Monday May 6, 2019

We live in a divided city. Anger, extinction rebellion: but we can heal ourselves. We can love. Or we can yell, fail to sympathize. Sit in separate rooms. Gather round fires, with spell-check clutching at our words. We face difficult existential choices: we stand at a crossroads of the personal and the political, the underworld and utopia. But which is which? Gold-wrapped chocolate rabbits, or a universe of books? Stern military Boys and Girls Club discipline, or Isle of Lost Boys? Gender submission or gender trouble? Fear or freedom? Attempts to determine answers remain clouded by the rules of attraction, each potential orbit possessing its distinct push and pull — and in the midst of these, the shaman. But I don’t want another novel of the ice age. I suppose I’m more green than red. Yet I remain torn between the two — the picnic and the bonfire. It’s all right there, laid out in the symbolism of a dining room. Picnic basket, flowers, hand towels — or Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam.” The contrast leaves me feeling radical, but also radically indecisive. Which cross do we wish to bear? Life is, even at its best, no more than that question — or so it seems. We remain amid tests and halls of mirrors, sorting amid conflicting sense-data.