I. What Messages Travel the Web
Back at the end of June, Mustardseed and I walked out to Cherry Beach from the Courthouse in downtown Toronto.
We had seen Pride weekend through; made it without passing out from heatstroke or heartache; celebrated three days with little break to distinguish night from morning. The heat was tremendous, the alcohol copious, and adventures were many and varied; ah, festival.
We walked the way out and down to the Beach because it's hard to know when it's really over, and after stimulating the body for so long (both honestly and artificially) it starts to take on its own momentum, and a sunrise is never a thing you can waste your time on.
It is time, all by itself, rising.
It was also the dawn of Mustardseed's birthday. Making it down to the sand, settling into a peeling, well used park-bench, we communed with the pixies (with a little help from they're magic powder), and watched the word turn form silver, to grey, to a perfect, crystalline aquamarine blue, dappled gold. We held up a tradition (after knowing each other for so many years, we've developed a few, halfhazardly): this one being the institution of the Birthday Breakdown.
For the second time in three years, I made Mustardseed cry on her birthday.
And the sky folded out, and folded back. I watched the swans (two, four, five... is one alone? is one bereft and undone like so many other un-pairs in the world? no, there on the horizon: six. Paired for life.). They themselves kept changing, transforming, at times glass figurines lighter than water, at others, twists of paper resting on a blue taracotta surface.
We came up with something. Well, two things.
The first was a question:
What the hell is the punchline?
Because all of it, the whole shebang, is quite obviously a joke.
The second was a realization, true for both of us:
I would rather my life be a nightmare than a bore.
Stagnation is that living death. It's been said before. It's taken books to be said before, but to have it come to you, with utmost clarity, knowing that it's true, and that you have made all your decisions up to this point, major and minor, willing to take the penalty, and rather that consequences supernova disastrously than fizzle and whimper into inaction, to make do with what it takes to keep it all in balance, suffer the suffering, but laugh and clap your hands freely when the lid blows off your world and everything opens up like a new book, fresh paper and words un-read or written, brimming with change and adventures yet to be lived... that was something.
We are of that ilk that are complicit participants in the ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.
We had seen Pride weekend through; made it without passing out from heatstroke or heartache; celebrated three days with little break to distinguish night from morning. The heat was tremendous, the alcohol copious, and adventures were many and varied; ah, festival.
We walked the way out and down to the Beach because it's hard to know when it's really over, and after stimulating the body for so long (both honestly and artificially) it starts to take on its own momentum, and a sunrise is never a thing you can waste your time on.
It is time, all by itself, rising.
It was also the dawn of Mustardseed's birthday. Making it down to the sand, settling into a peeling, well used park-bench, we communed with the pixies (with a little help from they're magic powder), and watched the word turn form silver, to grey, to a perfect, crystalline aquamarine blue, dappled gold. We held up a tradition (after knowing each other for so many years, we've developed a few, halfhazardly): this one being the institution of the Birthday Breakdown.
For the second time in three years, I made Mustardseed cry on her birthday.
And the sky folded out, and folded back. I watched the swans (two, four, five... is one alone? is one bereft and undone like so many other un-pairs in the world? no, there on the horizon: six. Paired for life.). They themselves kept changing, transforming, at times glass figurines lighter than water, at others, twists of paper resting on a blue taracotta surface.
We came up with something. Well, two things.
The first was a question:
What the hell is the punchline?
Because all of it, the whole shebang, is quite obviously a joke.
The second was a realization, true for both of us:
I would rather my life be a nightmare than a bore.
Stagnation is that living death. It's been said before. It's taken books to be said before, but to have it come to you, with utmost clarity, knowing that it's true, and that you have made all your decisions up to this point, major and minor, willing to take the penalty, and rather that consequences supernova disastrously than fizzle and whimper into inaction, to make do with what it takes to keep it all in balance, suffer the suffering, but laugh and clap your hands freely when the lid blows off your world and everything opens up like a new book, fresh paper and words un-read or written, brimming with change and adventures yet to be lived... that was something.
We are of that ilk that are complicit participants in the ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.
We've realized that we are not willing to trade stability for the alternative; and for that reason will always be looking at the sea from a different shore than our families.
So it's time to do something about it.
We've started to plan.
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