetic.

Where I come from, it rains in squalls - loud, like the temper tantrum of a celestial two year old - and when you aren’t being drowned, you’re being smothered or baked. The humidity is like a chloroform-soaked pillow over your mouth and nose that knocks you out and then shoves you in an oven while you’re down and out. (Yes, I just compared being outside to being in an oven. And I’m not wrong, either.)

That’s real weather, good or bad. You might hate it, but at least it accepts what it is and commits to what it does, and there’s something admirable about that.

*

What is it that makes a person real? Regardless of whether or not that reality is good, I mean. You might hate it, but perhaps reality has more to do with accepting who you are and committing to what you do than with pleasing others. Certainly, there is something admirable about being real.

Where I come from, people tend to be more than a little fake, like they never got the memo that growing up has much to do with becoming a genuine person. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they still throw temper tantrums behind closed doors.) Living among them is a bit like being smothered to death by a large, cheerful pillow and then stabbed to a pulp afterward.

And they never apologize. I hate people who refuse to apologize.

I imagine the first part of writing to be sort of like fishing: coming up with an idea, for me, is very much like coming up with a fish. There’s this mass of moving water that you’re standing in (or floating on), so you dangle a hook in and hope that something catches on it. If you wait long enough, something does - and then you get to decide whether or not it’s a keeper.

The rest of the writing process doesn’t lend itself quite as neatly to metaphor. What is simultaneously frustrating and exhilarating? Endless and over far too soon? The only thing I can think of is child-rearing, and my grasp on what that’s like is probably none too firm.

Then again, I wouldn’t be the first to compare producing art to producing a functioning adult. Trite as it may be, I do see strong similarities between the two - the patience and dedication it takes to do the job well, for example, or the learning process the artist/parent enters into. I could go on. Of course, there are also differences, perhaps the most significant being this: the former is predominantly selfish, and the latter is predominantly altruistic.

This is not to say that art does not have its place. But it may be, to return to the fish, that art’s place has less to do with the fisherman than with being the water that bodies swim in.

I, for one, would love to be immersed in it.

Ten years from now, I want to still be writing. Even if it’s just letters. And I want to still be drawing, even if it’s just doodles.

I want to be still making music with other people who have as much fun with it and love it as much as I do.

In fact, I want to be making more things in general - and buying less. I want to be growing more, both in personal terms and in terms of helping other living things. I want to be more grounded in transience than permanence, partly because the former is the one that I feel guaranteed of, and I think that there can be beauty, joy, and freedom in it if I look hard enough. Further, I think the value of transient things can be seen in the importance of experiences relative to the importance of objects, and I would like, as time goes on, to strengthen my preference for the former both in word and deed.

As a function of all of the above, I want to own less things than I do now. Books included.

Again as a corollary to the above, I want to eat well, and I want eating well to be a part of a larger habit of taking good care of myself in a way that I find pleasant. (By eating well, I mean enjoying the process of preparing and savoring food, both alone and with others.)

I want to have at least as many friends and friendly acquaintances as I do now, and maybe a lover. I would also like for them to be present in all arenas of my life - home, social, and work.

Finally, I would like to live happily within my means, and to earn those means through work that I like “more than any unproductive pleasure” (to steal from Paul Graham). As I see it now, finding work that I genuinely admire and enjoy - even if I can’t support myself entirely from it - will be one of the best fights I could win in this world.

She strings words along like a pretty boy trails adoring girls like a momma duck leads ducklings like little fat blobs of sunshine. And she might like that sentence if she read it.

There are rhymes hidden in what she says, and some snide humor, but it all flows by so smoothly that most of what you end up hearing is just the rhythm anyway. She plays fast and loose with it. Amazingly, everything makes sense anyway, and you find yourself wondering if it isn’t the rhythm you’re hearing in other people’s voices instead of their words, too, and if maybe that’s what makes anyone understand anything anyone tries to get in anyone else’s head.

She’s got style. It pours right out of her - she moves the mic back so she “won’t spit on y’all,” but I think it’s because she knows her style would burn right through our skin. And I guess that’s just another way of saying that she’s strong, that she knows who she is and who she wants to be and what she thinks about the world.

She steps onstage as if she were a boy and make sounds as if she were a girl and cracks jokes as if she were someone who knows what it is to renegotiate that dichotomy every morning, every time she meets someone for the first time, and every time she looks in a mirror. Yeah, if style has anything at all to do with strength, she’s got it.

The wind whips rivers of leaves along the grass, shoals of autumnal fish fluttering around my ankles. I am not in a hurry. I like the wind to push-broom me along, because this sort of bluster reminds me of Winnie the Pooh, and of my first home. I want to call the boy biking past Christopher Robin, and then I want him to stay with me and crunch leaves all the way home like my brother and I used to on the sidewalk between our bus stop and our house.

The boy is not Christopher Robin, nor is he my brother. But the day is blustery, so I do crunch leaves, and then I sit down on a bench. I wouldn’t sit on it with the sun beating down. I wouldn’t sit on it in a spring shower. But sit on it I do.

I feel a piece of the blustery weather beating about inside me. Everything in my head is liminal - stuck in the stage between stages - and carries the scent of fading colors; there’s something fragile and needling about it, just like the first few crisp days of the year. I can no more dispel it than I can autumn, and for that matter, I wouldn’t want to. I’m not one to reject a state of being.

So I stay on the bench long enough for three white-bellied squirrels to make their erratic way across my field of vision, and then I go about my business.

It is healthy for everyone to feel like a complete and total beginner every now and then. It’s a feeling that I rather suspect most people take for granted or even abhor, because it, by necessity, comes with a heaping serving of inadequacy. (I would also agree that it can be healthy for everyone to feel like an expert every now and then as well, but that’s beside the point.)

The whole mess starts with the love at first sight, when you meet something fascinating enough to make you want to pursue it. And then, hopefully, there’s the headfirst dive into it and the spongelike absorption of all related material that comes your way. At some point along the way, your fascination becomes discerning, takes on direction. You begin to get vague ideas of what it means to master the discipline. When you perceive an accomplished craftsman at work, you think to yourself, “Clearly, this is beautiful and elegant. Why and how is this, and why and how can I replicate it? What rules are there that I do not know? What intuition must I hone?”

At that point, on the cusp of developing a detection system for the nuances of what makes a master, right when you can tell that other people are good but not how or exactly why - that’s the feeling that everyone should be reminded of periodically. Generous amounts of humility and awe, but also of wonder and infatuation.

It is good to be infatuated.

“If I had to name one place you should go in the whole world,” he says, taking the conversation on a slightly different tack, “I think it would be… India. I’d have to say India.”

“Really?” I’m not that surprised.

“Yes.”

“Why?” But I do want to know the rationale behind it. This man has been around the world (“I’ve only been to Australia twice, but I’ve been to New Zealand a few times, maybe five or six,” he says nonchalantly, while I snort, “That’s more than me.” His response: “I’m older than you are.”) so his opinion is well informed.

“I found myself there.” It takes me a moment to parse this correctly. “It changed me. They have such culture, so many religions - and they’re quite tolerant, most of them. Ready to kill each other every five minutes, but still. I love to go there. I went to a rat temple once, how great is that.”

I gesture in the shape of a medium-sized rodent. “A rat rat?”

“Yeah, where they pray to rats. Or you’re driving down this busy road and suddenly everything stops because there’s a cow in the road. And it knows it’s in charge. They’re beautiful, too, glossy, because everyone brushes their coats and gives them their best food.”

I raise my eyebrows, but I have an idea of what he’s getting at. It’s not rat temples or glossy cows - it’s something much, much harder to articulate. “India it is, then.”