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.
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