That Kind Of Friendship Doesn't Just Materialize

Now That's A Concept That's Always Fascinated Me: The Real World. Only A Very Specific Subset Of People Use The Term, Have You Noticed? To Me, It Seems Self-evident That Everyone Lives In The Real World - We All Breathe Real Oxygen, Eat Real Food, The Earth Under Our Feet Feels Equally Solid To All Of Us. But Clearly These People Have A Far More Tightly Circumscribed Definition Of Reality, One That I Find Deeply Mysterious, And An Almost Pathologically Intense Need To Bring Others Into Line With That Definition.

The Smell Of The Sea Swept Over The Wall And In Through The Empty Window-hole, Wide And Wild With A Million Intoxicating Secrets. I Don't Trust That Smell. It Hooks Us Somewhere Deeper Than Reason Or Civilization, In The Fragments Of Our Cells That Rocked In Oceans Before We Had Minds, And It Pulls Till We Follow Mindlessly As Rutting Animals....it Lures Us To Leap Off High Cliffs, Fling Ourselves On Towering Waves, Leaves Behind Everyone We Love And Face Into Thousands Of Miles Of Open Water For The Sake Of What Might Be On The Far Shore.

I Am, Of Course, Romanticizing; A Chronic Tendency Of Mine.

We Were Still At The Age When Girls Are Years Older Than Guy, And The Guys Grow Up By Doing Their Best When The Girls Need Them To.

We Think Of Mortality So Little These Days... I Thought Of The Stern Victorian Determination To Keep Death In Mind, The Uncompromising Tombstones. Remember, Pilgrim, As You Pass By, As You Are Now So Once Was I: As I Am So Will You Be.