exercise

I think about this blog so much. Something will happen--often many somethings in one day--and I'll tease out all the implications of said/seen/experienced something, imagine how I would enter the scene, how I would exit. Slant rhymes for obese. The perfect metaphor to illustrate a moment, all senses firing, tell me what that smells like, imagine tasting it, now go and touch it, write it down, write it down.

Trouble is, I don't always write it down, and lately I've felt like I'm on this train, similar to a subway in NY or D.C. and I'm riding back and forth from numerous point A's to point B's (or K's or the occasional Y, if I'm up that late), watching the world go by and by and by. It may be that I'm having my first stint as an adult who is wholly conscious of aging. I'm only 36, but the "only" preceding my 36 is starting to rust around the edges. The l is listing into the y, and the y just wants to kick back and take a nap. Only 36 is going to pass by just as fast as fucking 30!, and I feel it acutely, this realization that life doesn't slow down as you age, it speeds up. The body deteriorates but the world keeps right on spinning.

And the next thing I know, I haven't written a line in days and I've got all these ideas and experiences to put into words. I'm at the bottom of a mountain but know well the thrill and beauty of being at the top. And all I can do is climb.

Recall, for instance, waiting for the bus in the cold darkess of a March morning in Ohio. Time stood still. I swore I'd been out there for an hour. It wasn't so much the chill that slowed things, because every little thing seems intermidable when you're freezing your ass off, but rather it was the very thought of making it through that particular day, the first day of freshman year, all 8 hours of it stretching endlessly before me. Soon I would be swept into the halls of Glen(J)Oak Highschool, my increasingly-fat-padded body stuffed into my hand-bleached jeans and Benetton rugby shirt, herded from French to Algebra to lunch to locker and all the while yearning for 3:29, the last bell, my call to freedom. It never came soon enough. I wanted those horrible high school days to fall like perfectly placed dominoes so that my thirteenth year (and my fourteenth and my fifteenth) would, in minutes, wind its way to eighteen, which back then seemed to me like the exact year when my life would (actually) begin.

No, I've never been one to long for my early teens as if they were the finest and most carefree years I'd ever known. I wanted them done. And they dragged on forever.

Now I measure my life in week long intervals, my eye on Friday. When I go to the bathroom at work, I think of what day it is, Tuesday say, then go down a mental list of all the work I have to do before the weekend. I measure time. This exercise often evokes the need for deep breathing. Besides panic, and constant reassurances that of course I'll get it all done because I always do, I find myself wishing for more time because I am now old enough to know that no matter how much I try to show up for my life, to savor each moment, I won't. I simply can't. Bombarded with choices, deadlines, desires, drives, I have to pick my presentness carefully...

Okay.
*exhale*
That's done.

I needed to stretch my hands a little, get back into the blog-groove, the bloove (as it were). It's not like I can write about time and age and do them one iota of justice in the span of one hour, right? I sit down and write what comes to mind then find myself here. Where I have to finish the laundry, cook dinner, sort the recycling. Soon it will be dark.