The Light is Right


Dear Eugene,

It's nice to write your first sentence without knowing where you are going with it.  Like now.

You can call me a compulsive writer, a chronic chronicler of life.  You might think snapping a picture with my phone is easier--which is not untrue, and also indeed fun--but writing is funner.  For example, you can invent words that you can't find in the dictionary.  (And you are wrong, "funner" is actually a word.)

Anyway, let me say something I really want to say: I like to see there's still sunlight on my path when I leave work at 5.  Like today.

I am ok with darkness.  I can tolerate rain.  I can by and large steer clear of cursing when wind joins in.  The whole climatic dome of melancholy like an umbrella over my head gives me a shroud of seriousness, an excuse to write silly things.

Yet I am hungry for sunshine.  It's all so trite, I know: light=life.  The hope, the joy, the fun, a light so exuberant that you almost want to talk it down and spin a dark tale about its hidden side.  Then you realize light=not dark and there is no crack to sneak in even a hair of cynicism.

Edward Edwards once said to his friend Samuel Johnson, “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”

LOL.

Sometimes I can almost forgive people around me for talking about nothing but eating and traveling and shopping and eating and gossips and body shape and eating.  I mean, what the heck are people going to do with their life if they don't burn off the light a bit?  Life is too interesting that if we don't trivialize it somewhat our curiosity might kill us.

I am ready for another day of sunshine.  I am happy when the weather report gets life right.

Yours, Alex

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