Consumption

Borrowed from Robozombie's post on 2/11/11

If I consume this product, will I relive my childhood? It is like resuscitating  a moment in time, this intangible feeling I didn't know I missed or lost. It was nothing then, but I crave it now.
This sensation reminds me I have a body.
This taste is my one experience of pleasure.
In a world of gray existence, I am consumed in color.
I suddenly have something to care about.
Now there is purpose, because I must have it. Thank god, something matters.
It makes me feel full, which is the closest I can come to love.

Dying, to feel alive.

Why does it seem that mot humans kill themselves to feel alive?
We smoke, we drink, we abuse ourselves. We do many other, much more subtle things, that lead to our physical, mental and emotional discomfort. Why?

I find myself constantly conflicted not so much about death, but about existence. This constant existential mantra "why am I here? Why am I here? WHY am I here?" Witnessing the pain and misfortune of others serves as a brief wake-up call, but it's fleeting. After reading about a murder or a car accident, it takes only moments to become completely absorbed in my own love-hate world of what seems to be a mediocre existence. I spend money, is my existence justified in that I support an imaginary economy? If I type many words into a computer and (some day) make fancy reports that I project on to a wall with many statistics, have I done something? Where does one find the sensation of being alive? If I feel alienated from my own family, but smile at strangers, does it even out somehow?

I'm so disappointed. Disappointed that it's not easy, disappointed in myself that I don't know how to make it easy, disappointed that I don't know how to care enough to do anything, about anything. Except for continue the conversation, and ponder my inexplicable disappointment with being.

Why violins confuse my heart.

The lights are dim as the violins tune. Their gentle lowing reminds me of cows idling in green Pennsylvania fields, soft and gentle as the breeze.

How can my heart feel so divided between past nostalgia and living into the present moment? Between two or more geographical places- what is it I'm trying to regain, what is it I have lost? Why must I suffer these images, this barrage of time?

I sometimes wonder if I'm not reliving a moment of someone else's life, or a fragment of a movie, a bit of a story I read or saw that has become a part of my own narrative somehow. Maybe it's my neighbor's feeling that accidentally found it's way to me, the owner being too full of questions about real estate, inflation, and baby formula. Just that brief and impassioned violin vignette brought me to a cold, snowy, New England evening, where the crispness of the air cuts you with a fleeting but bitter melancholy. Wrapped in the darkness, you feel the smallness of your existence.  There's joy that your life is not nearly as serious as the stars, and yet at a total loss as to how to make anything matter now that you realize this.

Is that why city dwellers are so narcissistic? They don't have enough wide open views to see the vastness of the world? The sky is too punctuated and divided, leaving children and long-time residents with a sense of it being manageable and divisible? I fear there are many examples to the contrary, and still I can't help but wonder.