Time continues to move at a pace that frightens me, that seems quicker than it should.
Jacob and I left the barbecue after one pitcher of beer yesterday. We felt awkward but were a little stoned and so it was certainly our own fault. Every summer the crowd is a bit different, composed of less familiar faces, the experience less fun. There were pushy people trying to get counter space to set disposable plates on, not friendly guys serving food, and a man who talked like an elementary school teacher asking me how I would feel if there was ever a vaccine for HIV. I told him I didn't want to talk about that right now, when really I didn't want to talk to him. He tried to give me yo-yos and lollipops and seemed offended that I didn't want them. I saw a couple people I had slept with years ago. We left the bar and bought ice cream on the way home and watched various music videos on YouTube.
There is a passage in Middlemarch that I keep thinking back to ever since I read it a week or so ago. That is is now apparently summer already, that I again feel like I am not keeping pace with the march of time, has me again thinking to this, thinking in broader terms about how I am failing to keep pace with aspirations once a little more firmly held:
"For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change!" (144-145)
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