December 2008 Archives

"Play long enough, you never change the stakes. The house takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet and you bet big, then you take the house." - Daniel Ocean

"Strange things are afoot at the Circle K." - Ted Theodore Logan

Big changes afoot here. I mean, I've been working at them for a couple of months, and I have several more weeks of work to do, and then there's a waiting period to find out if it will all come to pass as I hope it will, so there'll be no avian counting just yet, but today one of those intermediate pebbles fell into place, with a sound like a coin dropping into the washing machine. Clunk! A happy, definitive sound.

Something about getting the intermediate pieces accomplished, even when they're a bit of a slog, makes it seem more real to me. I might actually get to do this thing I've wanted to do for so long. And then this wild conversation I had last week, which unhinged some of my well-silted-over ideas, seems to be still percolating under there.

Wow, don't I sound mysterious? I don't mean to, honest. It's just that the details herein are rather private, and I'm not ready to share just yet.

But I can tell you, in broad outline, a few things more.

a) I didn't even realize how much I've been wanting to change the nature of what I do for work. I knew it on one level, but there are layers and layers and layers.
b) I've been looking at my time as a bit of a zero-sum game, and maybe that's not true. Maybe what feels like limited time and energy only feels that way because what I've been doing for a living saps my energy rather than energizing me.
c) I really, really like people who make me THINK.
d) I have a very big brain, and even though I don't trade on it in any social currency kind of way, it is occasionally really fun to take it out for a run.

"There's no place like home." - Dorothy Gale

"Your touch - it calms people. That's a gift from God." - Eugene (Doc Roe)
"No, it's not a gift. God would never give such a painful thing." - Renee (nurse)

I moved around so much, growing up, that I never stayed anywhere long enough for home to take on a geographical meaning.

And my family situation was so problematic that those ties can feel more like chains.

So when I am lonely, or sick, and hear myself say that I want to go home, there isn't a real place on the other end of that phrase.

It's more an idea I carry in my head, a feeling. Some days it looks like an empty cliff face, with nobody around for miles, and a wide plain below that I could swoop over.

Some days it's a fireside, with friends sitting around it, eating something cooked over that fire, or drinking something warmed by it, and most of all, telling each other stories - many of them made up on the spot (as mine always were).

Some days, it's the little house I owned with Boywich, with snow piled up all around it, nearly to the eaves, and a squirrel trying to gnaw his way into my office window upstairs. I hated that squirrel.

When I used to go for walks, I would always come back and pause before going into the house. It looked better from the outside, which is strange, given that we only ever managed to fix up the interior of it, and the outside looked raggedy and unkempt.

But looking in at it lit up, with the soft colors we'd painted it showing through the curtains, and knowing that inside were B. and our cats, and maybe knowing that it was ours in some way that a rented place never is, and maybe knowing that we both had dreams for the place that were never going to be fulfilled...

I don't know. It wasn't my true home either, but it was closer than most.

I guess after a long cold walk it looked to me like the idea of home - cozy, and containing beings I loved - but once inside it was problematic, since Boywich and I were kind of locked into a private hell of our own. Or rather, two private hells and a shared hell.

I've just asked Boywich what he thinks of as home, and I am betting he's going to say, nowhere, but if anywhere, that little house.*

I wonder if it's because home has always had some measure of hell in it that I can't conceive of it as a real place. The only thing that seems safe to me is, as it's always been, my imagination, and so it's there that I really live, in some important way.

There's a cliff, and I have the wings to get myself there whenever I need to. At least I hope I do.

*Later: Yep, Boywich said exactly that.

It sometimes feels to me as if life has two strands, and that their developmental processes are reversed. The physical strand - the health and strength of the body - deteriorates over time, while the internal life of the mind, spirit, whathaveyou - tends to grow richer over time.

If we're living Twizzlers (or oversized DNA, as I keep picturing it), one of our strands is always in a state of decline, and one is always in a state of growth.

Not sure what to make of that, but I thought I'd put it out there.

My so-called holiday week has been a bit like that. A lot of up-and-down. Spent yesterday and today largely rendered immobile after having hurt my back doing one of those ordinary activities that seem to prey on aging backs like vermicious knids on little orange men.

A friend came over yesterday (as we'd planned weeks ago) for what we were pleased to call our Anti-Christmas. We made cookies. We ate them all. (I finished the last half-dozen by myself, after she'd gone home.)

We watched a really brilliant movie. We drank a velvety, spicy wine (goes great with nutmeg-brandy sugar cookies, by the way). We ate a little of my leftover (but homemade) lentil-tomato soup, as a nod to nutritional value.

We knitted. We posed Spiderman in funny scenes. We texted and sent silly pics to friends in faraway places.

I said, at one point, that if it weren't for the horrible back pain, it'd be a perfect day. And she said, "Ah, but if someone weren't in horrible pain, it wouldn't be us, would it?"

True true.

PS. Reading back over this, I realized there's an error in logic here. It's not as simple as that one thread is always in decline and the other is always improving. In the second half of life, that pretty much describes it. In the first half, physical prowess improves until it reaches a peak, usually in young adulthood. But there's a narrowing of personal possibilities after a certain point in childhood, and then a somewhat stagnant period in young adulthood (I'm sure everyone in the world would argue that point with me, but I think there's some truth in it) before the mind/spirit starts to grow richer again. And it does seem that the body is weakest when the mind is strongest, and vice-versa. I could be completely wrong, of course. Just taking the (raw, unformed) idea out for a spin.

I sometimes think that everything, absolutely everything, takes place along a continuum. That is, at one side of the spectrum - or some place in the middle - a quality is positive. It helps you to navigate the world, it allows you to do meaningful work, it tells you what your own particular shape of human life is about. Or maybe it simply keeps you sane.

On the opposite end (and for some things, at either extreme), the same quality has a deleterious effect on you or those who have to be in the same room with you.

Today's example: focus.

I have this in spades, as does my dear adorable brilliant brother. We are both hugely creative people - great big engines of ideas. We never, ever run out of things we want to do, try, or make, nor of the underlying impetus, which is something we want (or rather, need) to say.

That's great, right?

It is. But...we can both veer off into the extreme of focus, which is obsession.

A certain amount of obsession can be good - it provides the necessary drive to get things done.

On the other hand, it can lead one to do something stupid, like, say, get on a bicycle and ride up an uncleared bridge or three before the ice has sufficiently melted to be safely traversable, resulting in broken collarbones and wrecked bikes.

Now before y'all get upset, I did not do this. I had a little Yoda-like talk with myself and amped down the level of urgency and took myself for a brisk little slidey-ice walk instead. No major mishaps.

Not as good as the bike ride would have been - by a factor of about 2,000 - but I don't have a big bloody smear on my chest requiring X-rays and tape and 8 weeks off the bike, either.

Tomorrow it's gonna rain cats and dogs, and I am gonna ride my little ass off in it. Because the temp's going up above freezing and staying there for a few days. Patience, grasshopper.

Okay, here we go. After two lyrical, stream-of-consciousness posts, you're in for a rant, my friends.

I have been trapped, bikefree, for four days now. Not because of my usual assortment of injuries. Not because there's anything wrong with the bikes themselves. Not because I haven't had time.

Not even because the weather's been bad (I have plenty of gear - I can be toasty and dry in most any weather).

The city of New York has, in its infinite insanity (with apologies to Hawkeye for the phrase pilferage), decided that an appropriate place to save money is by eliminating the use of salt, sand, and plows on (apparently) all bike and pedestrian paths on all bridges in this fair (but fairly impossible to deal with, sometimes) city.

I got on my foul-weather steed last night in a desperate attempt to ride somewhere, anywhere (lack of exercise = bad, bad, bad, bad), got 15 minutes away from home, started to go up the first of my two habitually navigated bridges, and got exactly nowhere.

Wheels spun and spun and spun. I put my foot down, carefully, since there's even less purchase on a cycling shoe than there is on a bicycle tire. SHIT. No chance in hell. The thing was a sheet of ice, and the temperature was only just beginning to drop below freezing.

Turned around. Went home. Spent the whole night looking for studded tires that would fit my road bike. (There aren't any. And my mountain bike requires a new set of cranks, possibly chainrings, and a new saddle to be rideable by me. Not to mention the studded tires, which are $150.)

Today I texted a messenger friend: "How's the bridge?"

"Bad."

"Crap. Thanks."

So here I am, hamstrung, because of two bridges. And before you ask, 15 minutes on a bike is roughly the equivalent of having the prettiest boy or girl (whatever your preference) in the world stick his or her hands down your pants and then instantly pull them out, saying, "Oh wait, I forgot. I'm gay/straight (whatever the opposite of your preference)." Except I think I'd mind that a lot less. I mean, at least there's a little momentary thrill there before your hopes are dashed.

A slow day. The waking out of very quiet sleep (unusual for me; I sleep like a twitchy sentry) to snow on trees and three messages on the answering machine. I'd turned my phone off.

The cat is in full-throated Feed Me Now mode. It's 1:40pm.

I wander around, making coffee (Peruvian - okay, but I preferred the Nicaraguan I had in the last batch - it was sharper), calling people back. Yes, I'm alive, sorry I missed brunch.

My brother and I are meeting at the Met tomorrow. I like the Met, even though I instinctively feel a bit claustrophobic and wrong there. It hasn't nearly enough exits for my taste.

But it reminds me of that movie, where the two teenagers get trapped in a museum overnight and get to sleep in that fancy 17th century bed. I always wanted to have sex in that bed - not the one in the movie, the real one in the Met. Boywich and I used to talk about it. Our first date was at the Met, in fact, and I remember him translating inscriptions in Ancient Greek.

I also remember getting turned on by the armor.

I know, I am fucking weird. But it's a perfect storm for me - anatomically correct, made for individuals who really walked the earth and fought wearing it. And I always have that feeling that I might just as well be one of them. So weird to be a woman, so unfamiliar.

I love my carbon-knuckle gloves because they feel like gauntlets, and I only just realized that that's what they remind me of. A familiar feeling. Bikes resemble horses, and the carbon knucks are gauntlets. Where is my fucking sword, anyway?

The roads are terrible today, uncleared, and I had a vision of what that bridge would be like, and I think I'm going for a walk instead. I hate walking. Slow and unpoetic and not me. Except in woods. Then it's good - the scrambling over roots and leaping of logs.

"And the woman liked the snake very much. Because when he talked, he made little noises with his tongue. And his long tongue was lightly licking about his lips. Like there was a little fire inside his mouth, and the flame would come dancing out of his mouth. And the woman liked this. Very much." - Laurie Anderson, Langue d'amour.

Yes, I am stressed out, but it is not exactly because I have more things to knit than time to knit them. Nor exactly because I am rapidly running out of funds and have no work lined up. Nor exactly because I have school deadlines to meet.

It is because of you, you see. You to whom I can say nothing of any of this.

"And the woman did not want to go. Because she was a hothead. Because she was a woman in love."

I look and I look and I look, and I find out something about him that makes it worse, as if he were thumbscrew-designed to seem perfect for me. As if someone had taken all the things I like and never find in men and put them into a package that happens to also appeal to me, and then there I sit, across the table, knitting, and dropping things like a 12-year-old girl.

I have those dreams that I can't wake out of, the ones where I'm all disoriented, where I wake up not remembering how old I am. I might be a child again, in a blue room somewhere in Southern California. At my grandmother's house, perhaps. I think it was blue in there - a dusky blue; the curtains had a trace of metallic foil in them. Blue flowers with metallic foil.

There was a sleeping-bag train. I was the horse - always the horse, in fact, pulling my sister behind me. That is how it was.

Now I am the horse again. Straining against the traces. One of those mustangs that goes bad and refuses the lure of oats and runs off into the wilderness despite years and years of training and formerly good behavior.

Every time I see one of those PBS programs about how you can buy a mustang, a tamed one, or a green-broke one, I think about it. Even now, in the city, I think about it.

And then I think about what I know, firsthand, about wild horses - how they think. How they feel in a herd. It's not the stallion who's in charge, did you know that? It's a mare.

I kissed him. Not the first time it's happened, but this time it was me making the move.

Now I want to fly, far away, to the top of a raw cliff, and sit there, looking out over my terrain. Far enough field of vision to see intruders coming from a long way off. Far enough to get a good big headstart, even in a headwind.

So I rode home in an ice storm last night, and when I arrived, there was so much snow and slush and road grit in my drivetrain that I thought, "I have to take pictures!"

Of course, by the time I'd de-Gore Texed myself sufficiently to pad over to where the camera was, half the gunk had melted off the bike. So just mentally double what you see here, and please, be impressed.

There was nearly an inch of untreated, unplowed snow on the bridge. I cycled up it, and down it, reminding myself of the strategies I use when driving a car in snow. They apply quite similarly, except that for "use your gears to slow you down," you substitute "use your legs to slow you down."

I would not have wanted to be on a freewheel that night. It'd be skid city.

Also, I heard later that the ice storm that started to kick up about 20 minutes from my house eventually laid down some serious black ice. And that would have been a problem for me, controlled-skid neophyte that I am.

Anyway, it was quite an interesting experience to ride in unplowed snow. Not as difficult as I would have expected, but the slushy bits were more difficult than I would have expected. Turns out you don't want to ride in the tire tracks of other cyclists; you're better off choosing the pristine snowfall - it gives you a bit of traction.

I got more yarn for gifts today - family gifts. From here until deadline time it's all about the family gifts (and has been, for a while now).

When Kitwich was little, we lived in a snowy part of the country, and on snow days she used to watch the flakes come down with an expression on her face like, "Mommy, it's raining cat toys!"

Now that she and I are city dwellers, the cat toys don't come down very often, but just a few minutes ago we started to get a few flakes, and now they're fairly pelting down. They're nice big fat ones, too - the kind that always promised a good thick carpet for me to tromp around in later.

Today, though, I'll be riding around in it, as I have places to go and people to see. I always have to get outside and experience the snow - it's one of those things that I love in some primal way that is hard to explain. Or pointless to explain - you either feel the same way about it, or you think of it as purely an inconvenience.

"We are the light that travels into space." - Zero Seven.

I love that line. I've often wondered about the connection between astronomy and metaphysics - or rather, how far off our science is from the deeper truth. No, that's not exactly it. I feel like maybe there's a connection between the kinds of esoteric ideas that advanced astro- and particle physics get into and the kinds of revelations that we usually think of as spiritual in nature.

I really don't want to die, ever, but I am curious about whether I'll find a connection at that point.

Yeah, yeah, Master of the Nonsequitur. Or however the frack you spell that.

No news is boy news, which may be a good thing, considering that I've been bashing my head into that particular brick wall the last few days, but I did have an interesting conversation with a girl who may or may not also have a crush on him. Maybe she and I will end up being friends, and that will be a nice perverse way for things to work out. It's happened before, if I'm not mistaken.

I was gonna wake up "early" today (you know why that's in quotes, don't you?) and dash off in hopes of seeing him. And then there was snow, and fond memories of Miss Kitwich keeping me company on my lap whilst I worked away next to the snowy window with the pine tree.

And now, well, there's a different snowy window, and a different pine tree, and she's on my lap again, head resting on my left arm, front paws folded under her in that beautifully Egyptian way they do, and purring, and cat-smiling at me. Who could rush off, under those circumstances?

I was thinking today that it's ironic that our popular culture's image of passionate love always revolves around a very young couple.

As even the very beautiful actors age, they're replaced by fresher models, as if desire itself fades with the onset of first wrinkles.

But the truth, I find, is quite different.

I had felt, all summer, a bit like a teenager. It was mostly to do with lifestyle. For a variety of reasons, I had a freewheeling few months, cycling about like a gadfly in the balmy air.

But it was also a state of mind. I didn't want to be pinned down by anything. I wanted, and got, lots of freedom.

And that was great. And I felt sexy. But I'd thought, at the time, that the added fillip of sexiness coursing through me was due to feeling young.

It's not.

I've come to realize that now, in my 40s, I am capable of feeling desire on a scale that is completely unlike anything I experienced as a young woman. I'm not just referring to my present state (though that is certainly an excellent example); it's happened a few times in the last few years, and it seems to be a permanent change in me.

I have two theories about it. (I've always got a theory or two, no?)

A) It's an internal change, to do with having grown more fully myself in the last few years. That may be something specific to me, because I've been on a bit of a mission about it. I've gained access to parts of myself that had lain dormant for many years (okay, all my life), and as such, I'm a much more fully throttled engine than I used to be. Picture the difference in horsepower you get when your car gets a desperately needed tuneup - then multiply that by some large exponential factor.

B) It's also got to do with recognizing what I want in other people. I think two people in their 40s are more likely than two people in their 20s (or even 30s) to know what they want when they see it. It probably doesn't come up as often; there are fewer people out there who will float their respective boats - both because lots of the ones who might are already married off, and because - I think - there never were that many to begin with; we just imagined the leakier boats into a more attractive state because we wanted there to be a bigger selection.

By the time you get to the point of knowing yourself pretty well, and believing that you deserve somebody worthy of you, you begin to recognize that those people are not thick on the ground.

So when you do magically run into them, well, it feels a lot like running right into a brick wall. It's a shock, and you're very likely to hurt your head.

"She's the place I'm heading. And I hardly know her." - Inman, describing Ada, in Cold Mountain.

"I lie awake; I've gone to ground. I'm watching porn in my hotel dressing gown." - Zero Seven

"Dip him in the river who loves water." - William Blake

It's so hard to tell, sometimes, just how I'm doing. On one level, I feel happy. On another, I am anxious. I am trying not to care how things go, because I have sort of come to terms with the fact that I am exceedingly unlikely to be able to get what I want in this situation, and that it's got nothing to do with not being pretty enough or charming enough or XYZ enough. It's got very little to do with me, at all, I think. It just is the way it is.

Like life, in that way. One of the hardest things to learn, it seems to me, is that no matter how much we want life to be a certain way, it persists in being the way it is. Unpredictable. Unwrangleable. Unknowable.

We may know, in theory, that that is actually part of the point. We may even feel that one of our chief goals is to learn to surf the unknown, to allow the wave to go where it wills us, to ride the crest and balance on that uncertainty, poised and at peace.

But, if I may quote Papa Matrix for a moment, there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

Oh, such a difference. I am halfway there, I think. I am half at ease and half anxious. Half accepting what comes, and half wanting to wrench it all into place with my own two hands. Knit knit knit knit knit. If I just keep thrashing these pointed sticks back and forth in my hands, maybe, like the Fates, I can shape the design of events to my liking. Yeah, right.

Note: The title of this post is a verbatim line from a documentary that's on TV right now. Who writes these things?

Wow. Cold out. Big tiring day. Rode into city, very very gingerly and carefully, and knees only hurt in last five minutes, as if to say, "don't get too comfortable, sweetie."

The skyline was so gorgeous in that clear, cold air that I really wanted to take pics for y'all, but I wasn't exactly certain where my pocketcam had got to. It's either hiding out in the bottom of my bike bag, or I've put it someplace I can't recall.

Must invent that handlebar cam.

Apart from the nervousness about how my body was going to treat me and the fact that my fingers and toes kept going alarmingly numb, it was beautiful to be on the bike, smoothly moving through relatively deserted streets, looking at the twinkly skyscrapers over the bridge and the homier Christmas lights of Brooklyn.

I got home weirdly tired despite not really having put forth much energy, and promptly (okay, after a nice warm shower) fell asleep on the couch, sitting up, with the cat snoozing on my lap putting forth all eight cylinders of her soporific energy.

I'd like to say that there's nothing so bad that brunch with my girls can't cure, but it's not quite true.

It's almost true, though.

I had a great day today, even though I had bouts of grumpyness and frustration, even though the wind nearly blew us into another county, even though I haven't ridden either bicycle in two days and am uncertain about the future of these knees for tomorrow. Okay, wait I'd better not start talking about that - it will send me into a downspin.

So, leaving that aside for the moment. Brunch. Happy happy brunch. My favorite omelette: egg whites, spinach, scallions, made perfectly at a certain place where once there was a very cute French boy who hit upon me by remarking, after I'd given him a Ginger Altoid, that it was very sexual. He meant sensual, of course. By which he meant to imply sexual. It was a whole delicious curly-headed incident, witnessed by Miz Fury, my mom, and my sister. I turned absolutely bright red and wanted to take him there, on the table.

Oh dear.

Where was I?

Oh yes, brunch. No French boys today; they are a rare and timid species, the pretty curly-headed French boys. They only make their appearance on the first springlike day. They pop their sweet flirtatious little heads out, suck your Ginger Altoid, pick up their handsome tips, and then sashay their lithe little behinds away for the rest of the year. No doubt to Paris, or Provence, where it might be warmer than it is here.

But the omelettes are still damn good. And then we did some errands and wandering, and making of silly dirty jokes (which are our forte), and we went and drank grog (arrr, why is all the rum gone?), and knitted, and talked about the difficulty of getting a straight answer from a straight man. And I rolled my eyes a lot, and fixed a couple of stitch mistakes for Special J, which made me feel useful and magical.

And we went yarn shopping. And I picked up two different kinds of crack - I mean Malabrigo - for gift knitting. Glorious purple Silky Merino for mom, and burgundy Chunky Merino for one of the bike boys (not that one, a different, though equally handsome one). The burgundy is much less orange than it looks in the photo - it's a nice dark brick red.

Lord, is there anything that yummy yarn and dear friends can't fix? No, there really, really isn't.

Okay, so I made the damned bread. And it was okay, I guess, except for the fact that I was so daft and unfocused that I left out a key ingredient, and accidentally made it fat-free. Which is not such a good idea, breadularly speaking.

It tastes better than it ought to, but I had the devil of a time getting it out of the pan, and I fear for its long-term survival. I mean, it's all well and good and has a nice texture now, but once it's a day old or so I wonder if it will dry out prematurely.

Pleh. All that work. And vacuuming. And climbing onto a precarious tall stool with wounded knees to unscrew my overly conscientious smoke alarm from the ceiling. And climbing back up to screw it back in.

Knees still cranky. Probably have to stay off the bike tomorrow too, damn it all to hell. Plus, it's going to snow and be very windy out - not the greatest weather for cycling when one has a trick knee or two.

Watching Butch and Sundance shoot guns in Bolivia. Took pictures of most but not all of my unfinished knitting projects earlier today but thankfully many of them didn't come out well so I don't have to unveil that particular part of my life for your amusement.

This one of Kitwich being in love with the Malabrigo silky merino I bought for my sister's gifts did come out, though. Looking back over the blog this past month it's been a very heavy dose of cat pictures, which suggests two things, to my mind:

a) I'm not bringing my camera with me when I'm out and about, and/or
b) I'm not having a very good month.

Both of which are true.

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence. - William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

What is there to say, when you can't decide what hurts more - your knees or your feelings.

The knees, after a few days of twitchyness but basically decent behavior, suddenly started to cause me the kind of pain where I'm whimpering with every pedal stroke, where one moment I am standing in the pedals and the next my left knee almost collapses. And the terrible part is, I have no idea why.

I've been cut off for physical therapy by my health insurance, because the middleman company it hired to save it money has deemed it medically unnecessary. Yeah, right. And the fact that my knee suddenly collapses while I am pedaling slowly and gently home means that there's nothing wrong?

ASSHOLES.

Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. - More William Blake. Wise man, that Blake.

The cat has figured out that it's warm on top of the radiator, and so she sleeps there when the thing is on. I'm trying like hell to get these damned gloves finished so I can stop thinking about that boy. (Yeah, I know. But I'm going to try, because otherwise my body is going to fold back in upon itself and collapse into a black hole created by its own impassioned and frustrated and sad little vortex.)

Really, just ask Einstein.

Hello Winter. Nice to see you. Sort of.

Well, actually, I'd been having a crappy week thus far, and so I made myself take the squash and yam, potatoes, leek, carrots, and collard greens in my fridge, and make them into soup.

With the help of:

yellow split peas
red lentils
homemade stock
ginger
dry mustard
hot hot Indian chile powder
fresh thyme
a few celery seeds
cider vinegar
balsamic vinegar
sea salt
a drop of honey

Considering all the angst that went into the soup, it's a miracle it came out tasting so good. And feeling so good as I ate it. It makes me think there's something alchemical about cooking. That when I am really, really upset, I can sometimes cook myself better.

No, it's not (all) about boys, or even lack of boys. It's actually more to do with professional and creative endeavors today.

For good measure I also called Boywich and asked his advice, and it was one of those conversations that make me feel glad we are friends. Glad I thought to call. Glad I actually got the words out when he saw that I'd called and called me back.

Whew.

Anyway. I have a plan now, and that's a good thing. And the soup is just damn delicious, not to mention such pretty colors that it's a pleasure to look at as well as eat.

Maybe that's enough, for now.

I wrote here, perhaps a few months ago, that if I were to ask myself what I wanted, I wouldn't have a definitive answer.

I don't know the degree to which that's changed, but I have been thinking lately about the nature of wanting. Or to put it more properly, of desire.

Ours is a weird society in some ways. When the Sept. 11 attacks hit, I remember being shocked (and appalled) that our president was asking us to pull together and...shop. Fight terrorists by spending money.

That just never made any sense to me. And it didn't to a lot of other people, either, judging by the social indicators (on which it was, at the time, my job to report). People were wanting to hunker down with loved ones and think about the deeper meanings of their lives. The acquisition of more stuff held, for once, not much magic or comfort.

I suppose it makes a little more sense to be exhorting us to spend money during a serious-seeming economic downturn, but still I get unnerved when I see things like this. And no, I couldn't bear to watch the video.

I have to say, I think that in our society a lot of the true function and meaning of desire (and by that I mean Desire, writ large) has been distorted, transmuted wrongly into a lust for material goods.

I'm not the only, first, or even 2,000th person to notice this, and yet it really does persist. It's as if that's what's at the center of our cultural identity: a yearning for stuff.

That can't be right. I mean, even as I wrote the words on the page, it just looked ridiculous - more like a child's arrangement of alphabet blocks than a real sentence. It's so wrong I can hardly even begin to explain why it's wrong.

It occurs to me, from the depths of my own, rather different, swirling storm of desires, that Desire as a basic human quality (it feels like it's not quite an emotion, more of a verb than that) has a proper function in a human life. I don't know what it is, exactly, but there is a sense in which a strong yearning for something - maybe anything - feels like a yearning for everything. For truth, to look into the night sky and see there the world - many worlds, an impossible measure of unknown creatures, looking back at me.

I won't ever know what they are saying - maybe when I am dead and melt once more into that dark soup - but somehow to look up and feel the cold burning of the question feels like a good thing. And when it comes to desiring other people, well, it's maybe a hotter question, but there hangs some truth there, too, in the heaviness of it. The feeling of it weighing down my steps and reading meaning that may or may not be there in gestures, in smiles, in smells.

Am I wrong, or is there some kind of poetry in that? There is, at least, no question that I am alive.