Today is a day of thought bubbles overcrowding the space between the outlines of my sketched presence and the bold square framing this moment of my cartoonish existence. As of late, I have had better control of these overlapping bubbles, an ability to focus the synapses into maybe five separate highways instead of twenty crossed paths, but today is just one of those interwoven days. Could be from reading a couple of very disparate perspectives this afternoon, the dizzying whirl of Kurt Vonnegut mixed with the reassuring glow of Mitch Albom. Truly an odd couple.
Vonnegut is a satirical, bumpy roadtrip where the signs are in another language and the roads angle in boomerang fashion, taking you first in this direction and sending you spinning into the opposite with no warning. Cat’s Cradle: no cat, no cradle, where the meaninglessness of life is captured within a web as simple and complicated as a cat’s cradle itself, threads twisting and repeating one upon another. For One More Day: hand upon your arm, Albom gently guides you through another rite of passage experienced by protagonists and narrators who are close, always close, to the whispered wisdom of the dying and the dead. Where the meaning of life is captured between prologue and epilogue, always found within the pages if you care to look, manifesting as graceful dancers tiptoeing across the tense tightropes that connect you to those that you love. The cynic and the optimist, and I sandwiched in between, all within the fading in and fading out of a sunny afternoon.
It has been forever since anything landed from my mind onto paper. Funny how the hours shoved aside by days and replaced by months are so hard to slow once you get into a groove. Especially when the groove is double-etched with happiness by the hand of the partner in your life, and when daily problems seem to bounce right off the protective force field that activates when Wonder Twins unite and transform into something else entirely. Thoughts swan-diving just past the edge of the blank page to be forever forgotten, crumbling on impact into ashes around the page. A kind of collateral damage that happens when there is not enough time to sit and reflect, record and translate the language of the synapses flickering a personal Morse code in your mind.
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Vonnegut is a satirical, bumpy roadtrip where the signs are in another language and the roads angle in boomerang fashion, taking you first in this direction and sending you spinning into the opposite with no warning. Cat’s Cradle: no cat, no cradle, where the meaninglessness of life is captured within a web as simple and complicated as a cat’s cradle itself, threads twisting and repeating one upon another. For One More Day: hand upon your arm, Albom gently guides you through another rite of passage experienced by protagonists and narrators who are close, always close, to the whispered wisdom of the dying and the dead. Where the meaning of life is captured between prologue and epilogue, always found within the pages if you care to look, manifesting as graceful dancers tiptoeing across the tense tightropes that connect you to those that you love. The cynic and the optimist, and I sandwiched in between, all within the fading in and fading out of a sunny afternoon.
It has been forever since anything landed from my mind onto paper. Funny how the hours shoved aside by days and replaced by months are so hard to slow once you get into a groove. Especially when the groove is double-etched with happiness by the hand of the partner in your life, and when daily problems seem to bounce right off the protective force field that activates when Wonder Twins unite and transform into something else entirely. Thoughts swan-diving just past the edge of the blank page to be forever forgotten, crumbling on impact into ashes around the page. A kind of collateral damage that happens when there is not enough time to sit and reflect, record and translate the language of the synapses flickering a personal Morse code in your mind.
[break]
As I pick up this fragment from where I left off more than a week ago, the visual of my sketched presence surrounded by grey ashes of forgotten thoughts still lingers. More than a week has zipped by, nine days plummeting deep into the archives of my existence as I whirl around, hands desperately groping into the indigo deep, but alas, Cher’s made it more than abundantly clear that one cannot “turn back time”. Ashes are piling up around the frames. Personal life, work life, and personal life at work have formed a cat’s cradle of overlapping lines. I can only thank the myriad of gods, lords and heavens above that I have my husband’s constant bass tempering the pace of these frames reeling past. The metronome’s tick, tock, tick patiently separating one sketch from another to form some recognizable linear storyline across the projection screen.
Yesterday we began his birthday celebrations as we count down to his thirtieth in nine days time. Although some may consider the thirties to be a good pivotal age for the separation between the child and adult in us all, we are much more the type whose stubborn fists refuse to release the naiveté, the wonder, the hope and the promise of remaining just a kid. Just a kid skipping along into another decade of inspiration and experimentation. I am so looking forward to what this next volume has to offer, now that sidekicks have finally joined paths, psyched and ready to face the trail ahead. Wizards and warlocks? Alien bounty hunters and never-dying one-armed dudes called Krycek? Smurfs and Oompa Loompas? What is waiting to be sketched into the shared frames of our existence? And more importantly, do we truly have any control over the hand of the Artist? Or are we talking about frames that have already been drafted and only await the livening touch of the watercolor brush?
A or B, it really doesn’t matter, does it? Our linear perception demands our reverence to seconds ticking one after another, skipping along as you hasten to keep up. This slice of reality electrified as the watercolor spreads across the plane, overtaking the monochrome skeletal frames, opening, expanding and soaking different wavelengths into the very fabric of our souls. Whether we are choosing each color now, or have mapped them out before in a color-by-number fashion, from this limited perspective it seems to make more sense to join hands and wonder at the spectacle of colors unfolding right before our eyes, rather than firing synapses into the why’s of what has been and what is to come. Hopeful to discover the meaning in the present frame, naïve to the rigidity of frames long established, and wise enough to enjoy each stroke of color for the singular beauty it represents.
