Playing for Time

The Grand Purge of 2015 is currently underway here at Chez Smith so everything that was on my desk … sticky notes, calendar pages, scribbled-on envelopes, wrinkled business cards, Twix wrappers … is in a heap on the bed and I can’t remember what Tuesdays are supposed to look like here on the blog because my notes are in there somewhere.  And who has the energy to scroll back … ?  Getting rid of that big stupid pile in the middle of the bedspread was my Tuesday goal.  Instead, oh look, it’s WEDNESDAY already!  Time to shift the detritus from love seat to bed again and see what happens.

Seems to me Tuesdays have been about thankfulness lately, which rhymes with beauty, which gets us back to Monday’s good intentions.  Are you OCD at all?  What are the things that hook you in and you can’t get enough of twenty-four hours a day because they engage your brain and ignite your passions?  And then a morning dawns, the next week or years down the road, when you wake up and can’t find two fricks to give about any of it.  And it feels kind of sad but mostly it feels like the most liberating thing that’s happened in too long.

Facebook and I reached an impasse like that the other day, one of many but this time totally out of left field.  We’ve agreed to stay friends, but we’re negotiating a little break from each other for health reasons — it’s an increasingly unhealthy place for me to hang out because my reserves are so pathetically low.  I can cite chapter and verse, but for now it seems sufficient to say that I’m out of energy for the general ugliness, and sharing my truth just annoys the crap out of people if it isn’t also theirs.  I woke up last Thursday with the settled knowledge that it’s not my job, man, and I have to tell you I feel SO much better now that I no longer care.

So I’m trying to make Facebook about relationship again without selling out.  We’ll see how long and how evenly my psyche handles the dichotomy — it’s guaranteed to be fascinating.  We should talk more about this tomorrow because I clearly haven’t solved the whole puzzle yet and I have a feeling there’s helpful advice out there that could open some windows.  I know it all comes back to beauty and beautiful places — living in them, creating them, facilitating them.  God, it’s probably something as cliché as “Be the beauty you wish to see in the world.”  Nooooooooooo, that sounds so pathetically passive and ineffective.  But bottom line, probably yes.  Because the really beautiful people do get trampled in life, but while stuff’s hitting them they’re shedding pollen and sloughing off seed pods that take root like science and make places for change to happen.

It’s obvious that the earth is losing its sparkle and could benefit from a beauty infusion, so I’m going to let myself think about all this for a while because it’s what we here in the office like to refer to as overwhelming.  Meanwhile, from the Playing for Time desk, a wonderful Wednesday to you all.  Make your corner of it beautiful if you can.

 Does this mess with your head like it does mine?  

I mean if you could know.