Big Box of Life: I Make Memories

Moment by moment. Time slips moment by moment and memory paints our lives in the colors of good and bad and sad and happy and bittersweet.

My favorite memories are the ones where nothing much has happened. It's the memories of those days that were perfect, as if one had reached Elysium; all soft music and sunlight before dusk and warmth and love.

There were a set of moments in Montmartre.

Paris in the springtime.

We climbed out of the Metro, a long and seemingly unending stairwell out from the depths of Paris into blue skies, no clouds. 67 degrees Fahrenheit. The air was dry and cool and crisp, as if it were charged with electrons floating about and crashing peacefully into each other invisibly around us.

Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, with it's white stone, stood out against the electric blue of the sky as if someone had painted it in the boldest of colors.

The painters were all out selling and creating pieces of art while all of us, the tourists/observers and the artists/creators encapsulated in the a town square in a sea of color and canvass and people. It is not for me to judge another's creative effort. It was just nice to see someone making something instead of destroying something, or someone.

It was like god threw a handful of life, happy, truly alive life, into a box and then gave the box a shake and stood back to watch what it would do.

I miss Paris in the springtime, I think someone sang once. I'm singing it again now, for you.

Construct

We bring order to chaos, but one man's chaos is another man's order.

I pay for everything with paper and bits of metal that have been given meaning and worth and whose meaning and worth I accept. If I didn't accept money as a concept of worth, I wouldn't try to make more of it and save it and spend it and use money on credit. I have trapped myself by accepting the construct of money as having any worth.

And you say, "But Adrian, you have to use money to survive in this world!"

And I say I have to use someone else's idea of my worth in this world to survive. And I also say that I agree with you. But it isn't money that puts food on the table, but the work that you do in the world that puts food in the table. And oddly enough, if you work enough you can put away enough money that will actually start to work for you.

A concept, a construct, paper imbued with worth, an actual inanimate object is producing something from itself. This is a miracle. I have a pen on my desk and it sits there everyday, but it doesn't make more of itself.

It is amazing the things that we have imbued with meaning! We have pulled shiny rocks from the ground and named it gold and it has been assigned with meaning and value; the same with diamonds and other precious stuff taken out of the ground. At least oil does something. I can respect oil, but gold? Gold does nothing except adorn people and things and make them look shiny and pretty, which is associated with worth and value.

What if I decided to take my work as the true thing that is valuable and not the money? What if I assigned meaning and value to everything I do? I think I just may become the richest man in the world.

But this won't be easy. Assigning value to everything I do means invoking every moment with value. My time will literally become money.

Which leaves me to wonder why am I wasting my time here? But I'm not wasting my time. I'm formulating a new way of looking at the universe. Everything I do will become priceless, a treasure beyond measure. My thoughts, my driving, my writing, my programming, my eating, my drinking - All of it will become something more valuable than gold and diamonds.

I will become the treasure of the universe.

All of us will become something beyond measure. And then maybe no one will hurt anyone else ever again, because we do not ever harm that which is priceless to each other on purpose. We'll only have to worry about accidental pain and harm to each other. No war. No murder.

We will preserve the treasures of the universe by treating each other and ourselves as nice and carefully as we would a billion dollar sculpture or piece of art because all of us would have aspired to make ourselves worth as much as this.

Now get back to making gold, my alchemical friends.

Antiquated Travel

The platform is barren in the early morning, except for the four of us, travelers waiting on the railroad. The sun barely shines through this fog, a dull reminder of things to come.

There is the kid, can't be more than twenty-two, the baseball cap backwards, the T-shirt a maze of creases and folds with his black jeans and slump of apathetic confusion. You see this everywhere and I even catch myself at work, under the tick-tock man keeping the pay clock, slouching toward infinity. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

Then there's the woman in mom jeans smoking a cigarette, high waisted almost white jeans, striped t-shirt tucked in. Her husband is holding their little girl in his tanned, wiry arms, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Maybe they should give the little girl a kiddie smoke too, like I used to have in my childhood; the candy cigarettes made of that powdery hard barely sweet nearly flavorless gum. Smoke they all told us, even Joe Camel™ told us to with his sly smile and penis shaped mouth.

Those cigarette guys were awesome like the pirates of yore were, until they were sued and taxed and maligned in the press for the cancer they caused that we all pretended not to know about or care, until too many started dying.

There's a lesson to be learned here about hunter and prey. Hunters shouldn't consume so many prey that the prey actually care. And as for the prey, the herd doesn't care too much if they lose a few here and there. But if too many go the way of all things, then the prey get angry and afraid and scatter or worse, fight back.

I stand on the platform and wait, the morning air raising goosebumps and sending the random chill through me, even with the sports coat on. I like to travel in style, like a modern Cary Grant sneaking onto a train in North By Northwest, but not really that elegant or that good looking.

I hope the seats are comfortable. Eight hours of nothing to do but get somewhere I need to go. Surely I can find some rest for my weary head and heart on the last of the old ways of getting around.

Most everyone flies these days. I don't like flying. Tired of watching first class citizens escorted to their first class seats. Airlines make me confront too many uns when I fly; Un-successful, Un-important, Un-comfortable.

Coach is an invention of the Illuminati to make you feel more like cattle being herded from place to place.

Makes me wonder if all this time, maybe just like everyone else, I've been looking to be comfortable in this world. That's hard to come by because lately, maybe even forever, I've felt so uncomfortable in my own skin that I wish I could slip it off and leave it somewhere for cleaning or retire it to some bag or box in a garage of unwanted soul-stuff. But at least for eight hours on a train I don't have to worry about a thing. It is one of the joys of traveling; you don't have a to be a worker, dreamer, father, husband, democrat, catholic, or yourself.

You can just be.

Morning, Glory

I wake. Breathe, breathing...Something in my throat. The alarm has not gone off, stupid alarm. 5:52 AM. I was supposed to be up at 5:40 AM - I hate that alarm clock.

The baby cries, his only language streaming wireless from a tinny speaker. My heart breaks a little each time he cries. This is the "where are you?" cry. I know his different cries and this is the one of a lost child.

The floor is cold. My joints are tight, tightness in my neck and shoulders. I stretch and crack and smell that I need a shower. Nice hot shower. Heaven is a nice long hot shower from which you never prune. I'd like to sleep levitated on air. I feel the fan buffeting small blows of air against my naked skin. I am naked. I need pants. Where? At the end of the bed.

His cry rises in volume and in sorrow.

Daddy is coming. Daddy always wants to be there for you and knows that you will fall and hurt and bleed and cry and it will be the end of the world for you, for what do you know of the world, my little version of me with some of your mother mixed in?

There is a great deal of fear involved in parenting. I protect. I serve.

My poor parents, what I put them through...

Your mother stirs from deep sleep as I nearly trip over pants. I hate pants. Pants enslave me. Muttering back from the bed where my wife lies. Can't make it out over the scream from the speaker.

Down the hall the dogs stir from low lying positions. I hear but cannot see shakes and stretches and snorts. There is no light now because there is no sun. No light from high windows showing neighbor's roof and dark blue clouds and sky. Gas giant burning and burning, yellow disc somewhere else around the world.

I tell him I'm coming but know he can't hear me over his own screams. Poor boy. Poor little one. Daddy's coming.

I flip the switch first and small light from his closet illuminates his crib in yellow.

Unlatch the crib and reach down for him, him wiggling on the mattress like a crazy glow worm, the yellow swaddle giving way under his strength and fear and rage and frustration. My wife tells me that he is definitely my child and I know this in my deepest parts. A lifetime of trying to get that strength and fear and rage and frustration under lock and key and I see it personified in my baby boy.

We are all children.

I pick him up and shush him as I give little kisses to his soft warm skin and plump, tear wet cheeks. My tears are saltier than a baby's, but that makes sense on many different levels.

Daddy's here, honey. Shuusshhhhh. It's OK. Daddy's here...