...there is also hope where there is no life.

lately, i've been feeling like a sick dog.

i have a friend who told me, recently, that dogs, when they die, try to find the lowest lying ground to lay down and wait. from my only experience with a dying dog, i know this to be true: my dog, sully, spent a lot of time just lying in the basement before he died. we weren't sure what was wrong with him, but a few days later we took him to the vet. when they opened him up, his intestines were full of tumors, and we had him put to sleep. or, rather, my parents had him put to sleep. i didn't know he was gone until he was gone. that was four years ago; i was twenty one; i cried like a baby.

at any rate, i've been feeling like a sick dog, quitting to the basement. i get up, and i go to work, and when i'm there i check my life at the door, because work is stressful enough as it is without loading baggage on top. i am happy at work. when i'm at work, i'm in work-land. life there is simple. get to the tables on time. talk about the specials. bring over drinks. take the orders. send them to the kitchen after calculating how long it will take rose to be ready to cook them and how soon i will need them. whatever other adjustments there are along the way, however often i feel like i'll never be able to get things done in the time i have to them, i know the world inside caffe espresso won't come crashing down. however close we come to the apocalypse at 4401 transit road, all is never lost, and so far i've made it out alive everytime.

i'm more comfortable with situations that threaten my job than i am with situations that threaten my life. there is no cigarette break from life, there is no punching out of life and coming back early the next morning to finish the stuff you left undone last night. anything that threatens the stability of my life amounts to being life threatening...the bags that i walk out of work with, the bags with no other door to check them at, no room to unpack them at. the rest of my life is a juggling act, a gypsy life.

one bag for the social shambles my life is -- the loose ends of ties cut, the search for true friends, and true family, the burden of building a core of people who can really know me, fighting against the lust i have to decieve them, to steer them around the landmines of my personality.

one bag for the spiritual, religious, creative experience that has taken a quarter of a century to start revealing itself to me, that is constantly tearing apart and re-raising what i think my life is, and what i think life in general means...full of secret compartments stuffed with words and the weight of all of their connotative, denotative, historical, etymological, linguistomysticism -- the tools for my self performed, exploratory surgery on the meaning of my life, the bricks and mortar for building my life, the iron girders that allow it to reach heights heretofor only dreamed. the art of my life, to take an old familiar thing and make it new and give it a spirit of meaning, to give it significance.

one bag full of the academic tragedy that was my semester, full of the fear that i won't be able to pull my academic career out of the nose dive i've somehow let it slip into, full of the fear that won't be able to recover, that i will have dashed opportunity into the side of a mountain in the chaos of one semester. my life, my livelihood may not ever recover. i don't want to be stuck in the meaninglessness of a lowpaying job working off a college education that amounts only to a lifetime of debt. i could have gone to grad school, gotten my docorate, and been paid to do it...

one bag full of rapacious sexuality, sometimes just barely in check

one bag full of perpetual financial disaster

one bag full of ego alternating between pride and low self esteem

one carry-on of loneliness; i carry it wherever i go. on planes, i buy it a ticket and sit it in the seat next to me.

i'm tired of carrying this stuff. tired of juggling it. at work i'm hardly bothered by it, but at the end of the day i come home, and i just want some place to store it for awhile.

one day i can't help but think it will drop, all around me; i'll fudge the act, the bags will drop, and my life will come crashing down. it feels inevitable -- you can only have so many things hanging in the air before gravity gets ahold of them. the only time it stops is when you die. you bring your bags to the basement, you stack them in the corner, you wait, and finally, you get some rest.

funny; i've been staying in my parents basement on and off for the past few weeks. it is perfectly dark down there. i could sleep for ages.
i'm not suicidal. but death is the door to new things. death is only half an equation, and yes, it is an ultimate end, but the beginning of some journey that we don't yet know. death as a metaphor fascinates me. death as a potential for reinvention, as a way of coming back, as a route, the only route, to resurrection.

i expect i will be staying down in my parent's basement for a few days longer, until the year dies. i'll come up and out and look foreward to a new year, a new life, more hope, more sunshine, more strength in the bones of my new body to carry my bags, to continue juggling them, to continue on in this gypsy life, and finally make it mean something.