for
6/17/2000
When I look at the women in my life, I see that few are true absolutes. And that heartens me. People should be whatever they happen to be to you, when they are that. They're not characters written for a bad staging company's play.
But there are exceptions, and they're hard to reconcile. I'll tell you why.
There are women whom I respond to on a level purely removed from my intelligence. I'm not talking about simple attraction or repulsion. Something far deeper.
This worries me, because I credit myself on being able to accept both my so-called physical and mental selves as the single unit they are. I credit myself with the ability to deal with life, no matter how sticky, gritty, nondivine or cold, it happens to be. Life is a simple game with endless ways to be played, and I intend to win it.
And thus do the simple absolutes bother me so. It is possible that I should not worry about this, that I simply see these failings as those of being human. Somehow I've already accepted that, and somehow I can never. No excuses, if you will.
But I've come too far avoiding the topic. I must press onward.
There was some discussion, in the process of writing this play that my fellow thesbians and I have begun, of making Lust--the living embodiment of the emotion--a man. Every other sentence out of his mouth, as another character would have remarked, was "May I fondle that?" Transition.
Lust is not a man, however: Lust is a woman, and she's one of my failing absolutes. I could be impervious to anyone's charms but hers.
Mental monologue, before this keyboarded one, on the one failing absolute necissarily led to another. Namely, the embodiment of trust, or should I write Trust. I've known absolute Trust, and now that I've seen it I wish the world that I hadn't, and thank the heavens that I have.
Life is full of contradictions, like the fact that it's not. There's no formula, there's no magic key, and there are no absolute rules.
But sometimes, there seem to be. Alas this fact, and alas the sheer volumes of thought that have been omitted from this piece for whatever reasons.
I might mention, however, that I happen to be on a downswing at this present moment, and I recognize it. I see the traps that others fall into, and, bear in heart, gentle reader, I plan to side-step them. Here they are: I don't assume that no one else in the world could feel just this way about the topic at hand, and I don't assume that I'm right now. Indeed, I know that I just felt momentarily depressed and felt like getting it off my chest. I also know that I'm not as perfect as I'd like to be, and not even as much as I'd like to see myself as. And yet I am. How wonderful to live in a land free of absolutes.
Writer's Note: Enough of this drivel. Sorry about last week. I need to get to work.
T.S.E.
Touch the Toast