Head 'Em Off At The Impasse

Sometimes ("increasingly ... today") I feel as though I am about to be obliterated by a tsunami-wave of nonsense. I've never had the experience of walking down the street with proverbial little bitty dogs nipping at my heels, but I'm convinced I own a time-share in that flea-infested acreage on which everywhere you turn, the same maddening problems keep cropping up until you are so sick of the dance they do on your head, you're ready to throw in more towels than a Martha Stewart white sale. And the worst part is that ninety-nine times out of a hundred you have no one to blame but the person you call "me."

Do you ever feel like everyone is singing but nobody's got the melody? And you listen for a while and it makes you so dissatisfied with your thin excuse for a life. So you search your mental database for the names and faces of all your dearly-held finely-honed loves, your hoarded store of dreams, and when they materialize on the screen you hold them there with your gaze until your eyeballs sting or the images themselves begin to fade, whichever happens first. You don't look away until you absolutely must and what remains is only an optical illusion where the loved thing once was. And you begin to suspect that this quickly-dissolving adumbration is all that's left to you.

I'm always among the last to comprehend. There is so little I really know and so much my mind aches to know. I'm going to run out of time. I'm limited by my sketchy understanding, my unresolved issues, my finicky tastes, my stubborn paradigm. There's an arrow lodged in my heart and sometimes the only comfort I have is in the knowledge that as long as it stays there I won't bleed to death. It may sound corny to you (it even sounds corny to me) but that's what I tell myself every time a thing of beauty takes my breath away or an intense love sets my heart afire: don't take that arrow out no matter how much it hurts. The velocity it took to plunge that projectile so deeply, and at that angle, is the force that's keeping you alive. God understands this so I don't need to.

Supposedly the best defense is a strong offense. Emily Dickinson, the "Belle of Amherst," wrote: In this short life/That only lasts an hour/How much, how little/Is within our power! Ah, yes. This is within my power: to never again cower before a problem. To stand up, stare it down, send it packing. Decline the key to a domicile in the doldrums, however temporary or rent-controlled. Put on my glad rags with a good hat and just the right shoes and take a fire-in-the-belly approach to the obstacle courses that routinely masquerade as ordinary days. Be anything but a poltroon. Flare out in high dudgeon and refuse to back down until life's eyes are once again shining into mine.

Ever do a System Restore on your computer? If your machine is acting weird you click a few times (you have to know where to click but you can Google that or ask the nearest geek) and your computer is magically restored to the date you select. The last date that you remember everything being all right. No data is lost and it is completely reversible. All the safety net you could ask for. All systems go. Houston, we no longer have a problem.

Yeah. Like that.

Hit it, Emily.

I dwell in Possibility --

A fairer House than Prose --

More Numerous of Windows --

Superior -- for Doors --

Of Chambers as the Cedars --

Impregnable of Eye --

And for an Everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky --

Of Visitors -- the fairest --

For Occupation -- This --

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise --