Track Mangoes

Sitting at my bedroom window, staring out into the backyard, the cars whizzing past on the street, the thirteen year old me used to think, Gosh I know there is something of interest, and it is not in this room. This is what I usually thought moments before opening the window slowly and cautiously, quietly as to not wake up my parents, and daintily hopping out onto the street.

It is the impetus of suburban life to live in a constant state of nothingness, waiting for things to happen, rather than taking the particular thrill of a moment and using it to make something happen oneself. Living in suburbia, the mind becomes as a storm of heat lightning, silent, contained, yet raging, even if distant. We become confined and ever vigilant.

My roommate woke me up at five o'clock in the morning by sticking a piece of chicken sausage in my mouth. It was raining outside, a hot summer morning rain, very steamy. I'm older now and I live on the second floor. I have no desire to window dive these days precisely because the things I used to seek when window diving seem to find me on their own. If I'm window diving it's only into my own house.

Art is the product of a certain temperament. It should not mold itself to popular culture. But it is stupid to think that culture will become more artistic. Just as the poor thinks about money, and knows it not, in the way a rich man does, so does the artist look out his window at society.

I lived in suburbia until the age of thirteen. When we had the chance to move to the city, and the means, my family did so. I look back on that thirteen years period like one looks at a very small paycheck, disappointed by compensation.

The worst slave owners in the south were those who treated their slaves kindly. The kind souls who believed in the institution of slavery--believed that it truly stimulated the economy in a way that could not be replaced, and it’s easy to see how, during Reconstruction, one might have easily thought that to be true--it is they who we should look down upon. For the robbed their peers of exposure to the horrors of the system of slavery. Where is it that we bridge between charity and sin? If I give a poor man a dollar I am charitable. If he uses it to buy meth I am an enabler.

The problem with suburbia is that it does not allow the mind to experience the full range of action, but rather a livid range of contemplation. We spend out days wondering what life might be like if if if. The language of the mind becomes a kind of poetry, and we become spectators to our own consciousness, sitting, staring out the windows in our brain.

When I light incense I can't help but feel nostalgic.

When in the throws of something happening, as it seems to never do in suburbia, the mind’s poetic modality shuts down for a hot second. At that point we are no longer spectators, as we are in suburbia, but participants, and participants have little faculty for documentation. The bias is immense. The cityfolk, I have found, are participants, deadened to what might shock the gentle people of the mid-country. It happens, out of necessity, that cityfolk ween themselves off stimulation. It happens naturally.

This is probably why when something bad happens to us, finally, it seems very distant, whether you live in the city or in suburbia. When you retell the story and feel as though the thing which happened is a narrative, something you are relaying to someone else, it is because our consciousness is removed from the actual event. We feel as though we must tell the stories of our lives in third person. And perhaps this is why we lie about our lives so often: we want people to know, not how something actually happened, but how we experienced it to happen. This, we feel, is more truthful to the narrative of our lives. Not some backwater rehashing of actual events. Heaven forbid.

So when bad things happen to good people and they tell the story as if describing an ex lover or a dream, with a small hint of guilt or disbelief, know that it is not because what has happened to them did not effect them, rattle them, etcetera, in some profound way, but rather that it did. What is most important is that you scrutinize them the way you have always scrutinized them. This is a constant affection; and because our true perfection lies, not in what happened then, but what happens now, we ought to resist the quidnuncs of the earth, even if they are, indeed, ourselves.