Your heart’s still beating

Our readings today will be from The Echo Maker, so please have your copy ready to reference during the course of the homily. Thank you.

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When I was little, say 9, I got anxious whenever I thought about marriage. Not because of the enormous commitment it represents, or the uncertainty about whether or not you’ve picked the right person at the right time, but because when you stood at that altar, you had to kiss a girl. In front of people.

Point being that all the difficulties and complications you envision outside of a thing are going to be non-issues when you face up to it. How freeing is that?

Fatalist in the audience: Couldn’t you just reformulate that to say that you’ll never be able to anticipate any of the terrible mishaps that will befall you on this dismal tour through life?

Possibly, but fuck you, guy.

page 29: “The body could survive any isolation. Then there was the mind.”

I’m purportedly on a spring break, but I ought take another look at the bill of goods. Says here Spring Break should be warm and rejuvenating. Miss and Miss. Hinsdale was pretty warm today, something like 50, and my shoulders were overheated beneath my coat, which I take for a promising sign. But there’s not much to do here, and nobody’s around except these entitled rich folk in their luxury cars. They seem so much more offensive this time around, with their reckless driving, obvious entitlement, and garish neo-colonials rising up too high against the flat gry sky. No salt stains on their Beamers, no dull paint on their Lexi.

At least their kids aren’t yet corrupted: passing through the park I heard one small girl rattling a bush, performing an unintentional homage to this:

Only with vegetation.

Ah, the fair Midwest. The snow melted, grudgingly, but holy hell how raw and gray can one day be?’

84: “They say it’s April, but one confused April, doing a pretty good January imitation.”

As I age, some spots on the calendar (Christmas, Halloween, February 26th) lose importance, and others gain it (New Years, Spring).

I’m thinking about thaw -> regrowth so much that I’ve already got the title for a short story collection: Songs of Spring. I never come up with titles, and I certainly don’t write short story collections. What’s the matter with me? I’ve got a perfectly serviceable potboiler, heavy on the plot and spectacle, with a dash of comedy, stalled at 30,000 words, and all I think about writing is morose little stories about people making decisions and caring about each other and not knowing how to go about either. But if you’re going to major in english, you might as well abandon all tendencies towards marketability and intelligibility, right?

Same audience member: Like these last few posts?

I said fuck you, guy.

Alright, I’m off to Be Legendary, running windsprints in half-lit gyms and shit.

“They left you half dead in the street/

But that just means you’re half alive… and”

–>TITLE

FOOTNOTE:

1: hulu.com, it’s full of stars.