Other Things
There really are other things to think about.
Like the kind of green that settles across these hills in June. It’s no longer a spring-lime green. The view from my house does not include the diversity of greens it did in May. No, June’s green is the universal green of summer. Solid green. Determined green. In it for the long haul green.
I could also think about the fact that by 2042, non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up a majority of the U.S. population and by 2050, 62% of the nation’s children will have a minority ethnicity. Now that is seriously cool!
The ever-increasing postage rates are likewise worthy of thought. It no longer makes sense to mail $10/month payments on my MRI bill using a 44-cent stamp. That said, the wonder of the United States Postal Service never ceases to amaze me. For the price of a sticker and envelope, I can put something into the mail and know it will arrive at the appropriate address a few days later. I can do this for my entire lifetime and the letters I send will make their arrival almost, if not entirely, without fail. The magic of the USPS is like the magic of electricity to a small child. You flip the light switch and the light turns on. You lick the stamp and the letter is as good as received.
Other things to think about include: whether or not to cancel my Netflix for the summer, whether putting warm leftovers in Tupperware will slowly kill me, whether the stray cat around my house will ever take the food I leave out (or whether it will die first, terrified and deluded as it is in its state of near-death), whether artists who incorporate found art into their work are making it their own or ripping it off, and whether the Baptist family from St. Augustine, Florida who just knocked on my friend’s door was using their 6-year-old daughter as fodder to convert the heathen artists or whether that little girl really wanted to recite Scripture to a total stranger in an odd location in the middle of a sunny, June day.
The thing that does not need to be thought about any further but which I cannot stop thinking about is whether or not obsessive and circular thinking is a necessary attribute the fully immersed writer. Must a writer re-play and re-live events in her mind’s eye and across the palate of her heart in order to fully comprehend them? As a monk runs his fingers across a river stone, must the writer repeat such scenes, images, ideas, and emotions again and again in order to a make a slow and steady impression? In order to make her mark? Are the images of the world and experiences of my own life the “found art” that I, the writer, incorporate into my view and words, trying to write them into coherence? Or is writing merely a protection in times of emotional dismay, a way of getting the kinks out on the page so that I do not humiliate myself in life?…
