Monday, February 20, 2006

Oh Wales, how I love thee


It's odd, but lately Wales has constantly been on my mind. Every time I do something my mind drifts back to the little town of Llangollen, Wales. I only spent a few days there but it's become one my favorite places in the entire world. It's just somehow different. Here everything seems so disconnected and cold compared to there. It's still just a village. No massive sbudivisions of subdivisions or sprawling suburbia. The air is clean, fresh, it feels like it hasn't already been totally depleted. The little roads winding up and down the mountain with ittle cottages to the side of the road. Walking down the streets you can smell the different dinners people are making. Looking out the window you can see the little lights of other houses on the surrounding mountains. People there genuinely know each other. Everything and everyone is just interconnected. Houses are small, quaint, people simply don't feel the need to compete with material possessions. Every back yard is meticulously turned into a garden which yields half of dinner. There's just something there that we're sorely missing. It seems that the whole street smells of roses. People just take the time to enjoy life, to cultivate it. My host parents had been married for 56 years. Fifty six. They just genuinely loved each other. They met during the war and have been together since, they never broke up for petty differences. That's part of what that little town that we don't. I"m not quite sure as to how to articulate it, but the difference is there. On our last night there, we performed with the local mens choir. It was at the local cathedral, we performed the Battle Hymn of the Republic with a choir we had never sugn with before and it was amazing. There's just something about the final chord in a piece like that that just reverberates in some sort of way that I can't quite describe in words. After the concert, they took us back to their home and we just all sat up talking for a while. They told us about the war and how they met. This was only two days after the bombings in London, so we talked about that. After a while, Ken (our host dad) got out his quitar and was singing for us. This lies most vividly in my memory. Ken had taught himself to play when he was sick and couldn't sing for about a year. So he had gotten his voice back and was kind enough to sing for us. He sung a few folk songs and the last song he sung just sticks in my mind. And I'm so glad I finally found the exact lyrics for it.

Have you seen the old man outside the closed down market
Kicking up the paper in his worn out shoes
In his eyes you see no pride and held loosely at his side
Yesterday's paper telling yesterday's news

CHORUS:
So how can you tell me that you're lonely
And say for you that the sun don't shine
Let me take you by the hand
And lead you through the streets of London
I'll show you something that'll make you change your mind

Have you seen the old girl who walks the streets of London
Dirt in her hair and her clothes in rags
She's no time for talking, she just keeps right on walking
Carrying her whole life in two carrier bags

CHORUS

In the all-night cafe at a quarter past eleven
Same old man sitting there on his own
Looking at the world o'er the rim of his tea cup
Each tea lasts an hour and he wanders home alone

CHORUS

Have you seen the old man outside the seaman's mission
Mem'ries fading with the medal ribbons that he wears
In our winter city the rain cries a little pity
For one more forgotten hero in a world that doesn't care

That's what makes that little town in Wales different. They simply appreciate life. They aren't compelled to constantly compete with one another for a better life. They simply see the good things in every day life and appreciate them. I"m determined to get back there one day. I don't care where my life takes me, I'll be going back there.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

ramblings...with aid of tea


Agh, ever get that feeling that you just have to write, but any topic at all elludes you. I hate that. I just have to write, but I have nothing to write about.

I really want it to be spring now. The cold is getting awfully...cold. And I really want to be able to go outside again. Yesterday was perfect. I twas warm enough to go outside and play frisbee, and as much as I sucked, I loved it. I've been missing frisbee. Plus, I really, really want to start archery again. as soon as it gets warmer I'm going shooting. Seriously, last summer I only got to go a few times. I really want to be able to see my instructor before he goes to Uganda. Seriously, he's not really my instructor, more my mentor. He's amazing. I've known him since I was six and he is just an amazing person. He's the one who's heading the crutch charity at school. He's gone statewide collecting crutches for people with polio in Uganda. So I'm so excited for the next time I get to see him.

And there is now absolutely nothing to write about. Scotch and Chocolate is an amazing song, seriously.

So I've decided that the one thing I miss about being a little kid is the belief that your dreams will come true. When I was younger, I had no doubt that I could grow up to be a famous singer or win the world championships in Ireland for dance. I just knew that I would grow up to be a happy, amazing, talented and successful person. I had no doubts that I would be a professional singer, dancer, performer, whatever. I miss that. I hate being faced with reality.

But, one thing I do like is taking Beethoven's Scherzo and playing on my media player at super speed then running around the room directing it. I feel so nerdy.

Also, I just made myself a lovely cup of mint tea, and the smell suddenly reminded me of my Welsh host family's home. A very happy smell. Seriously of all the countries I visited, Wales was the best. It's just different somehow. The people are different, nice to each other, considerate, and everyone greets everyone on the street. You look out the bedroom window and there's just a pretty little cottage on a big hill with the occassional lamplight. You go outside at night and it's quiet. The air is fresh and it actually feels like maybe the human race isn't so bad after all. All the houses are small and have large gardens. I miss Wales. Can I just skip a few weeks of school and go live with my host family for a while? Please?

Sunday, February 12, 2006

March 26!! March 26! And work at a new theatre starting today! Anyways

"Initiative comes to those who wait."

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Nothing

And Jason, you can't possibly accuse me of steal your ideas, because I wrote this way back last year. You lose.

I don't think anyone ever really stops to think that this could be it. What if we don't pass go, what if we don't collect $200, what if we just die?

It's that cold, intolerable absolution that people spend their entire lives attempting to ignore. No one ever considers that this could be the last stop. After all those efforts trying to secure a reservation in that ellusive nirvana, you just die. Absolution, once that bus hits, the morgue is the only place you've got left to go.

No feeling, no rewards, no nothing, you just spent your life gaining wealth, fretting it away, and pursuing what you call happiness, but in reality is only a replacement for that substance you feel you lack. The love you felt for your wife and family, nothing more than simple chemicals and a gullible mind. You work hard, set goals, and for what? A nicer grave plot than that schmuck down the street? But after all, you're dead, you wouldn't know the better if your dead and lifeless body were chopped up into a thousand pieces and fed to dogs. That money you worked hard for, useless. The now useless body carelessly dumped into the ground.

What if your life meant nothing, nada, zero to you or anyone else? It didn't. Doesn't matter if you fed hungry children in the outskirts of Ethiopia or polished the Pope's shoes, you're still dead, lying in the cold, worm-ridden ground as any low-life sinner with a drug problem. No where to go, nothing to do, but you don't know that because you're dead.

What if the only reason you ever existed was to make more mindless, pointless lives? Maybe it is. You served the same purpose on earth as any fruit fly. Sex, sex, sex, that's your life. All it meant, means or ever will mean was the continuation of your pointless species. You never had a higher purpose, you never had any worthy cause, you just lived to screw and die and that's it.

No Heaven, no Hell, nothing, just simple, absolute death. What if everything you ever believed or fought for was wrong, there is no great beyond, there is no God and there is no hope for any poor soul lost in the constant spin of creation and destruction.

What if I was right all along?

What if that bus hits tomorrow?

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

The eternal question, if given the opportunity to live forever, would you accept?

Personally, I would decline. Forever is a terribly long time. Yet, almost all civilizations think of a way to live forever, reincarnation, heaven, whatever it may be. It seems that people fear death above all else. But if one had the ability to live forever, you would see everything on this little earth, meet all sorts of people and live past the extinction of everything you know. Really, it's a tempting concept, all the time in the world to do anything you could ever want to, know more than anyone else, have insane amounts of money, go literally everywhere, experience absolutely everything, and yet, is it worth it? You could find your true love and watch them age and die while you're left living. Have a family, have ten families and watch them slowly deteriorate and fall into that ever-enticing embrace of death. You suddenly realize that after you've done it all and loved more than you could in ten lifetimes, there is no way out. At this point, survival is not even a factor. You exist no matter what. There is nothing left to experience, you're simply done. Everything loses meaning and you're left in a meaningless, unwilling existance.

Yet people sit back and rely on immortality to allow them to do what they want. Well, why not now?

Really, death is one of the most beautiful details in life. People avoid it and dance around it, but they never come to terms with it. It is the grand finale, the frosting on the cake, the explosion after years of anticipation. It is that magical moment when we finally get to simply stop. Bills no longer matter, that argument with so-and-so is already forgotten, we just get to close our eyes and there it is, silence. Silence and darkness. It's a welcome escape after a lifetime of noise and constant tasks. An end to everything, a beautiful, blissful non-existance. No matter how you die, it's happening. There is nothing you can do to stop it, just a simple surrender of ourselves to ourselves. Life is spent leading up to a single moment. 99.99999995 percent of our lives is spent preparing for a mere 0.0000000453%. That last moment when every possible thought is finally done must be so liberating.

Death is only a tragedy for someone who never lived in the first place.