I step onto campus and this guy whirling around in a blur of confusion is exclaiming, How do I get out of this place??? with what sounds like multiple question marks' worth of urgency and bewilderment. I point him toward the direction of the exit. I think to myself something like, well, soon enough, I will be as well. It is a cold and gorgeous day, bright strong sharp crisp winter sun, and there are people on the steps, photographs being taken, small atomized clumps of friends huddled, drinking coffee, talking. the world sounding a little muddled from the numbness of one's cold ears. colors so sharp that they hurt the eye.
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should, would, could? lately I have been thinking a lot about strategies and tactics, and the question of operating when, how, vs. a philosophy of clarity and earnestness. at when, what? how to navigate? plunge inward, never the same stream twice, continue, march, march, look backwards, march. wait and strategize? run forwards?
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an ever-changing palette of occurences. perhaps by definition, any sort of movement indicates a movement away from something, and thus a constant sense of change necessarily accompanies a constant sense of loss, this kind of shearing-of-one's-self-into-two, the wallace and gromit / looney tunes scene of rapidly placing train tracks ahead of one's being, 'tracks' being a productive excuse for direct movement; placing those tracks being the self of self-modification and thus loss that accompanies. to move freely and to lose sadly? to miss terribly and to change with a swift pointedness?
are orbits tethered, or loose? do celestial bodies orbit around each other because they are constantly falling, in endless freefall? or are they loose characters in a long-term dance who whirl around each other with equal parts immediate drama, distant/historical nostalgia, and relentless joyousness at being in this all?
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will, in thirty years, my email inbox be full of a series of thin tendrils coated with nostaglia and tenderness that makes them resilient, elastic, flexible? does one need the tautness of steel cable to move, or the adaptability and agility of give and take?
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ideally, co-traveling (and this applies both metaphorically and literally) as a kind of spatial, temporal dance in which two entities drift, come together, merge, separate, co-exist, operate independently, arrive at a junction, walk together, merge again, separate out. co-orbital configurations. here's to an infinite number of these configurations, with friends, lovers, collaborators, colleagues, comrades, co-conspirators.