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Jun. 28th, 2006 05:37 pmI am an exhibitionist. I am a mental exhibitionist, and I like to grill.
The second (hopefully inflammatory) statement is easier to justify. My parents are visiting my elderly-and-infirm great aunt in SoCal, and I am cooking hamburgers for my brother an myself. Right now. As I type this. I'm out on the deck with my laptop and my keyboard, because five minutes ago I was narrating in my head and the must-tell impulse was hard to bear. That's the second part, I guess. I'm too used to blogging now to deal with it gracefully, or any other way but by tapping out some rich-or-meager experiences.
But I was standing here reflecting, ironically, that words don't describe very well. This may be old news, if not no revealation at all, to some of you. But there aren't really exact words for the feeling of deck-wood under my feet and hands, or the sight of my shadow cast model-thin on the grass some fifteen feet below the deck. I can admire it, not because I dislike my solid body shape but because there is an aesthetic homogenity in the shadow, and a construct mood of its sun-angled skinny shape. If I raise up my hand with the fingers outstretched, I can't see the shadow fingers at all, except for a slight flicker of darker green.
I can't describe the difference between the cool breeze on my face, looking out past the barbeque at this admirable shadow, to the sun on my back. There's an equilibrium of heat when I open the grill to flip the hamburgers--I'm grilled, for a few seconds, on both sides, by the smoke and the light. I wonder if the admitted human obsession with sex is just a search for climax in these kinds of perfectly simple experiences, wondering--where is my life peaking? Here? Or here? There are places where we have to think, "Not here, can't be here, this is awful, I'll kill myself if this is the apex of it all," but there are so many good pieces, uncomplicated pieces, with no promise of ranking in importance or meaning. We read too many stories. We expect a hierarchical organization of what we feel.
And for some of us, we drag out small computers into the sunshine, so that the dust on the screen glitters and makes the words hard to see, and write. And hope that nothing worth mentioning happens in the meantime of writing it.
The second (hopefully inflammatory) statement is easier to justify. My parents are visiting my elderly-and-infirm great aunt in SoCal, and I am cooking hamburgers for my brother an myself. Right now. As I type this. I'm out on the deck with my laptop and my keyboard, because five minutes ago I was narrating in my head and the must-tell impulse was hard to bear. That's the second part, I guess. I'm too used to blogging now to deal with it gracefully, or any other way but by tapping out some rich-or-meager experiences.
But I was standing here reflecting, ironically, that words don't describe very well. This may be old news, if not no revealation at all, to some of you. But there aren't really exact words for the feeling of deck-wood under my feet and hands, or the sight of my shadow cast model-thin on the grass some fifteen feet below the deck. I can admire it, not because I dislike my solid body shape but because there is an aesthetic homogenity in the shadow, and a construct mood of its sun-angled skinny shape. If I raise up my hand with the fingers outstretched, I can't see the shadow fingers at all, except for a slight flicker of darker green.
I can't describe the difference between the cool breeze on my face, looking out past the barbeque at this admirable shadow, to the sun on my back. There's an equilibrium of heat when I open the grill to flip the hamburgers--I'm grilled, for a few seconds, on both sides, by the smoke and the light. I wonder if the admitted human obsession with sex is just a search for climax in these kinds of perfectly simple experiences, wondering--where is my life peaking? Here? Or here? There are places where we have to think, "Not here, can't be here, this is awful, I'll kill myself if this is the apex of it all," but there are so many good pieces, uncomplicated pieces, with no promise of ranking in importance or meaning. We read too many stories. We expect a hierarchical organization of what we feel.
And for some of us, we drag out small computers into the sunshine, so that the dust on the screen glitters and makes the words hard to see, and write. And hope that nothing worth mentioning happens in the meantime of writing it.