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Kurt Vonnegut once said that 5 A.M. is the most vulnerable time of day. It's the time when you feel most seperate from the world; you sit at a table in your bathrobe, a glass of whiskey beside you and the nightmares still hanging from the far corners of your mind, and there's nothing to do but think. It's too late to go back to sleep, but too early to begin the next day.
To me, five A.M. has always been a comfortable hour; I've either just ended a grand adventure, or I'm about to begin one. I enjoy staying out all night, or leaving early for a camping trip. Perhaps it is my youth, or else my penchant for peeling back the corners of the world to see what hides in the places where nobody looks. 5 A.M. is just right.
Instead, 3 A.M. tends to be the dangerous one for me. As any denizen of slumber parties can tell you, 3 A.M. is the hour for telling secrets. It's also the only time I remember that I have any.
It's an uncomfortable feeling, as you might imagine, to step just slightly to the left of reality and watch it compress into two-dimensional cutouts while a second You runs around carefully arranging the paper people -- their smiles, their drinks, their gestures. Monitoring looks, alliances, power structures. She looks older and grayer than you remembered her, gestures busy and harried and face in a perpetual focused frown. She clearly excels at her job -- precise, incisive, comprehensive -- and yet she does not seem to enjoy it. She cannot spare the time to.
This is not me; I do not craft things that closely -- at least not on a conscious level. Consciously, I am whimsical, amused, and compassionate. My subconcious is an entirely different story. My subconscious views the world as a French court intrigue, and it uses every tool at its disposal to insure that its political goals are met.
Fortunately, policy is generally set by my conscious, and so my subconscious's clever masterpuppetry simply serves to insure that I and my friends are enjoying ourselves. I like my subconscious; it does a good job. I am simply irritated whenever it intrudes upon my conscious. It's rather like having the servants sit down to dinner with you. Or, to employ a different metaphor, you do not notice your car's muffler until it stops working.
Recent events have forced me to recall that I am a political animal, and that I do tweak situations so that they suit me, (which often involves a measure of damage control). Possibly this is because I have been on vacation and therefore have more of my mind free to pay attention to the internal machinations of my friend group, but more likely it is the feeling that several old conflicts will soon be settled. There's an energy in the air that crackles in my fillings. It makes me manic -- even more a trickster god than usual.
Whatever the case, I'm looking at power structures and analyzing motivations. This is not as negative as it sounds, because most of my friends are extremely kind and extremely noble, to the extent that it periodically amazes me. It is not exactly positive either, because I start seeing the tangles in people's relationships, and I find myself wanting to Be Helpful and unknot them so that everyone is Happy.
This is about as good an idea as finding four quarrelling lovers, waiting until they fall asleep, and brushing their eyelids with a purple flower for which I made a girdle 'round the world.
It might also be called "meddling in other people's affairs."
(If you happen to be someone who interacts with me in day-to-day life, it would not be inappropriate to mumble a prayer of thanks for my foresight and restraint. Despite recent outward appearances, they do both exist, and they are pretty powerful; they have to be to keep a reign on my much-vaunted caprice. God help us all if they ever fail.)
In the meantime, both Patrick and Valancy have seen fit to remind me that I have emotions and cannot/should not simply decide to ignore them unless they suit me. Because it is three in the morning, I shall be harsh and say that this is simply because they enjoy seeing my controls slip -- that they are amused to find me caught off-guard in a matter so pivotal to my humanity; but my heart is not in it. I know that they mean very well -- they who value love above all other things. And I think they worry about me, and my difficulties with the subject. I don't doubt they're entirely right to.
It's all so inconvenient.
I would say "I didn't ask to fall for him," but I think I did, in a way.
Will. Will Will Will.
There; I said it. I had to, simply because it was so difficult. So Very difficult, regardless of the fact that I've said the name before. Regardless of the fact that in the befores I said "anyway, we're wrong for each other" and "this will not work out" and "he doesn't really know I exist."
Although now he might, albeit in a context that makes things difficult.
I don't know how to slant this situation. At all. At all at all at all at all. And that's rare. Really fucking rare.
The ignoring it has been working nicely, but this might be because he has been quite far away. Soon, that will no longer be true.
I think I'll ignore it anyway.
To me, five A.M. has always been a comfortable hour; I've either just ended a grand adventure, or I'm about to begin one. I enjoy staying out all night, or leaving early for a camping trip. Perhaps it is my youth, or else my penchant for peeling back the corners of the world to see what hides in the places where nobody looks. 5 A.M. is just right.
Instead, 3 A.M. tends to be the dangerous one for me. As any denizen of slumber parties can tell you, 3 A.M. is the hour for telling secrets. It's also the only time I remember that I have any.
It's an uncomfortable feeling, as you might imagine, to step just slightly to the left of reality and watch it compress into two-dimensional cutouts while a second You runs around carefully arranging the paper people -- their smiles, their drinks, their gestures. Monitoring looks, alliances, power structures. She looks older and grayer than you remembered her, gestures busy and harried and face in a perpetual focused frown. She clearly excels at her job -- precise, incisive, comprehensive -- and yet she does not seem to enjoy it. She cannot spare the time to.
This is not me; I do not craft things that closely -- at least not on a conscious level. Consciously, I am whimsical, amused, and compassionate. My subconcious is an entirely different story. My subconscious views the world as a French court intrigue, and it uses every tool at its disposal to insure that its political goals are met.
Fortunately, policy is generally set by my conscious, and so my subconscious's clever masterpuppetry simply serves to insure that I and my friends are enjoying ourselves. I like my subconscious; it does a good job. I am simply irritated whenever it intrudes upon my conscious. It's rather like having the servants sit down to dinner with you. Or, to employ a different metaphor, you do not notice your car's muffler until it stops working.
Recent events have forced me to recall that I am a political animal, and that I do tweak situations so that they suit me, (which often involves a measure of damage control). Possibly this is because I have been on vacation and therefore have more of my mind free to pay attention to the internal machinations of my friend group, but more likely it is the feeling that several old conflicts will soon be settled. There's an energy in the air that crackles in my fillings. It makes me manic -- even more a trickster god than usual.
Whatever the case, I'm looking at power structures and analyzing motivations. This is not as negative as it sounds, because most of my friends are extremely kind and extremely noble, to the extent that it periodically amazes me. It is not exactly positive either, because I start seeing the tangles in people's relationships, and I find myself wanting to Be Helpful and unknot them so that everyone is Happy.
This is about as good an idea as finding four quarrelling lovers, waiting until they fall asleep, and brushing their eyelids with a purple flower for which I made a girdle 'round the world.
It might also be called "meddling in other people's affairs."
(If you happen to be someone who interacts with me in day-to-day life, it would not be inappropriate to mumble a prayer of thanks for my foresight and restraint. Despite recent outward appearances, they do both exist, and they are pretty powerful; they have to be to keep a reign on my much-vaunted caprice. God help us all if they ever fail.)
In the meantime, both Patrick and Valancy have seen fit to remind me that I have emotions and cannot/should not simply decide to ignore them unless they suit me. Because it is three in the morning, I shall be harsh and say that this is simply because they enjoy seeing my controls slip -- that they are amused to find me caught off-guard in a matter so pivotal to my humanity; but my heart is not in it. I know that they mean very well -- they who value love above all other things. And I think they worry about me, and my difficulties with the subject. I don't doubt they're entirely right to.
It's all so inconvenient.
I would say "I didn't ask to fall for him," but I think I did, in a way.
Will. Will Will Will.
There; I said it. I had to, simply because it was so difficult. So Very difficult, regardless of the fact that I've said the name before. Regardless of the fact that in the befores I said "anyway, we're wrong for each other" and "this will not work out" and "he doesn't really know I exist."
Although now he might, albeit in a context that makes things difficult.
I don't know how to slant this situation. At all. At all at all at all at all. And that's rare. Really fucking rare.
The ignoring it has been working nicely, but this might be because he has been quite far away. Soon, that will no longer be true.
I think I'll ignore it anyway.
