Friday Night: A Clementine, Some Wine, & a Black Blizzard

I stayed up until 2am watching the History Channel. Gosh, I love it. Can even watch the same shows twice. Anyway, last night was black blizzards and the Armageddon list of seven.

I think for the first time, I really felt what people who fear death feel. Normally, I just don’t entertain it at all…and death (pain aside) doesn’t frighten me. Yet somehow, for about 30 seconds last night, it was there in the pit of my gut, ripe love, heavy anger. Some indescribable feeling that was there, then gone. Was it fear? Not really. More like acceptance with a tremor.

This morning, another post from a classmate of mine from undergrad days, Joseph DeVoir, who continues to post daily about the struggles in Gaza. About the 100+ people led to a building they were told was safe, only to be shut in and later, attacked. 30+ died.

Milton readings. Long papers. Waning energy. 72 hours of cheering for boys’ basketball games. blah blah blah

Yesterday, I went out to the back porch for quiet. In the distance, a horn blew steady for the time it took to smoke a cigarette. As I went in and closed the door on the cold (the window w/the pattern of frozen flowers in the pane), I was sure it would still be blowing.

It was a wreck: a truck’s fender bent into a telephone pole. A housewife in the subdivision up the hill from my valley—the village where I live peacefully, most of the time—her head pressed against the steering wheel in a garage full with fumes. Let her sleep, I thought.

Let this be an angry lover who’s run his car into the yard of a woman he’ll never have. Here is the horn he blows. This, the sound I’ll mark my night by. This, the noise I’ve always wanted.

I’m a liar. A hypocrite. I have no idea what I want from life. Only sometimes do I even let real life enter my mind. What does real life mean?

Sometimes, when I read things like what Joe’s posting about Israeli ground attacks, I think that I have nothing left to say. To speak is arrogant. Something like this is happening all of the time. Just not here.

Everyone should be reading Joe’s words, not mine (see his and other updates at the Palestine Monitor). Yet later, after I go shoot pool this afternoon, and my mind feels right again (empty of real life), I’ll speak again. So damn arrogant, aren’t we.