Prose and Cones

I could have had the best day of my life yesterday but I had a brain. It was a functioning, over-analytical brimming-with-depressed-neurons brain, and it won’t let me stop thinking about the pros of what I don’t have, and the cons of what I do have. I was hanging under the monkey bars with my pits exposed to the whole world with zero modesty, but my mind was in the two places I couldn’t be. I could probably grasp those rusty metal bars for minutes on end but I couldn’t quite grasp the reason why inertia couldn’t be applied to everyday life, if scientific laws were truly unbreakable.

Friday the 25th, I was waging an impossible war against myself. I tried to get the important people to have a say in my personal conflict but they were either too calculated, or too self-involved. I pitted my selves by myself instead. In my head, my past self and my future self were garroting each other trying to decide what to do with my present self. One of the two had to die, and by 3:31pm of that Friday, it was pretty clear my future self was the surrendering vegetable on the ground. I marched back to the room in which I withered for my freshman year, with the newspaper folks who used the word “awesome” and “epic” seven times more than your average human being.

Come Saturday, the “supposedly” best day of my life. I couldn’t believe I asked for spikes for my fifteenth birthday and I had to wake up every morning, seeing those shoes and thinking, there’s no “I” in softball. I could have at least joined the club since the 18:00 transportation wouldn’t be such an issue but Coach, who previously wanted me to continue playing, looked at me like he wanted me to scram because I was such an ugly view, waiting with my pointer finger all over the sign-up sheet when there clearly was a dozen less-problematic freshmen waiting behind me.

“Pag-isipan mo,” said he who I spent my most productive summer days with. That was the worst advice, to be left alone with your thoughts when you’re clearly in need of outside opinions. I turned around and walked away while the freshmen chattered on behind me, without knowing I was deeply conflicted and torn. Why should they know anyway? I was letting myself be consumed by the moment. That was a pivotal point, had my life been a movie. It’s not every day that you face and decline opportunities that could have put your whole life in a different light.

I don’t want to get started on the fitness club’s triathlon dream and how appealing it is to have companions who can run distances without you having to hear about their weather complaints. I don’t want to have visceral pain in three places. I think two problems are enough, thank you.

In Diary, that bloody dirty fishbowl of a novel, Chuck Palahniuk says that what we can’t understand, we can make mean anything. It’s been months but I still don’t have enough heart or logic to make something out of this frustration I have. I just want to be something bigger than I am. I want to break out because that’s the good and healthy thing. I want to stop writing and do something else with my life, like playing as catcher while getting singed by the sun. These mighty efforts I put into the races I ran and the balls I threw, they’re the outside forces that I thought would break the straight boring line that was my workaday life. If inertia were true, I would have been a zigzag but I guess God and the Rest of the Universe wanted something else for me.

And I have a favorite passage from the Bible now. I never thought I’d be that kind of person but Matthew 6:34 is the best thing I’ve read since Palahniuk. It simply read, “Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” It's not very biblical, for a verse from the Gospel of Matthew, but it's universal ideals like those that keep me going.

I now leave this blog with an adjective I'll be hearing zillions of times in different contexts for the next forty or so Friday afternoons. God and the Rest of the Universe, taken as one great entity, is awesome.