rom a letter to a friend...

"I first fell in love with the web in Lynx. There was something amazingly intoxicating about tunneling through this immense new information space with just the back and forward keys on the keyboard. I remember countless late nights filled with "just one more link..."

I saw my first "image" browser some months later at a computer lab at the university. I viewed it with suspicion, as if my favorite copy of shakespeare's plays had suddenly begun sporting bright yellow smiley faces. Eventually (obviously) I was won over by it, but Lynx in some ways still represents the "real" web to me."

his excerpt from Richard Linklater's movie Waking Life was cited last week in a thread on Ask Metafilter about how to come to terms with death. I found the passage intriguing when I originally saw the movie, and am happy to have been reunited with it:

f "hell is other people," as Sartre suggested, then surely sometimes the opposite is also true.

As I enter my 37th holiday season I have been reflecting on what makes this time special. I think it is the way the rituals make life feel less lonely. If you participate, you have a sense of being surrounded by lots of other people doing the same thing you're doing, and you feel connected to something larger than you could ever feel on your own.

I find this comforting, and also profoundly sad, as it seems we humans can never find all that we are looking for.

Sometimes I imagine what it must be like to love everyone on earth with the same passion and tenderness that one feels for only the most special people in your life: your mother, your father, your spouse, your children. I think this might be what G_d is about, and I wonder what it would take to approach this state of being. It seems connected somehow to the deep-seated, inchoate, unfathomable longing and joy I sense at this time of year, inextricably linked, augmented, and made manifest by the music and the colorful lights with which I am working to surround myself this long Thanksgiving weekend. 

ell is not the presence of pain—it is the absence of pleasure.

he surrounding hills are beautiful...their monumental scale and the riotous greenery covering every inch of them makes you feel as if you are living your life the size of a bug in the secret heart of G_d's garden. 

his has been a good visit. Dad seems almost completely well, if a bit tired ("Is a balloon still a balloon without any air inside it?") and bothered by pain in his arm. He walks far more slowly now than both me and my Mom. All three of us went to see the cancer doctor this afternoon. The news was good: his PSA is failing to rise so far, despite six weeks free of chemotherapy.

We are the same distracted, mildly anti-social, mostly-happy family we have always been, still arguing over matters theological in public places. And yet we are hanging over the abyss by the smallest of threads. Just because the thread has failed to snap in three years does not mean it is any less of a threat, and yet that is exactly the illusion we are enjoying.

Spending time in the waiting room is a surreal experience—for many reasons—not least to feel the rushing undercurrent of denial which runs through my head at all time, insisting that me and my Dad are not like the other poor, doomed people sitting in the chairs beside us. It is also disorienting to see the medical words I've learned only in the context of Dad's treatment bandied about on clocks and refrigerator magnets, like some kind of amusement park, always strange places in their way, made more so by imagining one with the objective of making death cheerful.

The sky turned from blue to white today. It was so sudden, and so complete a change from every other day since I've been here, that I could hardly believe my eyes. How could such a thing happen all by itself, and without anyone's permission? On a related note, why is it that the sky in dusk is always an ever-deepening shade of blue, even if it was overcast before the sun went down?

Also, why are things so much sweeter when we are about to leave them? 

pparently there is an old Viennese saying that goes like this:

Dad brought this up today as we talked before lunch about the way depression feels. I relate to the latter expression. In fact, such a sentiment is sometimes my best source of courage. To believe the former is to live one's life at the mercy of fate. 

went out into the woods behind the amphitheater in Chief Logan State Park yesterday and took a short hike on a trail I remember from my past, an obscure one until now, thanks to a new sign by the main road announcing its presence. Along its path were cabins and bridges, and even more direct evidence of humans, in the form of actual people camping out in actual tents, sitting solitary by fires and talking in small groups, wearing vaguely evangelistic t-shirts and eyeing me with the usual mix of friendliness, curiosity, surprise, and skepticism that I always see reflected in the eyes of the people I meet here.

On the way back I stopped to clamber across the remnants of a huge tree that had uprooted itself and fallen across a creek. I wanted to sit comfortably in the midst of everything and contemplate my life at the moment and the way it felt intersected with the scenery.

The tree was huge for these forests' standards, but all the trees here come across a little skinny and young compared to the moss-covered giants I've seen on the Olympic Peninsula. Also, I am persistently reminded of the Blair Witch Story when in these eastern woods. But mostly the setting impressed me with its beauty, serenity, complexity (all those leaves! rustling together to the same gust of wind!) and sanctity—somehow I am always reminded of a cathedral when I am surrounded by a canopy of trees.

My perch was comfortable but it was alive with a layer of small moving things. I notice this morning that I have picked up several nasty bug bites, and I am blaming them on my stay on this log. It was worth it, as long as the wounds heal in the usual manner. But as much as I should have expected it, I did not, because I have become accustomed to the absence of such provocations in Seattle, where there seem to be no true seasons, no true bugs, and no true community, all of which combine to remove something of the challenge, and the sweetness, from life.

It makes one want to devote oneself to travel. In some parts of the world, red, itchy welts on the skin as a result of sitting practically bare-assed in a skirt on a tree in the middle of the forest are not, in fact, inevitable. What other kinds of injury and pain might one be able to forget about, which seem to be so inevitably a part of human experience, but which might turn out to be simply a geographic peculiarity? 

eing in West Virginia always provokes me to write in this journal again, no matter how long it has previously suffered from neglect. I think this is because I need to write home to someone, to tell them all my earnest little observations. I should reawaken this sensibility for when I am living my default existence in Seattle, because I have let a great deal of life go by without discussing it here. I think this period of draught was incited by the news from Florida, which wasn't good. The expert surgeon I paid so much money to consult with decided that my case is inoperable.

Recording this event makes it final, something that is in the past, and this has not been something I have so far been willing to accept. I've gotten so used to deferring judgment about it that I have been afraid to do something different. I still don't know if acceptance is entirely within my grasp. I feel sick much of the time and I am worried about the future. But it could be much worse and I am capable of feeling joy and pleasure, for which I am grateful. As my father says, where there is life, there is hope.

Not that I don't do a lot of writing these days. It seems I communicate more with my fingers than with my tongue. If, fifteen years ago, someone would have told me that I would be regularly writing twenty letters a day, and that most of my human contact would involve discussing these letters, I would have thought this unlikely, and dreaded the detachment which such a fate might bring. I treasure the rare moments of deep, sustained human contact which come my way these days.

Work is going well; the intensity of it seems to continue to mount, which I appreciate, because I like to be very busy. Still, it can only get so crazy, because the environment is by definition non-crisis oriented, due to its elevation from the plane of the strictly financially transactional. The people are so nice to me. During the first week of classes I got to walk out on the lawn between my office and the student center, and take in a Guster concert, which I enjoyed immensely, as I almost always do with live music. The students were too shy and cool, I suppose, to move much, but I bounced and swayed like a younger version of myself, reveling in the way the music that I usually have piped only to my ears had everyone around me awash in the same sensations.

I learned of the death of my friend and former roommate Kelle Vogel at around the same time, sending my already nostalgic musings at being at a University at the beginning of another fall quarter down a somewhat darker path, and making me feel grateful that she had always seemed to live her life as if nothing was more important than her own bliss—in funny hats, in crazy makeup, in strange boys—and how lucky I am to still be around in the world, being basically the same strange, moody, occasionally ecstatic but mostly unfulfilled creature I was at age 20.

Writing in this journal and in email bring me pleasure, because I enjoy what I write, and because I think I am a good writer. But it is only in the context of communicating my own intimate thoughts that I am capable of this feat. When trying to do even the most rudimentary writing for websites, for the public, if it extends beyond simple information architecture, I find myself falling down all over myself and not knowing what on earth to say or to delete. I really admire people who can generate different voices in their writing, and I think my complete failure at it is the same failure behind my fear of public speaking. I think it is because my own internal narrative speaks so pronouncedly, constantly, and significantly, that I have no means of competing with it.

It is good to be here with my parents, my other home. The weather has cooled off and the sky is so blue, far more blue than it ever seems to be in Seattle. Perhaps this is because of the way it contrasts with the green of the mountains. There is always a moment after I arrive from my journey when I am horrified at the strangeness of everything and the way the pace here is so different—but then after a few hours this fades and I am pulled back into the way of living here, and I find myself smiling with utter relief at the detachment it provides from my regular life, which I live so intensely that it often feels like I am about to break. At night I lay in my bed by the window and enjoy the smell of the air and then, half-asleep, I hear the trains, and my entire life after age 17 seems to be some kind of strange dream.

I was nice to the man at the Avis counter and he upgraded my car rental to a shiny black Jeep mini-SUV w/Sirius radio, with which I am tearing up the roads with much joy, a spectacle you are encouraged to imagine in all its glory. My favorite station so far has been the retro new wave '80s channel, so the transformation back from grown-up, mellow butterfly to awkward, disenfranchised caterpillar is mostly complete. 

read an excellent book this weekend, a memoir written by a journalist who became intimately involved in the practices of snake-handling congregations of Southern Appalachia. It taught me a lot about Appalachia that I did not know before, and it contained a great deal of insight into the nature of writing, faith, and the human condition. This passage, in particular, stood out for me, given as it how it touches on the supernatural quality of creativity and its ability to operate in a place that transcends the normal experience of time:

oday my story is being heard by one of the doctors at the Norman Endocrine Clinic in Florida. This is the last, best, and only hope for a cure to my disease. I've spent time and energy over the last few months gathering up all my records and filling out forms and writing a personal history and making trips to the post office. This work came to an end yesterday when I called the billing clerk and gave her my credit card number, authorizing the twelve hundred dollar out-of-pocket fee for which I am owed today's attention.

Praying is something you do when you want to do something but there is nothing you can do.

What will the verdict be? I am hoping that they say they are willing to attempt a second surgery, because this would mean I have a choice. Otherwise: I can hardly bear to think of it. I am so tired of feeling this way. Maybe without the spectre of a possible successful intercession I would find a way to make peace with it, go back to treating it symptomatically with various chemical substances, work harder at dispelling the multitudes of unhealthy thinking habits I've grown up around the pain in the effort to afford myself a little shelter.

Soon I will know which path I am on. In any case it will be a new path, and I will be grateful for the change. Still, I can't escape the sense of futility in trying to find solace in thinking differently. I am tired of this life, tired of not fitting in, of needing so much more than anyone else, of wanting to connect but being too afraid to make myself vulnerable. It seems I am only happy when I am doing things that are not healthy, with the sole exception of exercising my creativity. Not even in sleep do I find peace.

If only I could find a different self to center myself around. Perhaps if I am to feel this way for the rest of my life I should become a religious martyr. When I am at my worst I find myself wishing that I was living in the midst of the French revolution, or some other dangerous, righteous situation where I could easily give my life for noble causes. 

n Friday I was browsing nwsource , a local events website published by the combined forces of the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer. I noticed a feature article they were running on a jewelery designer named Kimberly Baker. The photo that accompanied the piece showed a pair of silver seahorses, back to back, their bodies curving together to form a heart. I thought it was lovely so I visited the designer's website. Much of her work turned out to have a distinctly naturalistic flavor to it, and a lot of it featured sea life, including a stunning necklace featuring an octopus with two green garnets — for eyes or for prizes I am not sure which — its tentacles reaching out and grasping the chain that holds it.

I decided I had to have it so I visited her shop in Fremont on Saturday. I bought him in gold, and paid over four hundred dollars for him. This is more than I've ever spent on any piece of jewelery in my life. I philosophize and rationalize by thinking that just like I'd have twelve children if babies looked like puppies, I'd also bankrupt myself on jewelry if I could find more of it that resembled large, intelligent mollusks. However, neither one of these conditions is likely to ever become a reality.

It was such a treat getting to buy it straight from the artist who created it. This is one of those things about living in a big city that I will miss if I ever leave Seattle.

I love the way he looks around my neck. His body perfectly matches the scar from my surgery four years ago. I imagine him protecting it for me, enhancing it, and transforming it into something sublime.