Follow-up

It's not a metaphor and there's not always meaning hidden and that's a lesson that I sing to myself over and over again while the scenarios play out in my mind as to what this or that meant or could mean or signified.

Sarah Kay performs "Useless Bay"

So it doesn't really matter what my grades were, in terms of who I am as a person. I get to be me either way and I am functional either way and there is a determined practicality to the denial of metaphor, the denial of meaning. You can take a shout into the void and make it just compression dissipating in the atmosphere, the existential dread neatly packaged into an equation or two and if those sound waves happened to fall on listening ears, it wouldn't mean anything more than proximity, not unless I made it, took it to be something significant.

(Well, actually, the grades really do matter, especially if I'm looking to be an academic, and there is a real sense in which they numerically reflect my performance and are representative of the effort and ability I can display, so being slightly sub-excellent in a situation that requires excellence is a real and significant status. There's actually not much of a metaphor when it comes the practical implications of the numbers assigned to my work.)

What I'm saying, I guess, is that life is complex and sometimes it's easier if you don't assign meaning to every little thing. It's wonderful to be able to stand on the edge of a sunset and feel the tension in the world waiting to rest, and it's powerful to be able to lay in the whisperquiet of night listening to the rustle-thump of your heart and lungs and grasp the beauty that is a living body, but shit, y'all, I also pick my nose and pop my zits and I can't pretend that isn't a part of the "beauty of living" too. Everything can fit on a spectrum from crass joviality to pensive sobriety if you try hard enough.

I embedded the video above because it's so rare that a random youtube suggestion brings a perfectly distilled counterpoint to your spirit. The poem might be driven by pain but there are other things here too. There's a weariness with the need to search for a better idea of what's going on, a weariness that I feel all to frequently. Let a storm just be a storm. Goodness knows we get enough of them here. They're a fact of life.

Just life.