13 Years

This is in many ways my saving grace. I try to put into words those ineffable "feels" or "propositional attitudes" of the language of thought. So today I took a walk into a park I have not seen in a long time. And I thought "how much has happened in 13 years". It had not been 13 years since I had walked in that park, but it sent me thinking of a time when I, eight years old, chased a temporary friend around the stakes supporting tomato plants in some muddy backyard garden. How strange! How absolutely absurd! This park I was walking through was the site of similar childhood antics a few years later. There were the willows by the stream! And there was the copse which was our hideout. All the playground eqipment has been changed, though. Probably because of a girl who fell off the plank bridge connecting two needlessly tall towers of the old structure. Apparently she had internal hemorrhaging. But that's development: the rest of us learned about the cruelty of gravity, as we learned to fall in line in the schoolyard, as we learned what the pecking order was.

I'm not explaining it well: these words are little smoke puffs coming from the censer; they serve to obscure. They obscure the pangs at the realization (one I keep getting again and again) that childhood is over; my personality has been realized; the connectionist nets implementing it in my brain are hardened by the standards of a few years ago. The only choice now is what to apply this clustering of temperament, action patterns and hobbies to. (A few thanks to formative individuals: to B.M. for his unobtrusive but looming pointer to creative endeavors, to S.R. for being the first to collapse on top of me in the snow, to O.S. for what I can only describe as necessary explorative cruelty.) To apply all this to what end? For survival? That is the ultimate end. To endure is to make one's way in the world. And then to sleep when the tired mind has been sucked of all potency.

But this post is not for those formative giants of my life. It is only a few days ago that I put into words the unifying principle begind this scattershot blog, and it deserves airing. This is written for those who I do not know, but one day may know.

Consider: "If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based."