Conversations And Memories That Make Me Want Life

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A girl, nearly ten years younger than I am, talks across the room at a boy who's reading an ebook. They joke around about how easy it is to find a pizza place anywhere in the world, using just their cell phones. She urges the notion that we're suffocated in the digital age by suggesting to anyone listening that she's been writing a book by hand, without the use of a computer. "Technology scares me," she says, with a nervous laughter.

The boy holds up his ebook and says with the nonchalance of an educated James Dean, "Well. Yeah. I would pick up a hard cover of Hemingway just to thumb through the pages and all. But for the Guide To Marketing 3rd Edition, who gives a flyin'_____? I'd rather throw it on my Kindle and be done with it."

"I wish I could go back 50 years," one of them says, with the grace and apparent self-awareness of a sage.

I feel old. And I chuckle on the inside while sipping another bit of my coffee. But, while I'm trying to catch back up on my book, my mind soaks up in casual idleness that escapes to a place several years ago, where REM is singing something about the end of the world. In my mind's eye, I'm sitting Indian Style in front of the tv at my parents' house. On the tv, I see a boy without a shirt, roaming through a broken-down house, doing tricks on his beat-up skate board. He's a rebel. I want to be a rebel.

I flip the channel and watch Andre Dawson catch a fly ball in the top of the second. I make a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream and watch Shawon Dunston hit a flat-footed home run in the top of the 3rd. And fall asleep in the 4th on the short shag carpet. My stomach is full. And Shotshie, my toy fox terrier, cleans up whatever I had left in my bowl.

Later that night, I climb the chimney to play cops and robbers on the roof with my imaginary six-shooter. I play both the cop and the robber. I catch a slug in my gut and fall to the 14' trampoline below, perfectly executing the scene. The director yells, "cut!" I smile and do another scene just like it, just for kicks. Fade to black.

All of this memory has lead me no where in the book. I've been rehearsing the same paragraph for minutes upon minutes. And my coffee cup is empty. It's cold outside, like the ghost that comes after christmas time. I'm consumed with memory and grin again on the inside.

That was fun.

There are books. And there are films. All of these are stories that are told rapidly, in time and consuming space. Our lives are not books and are not films. They are real flesh and blood. But the things we say are the things that we remember or want from life. They are told as a story of sorts with each breath. Each word we read with a glance. The lines on the page are the way we react to the stranger behind the counter, the post man, and to the ones we love the most, that put up with our strange behavior.

There are no guidelines to write prose or to write poetry. No rehearsals. It's raw. And it's fresh. Each and every moment we are alive, we are alive in a wild and imaginative scene that bleeds reality like a poke in the ribs or the most romantic kiss. The human experience is rich like dark chocolate and deeper than the most hidden ocean floor.

There is a divine nature about us that translates in every single movement. We cannot escape it, no matter how hard we try.

Life is beautiful.

That's all I have to say about that.