declaration of dependence

So...it's been a week, for which you have my deepest apologies!

Things have been quiet at work; when you work at a university and summertime rolls around, suddenly the campus that had been so busy (and, at times, frustratingly noisy) becomes quiet and reflective.  Halls that once vibrated with the sounds of school life now do nothing but echo my own noises back to me, and most of the lights are turned off.  The chairs are stacked on the tables, and the learning is on pause, but for some of us, life continues just the same.

It's also unfortunate because I had been relying on going on walks, and the associated people-watching, for a lot of my inspiration.  With the temperature hotter and the people gone, my walks are going to be a lot less interesting.  I can still look at the trees, of course, but we all know where that'll lead...poems about trees, probably.

I haven't written a poem in a few weeks, though I've started a couple.  I want to get back into poetry, but it's pretty difficult without being able to look forward to a class where I discuss the process of writing it with a bunch of like-minded individuals.  Not that you, my fine readers, aren't an excellent replacement for that -- I'm just out of the habit.

A big part of the problem is that my standards have gone up -- where, before in my life, I might have been content with slapping together a few quatrains and called it a day, now I expect a better sort of meaning in my work.  Certainly in any work that I'd be willing to let see the light of day!  But I'm going to try getting my poetry going again soon; I need to stay in practice.

Practice in other areas is important, too; my guitar playing has been improving, slowly but surely, but over the weekend I suffered an allergic reaction that I think may have been caused by the metal in my guitar's strings.  It was extremely uncomfortable, causing a painful rash to spread across my face.  Thankfully, it cleared up by the next morning, but it made me a little wary of the guitar.  Then again, I have no idea that the guitar is what caused the reaction; it could have been anything!  I'm just lazy, I suppose.  But I was having a great time expressing myself musically...

This blog should be proof enough of my maniacal need to express myself, to get in touch with my emotions, and my sense of belonging.  And I do I feel like I'm building up to something big in my sense of emotional relation to the world, some grand moment of catharsis.  Not an epiphany, really; I think I've had all the great revelations I'm going to get before parenthood.  But something...gentler.  Something like the overview effect. My cognition is certainly shifting, and I just assume that it'll make the jump to a full paradigm shift in my involvement with the world any week now.

Strangely, I realized today that I've taken the first step on the path towards being a king, which worried me somewhat, due to my earlier vision of the horrors that would unfold were I to become the King of the World.  But it occurred to me that I don't need to be king of the whole thing -- that there are other kinds of kings I can be.  There is room in this world for many kings!  I now have the goal of being among their number.  Royalty, I have always felt, is in my blood.  Now it's time to claim my birthright.

Allow me to share with you the source of my realization about kings.  It's from a comic called Achewood, which is one of my dearest, most favorite things in the entire world.  Chris Onstad, its creator, is a genius, a Mozart of the form, and I would follow that man into the very depths of the inferno, were he to request my humble company on the trip.  Most of you will probably never read it, will probably never come to understood why it matters to me more than the act of breathing itself.  And that's fine; I need to learn to accept that.  But the knowledge will still carve a wound into my heart that cannot, and will not, heal.

shadows of a new life

As I left my apartment this morning, my eyes fell on a bush on the complex's front lawn.  The bush was short but wide, covered and lovely white flowers, and I felt certain that I had never seen it before in my life.

Maybe it just bloomed, so I'm only now noticing it, but I've lived in this apartment for four years.  That's four Mays that went by without me ever once noticing this bush.  And I'm even more certain that it wasn't just put in there; that kind of thing just doesn't happen.  So that means that I've been completely oblivious of this very beautiful plant for all this time!  Does that mean something, does it say something about me?

The concept of perception has been on my mind lately, not least because it seems that the way I perceive the world visually really is changing, and not for the worst.  In the past few weeks, I've noticed that my vision has become increasingly sensitive to motion -- it's as if I'm watching things with a high-speed camera, able to pick out the slightest details of movement.  The actual fidelity of my vision hasn't improved any, and I still have terrible eyesight without my glasses or contacts, but I'm taking in more frames.  Or it feels that way, at any rate; it probably isn't physiologically possible, but I'm definitely perceiving an enhancement to my perception.

Maybe I'm just paying better attention to the world than I was before.  But seeing the details in things is a mixed blessing; it's beautiful, but also incredibly distracting, and I find my attention arrested by the slightest motion.  And when I'm so focused on one thing that's moving, I completely ignore everything else.  Razor focus is fun, but it might be part of the reason that I can be shocked by the sudden appearance of a permanent bush.

I do tend to get lost in thought, to let the world slip past me while I'm engrossed in just one avenue of inquiry (which I've discussed here before).  But now I'm starting to get concerned about my susceptibility to "missing the forest for the trees," because I don't want to miss anything.  If you want to experience everything the world has to offer, should you approach it narrowly, or broadly?  Experiencing everything in depth is impossible with one lifetime, but is experiencing a few things in depth better or worse than experiencing many things shallowly?  And did you really think I was going to get through a post without mentioning trees somewhere?

I'm not really overly concerned by any of this, though.  Life goes on, and if I'm doomed to intermittent tunnel vision, I can still be content knowing that my time, no matter how I spend it, will be well spent.  That's because I'm developing such a keen eye for metaphor that everything is infinitely applicable to everything else.  I've always been adept at twisting the meanings of things to any shape that I wished, but now I'm getting a sense for how I can use that power as more than a party trick.  To see, and to shape, are precious gifts, and I'm so happy to find that they can be used all the time.

Let me close with an excerpt from a book by Charles Warren Stoddard, In the Footprints of the Padres, from the chapter titled IN YOSEMITE SHADOWS:

I leave this morning. Opportunity takes me by the hand and leads me away. The heart leaps with emotion: everything is momentous in a quiet life. This is the portal we entered one deepening dusk. Its threshold will soon be cushioned with snow; let us hasten on. If I were asked when is the time to visit Yosemite, I should reply: Go in the spring; see the freshets and the waterfalls in their glory, and the valley in its fresh and vivid greenness. Go again, by all means, in the autumn, when the woods are powdered with gold dust and a dreamy haze sleeps in the long ravines; when the stars sparkle like crystals and the mornings are frosty; when the clouds visit us in person, and the trees look like crayon sketches on a vapory background, and the cliffs like leaning towers traced in sepia on a soft ground glass. Go in spring and autumn, if possible. I should choose autumn of the two; but go at any hazard, and do not rest till you have been.

rainy recollection

The rain always makes me contemplative.  So while the rest of the world is out partying through the maelstrom, I'll quietly jot down a few thoughts that are bouncing around in my head.

I can't see rain without feeling the urge to go out in it.  I don't know if it's some misplaced admiration for the raw power of nature or if I just like being cold and wet.  I can remember once, during a particularly nasty hurricane (possibly Isabel?), just throwing on a poncho and going for a walk.  In fact, I neglected to tell anyone where I was going, which caused my mother to fret something awful (sorry, mom).  I walked down the street of my suburban neighborhood, enjoying the tempestuous monotony of constantly nightmarish winds and rain.  Somehow, in the complete absence of people brought on by the huge storm, I felt a sense of terrific peace; for those precious minutes, I was the only person in the world.  Kept dry enough by my poncho, I ventured down the street and walked on a road alongside a forest (in fact, that was the same street as the one in my bat/cicada dream).  As I walked, I started to sing -- Kool & the Gang's "Celebration", in fact -- shouting my feelings of elation to the thunderous heavens.  And for once, they shouted back!  The sky opened further, the rain beat down a little harder, and the wind grew strong enough to actually push me backwards.  I stopped to marvel at the increasingly harsh conditions, but continued to sing as loudly as I could.

Just as the song reached its crescendo, a tree a few feet in front of me jerked once and fell, slamming into the street and leaving it completely blocked.  I stared at that tree in shock for several seconds before coming to my senses and scurrying back out of the forest's reach.  I knew that, had I continued on at the same pace, I would have been crushed by that tree, with no hope of avoiding it or even any real notice of my impending doom.  On that day, I owed my life to my sense of wonder and awe.

A few minutes after that, one of my neighbors drove by, stopped, and told me my mom had been calling around, asking if anyone had seen me.  I realized my mistake and hurried back home to apologize.

Since that day, I've never quite been able to shake the feelings of happiness, serenity, and freedom that I experienced while singing and dancing in the hurricane.  I can't help but find the joy in chaos, and that encourages me to seek it out where I can.  But trees are the enemy of chaos; nothing is more orderly than plant life.  They are the most beautiful, most boring things that I can imagine, and even they can still kill you if you aren't careful.  But if I were careful, I never would have learned what freedom tastes like.  I never would have learned to dance the storm.  Isn't that a price worth paying?


we emerged from youth all wide-eyed liked the rest

another man's sorrows

How about a quote from the Buddha?

"Long is the night to him who is awake; long is a mile to him who is tired; long is life to the foolish who do not know the true law."

I've studied laws, both true and fake, and shortened my life thereby.  Law school was like a crucible, but I fear my metal may have been weak; I emerged from it feeling cold and brittle, and I'd forgotten the shape that I used to be.

Having read the phenomenal work Buddha by the genius Osamu Tezuka, I understand some of what is meant by the "true law" in the quote above.  And it does have to do with the proper shape of things; it stresses the importance of hewing to your purpose, and not letting yourself get distracted from it by the baser interruptions, the minor pains and pleasures that every life contains.

Physically, I've rarely been particularly uncomfortable in my own life -- recovering from breaking my arm would have to count as the worst physical pain I've known, and (thanks to painkillers) it wasn't too terrible.  Emotionally, of course, I've known some awful pains (many of them self-inflicted, but not the worst), but even there I tend toward the comfortable.

Mentally, though, I seek and prize the feeling of discomfort more than anything.  If my mind isn't being taxed to the limit, I feel extremely bored.  It's not enough to be confused or uncertain -- I need my mind to be twisted in knots, I crave stimuli that force my mind to turn back on itself in reciprocal reflection.  I can't be happy unless I'm nearly being driven insane by this contemplation or that.

I think that's good for me -- I think it keeps me sharp.  But it means I am so very rarely surprised, because my mind has been conditioned to see the inside of things.  I love the sensations that go with surprise; I crave them!  Some of my fondest memories are linked to times when I was truly surprised, and my favorite books and movies all carry in them some sort of surprise for the careful devotee.

My favorite book ever is Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.  That is a book that deals with some extremely uncomfortable topics; it is a true challenge to read.  But its subject matter isn't what elevates it to the highest art I know -- that would be Nabokov's unquestionable domination of English.  Nabokov, in fact, described the book as his "love affair with the English language," and that sense of romance, excitement, and danger is present in every word choice, every comma placement, and every last nigh-inscrutable grammatical experiment.  Every sentence hides another delightful linguistic surprise, and it's more than enough to help me past the content's utter repulsiveness.

Alas, for many (most?) people, it is not so, and the book's plot proves to be an obstacle too great to traverse.  I would say that the joy this book has given me is at least matched by the frustration I've felt at trying to explain its greatness to people.  How can I describe the total despair I feel when looking into someone's eyes and realizing that, no matter how sincerely I extol the virtues of this masterpiece, how fully and beautifully I was moved by it, how much more it is than the dirty story they might assume, I will never be able to convince that person to read it?  How do you respond when someone's reaction to something you love is pure closed-minded ignorance?

I realize that I've traveled this ground before in this space, but Nabokov really does deserve a special mention.  As does my fervent desire to punch people who shake their heads and turn away from words so masterful and moving they bring me to tears, people who instead embrace and re-read their same favorite novels year after year, as if something different will happen.

I have never re-read Lolita, and I doubt that I can.  There are some experiences that are too singular and permanent to ever be repeated -- but more than that, I don't think I could bear the need to share my feelings while reading it again.  It was like learning to read English all over again.  It was like being born anew, and seeing things for the first time. It was like my third eye opened, and I awakened.  But now that I'm awake, the night feels very long, indeed.

reflections in shadow

...trying to ski without any skis...

...wanting to talk when I'm not supposed to...

...my teeth falling out, one by one, as punishment for betrayal...

These are some of the dreams I had last night, which was an unusually fruitful night for dreamsauce.  They were mainly disturbing, and none too happy!  I don't remember my dreams very frequently, but when I do, they tend to be more weird than upsetting.  Last night alternated between the frustrating and the grotesque.

As part of my now-ended poetry class, I kept a dream journal for about a week.  Here were the results:

Dream Journal

·         2/6-2/7:  In high school, but not the one I went to.  Mixed in with people I remember were people I've met since.  I couldn't find a seat, and the teacher was unhappy with me.  The class material, whatever it was, was too challenging, and the people sitting nearby me were annoyed that I kept asking them for help.

·         2/7-2/8:  On a car trip with my wife and a few of her friends.  We arrive at a house at the top of a long driveway, and my wife and her friends go off to some sort of gathering -- a bonfire maybe?  I stay behind with the car, but I begin to have strange difficulties with the gear shift; at times there seem to be two levers (although it is an automatic transmission), and the car seems to be moving no matter how I try to put it in park.  I feel like there is a menacing presence in the car with me.  Although I am having trouble with the car, I still want to stay in it...something about the gathering or party that my wife and her friends have gone to  repels me.

·         2/8-2/9:  can't remember a thing

·         2/9-2/10:  I am a secret agent or national-level investigator on the trail of a criminal, chasing him through a region that resembles Eastern Europe.  He is always one step ahead, and eventually I realize that he is moving through a parallel world.  I find a way to move myself into the other world, and I am in a place that is disturbingly different from our world; plants transform at the touch, everything is colored wrong, there are almost no people, and feudalism seems to be going strong.  I continue my hunt, but I realize that my target has developed amazing powers in this world that make him all but uncatchable, although I come close to catching him several times.  This dream has two endings.  In the first, I return to the real world only to find that I myself have been changed by my journey, and I am now capable of strange feats; however, regular people find me disturbing and uncomfortable to be around.  In the second ending, I track my target to a fortress in a forest, only to find that he has joined forces with one even stronger.  I am beaten up by the stronger one and forced to flee, then decide to make my life in this new world and return to challenge them, even stronger.

·         2/10-2/13:  can’t remember, but shades of themes similar (struggle, failure or incompletion, not fitting in)

I've always known that these themes were present in the majority of my dreams; I don't really have happy dreams, as far as I remember.  But putting those feelings down in a journal like that was a little more worrisome, because it indicated to me that these are probably the only kinds of dreams I ever have.

I wrote a poem about my dreams, but it wasn't that good.  Here's the best part of it:

I have a dream, but he is poor.

He cannot run,

Fight,

Speak,

And cannot change his mind.

I go on in that poem to contemplate whether my waking times are like dreams to my dream-self, and perhaps he watches my personal failures with that same sense of helpless, uncomfortable inevitability. Somehow, I'm comforted by the notion that, when I go to sleep, he wakes up, shakes his head, and feels thankful that his life isn't really like mine, that I was just a dream he'd had (or nightmare).

I think that I'm going to appropriate, for now, a flourish used by the writer of Penny Arcade, wherein he finishes out his blog posts with a lyric from a song he's heard recently.  I always have one song or another stuck in my head, and I think it might be nice to give you a peek inside the music that entrances me.


I won't lie, I thought of you when you weren't around

'tis the season

Last night, I had a dream.  I was walking down a street that ran alongside a forest, with powerlines overhead.  Between the forest and the road was a little brook, and I decided to wander off of the road to traipse around in the water for a bit before heading off to explore the forest.

I stepped off of the road and was about to make my way down into the creek when something solid bounced off my shoulder.  Surprised, I looked around and found that tiny pieces of what appeared to be plastic were raining down around me, bouncing off my shoulders and the ground in a growing cascade.

I looked up to find the source, and suddenly noticed hundreds (or maybe thousands) of bats, hanging from the powerlines above, chittering to each other as they dropped little things all around me.  Then I remembered hearing that this year would be a cicada year, and I understood all at once that the objects the bats were dropping were, in fact, the dismembered bodies of cicadas.  Looking down, I could see thousands of cicada heads staring at me, and I felt their body parts building up on my clothes, and I ran.  The bats, startled by my sudden movement, took flight as one body, soaring up and away, ending the grisly torrent as quickly as they had started it.  It was horrifying, but it was still one of the less upsetting dreams I had last night.

There are cicadas in Japan, but they come every year, and they have their own special way of inflicting terror.  When they moult, they leave their discarded shells everywhere, and the ground receives a thick carpet of cicada-shaped chitin that you have no choice but to walk over if you want to get anywhere.  The crunching noise and texture certainly bothered me, but what really stuck with me was what I spotted once when I was getting off the subway.

On one of the landings in the stairs heading up to the street, there was a live cicada buzzing about in frustration. It had mostly finished its moult, but somehow it became caught in its shell; unable to escape, and weighed down by the shell, it buzzed around on the floor in crooked circles, sweeping aside other shells and occasionally bumping into walls.  Even though I know cicadas can't hurt me, I have an innate fear of all buzzing insects, so I stopped in my tracks and watched it warily.  Other passengers passed me and headed up the stairs, but I was stuck watching this insect, trapped with no way to extricate itself, nor (I assume) any understanding of its situation.

I contemplated stepping on it, saving it the trouble of fruitlessly fighting against its own skin for the few hours it was likely to survive.  My fear held me back, but something else did, too:  I had no way of knowing for sure that the cicada would be unable to escape.  What right did I have to snuff out its life, if it turned out my supposed mercy may have been misplaced?  Who was I to say that the cicada was too weak?

I left the cicada there, spinning in circles.  When I got to the subway station the next morning, the landing had been cleaned up.  I never saw another cicada trapped in its shell; eventually, the cicada season passed, but the memory of that little battle, and my untaken opportunity to end it, stuck with me.

finding purchase

Feedback on the first draft of my book has begun rolling in, and so far it's very positive!  I'm excited to get back to work on it, although I think I might wait until June for that.  Once the second draft is ready, I plan to push the book out to a much wider audience, so sit tight!  I expect there to be, at the very least, a third draft before it's ready for publishing.

There does come a point, though, where you just have to accept that perfection is unattainable.  Although I love writing and always have, the desire for perfection is what kept me from sitting down and starting something significant until this past November.  I always told myself that I needed to hold off and read more, that I wasn't quite ready, that I needed to start from the best possible position.  The danger in those excuses to put off something is that they are really good reasons!  If you want to create something excellent, you do need a good foundation, you do need to be at a point in your life that can support that creative activity, you do need to be in the right frame of mind to begin!  I was lucky enough to realize that, no matter how good those reasons were, I couldn't follow them forever; you have to stop somewhere.  Even if the journey is more important than the destination, how meaningful is the journey if it doesn't go anywhere?

It's funny that I'm so wrapped up in this idea of perfection with my writing, because I really don't live that ideal in the rest of my life.  I do hold myself to a certain standard, but it's far from perfect, and I'm downright inadequate when it comes to things that I can't reasonably relate to one of my core values.  For example, I'm pretty bad at getting myself to do chores; even though, intellectually, I understand that it's important, I have no way of connecting those mundane tasks to the image I have of myself, so I put them off whenever possible.

It's true that part of me has always fantasized about escaping from the drudgery of the common life, with its little distractions and inconveniences.  That desire to remove myself from the day-to-day hasn't always manifested itself in healthy ways, however.  In middle school, I read Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, which filled my mind with thoughts of what it would be like to become one of the monstrous (yet debonair) denizens of the night.  I found myself pondering how my existence would change if suddenly the sun became my nemesis:  how would I explain that to my family?  Would I still be able to go to school, somehow (night school, maybe)?  When would I get to see my friends?

Whose blood would I choose to drink?  Whose souls would I damn, so that I wouldn't have to be alone?

Would I really want to spend eternity as a thirteen-year-old, anyway?

And so on.  The idea of eternity especially enthralled me, interestingly enough; possibly being able to fly, transform into a bat, or control peoples' minds were all bonuses, certainly, but it was the immortality that always resonated most strongly in my heart.  Even at that age, I was all too aware of the ticking clock, modestly paralyzed by the realization that every second I spent on something was a second I would never get back.  Thirteen-year-olds should not be asked to decide the most useful way of expending time on earth, but there I was.  Vampirism, however unrealistic, offered an out:  no more time limit meant no more worrying about wasted time.

Now that I've tacked on another thirteen-year-old's lifespan and then some, and wasted a whole lot of time in the process, I don't fret quite as much about the idea.  I can feel that I'm wiser than I was, although I may have spent a bit of the in-between being a fair bit less wise than either thirteen-year-old me or current-me.  Part of that wisdom involves making peace with the inevitability of death, as well as determining the things in life that truly give me satisfaction, that aren't just passing fancies, momentary diversions on the road to the grave.

Another part of growing up is learning when to bury a part of yourself that no longer has any place.  Today, I can comfortably say that I no longer want to be a vampire.  You might joke, but this has nothing to do with Twilight or any other vampire-related concepts that have emerged since an impressionable young me desperately longed for an escape from death.  I have built, and am still working on, a life for myself that's too valuable for me to willingly pay the cost of discarding my humanity, thin as it is.

Which isn't to say that I wouldn't make the best of it if somebody decided to turn me into a vampire.  But if you gave me that choice today, I know what I would say.  I don't need the powers of a nightmare to be special.  I will elevate my life to the fantastic, instead of trying to elbow the fantastic into my life.

A hundred thousand threads of possibility!
I could cut my arm off.
I could play violin on the streets in Spain.
I could stare an elephant in the eye.
I could tell you what makes the heart beat, the trees grow, the old ones weep.
I could plant myself, and never move,
Or I could walk and never stop moving.
What will I do?  What will any of us do?
We are seeds; where lies the dirt, where falls the water?

save the last dance

For those of you on tenterhooks, in the end I went with the HTC One.  I was leaning that way anyway, and when I got to the store, they were sold out of the Galaxy S4!  Easy choice.

I'd like you to direct your attention to this essay by Brandon Sanderson about the genius of Terry Pratchett.  It's what I've been saying for yours, and it's nice to see those sentiments echoed by a writer I enjoy so much.

I had my last poetry class yesterday, and it was suitably short and touching.  The professor gave us all signed copies of one of her books, gave us some tips on how to continue working together as a group, and sent us out into this big, scary world to scrawl our names in the heavens.  Before we parted, I told her how lucky I felt to have been a part of her class -- how it's sparked a renaissance in my personal story, and that now I feel as though I see the world with younger eyes.  None of that was hyperbole, either.  I owe her a lot!  She told me to drop her a line if I was ever in the west of Ireland, and she'd buy me a drink.

I left the class and drove to get my new phone, on the way listening to a book by John Green called Looking for Alaska.  I'm a little more than halfway through it, so I can't really give you a full review; suffice to say that it's really enjoyable and touching, brimming over with humanity (in all its petty flaws).  The main character's relationship with his roommate especially connects with me; they're described as being like an "old married couple" in their dynamic, and that hearkens back to the friendship I had with my college roommate, Rick.

I don't think I could have asked for a better roommate, someone as sensitive and thoughtful as I was, but slightly more worldly.  Someone who would only laugh at me a little in my naïveté, and then step up and help me learn what I needed to know about life.  Someone who, when the time came to decide what our living situation would be the next year, was just as scared as I was to bring up the subject, in case it turned out the other wouldn't want to room together again.

We've lost touch (despite my efforts), and I kind of got the feeling that he just wants to leave everything from college in the past.  I've given up on trying to re-establish contact, and decided to just focus my efforts elsewhere.  But every day, I'm reminded that a huge part of who I am is thanks to the random bureaucratic decision to put us in the same room.

Bureaucracy is a very funny thing.  Yesterday, my wife's grandfather passed away; he had been sick for years, so it wasn't sudden or shocking, but still very affecting for my wife and her whole family.  Tomorrow, we'll head up to Rhode Island for the funeral.  I know that I'll struggle to connect with the emotions running high through everyone there, as I'll spend a few days surrounded by people who knew and loved this man whom I barely met.  I will be as sympathetic as I can, but I know that it'll be an alienating feeling for me.

The reason I mentioned bureaucracy is that I learned I would be required to use sick time to go to this funeral.  My work provides for bereavement leave, but not for so attenuated a connection as a grandparent-in-law.  Parents-in-law, however, are covered, as are my personal grandparents.  I can see the logic behind it -- they have to draw the line somewhere -- but it still feels so arbitrary.  You know, a lot of the rules that we live by are completely arbitrary, but just because we follow them out of habit, and have done so for such a long time, they can become normalized in our consciousness.

It's in me to question norms, to constantly judge and attempt to discard the ones that don't make sense.  Part of me has always felt a little less bound by the common rules we theoretically all live by; the older I get, the less I feel they apply to me.  I look at some older people who use their advanced age as an excuse to break those rules, and it's amazing how I feel the exact same contempt for the artificial limits society has conspired to place on my behavior.

There are those, and some of you may be among them, who would decry such flagrant violations of the social code as immoral, harmful, unethical, or inconsiderate.  And, depending on the actual transgression, it might be!  But it behooves us all to look past these potentially obsolete strictures to the reasons underlying them, in order to be certain we are doing what is right rather than what is done.

Hoo boy, is that vague!  It's not that the social mores I'm contemplating myself breaking are anything serious; I mean, hasn't everybody wanted to start screaming and dancing at a funeral?  I'll let you know how it goes.