Wednesday, August 13, 2008 | |

The Life of the Mind: A Sign of the Times


Thoughts for the day (or at least for the past couple of hours)


1. Thinking about how I just played my first hand in the stock market...this could be fun.

2. Thinking about a friend I met not very long ago who is in “the desert” – at war in an undisclosed location.

3. Thinking about how I am inching away from agnosticism and into a true belief in something greater than myself and how it’s a shame to feel to have to excuse a belief in a greater force at work in our lives and in the world.

4. Thinking about how I asking that greater force to be by the side of my friend in “the desert.” Also at the side of my good friend who is about to have a baby. Her third girl.

5. Thinking the person I love. How there were two times I lost my virginity, with two different people. How the first time, it was simply an act, the breaking of tissue. And how the second time it was more gradual, over days of sex and champagne and conversation. How the second time felt like it was the true loss of virginity along with the very real gain of something else. This second person is the person I still love.

6. Thinking about how my first love was a platonic one – not too very long ago, full of a unique kind of hunger – a literal physical hunger, a sexual hunger, a desperate hunger. Love should never be desperate. I’m glad we remained friends and didn’t, at that moment in my life, become lovers – it might have ended in disaster. It was a wise decision on his behalf.

7. Thinking about how the Chinese Gymnasts look so young and how Phelps has to consume 12,000 calories a day in order to keep up with those speedy laps. Every time I watch him swim I think to myself: is this man human? And then that leads me on a train of thoughts about humanity and where we come from and how our gymnastics are not so far from fantastic documentaries like Planet Earth…and how really we’re just mammals with minds. But then isn’t that combination a very powerful thing? And then I say, ok, ok…avoid the philosophizing and BS, move on, move on.

8. Thinking about another set of human acts: creation and commerce and how that comes together in the selling of a $26 dollar grape ($910 for the bunch) in Japan.

9. ...Obama, Mc Cain, Paris Hilton. Georgia and Russia. Putin. Hijo de Puta?


10. Back to Japan; how I love Japan. And how in Kyoto I had a spiritual experience that’s difficult to express in a bullet point. Thinking about the book I’m reading by Murakami about running. And how I’m training for a marathon and how all of these thoughts came to me while I was just outside running. And then thinking about how all these thoughts come full circle…and how tomorrow there might be another circle to ride.

11. Thinking about traveling, in circles in lines, across borders and boundaries, cities, states, and countries…Hawaii (I want to go back to Hawaii...). Thinking about love, the roundness of my life, about fruit (like the grapes), and the fruit of the earth and the fruit of my mind, and the fruit of my efforts, and my second love, and all whom I love, and my life; and then I think of death…as always, the day has not gone by without thinking about the death of my father. The anniversary of his death is next Friday, the 22nd…I think I want to add him, my father, to number four on this list…that the greater force be also with him, to guide him through what I don’t yet understand, in whatever transition of self and form he might be going through…

…There are always more thoughts…but, today, I’ll end here.

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