| Apr. 24th, 2005 @ 12:34 pm kites, satellites, and thunder booms |
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Current Music: such great heights (iron & wine version)
I got really high last night. I didn’t really plan to, honestly—I probably smoke about 2-3 times a year maximum. I have no problem with myself or others doing it, it’s just that my life is not…constructed…to incorporate that kind of thing very often anymore.
“When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things. At present we see indistinctly, as in a glass darkly, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known…”
Or some such nonsense.
My one friend is known for having good stuff. I don’t really ask how, what or where – and he usually doesn’t say. But last night had something to do with Alaskan Thunder Boom (Thunder Fuck? Some such silly name), and there was a quick mention of a guy in California who can grow marijuana for medicinal purposes or such.
I took one small hit off of my friend’s homemade gravity bong (an old Gatorade bottle doing the trick). There is that cliché – “high as a kite.” Such nice buoyancy, floating lilt to the imagery in that phrase. But that seems outdated in light of today’s technology. I believe a better description for my state last night would be “high as a satellite” (although that has nowhere near the syllabic rhythm of the clichéd phrase). Because a hundred feet off the ground is not high enough. Alaskan thunder booms indeed.
I was worried at the time because I was supposed to go meet some people for dinner. It was going to be one of those nights (that I seem to be continually involved with) where there were all these separate factions coming together for dinner, the only common thread being me. A friend is in town and he will be out with some of his friends and so I agree to meet them for dinner but then also invite along two separate friends who just so happen to be in town the same evening…the “piling it on” theory of social interaction. We were supposed to meet at the newest sushi restaurant here in Columbus – Kooma (the kind of place that seems to be popping up all over Columbus recently, what with their chic bathroom designs and hip mood lighting and such). One of the couples – who only knew me and none of the other folks— are some of the nicest people in the world, always gracious and accepting and easy-going, but nonetheless not into discussion of kites, satellites, and thunder booms (Alaskan or otherwise).
I thought about ditching out of the whole evening…apologizing to both factions the following day for inviting them all out separately and then never appearing. The fallout would be slightly awkward (since both groups included people who were out of town visitors that I don’t get to see often) – but it would avoid a potentially far more disastrous evening, considering that I was almost incoherently high. (skipping, of course, the mandatory thoughts I also had – why take that bong hit, no matter how tiny, when you know you need to be meeting people in 40 minutes….)
But instead I went ahead with dinner. You make the bed, you lie in it.
The point of this post is not to say: I was high as shit last night. The dinner went as expected – I was unable and ill-equipped to drive to a restaurant I had never been to, be the first to arrive (somehow) and have to negotiate a table for 9, and then make small talk with a couple of strangers while my mind was taking repeated, mini time warps. Let’s skip the part that includes the incredible absurdity of running into two guys I used to know in high school – but didn’t really like – by complete chance, while in such a state. But I did it anyway (I knew I just had to tough it out for a few hours and the high would dissipate – to the point I could function around human beings again. Just avoid major embarrassments – and suffer through a series of minor ones).
No, the “point” has something to do with that satellite image. And I don’t think I will be able to explain it. So instead I tell you a story about being fucked up in a swanky sushi restaurant in the heart of the Midwest. There is this wonderfully comforting feeling that nonetheless leaves me a bittersweet aftertaste. It has to do with living in a social external world with other people and things yet never truly knowing each other, the internal universes we all seem to walk in alone. But I don’t mind that loneliness and I think that is what gives me the bittersweet aftertaste – I wish that the loneliness, the sometime self-imposed isolation – would bother me more. That I would feel compelled to sneak back toward the fire around which all the others are gathered.
The satellite. All alone by itself in the coldest part of space, moving in silent circles through vast and absolute silence. Utter solitude, yet there is the comforting, invisible pull of gravity (of an ineffable force poorly described in the most intricate of words and equations). There is something reassuring and safe about the set orbit, a guided path, the sum of incalculable pushes and pulls, the total result being a circular path, over and over.
And seeing the world from such great heights. Detached, yet gaining perspective. Walking with one foot buried in the dirt and the other stretched to the wingtips of birds in flight.
A weird schism, one that I have to straddle in my own private silences.
Such great heights. Such great depths – “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas” as Eliot would say.
A thought about Kierkegaard. The infinite abyss between human and Creator. People left in absolute isolation, from their God, from each other in the end (?). Yet, Kierkegaard extends a quiet hand of support, perhaps – that silence, the deafening roar of lack of sound in the coldest parts of space is the Creator’s presence.
The feeling of frustration and relief, simultaneously.
Everything looks perfect from far away. |
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