Bloggers. Masturbating. The Stories We Tell. A Failure of Imagination.

…Old blogger friend reappears, new blogger friend disappears, and old blogger hater proves he’s still around.

1. Where did Dena go?2. And welcome back Leva Malone.
Who has blogged a story startling enough to make Holly Sargis gasp.
(and if you get that reference…I don’t know…some kind of extra special kudos).
3. And Al (only a few of you have been around long enough to remember Al) how he found some November post shallow and curtly called it writer and all of the people who had commented on it incapable of true emotion .

Surprise surprise, turns out he’s still reading (see comment section for Hair Today…).

Al, this post is dedicated to you. Sure, you’ve been a bit rude, but I have to adore you.
You want to hate me but can’t. Most people, they want to love me but can’t.

And you’ve proven yourself an avid reader.

I thank you for your addiction.
I’m really flattered.

...It occurs to me that you know you’re in trouble when you fall asleep masturbating.
If this happens to you, it’s not about fatigue.
The problem is deeper is deeper than that.

It’s not a problem I’ve had by the way.

I’m much too narcissistic for that.

…I used to have this idea about connections.
Because for me the apocalypse is always visible in the genesis, I know that things will end, everything.

When I say hello to you, the echo I hear is goodbye.

And when you think like that, you either stop, or you find a way to deal with it. To allow yourself to touch when you know that you’re going to have to un-touch.

What I used to tell myself, it was a story. In that story, I met the same people over and over. My lovers, they were the same girl. I never really said goodbye to her, just some particular makeup of flesh and bone, just some distinct voice and eye color.

This Girl, it was her soul over and over. We part and meet up again and part again.

These are the kind of stories we tell ourselves to keep on going. To give meaning to our lives. To make things ok.

Like the stories we tell ourselves about Olympus, or the Rainbow.
Like, in fact, most of the stories we tell ourselves.

…Perhaps the greatest failure we face as humans is the failure of imagination.

So I imagined that when we touch and have to let go that some consistent soul links them all, all the touches. So I imagined that there was never a real goodbye. That was useful in that it let me touch.

And sometimes, it helped me to let go.
What happens when you think like that, you float too far above. You’re half a suicide. This is your death dream.

This is you looking at your life through a telescope. This is you drifting up beneath a balloon, the ground getting far away, the people turning into squiggles.

The stories we tell ourselves and how they lead us astray.
The way our imaginations refuse to try to summon up the truth.

We imagine that the stars guide us, so that whatever happens, it’s destiny. We imagine destiny is good. In that story, Somebody somewhere has a plan, and no matter how things all seem to go wrong, it’s ok, because that’s how the Author wanted it.

Ask Pirandello.

…The near-husband who stands on the alter, he fails to imagine himself in seven years, that slow burning itch. He imagines a love song come to fruition in a world where there is no desire to stray. There is no argument that can’t be simply overcome. How can he prepare for all those hard roads when he’s imagined it all wrong?

That near-wife, same problem. Imaging every love story she ever watched, every fairy tale she ever heard. If she’d only imagine how it will really be, maybe she could do something about it.

Poor woman. Poor man.

…There was a time when I’d look at a girl, and what I’d see, it was a cure for all that ailed me. If I could only see her nipples, touch her vagina, get inside of her. Then we’d sacredly bond and everything would be better than all right.

What I do now is I make myself imagine what she’ll seem like to me when we’ve done all that. When I’ve scratches the physical surface of her mysteries. When I’ve convinced her to surrender and to accept mine.

What will she look like to me then?What will she sound like?
Feel like?

Like Ben and Elaine on the bus at the end, how will we see each other when the excitement of the chase is over?

This helps a little.

This unfailure of imagination.

…When I lived on the rez, city people would come out, grow braids, beat drums, build sweat lodges. They imagined some purer life was to be had with indigenous peoples. They got nostalgic over the times the tribal people had before Anglo contact, before Manifest Destiny, before the devil on the Mayflower.

As the victim is sacred.

As if women weren’t marked by men with knives; as if they didn’t war from one tribe to the other over resources; as if the individual wasn’t plagued by greed and jealousy.

There was never a garden like that.
Only children., bless them, live in that kind of paradise. And not for long.

These credit card hippies with their blond braids, they couldn’t imagine what it really was like in the onceupontime they’d dredged up so that they could believe the world was ever un-corrupted and that it could be communed with in that way again.

We don’t imagine things the way they were or are or will be.
We imagine things the way we want them to be.

And dreamers are lovely, but what little good we do dreaming.