but i'm not much of a screamer
I was away from a computer for ten days, sleeping in a tent in Eastern Oregon and waking up when the sun rose and eating breakfast, usually oatmeal, and I came back to a screenfull of email messages and a crashing stock market and David Foster Wallace is dead, and I’m wondering if coming back was so wise.Yesterday when I returned the not-yet-empty ice cream tub to the freezer Operaman commented that I am a moderate person, and I just about wanted to scream. This is an experiment, is what I would have screamed. This all feels ridiculous, this 8-to-5 job and this mortgage and this general sense of decorum, this putting back the ice cream before it’s gone. For ten days I wore leg warmers and a fake fur vest I bought at an Austin tack shop, and I cleaned bikes for hours on end to raise money for a kickass nonprofit, and sometimes I slept and often I danced and always my hands were dirty, and that felt like normal, that felt like real. This, on the other hand, is an experiment, and I’m wondering how long to let it run.
posted by tortaluga @ 10:47 AM
2 Comments:
I didn't know you were a David Foster Wallace fan too. That was pretty sad news for me. That's two of my favorite authors in just over a year. At least one of them had a full life and a full life's work completed for me to read.
Which leads me to my other point, which is that, sometimes, having a full life means taking the moderate seeming-- the house, the dog, the family, the stable job-- along with the not so moderate. There's still room to dance around the campsite at 3 am in your fur vest and socks AND have some stability and center to your life.
Maybe sometimes moderate is playing equally in both yards rather than always walking down the street in the middle.
The dance between the real and the surreal is more rewarding than living in either.
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