Brilliant Nothing


Dear Eugene,

Sometimes life feels like one big distraction.

You move to B to get away from A just to learn C might be the better answer which looks awfully like A.  The very big might-bes in life make us move around enough to forget we are dying, dying to truly live for even one moment, to touch the one true thing for even once.  Since we know full well that moment has not and might never come, we play the game of Let's Look Busy.

The most distracted person wins but he has no time to shake your hand cos he's somewhere else again already.  His success is in perpetuating an illusion of success but that is better than failing which in this world means sticking around for too long that everything comes out of your mouth in any and every social setting is to justify why you're "going nowhere."

"So what have you been up to?"

Absolutely nothing I can do without, we can't get ourselves to let on.  To plunge right into the next distraction is the best cover-up for being absolutely nothing and living for not much more.  ("Well, the other day I got this really cool thing from Costco, clearance priced, and you won't believe how much more it was selling for if I were to get it even from Amazon...")

YouTube was down last night, a "global outage" they said.  I am sure I was among the firsts in the globe to know.  My YouTube is not working, that is about the only thing my son said--mumbled--to me last night and, as ridiculous as this might sound to you, he meant I should look into it.  He could have Googled it to know it was about YouTube and not just his YouTube and not just his computer, a computer that I purchased for him and thus he thinks I should service it for life the way he probably intends me to service him.

Absolutely ridiculous, these young people, nowadays, we say.  Everyone else is ridiculous but me, we meant.  These young people are taking their cue from those old people.

Now those old people are getting older, and they say they need healing, they need help, finally find a way to become vulnerable and maybe honest.  Let's look busy fixing ourselves up so that we don't have to explain to these young people what is wrong with us or worse give them the pleasure to explain ourselves to us.  To eat is to explain away hunger; the doctor's prescription relieves us from our dis-ease with self-description.  The joy of a new morning we deny ourselves of even that.

It's a brilliant morning in Vancouver.

Yours, Alex

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