I wish I knew the source of this early morning ennui. If I knew the source, I could address it. But I have no idea. I thought I was perfectly happy when I went to bed. Yet I woke in a different frame of mind. This morning feels different; it’s not like most other mornings. Most other mornings are more precise. Their clarity cannot be questioned. But this morning is imprecise. Its clarity has long-since devolved into a vague, clumsy frost. How could it have devolved “long-since?” Long-since implies significant amounts of time. Certainly more than four or five hours; that’s the length of this morning, so far. It will get longer, though. It always does.
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With ennui comes a stillness of epic proportions. Silence so quiet that it has been known to cause madness; and when it doesn’t, it causes happiness. Even when I try to be funny, in an attempt to smother my ennui, I fail. Because, well, pillows do not work on ennui. Everyone knows that. Or if they don’t, they should, for Christ’s sake. The problem, of course, is that we have made a monumental failure of society, this human anthill that’s now drenched in a thick mixture of gasoline and oily sludge. That’s a tad unfair; human society is not yet irretrievably unfixable. We’re not irrevocably broken. Yet that’s just one opinion; others might say we are on our last legs, just microseconds away from utter self-destruction. Waiting to see is really the only option available to us.
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An old friend called last night. He’s still young enough to enjoy confronting the challenges of life. I once was that young. I wore my youth on my sleeve; it was even more obvious than my emotions. Listening to my friend talk about his recent and his planned travel adventures, my longing to be on the road welled up inside me almost to the point of bursting out. My desire to be on the road has very little to do with the destination; I do not even need a destination. My desire to be on the road arises from the road itself and what it represents. “Awayness.” “Otherness.” “Somewhereelseness.” An opportunity to wash away the gritty sand of repeated experiences, replacing it with a fine dust born of breathtaking adventures. My friend has mastered the art of embracing adventure. He plunges into adventure the way some Scandinavians plunge into icy water as a means of heightening happiness and engendering a sense of community. But I have gone well beyond the expected terse reply to a question not even yet asked. That’s another of the legendary flaws.
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I might do just fine in a mid-sized town or a small city in a midwestern state. Or in a rural community in a southeastern state. Or as a faceless, nameless city dweller in a place too generic to even attempt to name. You would be fine there, too. We can adjust. We can adjust to new environments, new climates, new social structures and strata, new people with new ideas or experiences, new forms of emptiness. You name it, change is survivable. Tolerable. Even likeable, if you play your cards right. You could enjoy living in one of the deep suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. Places like Hueytown or Mountain Brook or Midfield or Forestdale or Coalburg. I could say the same about urban and suburban New Jersey, in the shadow of New York City. It’s not where you live, but how you live. Though where you live can dramatically affect how you live. So, it’s a symbiotic relationship. But, actually, depending on one’s perspective, it could be a parasitic relationship. That’s too involved to get into here and now.
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I will focus some attention this morning on getting my thoughts together for my presentation at church on Sunday. While I want to wing it, I need to create and internalize a basic structure. Otherwise, I could ramble on for days, never noticing the pews emptying and the lights dimming; nor hearing the “click” of doors locking me inside the sanctuary. Seriously, I need to think about what I want to say. Aside from what I want to say, I need to consider what the audience might want to hear. And not hear. What, if anything, in my past could possible hold their attention for 30 or 40 minutes? I can’t even hold my own attention that long. I have nothing of interest that could fill that much time. I’ll be naming each hair on my head and orally relating to the audience the story of its evolution, by the time the clock notifies me that sufficient time has passed that I might legitimately stop speaking.
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Enough drivel for now.
