Coming of Age

This blog required a good deal of thought. At first I felt as I always do when writing an entry: "I don't know if I've ever experienced that, but I'll come back to it later." For most blogs I can think of something pretty quickly. That was not the case with this one. I had a genuinely difficult time thinking of a coming of age moment. After thinking on it for an extended period of time, I have come to the conclusion that not only have I never experienced a coming of age event, I would go so far as to say that no person my age has. Not only are we all still young; I doubt there is one among us who truly knows what it means to come of age. In a society that celebrates youth, change and beauty, the idea that one could progress to the level of a mature being in fewer than thirty or forty years is completely dismissable.

Besides the fact that no facet of our culture has reached its final stage, the inevitability of which I am hesitant to concede, the modern concept of adulthood is as inconsistent as it is unappealing. If adulthood is understood to mean self-sustaining, independent, and practical, what use does an adult have for marriage beyond emotional ties? Does it make sense that we are raised with the lone wolf/maverick archetypes impressed on us through every avenue of learning, from academia to athleticism, only to be deemed less valuable because we choose not to weave our personal fabric into a tangled mesh of contrary ideals? Marriage no longer serves a practical purpose in this society, and yet it is generally acknowledged as a "normal" adult thing to do. This rejection of the pragmatic illustrates the disjointed nature of the concept of adulthood. 

If I am scared, have I come of age? If I am irresponsible, have I come of age? No single event can shape one's identity so greatly without being greatly traumatic, leading me to ponder: Is maturity born of tragedy? And if so, is cynicism the only appropriate view of the world? To see all life's majesty, and to find it wanting, a dresser who's paint is worn and in need of varnish? And if not, is there any other method to reaching adulthood other than slowly, sometimes painfully, and always clumsily? It appears to me that adulthood is no more a destination than a trail on which to find one's way. Nobody follows the Trail step-for-step, and each person's journey differs slightly from those around them. There is a limit to how many hikers the Trail can fit, and it is being pushed at every turn. The hikers all rush to the middle without heeding the end; as competitors in a canoe race that ends in a waterfall. They paddle as hard as they can, and no sooner is victory claimed than the ground falls out from beneath them.

And so, I have determined that adulthood is nothing more than a path, and one cannot reach it any more than one can pick it up and bring it with them. Everyone strays from the Trail here and there. As their feet crush the underbrush, the Trail widens. New paths are formed, new shortcuts discovered. But shortcuts are dangerous. There are reasons that they are not as worn as the other paths. And once one comes to the end of a shortcut, they find that they missed a piece of the Trail, and are much closer to its End.

The Trail's End is an interesting place. When people see that their remaining steps are numbered, they panic. Some fall. Some try to fight the tides of the crowd, always in vain. A few even try to push others ahead of them, under the false impression that the End might grow full, as a dog might. Only those content to reach the End at an easy pace find themselves Enlightened. That is what coming of age is. No societal influence or ethnocentric ideals, merely acceptance of the futility of struggling against the tide. 

Sunday Afternoons

It's 5:00 PM. A Sunday afternoon. The trees are stagnant, bathing in a lazy sun who holds the day in Its waning stare.  I am, as always, in the basement of a one floor house with the smell of laundry, married with curry powder, clinging to the pleasantly dank air (cool enough to fight the heat, stale and dark enough to pretend that the passage of time could be slowed as easily as the flow of a stream by careless leaves). We have just returned from the large trampoline in the backyard, where our merry play mocked the sun for Its indifference. Though It was present - as It always was- it could not join us. It merely soaked into the treetops, forced to witness our regular jubilation on a day that was supposedly its own.

But the sun would have its revenge. Even in Its final moments, Its rays would tease me on my way home, a fifteen minute walk down one road, then up another, to my own home on Mountain View road. I was never in much of a hurry, though. When that hour sets in, at the close of the weekend and the coming of school with the tide, time loses its step. No longer do the unforgiving Ticks and Tocks that reign over every minute crack unabashedly into the wall of sanity against which I lean. And yet, this is the most frustrating time of the week. Despite the absence of the temporal metronome, the sun keeps time perfectly. Triumphant in Its ballad, the walk home is an encore, a symphony of regrets, who's composer watches every beat. Maybe once or twice, in the early days, I tried to outpace It's meter. But the sun was clever, or perhaps simply petty, and melted the pavement so that it flowed downhill (The entirety of the trek was uphill). I know better now, and my pace obeys Its wishes.

This struggle recurs every Sunday, without fail. Both of us, the sun and I, fail to see the cycle of reciprocated animosity, truly believing ourselves, respectively, to be the one wronged. What right had I to rejoice on Its namesake day? To mock Its dying refrain? And what right had the sun to compose my free time? To demand my complacency for a concert I did not wish to attend? Neither of us were justified in our accusations; in fact, we were both wrong. For my mocking was out of envy- as was Its intrusiveness- It would watch upon every Sunday for as long as It wished. Yet It could never absorb the joy It observed. No amount of fiery yearning, of explosive jealousy, of simmering hate, would alter this eternal dynamic.

And so the Composer wept, for He would never join His audience. And His tears sweetened the music. And the music brought tears to His listeners, because they knew the concert would soon come to a close. And they raged against Him, for they believed him to be an eternal fixture, an undying member of the celestial audience. But he could no longer hear the music. And so the Composer wept.

A Safe Space

Since I was a child, I have always been infatuated with the absence of others. I never liked being in crowds, and being alone is like living in a vacuum. It conflicts with the intrinsic nature of the human experience: that everything we do has an effect. When I'm alone, I can say something and nothing will change. It breaks the imposed philosophical law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, as my words are absorbed into an Abyss that defies its name. Within itself it is everything that has, is, or will ever be. From the outside, looking in, one cannot help but try to fathom its depths. Yet the power of the Abyss lies in the inability to pry open its hinges, because it has none. It stretches and twists and folds and bends and never breaks. Outside the Abyss thought and words overlap and merge to form an ever-expanding Web of Noise. I hate the Web. Its many tendrils wrap and squeeze around any creature who draws to near to the edge of the Abyss. But the Abyss is by nature un-caring, one of my favorite things about it. It is the cold space that is warmed, for an instant by a pleasant or plain thought. These thoughts twist together until they are unrecognizable, but the Abyss is an infinity. There is always space for new things to be lost, as each thing before it forgets its identity and ceases to be. Unlike the dreaded Web, where the rate of growth is exceeded by the rate of contribution. In the Web, borders are pushed by the comingling and procreation of its contents. There is never enough space for the Noise to lie dormant, so each component stands on end, like iron filings under a magnet. The Abyss will never be full. It expands, as population does, geometrically. The thoughts and words cannot last long against the harsh chasm of nothingness that pervades the Abyss. This is why my bed is my favorite place to be.

When I am in my bed, I am at home in the Abyss. It's embrace allows for a sense of freedom, as any sense reason or logic can be swept of like nettles on a river. No thought is too loud or too big to dam the constant torrent of the Stream of Null. as thoughts touch its surface, they are drowned in the Streams black depths. Maybe the strong ones can struggle for a moment, but nothing can last forever. In my bed, I sit at the edge of the Null and watch as my supposedly meaningful stream of consciousness is swept into its undertow. The fear I once felt while staring into the Abyssal current is dwarfed my admiration of its sheer power.

When I shut the door to my bedroom, I invite the Abyss to come in and stay a while. Maybe this is why I've always slept with my door closed: It serves as a barrier to keep out the Web. The moment I turn off the light, I can always be sure that the Abyss has arrived. In that moment-between-moments, when darkness cascades down the walls, over the shelves, and seeps into the carpet, that the Abyss surrounds me. I am no longer required to maintain the strained facade of one who appreciates the Null. Just like my thoughts and emotions, my false countenance is wrenched into its selfless torrent (The Null, I have decided, must be selfless, as it is, by definition, without self).

Every time I feel the prongs of the Web dig in, I think back to my warm bed; a tiny, worthless speck on the edge an ocean of infinity.

Forever and For Always

I took this photo about three years ago. Yes, I took it. This is my cat, Neka. Neka is Japanese for cat, because my father, my sister and I don't seem to have a single ounce of creativity among us. I was bored, it was summer, and that was redundant. I found myself, as many a youth finds themself, taking somewhat self-indulgent pictures of my cat. Through persistence(luck), willpower(more luck), and unprecedented skill(a preposterous amount of luck) I captured a very, let's say, "novel" image.

This masterpiece is nothing more than me mashing the "take photo" button on an iPod touch. Seemingly as bored as I was, the cat was yawning. Mid-yawn, a miraculous thing happened. A picture so inherently, inarguably precious was captured by a boy with very little else to offer the world. In a cosmos so entangled, so random, and so destined for ever-increasing entropic forces, this moment-in-between-moments was allowed to be caught and trapped in a wafer-thin universe, all its own. More than anything else, this innocent feline's visage is a testament to the fact that anything is possible, despite ridiculously stacked odds.

Hundreds of millions of years of evolution, climate change, and erosion, allowed me to stand in that spot and entrap a truly wonderful thing. I could have been born without thumbs; New York State could have been an inferno, forever raging;  the Hudson valley could start and end in Wallkill. A literally infinite number of events could occur or not occur, instantly destroying any existence of this photo in the future. But an infinite number of things did not happen. One thing happened. This photo was taken, and no-one and nothing can ever take it away from me, from you, from everyone who has, does, and will ever live of this or any other world.

So allow that spark of innocence, that waste of time, that foolish pet peeve, any piece of idiotic, beautiful entropy manifested in an experience to survive. It will not grow. It will not whither. It will only BE. And maybe, just maybe, it can be captured. In story, song, poem, painting, play, voice memo, photo... All of these things weave together to form a metaphysical tapestry of arranged chaos, proving to anyone or no-one that no matter the odds, anything can happen.

This photo is a catalyst for future manifestations. Once it is seen, it plants a seed in the mind that sits. It will not grow. It will not whither. It will only BE.



The Power of Entropy

Failure: An Option

When I was in elementary school- Lenape, 5 grade- we had a grade-wide optional spelling bee. It was  volunteer-only due to the fact that it revolved around getting up and speaking in front of the rest of the grade. As I recall, roughly thirty kids signed up, meaning that they would be "performing" in front of about seventy kids.

I was actually pretty excited to participate. I was a very self-conscious child, to the point where I was actually a bit self-centered in most social situations. I thought that I could impress my peers with my assuredly daunting spelling skills. In reality, I was not a fantastic speller, and I had never been. In first grade, I had a sheet with a handful of words I used a lot and had trouble spelling to help me write in class. Words like "shadow" and "dragon" made appearances on the list, among many others.

During the spelling bee itself, I actually did very well. It started with simple words-three to five letters long- that were easy to spell. As the bee started, I started getting nervous. Speaking in front of about seventy people, even in such a friendly setting, was not an easy thing for me to do. But as the bee went on, I began to regain my former confidence. I made it past round after round, managing to either luck out and receive very easy words or blindly guessing my way through them. I made it into the top ten, and that was when I started getting overconfident.

After three more kids got eliminated, I got the word "lightning." I thought I had it. Gosh darnit, I knew I had it! With the confidence of the most swelled puffer fish, I began "Lightning, L-I-T-E-N-I-N-G, lightning." And then I froze. I fudged it. I fudged it and basically a thousand people saw. It felt like the blood rushed out and into my head, all at once. I would have rued my hubris, had I known tat I possessed it. I had to make the walk out of the lineup and into the crowd, head hung, assuming that every single person in the room was watching me. Again, I placed my own value on the pillar raised through others eyes. The spelling be was just another night with ninjas, a small thread in the tapestry of my self-image, hung from the rafters in an attempt to shut out the light of my own ideals.


Spelling Bees