Huh.

I cannot think of any reason to love someone other than unexplained feelings.  The feelings that come from somewhere else and change the way you look at life.  Where do the unexplained feelings come from?  From love's storing ground?  Are love feelings handed out when storage is too full, or when all the good love has already been given away?  Why and what other reason would anyone suffer love?

It is far easier to like someone with great feeling.  You choose it then--it comes from no where but yourself, attached to no secret rules or properties that may flippantly modify thoughts or emotion.  To like or regard someone highly is the true contract of living people, furnished with ALL the splendors of love but none of the dripping sentiments, the burdens of jealousy and wandering affection.  To love is to fix with rules another person in time the moment he or she was deigned to be love-able--was loved.  Desired.  Possessed.

Huh.  So lovers are kind of assholes?  Huh.

You can like a home that doesn't belong to you and not wish to posses it.  In fact, you may even regard those living within very highly, maybe they even ask you to dinner every other tuesday and are likely to ask you again because you've never broken anything that belonged to them--and you refrained from acting like an idiot around anyone living on the premises who might be their daughter.  In general you refrain from things that might make your presence "tiresome".  Indeed!  These imaginary people cannot mistake your gentle loyalty and lack of aggression!  You are as peaceful and desirable as a night breeze, simultaneously forgettable and irreplaceable.  No harm intended, no harm to come.

Yes I should like to be liked far more than loved, especially if this means matching a night breeze.

~ B

The Width of the Heart.

It's comforting to me somehow to think that while compassion is a shining developmental achievement of mankind, some people just aren't born with it.  They are completely deficient.  They simply do not have the capacity for it, or have trouble recognizing it, even when they see it happening, even when they refer to compassion as something else--weakness perhaps.  How can this be comforting?  How can I view this phenomenon in a positive light, rather than frustration or a heavy acceptance of psychopaths?

I will get to that.  I want to say that, from my perspective, those who "feel" more than those who don't are more often the crazy ones.  The ones bombarded with these extraterrestrial "feelings" are kept from operating within their given reality in a civilized manner.  To be civil, surely, is to ignore passions on a daily basis.  To Feel the passions, to use them up and lavish them with experience and indulge them in sweet execution and delight...now that's crazy.  I think what I'm saying is the argument can go both ways.

But comfort...how am I comforted when facing my opposite?  I am comforted realizing that People Either Feel A Certain Way Or They Don't.  I really have no say in it, no chemical to add to the process.  It means that people play the piano or they can't.  It means you'll be blonde your whole life or you'll be raven.  Someone will love you with the power of a thousand suns or they simply can't--they don't even have the gas for it.  You can no sooner train someone to burn for you than you can train someone to be good at having arms (if they don't).

It is a matter of chemical harmony and becoming frustrated with those who are unABLE to display compassion is truly a senseless act.  We will no sooner teach them heart manners than they will teach us indifference.  We, that is I, can find the night wind that smells of freshly mown grass and just stay put until a time when another passes and asks if I too can detect the smell or we simply catch each other smiling over the simplicity of it.  The beauty of the clean and simple.

I refuse to fall in love with someone so against my feelings ever again.  I will be strong enough to steer clear of the pitfall of opposites.  I will love one of my kind, and they will see my heart.  I will not have to ask them if they can see it, I will know.  And they will view it as the gift that it is, because love is the thing I am good at, though I so rarely give it away.

~ Bernard  

The BookThatDoesn'tExist

I recall a picture book with which I was wholly obsessed when I was small.  I've never again seen it, even after troubling various librarians and exhaustive online searching.  I can't find it.  My mom checked it out of the library.  It had a shiny and yellowed protective cover and was pretty large.  I'm embarrassed to say it was a story about a pegasus--but an AWESOME pegasus.

The illustrations were all in Black & White.  Beautiful.  I have almost no memory of the story because my mother would make it up each time she read it to me.  It always changed.  I know that a pegasus lived in a house, and one night decided to fly out of one of the windows all over the town.  Looked at stuff.  Did things.  I must have loved all the different versions more than anything because the only picture I remember is the very manly winged horse flying out the window and my feeling of overwhelming excitement wondering where he would be going and what he would be doing that night.

I suppose it's possible my mother just made the whole thing up by blotting out the existing words of a very terrible book with excellent illustrations and I never noticed the tape or the white-out or her deft hands shielding me from crappy, indelible narrative.  I hope I don't wake up one day and books are dead, awakening to the snap of the final bullet sounding in the air as I realize the novelty has worn fully and completely off.  I try to imagine my mother reading the manly pegasus book to me from a tablet and it gives me a stomach ache.  But surely if a way is the only way you know, growing up, it is just as precious?  Maybe?  Help?

~ Bernard

I overheard a conversation today that went something like this:

Woman: I think I'm going to get my ankles reduced.

Man: What?

Woman: My ankles.  I want to make them smaller.

Man: They do that?

(Lots of nodding.  Man looked concerned.)

Man: ...your ankles look good.  I mean they look fine.

Woman: They don't.  I have excess muscle down there.  It's genetic.  Which is weird because the rest of me isn't like that, so if I get them reduced I'll look symmetrical.  I've thought about it a lot.

Man: That's amazing they can do that.  Won't it be hard to walk for a while?  Removing muscle is probably a big deal, like major surgery.  I just didn't know that was possible!

Woman: It isn't, Jared.  I was kidding.

(Tonally, Woman is pissed).

<Silence.  Lots of silence for Jared.>

I don't understand women.

~ B

Abe!

This was on the ground outside my house today.

So I was wrong about a secret follower.  It appears that one of the greatest men to have lived 

is trying to send me secret messages.  

Maybe.

1980?  

I've met people who were born during this year...I don't remember it much but my father bought his most favorite couch he's ever owned in 1980.  

I will think more on this.

(I would like to add that the tiny bag was sealed, and discovered face-up, once again).

~ B

the Lottery

When I was little I can remember eating a lot of frozen peas.  Why don't I do that anymore, eat frozen peas?  That would be better than a lot of the things I choose to eat now.  I think on the way home I'm going to buy some frozen peas and eat them.  What a barrel of laughs.

For the last few nights I've been having dreams about birds landing on my right hand, then they fly off into a cloudburst...then the sky explodes (in a good way.  Really good.  It's beautiful).  Usually at least two land at once, sometimes four.  Last night they were hummingbirds.  Different sizes--some probably too fat to be hummingbirds but they were hummingbirds anyway.  If I'm having recurring dreams about animals it's usually fish.  I am always dreaming of fish.  I don't know what that means either, but at least it's familiar to me...

Perhaps I'm feeling foolish because I have seen no other change around my house or at work.  I still smile at everyone, but something about it makes me feel like I'm trying too hard.  I don't think my secret follower is following me anymore.  Maybe there never was one.  That's okay, but I think that is what made me think of the peas.  I used to eat them all by myself and I was very happy when I did that.

I miss Paris today and it hurts a little.  I'm not sure how to feel about it.  Surely I can smile at people just the same there?  Hm...

After I buy the peas I will stop at the bodega and purchase a lottery ticket as well.  If I win, I will go to Paris.  If I lose, I will try again tomorrow.

~ B 

Bottle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mVEapKnS1c


My dearest Kirsten,

Do not stop.

~ Bernard

Pita Chips.

I wanted to distract myself today from thinking about things that confuse me.  The average person I suppose would explain that I read too much into things.  I do know that before anyone read anything into anything, there was so such thing as classical music.  This defense doesn't get me very far, and the average person is not wrong...I do read too much into things.  But I can't think about it any more today.  So I wrote a letter to a company.  It relaxes me.

Below please find the text sent to BAKED PITA CHIPS.  I don't think anything is quite as delicious and crunchy.  There was a rather small box and allotted number of characters, so I had to be as brief.

Dear Creators of Baked Pita Chips,


I would extend the courtesy  of introducing and explaining a bit about myself were it not for the space restrictions in which I might praise your fine product.  The Romans believed so much in bread and bakers they put a baker in the Senate, and certainly thought of bread as some kind of boat for man's soul, a means by which (through creating and sharing) he might nourish himself and extend kindness to others.  I have no doubt this philosophy was imbued in the entire creative process of your "baked" pita chips; heat and ovens of course also representing passion, fire--the center of the universe.  The mind of God.  Wasn't it Nietzsche who said "seek not God in the empty firmament of the mind"?  I have no idea what he was talking about.  But clearly the leader at your fine company--the single creative epicenter from which the idea of this crispy chip burst forth--this individual's mind may very well contain some portal to the almighty infinite being called "God".  Please extend my hearty congratulations, and encouragement to this person to adamantly continue exploring the helpful recesses of his or her generative brain, for therein lies transcendence and sublime snack satisfaction.


With Admiration and Respect,


~ Bernard

Thursday. Wearing the red scarf.

Discovered a penny, heads up, on my front mat.  It was positioned directly in the center, and Abe was perfectly arranged.  An unexpected and audacious move from my secret follower.  This gesture shouldn't be taken lightly, nor can I deny that the closeness of this gesture to my personal space is exciting and unnerving.  How should I take this expression, now that it radiates desperation?  Will think more on this and return home with a plan.

~ B

Dear Everyone,

I believe someone has been following me around and leaving me change.  Whomever is doing this--thank you!  How might I reach you?

~ Bernard

In the beginning

I was conceived in Paris, born in New York.  I would like to think I was formulated within a rare romantic atmosphere, but perhaps the physics of my life were only meant to operate properly within the states.  Had I been born and raised in Paris, say, I would have been missing one side of my face or been unable to pronounce certain vowels.  Thank you, random chance!

Neither of my parents are French.  My mother died of cancer when I was five.  I've noticed my father holds no special reverence for Paris, other than the standard type: he enjoys Serge Gainsbourg and speaks half-heartedly of seeing the Seine at night once more before he's dead.  It's possible the memory of my mother is what keeps him distant from the place, but I think he is just the type of man who moves forever forward rather than back.  For that we get along famously.

To this day I don't know what my parents were doing in Paris and I like that very much.  I know one thing they were doing, and I am glad to be alive.  When I can tell my father is thinking of Paris I don't sense regret, and secrets without regret are the finest kind.

~ Bernard

To begin...

Love is more interesting than loneliness.

Why not be in love?

Why not look for the divine, the unspeakable in others, and cherish it?  Worship it?  Crave it more than nourishment and other necessary things?

Love is constantly seeking magic.

What a fortunate species we are!  Irrational to the point of madness...and fantastic!  Fantastic!  Fantastic!

(...it smells like raw eggs in here).

~ Bernard