It just struck me strange; standing on a busy street today, buying gas from a guy in an armored booth. Two inches of bulletproof glass separated me from him, like any minute I'd want to blow him away. He was a recent immigrant from India, and we had a nice conversation, in a buying-gas sort of way, and I realized that the guy who designed that booth was helping to impose fear on our relationship
What a world. People so afraid of the loneliness that they wave flags or buy more things or fuck themselves silly. What are we so afraid of? Speaking of gas, Why do we carry two tons of steel with us wherever we go? Blast Beethoven or Sid Vicious or Gospel music, never thinking about what any of those guys
Mean -- they wrote those songs to share with other people, not to impress them, just to try to share the ache of glimpsing something larger than Me, larger than petty human circumstance - to seek something larger than the darker selfishness that seeks to ruin our world...
Sometimes, in the driest moment of Fall in California, when the Oaks and Manzanitas are struggling through the last of the summer drought, I smell 6-month-absent rain on a new breeze that is somehow different than the dry, damp fog of coastal Northen California summer - like Life sending its reassurance that death does not win - and I climb up the hill, sit on a rock and face the wind, so that I can feel the first drop of the rainy season on my face...and ache for someone to share it with, but afraid that no one would understand.
And then I remember that they have things to show me that I may not understand, but the joy is in trying to understand, and trying to express my own joy or sorrow or hope. Sometimes the greatest gift you can give to someone is to allow them to give to you.
