Slowdown

I haven’t been keeping up on the news for the last month. True ... while I was at my parents’ home last week, my brother and I would catch the 8 o’clock repeat of The Daily Show. But I didn’t learn much about the world. Without concrete knowledge of recent events, what I saw didn’t do much but produce a shallow laugh. My brother laughed louder ... he’s been keeping up. But I’ve been avoiding that kind of concrete knowledge. My world is tiny right now. Perhaps repressive. Perhaps self-aggrandizing. Perhaps naive. But it is what it is.

Today, though, I turned on the TV and Katie Couric informed me about the London terror plot and how I should beware of suspicious looking vehicles. She also told me that we can look forward to increasingly segregated classrooms. And she finally told me that Joel Siegel died of colon cancer (I wondered if she would mention her husband and tell us to ask our doctors about colon health ... but she didn’t). I never watch Katie Couric--but I’m glad that hers was the news I caught today. She enabled me to justify hiding my head in the sand a little bit longer.

But the problem is that I do well when I have concrete THINGS to deal with--known quantities, entities, issues. The abstract and unknown make me nervous. Don’t get me wrong ... I love change. But that anticipation before the change, I HATE that. And where I am right now feels so unpredictable. The only thing I know, in fact, is that I'll be left with an incredible void in my life. I don’t mean to wax existential (I’m in the middle of reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and I’m certain some of her Camus-inspired musings are coloring my thoughts), but I don’t like the way things are right now. And I feel helpless to do anything about them.

But there are the small things, I guess, I do for myself and the people I love. And I guess I need to remind myself that that’s where life really is ... where it counts ... and what I can hold so tightly and close to me. My drunken e-mail to you, the promise of her secret, his lunchtime joke falling flat, her eyes that hug, a shallow complaint made again, and again, and again, and someone so amazing to whom to make it. The big ideas?--they can suck my ass-stick.

And I’m pretty sure that that’s the dumbed down and personalized version of Camusian absurdity ... and, man, that’s annoying as hell.