early morning thoughts…

This scruff and odd bark. So suiting of his appearance. Funny how we have obedience schools for dogs. Train them to fit us. Beat the masculinity out of them, physically drain it from their man parts. Palpitate their spirits out and re choreograph them, so they make more sense to us. Coexist with us. The superior race. And my friend Cindy has this idea that the crows are actually the superior race. Has this entire theory around crows. That they are more intelligent than people. I feel like stupidity and intelligence walk a very fine line. Squat like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. Perspective. Continuum. Fluid. Changing. Flowing. My mind feels although busy, vacant of actual concrete and logical thoughts to commit to write about. Maybe it is because I want to re read my morning notes. Was getting too into the process. Cheated. Fucked up the process. Self sabotaged a little, for old times sake. To remind myself that I am still me. Such a strange procedure, such an irritating habit.

Yesterday marks the three year anniversary of Kai’s death. That absurd, disconnected, and seemingly unrelated to him at all, but what they called his funeral. The compulsive hail-marys. The random strangers that spotted irrelevantly through his life, gathered together, physically together but separate in all the other ways, gathered to beg forgiveness to some power bigger than we are, beg forgiveness for his mistakes, how he spent his days. Flawed like every other beautiful soul in this human experience of mistake making and learning. My daughter wants to know what is going on and I tell her we are saying good-bye. Also that nobody really knows how to do that or what happens next. We are doing the best we can, its all we can do. When it finally passes, and I feel as though I have just witnessed some foreign and completely over my hear ritual that I want to shout out in disgust and disagreement about, we move into the basement of the church. His friends conduct a toast to Kai here. The solid beings that supported his existence. Loved him for who he was. Spent their hours and days with him. They are kids. He was so young. They are young. Not yet tainted by age and experience, still intuitively present to life and its moments. Without having to work at noticing. Living. Experiencing. Naive and also wise and trusting of themselves and of others. The re live the memories of Kai. Display pictures and videos capturing his smiles, show us his experience. Let us stay in love with him for what he was and not what he should have been or shouldn’t have done. Still see the glass as half full. Even though it tastes like shit right now, it is just all part of it. Teenagers really exhibit this camouflaged and other worldly brilliance and knowing. We sometimes get too busy and jaded and educated to see it as adults. Through short sobs of breath and hot tear clouded lids, we get to bear witness to the joy my little cousin brought to so many. We get to see his smile never faded and never changed. We get to learn that in contrary to the brainwashing session upstairs of pleading for pardon, he lived this life of touching people, even if his time here was too short by opinion. He will be missed, cherished, loved always.

And it irritates me to no end when people complain to me about their lives and refuse to make change. To even try. Blame time. Business. As if anyone ever relishes in the amount of time they have been given. And Jason warned me that people always make time for what they want to be doing. I think we all kind of inevitably do what we want to in the end anyways. We are gifted time and we choose how we fill it. Even if we slip into victim dance periodically or ironically choose to hang out there longer than we ‘should.’ We build our hours. Create our habits and patterns and rituals. Unconsciously most times. Brand them into our hearts.

And the habits both build and break one day at a time. The good ones and the bad. The good ones break easily. You forget one day, or sleep in or ‘run out of time’ then the next. then suddenly its a memory, this thing you used to do and now idolize in your mind. Attach guilt and shame to it and scold yourself for not following through. The bad habits are easier to form and difficult to forget, take time and effort to do without, constantly. They become second nature. Primal existence. To stop is to mourn them daily, hourly, until we break them, subconsciously miss them, until you don’t anymore. We don’t anymore. smile when they are forgotten, even momentarily. Progress. We are a strange species.