too bootylicious

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.

And other times, you want to go where nobody knows your name. Where you can dance on the street to a little duo of guitar playing hippies and not care about who may see you - not care about who you may see - and certainly not care about what certain people might think. Certain people are always going to think those things, and so to be away from certain people, around uncertain people - faces undiscernible - identities unknown, is something wonderful. Not having to talk to people - to say hi - or at the very least to give a nod of recognition is something close to wonderful. To be able to sit on a busy street, drinking coffee, and just watching people go by, streams and streams of people, a never ending tide of humanity, the product of generations before them, the apex of our collective histories walking past me in a pagent without the pomp, strolling down the street, walking slowly or fast, but always walking - moving towards something - or maybe even just moving. Reinforcing our mobility - believing that that makes us alive, present tense - that as long as we keep moving, we'll never grow old. The rush - the hum of life on these streets of lives I know nothing about, other than that there is so much about them I want to know - about their first kisses, about how often they cuss, and what they think about when they masturbate, about if they like to say racist slurs in their head because it gets them hot under that proverbial collar, and whether they just run water after they use the bathroom to make it sound like they washed their hands even though they did not just because they don't like to. I can sit there, or even here at this computer terminal in the school's library, and look at people and be amazed by how little I am - how no one here knows me - and that I could dissappear and no one would have even know that I was absent because I was never here in the first place. Or maybe realize that I was looking at the situation the wrong way, and realize how big I am - how big we all are - a teeming mass of bodies not exactly sure what they are doing, but knowing that it is something great they are involved with - that the cause is a good one.

Sometimes I feel like it is too hard to type - that my fingers are too tense and that the keys are too stiff - too unresponsive to what I want to say. I think maybe if I had a set of markers I could show how I feel. Not even a big set. Three or four would do. I could scribble some lines - some circles - maybe even connect the circles and the lines into some unified form - that this would do better for telling how I feel than trying to type something about myself, about you, about us in the heat of this library, with Bonnie sitting probably less than three feet away from me, and with these damn stiff keys that don't want to fucking dance with me tonight. They (the keys) simply are not ready for this jelly.