When I was young I became enamored with the idea of being a bit lost, questing, searching, looking, traveling, trying for answers to unanswerable questions. It affected conversations, book selections, adventures, music and movie likes.
A couple of nights ago I left work late and the air was chilly but hinting at a warmth to come. It struck a chord with my memories of youth and reminded me of nights with a slight beer buzz, a lust for girls, an unknowing of life, a lack of understanding of my place in the world, an insecurity of how I would survive, an energy that I would now identify as related to anxiety I didn't know I was prone too. These feelings that I found comforting and was addicted to, feelings I welcomed. Feelings I was comfortable with and felt odd without. The kind of feelings that would cause me to smell the subtleties in the air, take note of the beauty in the sky and the force of life within me, poetic in my own way over the beauty of experiencing life.
I thought, as I drove home, that these nights would never be the same for me again. The world is not mysterious in the same way for me any longer. It is rarer that I get into the same flavor of semi-manic state like jumping around inside with the music while wondering if I would get a kiss and not knowing how I would make a living in this world, how to make sense of life, how to be ok just being.
I remember referring to a familiar feeling when the time of year changes and the air is distinctly different and I would refer to it as spooky, but in a good way. It was a good fear to me. I see now, again, the heightened anxiety that was an unidentified part of me, a friend of habit like an odd addicting relationship.
I remember an ex girlfriend saying that she didn't like her dad when her mom was busy doing other things because he became hollow as though he didn't know how to smile or entertain himself. I was sad for him at that moment, partly for his loneliness in his own home and partly because his own daughter judged him. Maybe I felt sympathy, a part of me subconsciously recognizing my own potential to be in that experience.
In those younger days I was happy to spend half my time socially exploring and half my time traveling alone or reading alone or thinking alone. I was never a hollow shell when with others or when alone in my wondering, not usually anyway.
Today I was to go on a motorcycle ride. Tami and The Kid are at dance class. Somehow I ended up eating too much left over pizza and watching TV instead. I barely escaped, eventually, on foot to get to downtown. The motorcycle ride I craved seemed without flavor so I didn't even start the bike. No book on the shelves seemed worth it. I'm in a funk.
In a funk, I'm a poor judge but I wonder if I am at a crossroads. My habitual drive to be lost at odds with my present understanding and pleasure in my child, and the world I know well enough that the unknown is of a different flavor lacking at the least that spice of insecurity.
The pleasure in what I know about my career, my family, my world.... at odds with my habitual refined comfort in unease, anxiety, natural high in the mystery and frustration. I am a bit hollow right now. I am in a funk. Diversions seem as no more than diversions. I could almost let it go and just be..... but I am not quite ready to. I could almost cry to get there but I know instead that I could let this unease at this crossroads build as a substitute discomfort and get by, my own form of methadone until a distraction would take and I can set this facing of truth aside to wait for another day. I hear Arcade Fire playing Ready to Start. Ironic as it is beginning to work as a release for the false stress acquired. In effect, making me ready to postpone this reckoning for another day.
Hit replay on my ipod, and my body is dancing in itself. I can wait for another day to deal.