|
Moments in Time
[Takashi-kun! Hitomi tojitara futari ni nareru ima tatoe kono heya hitori demo.....my destiny.]
Seconds build a day like drops of water make an ocean -- in this mundane business of living the day, it is unlikely that we are aware of how many seconds are there, and only those outside the O.R. are conscious about their presence. Time, of course, is elastic. It's just a state of mind and our minds are anything but tidy, precise, predictable simple machines. Even "now" is many things. "If you would be unloved and forgotten," said a character in Vonnegut, Jr.'s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, "be reasonable." But there are many loves and many ways to reason. And forgetfulness comes painfully slowly. It was a frying afternoon and someone from more than eight thousand miles away asked me this: "Are you happy?" I said no. I asked him if he was happy. "I'm 60% happy," he said. How come his written words had been nothing but sunshine and blue sky and nowhere was the smog? He said, "I'm a good actor." I'm still hearing his voice now, as I write this down -- I love that voice, it's one of the crispiest I've ever heard -- but it's the words that ring loud -- we're all actors. He could be a candidate for something at Cannes. Some would be perfect for the Oscars. Some others are not that good. Some crave for "good images". I know at least half a dozen who would do anything to keep their painstakingly carved Other Selves, the Social Selves, the Selves To Meet Friends In, the Online Selves, the I, Only Way Much Better Selves intact. They won't wake up and admit the fact that they have fabricated the selves for outward-bound consumer-related business unless you let a bomb goes off right at their faces. Some are Ordinary Stuff, they have no personalities at all, they keep the Selves As The Majority Of People Around Here Sees As Normal. I know many of them too. Half of which keep denying vehemently that they are "normal" people in the first degree. They want to be seen as weirdos, as wackos, as eccentrics, as whatever but what they actually are. Nothing annoys me more than square people ( yup, "people", not "persons", since the latter means personalities) who desperately dress themselves so that others would miss the obvious insecurity, timidity, cowardice, and all-out conformity, and take them as "interesting" entities -- which they are never. They would only admit half-heartedly that they are actually "normal" and as authentic as a pair of Nike shoes compared to another when you get them cornered and against the wall. These are the people who laughed when they heard the story of a woman in Tacoma, Washington, who's broken-hearted because her British "online boyfriend" left her for another "online girl" (2000) -- knowing that they have never met in the first place was enough for them to think of it as a slightly stupid joke. The ones that display the Selves To Meet Friends In offer a light string of consolation to the woman -- they have to, you see, because being Politically Correct is one of their sacred duties. They do this right after they laugh at her. They're experts on this and are highly skilled with a long practice. You could believe that they're sincere -- if you're too busy doing the grieving to notice how a suppressed smile plays at the corner of their lips. The ones who are Mr./Ms. Ordinary Majority do exactly the same at first, but since they're so clumsy and un-creative, they almost immediately have to offer something more sincere, and that's the time when they admit that to them the story is weird beyond belief, for the only rule they know and obey is, just fall in love with someone of your own kind, of your own geographic location, of your own race, of your own ethnicity, or at least someone whom you could go to bed with, right here and right now. The rule says, the only way to be with someone else is by physical contacts. Other than that, it's pure fiction to them. To the Selves To Meet Friends In the broken-hearted Tacoma girl was a pitiful sight gag. To the Ordinary Majority she did not exist. But there are a few who happen to thread on the same path with the one she, and actually a lot of others, have been taking. It's been long gone, now, the time when my friend from Tacoma finally swam for the shore. Maybe she's having a good time now. The one whose happiness was 60% is probably decorating his church for Christmas that starts to knock at the door. I'm thinking about them and others that I have known, and wish them all some real happiness of the highest attainable degree that daily circumstances permit. So many of us never even knew what happiness is. But maybe the thing to measure bliss that we've been using isn't right. One moment is enough sometimes. As you grow older you understand this. In every second there is a universe, a full day. In a petal of rose an unbound scent and beauty. In a grain of sand, in a blink of an eye, in a heartbeat -- infinity. So in my life I have known good friends and bad acquaintances, the best of all people and the worst ever in history; I have done some haphazardly good deeds and I have made mistakes so big they spilled out of my nightmares and got my bed on fire;I got things right sometimes and I screwed up big time; all these stay in me as I have another day to get over with. Bad memories and people we wish we'd never encountered are, to me, just as good as the commonsensically good ones; I'm grateful for them all. In fact, we should have thanked them more -- why, they made us the way we are today! If you have known the worst, you'd be able to better appreciate the best. You wouldn't know how good your good memories are, unless you have experienced the unspeakably worst. I'm listening to Linkin Park's My December when writing this -- the hint of heavy rain is floating outside my window and I feel a little bit mushy -- but I'm not going to talk about tears and pain and whatever is inside the folder named 'Misery'. This is a thank-you page, by the way (of course you wouldn't have known that it is! I forgot it myself!). Thanks to the following persons who have given me the moments of happiness or something close to that area, even if they all have forgotten what it was, why, where, when and how:
It's incredible that my memories collected absolutely ZERO record of you having done anything bad or wrong or stupid or all three, at all. Thank you. And I mean thank you. You have your own moments in time. Try to give them a room inside, a little room that will hold it for you as you live on. Even if you don't feel so good right now, it shouldn't be just ancient wounds that occupy your little mind. Moments of bliss too are there, even if you can't find the keys to the rooms at the moment; you have misplaced them. "Carpe diem, baby!" shouted Metallica. Encore.
In 1997, Art Thomson, Betsy Clark, Steve Davidson & I (see pictures on the logos) were proven vulnerable to the virus rampant at the time; everybody those days cranked up a collective site. The digital climate worldwide was, unlike today, neurotically welcoming everyone online. Lavishly sized free space was forced on any cyberentity who cared to drop by on any host instead of tiny weeny megs being begged for; maddening pop-ups and banner ads that took a thousand times longer than the content of a page to download were all decently scarce; the internet was crisp and fun, it was still, as well as we were, young. Art named the site after one of his poems written several years earlier, Scarlet Shade. It was a virtual open house; we elicited poems, stories, essays, song lyrics, and nondescript wordy pieces from more and more people as the site grew older and fatter and perhaps shabbier. There were more than 65 people contributed. We shared the mailbox-gorging and HTML-messing tasks unequally (Steve, being the only one to whom digimons surrendered, got to do it by himself most of the time). It was one of the best online memories I keep in a safe-deposit box in my mind. Sure, we are no longer doing it now, everybody has been busy with his and her own stuff, and the site formally stopped ticking after Steve passed away in 2001, leaving a lot of typos uncorrected and clogged links unattended -- but if friendship it's never been, nothing would ever be. Even if this is an epitaph of a long gone collectivity, I want to say to the 65+ men and women whose pages are at Scarlet Shade, thanks so much to keep it, then, alive. Scribe on.
|
Steve Davidson
