Thursday, September 11, 2003

I most miss my car when I need to see the stars.

I've so wrapped myself around myself, creating a gut-wrenching tension, that I need to put myself in place. When I was like this, back when I lived in greater San Bernadino, all I had to do was get in my car late at night. I would drive over the San Bernadino Mountains and into the High Desert, and pull off on some ill-used highway so I lay on the hood of my car and look up. Just look up. There, beyond the urban glow, under the clear desert sky at night, I could feel very small. The dome of stars, so many more seen out there, would suck the hubris right out of me. Here I am. That up there is the universe. Star upon star, each a system in our spiral galaxy, They are so far away from me, that I am just seeing the light that took countless years to get to the Earth, light from a source that isn't probably there anymore. Usually, that's when I'd start laughing. If you really want to ask me why I am funny, the fucking big universe that's why. Then I wonder how I'm going to make something very good out of something so very damn small in the big cosmic picture.
The endgame of all that was I got stoned, broke my month off cigarettes, and climbed the fire escape ladder up to the roof to look at the full moon on a rare clear San Francisco night. I saw Orion the Hunter, took me a while since the stars are so dim, and I've always identified with that constellation for some reason. Maybe because it's just really easy to find. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I've made myself so tense lately, I swear I don't move, I twang. I'm stagnating in a pool of stress that I've filled myself. So maybe, it wasn't the desert sky at night, but I do feel a bit smaller, and my problems I have seem less earth-shattering. I know I shouldn't have bought smokes, but I'm going to have one more, then drench the rest of the pack and trash it. Yet it doesn't bug me that much. Doing all this on a work night, it was a necessity so that I would be able to get out of bed and go to work tommorow. But it doesn't settle me completely. This drama I put myself through, that I know. Who will I be when I put away the drama and stand on my own?

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