tavie.com

Trying to sleep, in the dark, computer closed (not for long) and trying to visualize some peaceful place and my mind keeps taking me to the woods. Want to go to the woods. Wish it was spring. Want Muir Woods with giant redwoods. Want Bear Mountain. Want Greenburgh Frickin Nature Center. Just give me some trees and sticks and rocks and stuff. Maybe a brook. Birdsong. Mulch. Fallen logs. Bushes. I was thinking about how I shuttle back and forth in metal tubes through cement tunnels and over cement streets back and forth every day. Wearing a rut in the cement, wearing holes in my rubber soles, picking around dirty ice patches on trashy sidewalks and that I can't think of any wild growing place anywhere close to me, anywhere I could get to easily on my own. Parks don't count. Parks are full of children and skateboarders and dogshit. I want a quiet place with trees and rocks.

So I can't sleep for any good, logical reason. I can't sleep because I'm all out of nowhere a claustrophobic city rat. Which is very much my nature so why would I suddenly mind?

I'm like that guy in the Ray Bradbury story that I was telling Gina about yesterday. The guy who suddenly becomes aware of-- and disgusted by -- his own skeleton.

His teeth began to chatter. God All-Mighty! he thought, why haven't I realized it all these years? All these years I've gone around with a-- SKELETON-- inside me! How is it we take ourselves for granted? How is it we never question our bodies and our being?

A skeleton. One of those jointed, snowy, hard things, one of those foul, dry, brittle, gouge-eyed, skull-faced, shake-fingered, rattling things that sway from neck-chains in abandoned webbed closets, one of those things found on the desert all long and scattered like dice!

... Now, now, man, control yourself. This is a revelation, take it for what it's worth, understand it, savor it. BUT A SKELETON! screamed his subconscious. I won't stand for it. It's vulgar, it's terrible, it's frightening. Skeletons are horrors; they clink and tink and rattle in old castles, hung from oaken beams, making long, indolently rustling pendulums on the wind...
Ray Bradbury, Skeleton

So you see, I'm losing my mind, longing for trees and thinking about old stories I haven't read since I was 14.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 12:23 AM | shower me with attention