In ten minutes, the redness of the sky and the morning fog are gone. The day resumes.

Sometimes, living just means being at the right place at the right time.

“Is Petersburg really as you draw it?”

“I draw it as I see it”

—Onegin

When I woke up, it was just another day, and my room resumed its silence as I turned off my alarm in the darkness. When I got outside, it was just another morning, although the recent drop in temperature has frosted the grass and turned the pavement white.

When I got on the bus, the sky started with a plain, early-morning glow that seemed to stretch out in a tunnel towards my destination. As I traveled further east, the sky turned pink and red, and a perfectly vertical beam of cloudless light shot out from below the horizon, letting me know that the sun was waking up.

I watched the sun rise as the bus took me to work, watched the sky turn from grey to red to yellow to white. I saw the heavy morning fog snake through the trees of a forested green golf course, and saw it recede, as if the earth had chosen to display itself by lifting her downy veil.

There are days when I want to get off at every stop and take pictures of the graduating atmosphere. When the ride is a journey only experienced by bus.

Bus rides are always either really good or really bad.

They’re really good when I find a window seat. That’s when I can tune out completely, lose myself in my music, and become totally oblivious to anything going on around me. I get to watch everything pass by and drift in and out of my thoughts. It’s when I get the most thinking done during the day (even more than in the shower).

They’re really bad when I can’t find a seat and I’m left standing up. I keep my music low so that I can hear any announcements by the bus driver, or people trying to get by. I’m always on guard about where I should be moving or when a seat might become available. And music on a low volume isn’t really worth listening to.

One of the reasons why I haven’t bought a car is because I’d lose all my thinking time. Every day I can reflect for an hour going to work and an hour coming back when I’m on the bus. If I was in a car, I’d be too busy paying attention to the road, to bad drivers, to traffic lights, to pedestrians. I wouldn’t be able to think, and I’d probably write a lot less.

Some days, when I’m coming close to my stop, I wish that the bus would just keep going, just keep driving, and never stop. I’d ride it from morning to night, listening to my music, just enjoying the feeling of going somewhere and nowhere at the same time.

Thinking about nothing and everything.

There was this one time I was on the phone with John, when I walked through the basement hallway on Daly, past Jonathan’s drum kit, and paused at the frame of his door.

“You’re so megalomaniACal”, I told him.

“No, no, Jeff, it’s megalomaNIacal”, he curtly responded.

And I knew. And John knew. And I knew that John knew that I had simply thrown more fuel on the fire, I had somehow added to his limitless ego. I could see the smirk on his face through the phone, as if Anderson himself was there with one of his close ups in my brain.

When approaching anything new, as a human, aside from bias, there is always the danger of relating even the furthest idea to the self. Everything is subject to interpretation, of course, and I’ve always strongly believed in the importance of interpretation. However, when interpretation stretches too far, the entire learning process can become perverted, an understanding based on nothing.

An example: after the Nietzsche’s death, his sister secured the rights to his publications. She later married a leader of the german anti-Semitic movement, and made distorted publications of his works. The Nazi’s welcomed his ideas, eventually building a monument for him. Yet Nietzsche himself wrote about his strong opposition to racism, and his contrast with the German Nationalistic movement.

And such is how we, as humans, see ourselves in almost everything. I admit that at times I’m guilty of such a thing myself, when I see my life in the characters of movies, when I read my stories in other peoples books. So I start Thus Spoke Zarathustra with trepidation, with the hopeful awareness that I will be able to be open-minded in what I learn.

It’s ironic that Nietzsche had paresis when he wrote his book, and was most likely suffering from delusions of grandeur at the time, although how much it actually affected him is debatable.

Perhaps the best that one can do is to keep a work in mind as inspiration, and not as an influence.

The legless man in the motel room next to me
listens to country and western music
all night, an endless song
about going down on his knees
for some faithless woman’s love.
I turn in my bed, thinking of you the day
we thought our daughter had gone
missing. The moment
before she disappeared you’d seen a stranger
on the block, the kind who wore
a stained suit from the Sally Ann, the kind
who couldn’t know innocence
existed. Our daughter was supposed to be

next door, playing in the fenced yard
with two neighbour boys. You’d been
on the phone and I’d turned my back
on the moment to do something
predictable — move the garden sprinkler,
open the morning mail — acts
that would never again seem so ordinary
once we’d made up our minds
between burial or cremation. Your body

had never felt so alive as you took off
in the car, driving down
every back lane, listening for her
glove-muffled cries. You drove

deeper and deeper into the kind of hell
we reserve for ourselves and never want
our children to have to know. You knew

at this moment she could only be suffering
in the hands of that stranger who would afterwards
stuff her trusting body into a single forest
green Glad bag, then tote her to the park.

They would find her legs first, dangling
from the swing, shoes on the wrong feet
as usual, arms hanging from the jungle
gym. I’d want to touch, to straighten
her turned-in toes: how clumsily
we lived on this earth!

She was lost only for a moment, locked
in a spare bedroom with the two boys
next door, not wanting their privacy interrupted,
but in that moment when she was gone
forever, death in all his beautiful variety
sang to us, off-key and aching
inside our cheated hearts.

—Susan Musgrave, The Moment

After reading Things That Keep And Do Not Change, I deleted my poetry/prose section. There is nothing that I could ever write that would actually be considered as such. Susan Musgrave has put me to shame.

She writes so…ghastly, so raw, so erotically, and so piercingly. It’s unbelievable how she can come up with the ideas in her poems; often it’s as if she’s lived in that moment and describes what she sees. And yet, one knows that she only creates the images she talks about because of their very permanent and scarring nature. One of my favourite things about her writing style is the way she begins with a very ordinary situation and leads the reader along with her thought pattern.

The way she sees the simple things around her with such vivacity, the passion and emotion she expresses in her written voice, the poignant way in which she views the world…she is someone who lives life to the highest degree.

And some day I hope to do the same.