My heart feels like it's in a holding pattern. I don't think I really ever got off my recent flight back to Cleveland. Hence, a reprint from 3/5/2001:
What a strangeness always the world brings when you open yourself up to it vastly! No room for routine as each succeeding surprise washes upon you like a tingling ocean wave. One learns how foolish mundane *expectations* can be. One learns to live like a tourist in a potentially predatory universe…
…to live like a tourist in a potentially predatorial universe seems to me to be not simply a valuable strategy, but an indispensable one. Conversant tourism predisposes one to fun engagement with a probing awareness, to sensitized discernment, and to activity without habituated involvement. Precisely: take in everything possible with heightened perception while never settling into a pre-fabricated template—a habit. For it is the nature of habits to inhibit conscious awareness for the sake of optimizing an efficiency in performance of some well-rehearsed structured task ("good" and "bad" habits are the same in this respect). But in a universe which can be changeable and predatorial, yet the structure of which is otherwise largely unknown, habits—either good or bad—may turn into fatal assets without warning.
As a youth of 14, I started seriously entertaining notions of a, no—wrong word—not “a” but “my” first love affair with a girl. Oh how romantically consuming it was to going to be! How marvelous this country, this America to provide young men like me this opportunity! Ha! How much did I know? Nothing! I woke up 11 years later as a sergeant in the U.S. Army stationed deep in the heart of Central America—still a virgin! There I was: warrior-clad, a father-figure to my troops (who’d ask me, time to time, for paternal advice about making it with their girlfriends!), in charge of a jungle mission, and still wondering why the monkeys in the coconut trees could get it on, but not me!
So what the hell was I doing with my youth for all those years? Too much of everything to ever be bored! I read books while others frolicked, but I stayed tuned with utmost attention. You might say that my attention was transfixed somewhat by the psychic television network (PTN) that played its transmissions endlessly but unrepetitively, for my enrichment, at times I thought, and then at other times I thought, in preparation for my mortal demise. What played on that channel? You name it! I watched two Catholic popes die in their beds while I was laying distantly in mine. I caught unrehearsed glimpses of several heads of state betrayed, subsumed, and destroyed. I watched the PTN with such consummation that I grew a third eye! And that third eye had great acuity in detecting a nemesis that had a habit of stalking me now and then from behind. *duck* ! Of course I could see it coming! How else could I have survived?
So the sexual allure of my youth—to and from girls—while always there, played like a *ping* with a TTL (time to live) of: timeout! I *pinged* but got timeouts always since the PTN channel redirected everything to infinity or thereabouts before even toying in echo a response. “In time…in due time,” I reassured myself--a thought which was so completely out of that world and beyond the bounds of then referable time.
But I was reborn in the jungle! I found my manly fate in the tropics! Thus my affinity with all tropicalities: the procession of humidity and heat, the huge blue slow flapping flutterbys, the python stretching so long across the road that its head and tail was obscured by the encroaching junglement, even killer-bees that suffered me to walk among them! Even vampire bats that led some troops in unawakened sleep to a painless pallid death! All of it dangerous, all of it beautiful, all of it shared with an open heart and the deepest sense of intimate relatedness. All of it me! All of it and "my first lover" so becoming a fulfillment so becomingly!
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