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and so it goes. something i think i want is practically in my hands, and it turns out i don't want it after all. or maybe it only looked like what i wanted at first, and turns out not to be.
it's a bad cliche: the grass is always greener, etc. so i get up on the fence and swing my feet over to the other side. and i don't jump. maybe i have to see things from that precise vantage point to realize that the grass is basically the same on both sides. or maybe that's the only place where i can see that the grass on the other side is only greener because it's fake, an empty promise, like this plastic lawn i always walk past on capitol hill. or maybe it's just not the kind of grass i like. timothy instead of kentucky bluegrass or something, looks good from a distance but it doesn't taste quite right (i'm a horse now? or a cow or a goat?). or maybe i realize i've been over there before, and when i'm sitting up on the fence i remember what a bloody mess i made, clawing my way back out. looking in, realizing the fence *encloses* that greener-seeming grass, it doesn't simply divide where i am from where it is, makes my scars itch, and my hackles rise.
surely this is the answer: take a bad cliche and press it to your life until it takes the image of what you're currently experiencing, like silly putty, then stretch it out in different directions so everything looks like a reflection in a funhouse mirror, all distorted and exaggerated, melodramatic. is that what memory is? is this how it drives us through successive decisions? live and learn, they say (so many cliche's, so little time). well we have to either live or die, and i'm not dead, so i think i have that first part down for now. but learn what, exactly?
it's a bad cliche: the grass is always greener, etc. so i get up on the fence and swing my feet over to the other side. and i don't jump. maybe i have to see things from that precise vantage point to realize that the grass is basically the same on both sides. or maybe that's the only place where i can see that the grass on the other side is only greener because it's fake, an empty promise, like this plastic lawn i always walk past on capitol hill. or maybe it's just not the kind of grass i like. timothy instead of kentucky bluegrass or something, looks good from a distance but it doesn't taste quite right (i'm a horse now? or a cow or a goat?). or maybe i realize i've been over there before, and when i'm sitting up on the fence i remember what a bloody mess i made, clawing my way back out. looking in, realizing the fence *encloses* that greener-seeming grass, it doesn't simply divide where i am from where it is, makes my scars itch, and my hackles rise.
surely this is the answer: take a bad cliche and press it to your life until it takes the image of what you're currently experiencing, like silly putty, then stretch it out in different directions so everything looks like a reflection in a funhouse mirror, all distorted and exaggerated, melodramatic. is that what memory is? is this how it drives us through successive decisions? live and learn, they say (so many cliche's, so little time). well we have to either live or die, and i'm not dead, so i think i have that first part down for now. but learn what, exactly?
