ad astra!

So life has been fun lately. Emotions are changing once every four seconds, and someday, hopefully soon, the will return to their previous steady-state conditons.

Life, if anything, serves for the patient and observant as a lesson in impermanence. What once was one thing today will be quite a different thing the next. The aluminum can that I bring to the grocery store for recycling (you see, we have a 10� deposit in this state so those fuckers are like GOLD) will be made into something else, but it will still be a mass of thirteen protons and fourteen neutrons refined from bauxite that was dug out of the earth. There are traces of it in my bloodstream, and since we’ve been recycling for some twenty years perhaps even the litle bits of Al-27 floating around in my mitochondria were once somebody’s beer can. The water I had just now was once in Lake Michigan, and before that in a cloud or a glacier or who knows where. Things change state constantly, but ultimately they remain part of the interconnected universe that we are all a part of. That is almost too lofty to be even remotely comforting, but if I sit still for awhile and think about it things seem okay. Just like the can, I too have changed and will change again, but remain a part of the same whole as I always was.

The hard part is getting to understand one another and forge healthy relationships. I’m still not sure what a “healthy relationship” is, and while you may have one or another along the road mine are complicated by all sorts of feelings and sex and resentment and grattitude and confusion that give them a richness and a difficulty that, while one may change and leave me reeling, I still can somehow (at least today) find the energy and the desire to go and look for more.

Happiness is, after all, what we are all looking for. Some people may have given up trying to find it in our carbon-based companions (the current trend has been towards plastic consumer goods, but this was not always the case�ivory and limestone were the rage of the roman world) I still have some hope. While there is no knight in shining armor to rescue us from our ivory towers, it is the realization that we’ve built our own tower and imprisoned ourselves there in hopes that the knight will come that guides us towards true love. The knights, after all, have coconuts and not horses.

Now go away or I will taunt you a second time…

*So I understand I suck at updating this, but I’ve bee trying to read alot this summer and have been working a lot. Now the bottom has fallen out of things, here is a long post…

I’ve spent the last four years looking for happiness.

During the first, it was respite from a constant, plaguing depression. At first I found a respite in Jeff, it was one of the first times when I can remember not being vaguely depressed. I can remember that feeling exactly: I was driving somewhere and I stopped at Cottonwood and Baldwin at the light and just sort of noticed, like you notice how the neighbors had painted their house a different color or that they’d torn down a building on the block�something obvious had changed but yet it was almost such a subtle change to the landscape that you might not notice it if you weren’t really paying attention. I had poured so much emotion into that relationship that when it ended I didn’t know what to do and I was just unhappy all over again.

I thought happiness might be restored in another relationship, but one of those was a long time coming. In the meantime I’d found some genuine friends and can remember some genuinely good times that we had. The summer and winter with Heather Griffis and her friend Becky is up there with the best times of my life, then I met Carson.

Carson and I have had two years. Two years of memories that are swarming around in my head right now and I just don’t know what to do with them. Last night he said it was over. I can’t say that I didn’t see it coming, but I can’t say that I don�t love him and that I don�t want to wake up next to him every day. But he doesn’t want to be my boyfriend anymore. He says he doesn’t feel for me the way I feel for him anymore.

He says he wants to go and be happy, he wants to find himself, and that he feels a positive momentum and that I am not positive. Which is true. Because I don’t know what to do be happy.

I know that when I write I am happy, but even during the period leading up to the Oldenburg awards I was deeply depressed and doubting myself and my talents, which lately has been going on as well when I sit and really think of how much of a hard thing this is that I want to get involved in.

Socio-culturally I am told on nearly all fronts that I must have “stuff” to be happy. I see people with “stuff” who are happy, but I think that some of the happiest people I know don’t have much “stuff’ they have people. My people were replaced with most just one, and for two years it’s been pretty much just Carson and I. I still think Carson is great to be around. I really hate that we cannot be lovers (as it were) but then I know that if he doesn’t want it then there is not really much I can do, and that I have to go and let him find out who and what he wants to be�which is what he is ready to do. And we’d been fighting so much that it is just not working how it was anymore.

I know that anything I can buy will not really make me happy. Thinks break, they are stolen, they do not by any means even begin to replace having my dearest friend on my sofa at 4am on a friday night in front of the Elte Monte Billy Bob show, no matter what mental state we might be in. Or just a good conversation over coffee, because I would trade the biggest house or the biggest TV or millions of other things for true understanding with another human being. Right now, really I would trade nearly anything just to wake up in the bed with Carson one more morning, but we won’t be doing that ever again. That really causes me to suffer.

But I know what the thing I want most when it comes to Carson and I for us to be happy, and if we cannot be happy with each other I will have to accept that. My love for him needs to go beyond my needs but must encompass my wish for his happiness.

What I’ve been looking for for the past four years is to try and duplicate an assortment of moments with Brad that begin with experiences in high school, Oscar and Felix and Clarence and Ethel at Applebee’s and ended on my porch three months ago with a farewell that seemed to come much too quickly and last not nearly enough.

I looked for hapiness in a social group of my peers and could not find it there, I look for it every hour or so in a cigarette even though I know that it just makes things that much more better. I looking in a bottle but that was extremely futile if not excessively harmful and shortlived. I looked at other substances but knew those were temporary as well and only led to much more suffering. I’ve tried to find it in the arms of another man, but really I think the only place for hapiness in the world lives within one’s own human heart, but I’m not sure how to find it. I need to go and try but the darkness is closing in around me yet again and I am doubting so many things in this world that I could use some words of encouragement beyond the cheap clich�s I could find on television or in other forms of mass media, but I don’t even have any for myself.