There are times in New Orleans when, if you stand perfectly still, you can actually feel the city glowing. Like, with an aliveness that has nothing to do with the thousands of living creatures inhabiting it. But it's subtle. You have to listen closely to feel it. Tonight is different. Tonight this entire city is pulsing and glowing and you don't have to be perfectly still to feel it all around you.
Thanks to the Saints victory thousands upon thousands of people are having the best night of their lives. They're drinking and laughing and celebrating and acting like complete dumb shits because, for this one moment in time, their world is beautiful and they are alive and how, really, does life get any better than that. Tomorrow will come and life will still be shitty. Bullshit will still be occurring all over the globe and the city will still be a clusterfuck of road construction NO MATTER WHERE YOU TRY TO GO. But tonight they're alive, and they are happy as fuck. My complete and total indifference to the trigger aside I can get behind that. I think it's beautiful. And I am so thankful that I live somewhere that pulses and glows in the first place--it's my favorite thing about this city. But tonight, with the intensity amplified, the glow is so palpable it's almost oppressive, and I've never felt more disconnected from the rest of humanity.
It's a thought that wants to be depressing but only kind of is. Kind of because I've already been pretty fried and disconnected lately so of course it's something I've already been thinking about, but only kind of because (at least when it comes to this) I've gotten pretty good at tweaking my emphesis when I start to feel disconnected.
My existence has always seemed to ebb and flow exactly opposite to everyone around me so that my mania hits when everyone else is level (or sleeping) and my quieter states inevitably roll around when everyone else is partytimeexcellent. There are times when our existences flow into each other, and those are the good times, the most of the times, but the peaks and troughs usually tend to miss each other. It used to bother me a lot. I used to get really depressed about it and try to force myself into moods I just wasn't in (or reign in the one I was in) so I didn't have to feel like I was off alone by myself with my loud-ass existence while everyone else made merry with perfect synchronicity.
It took me a while to realize that I had my emphesis on the wrong syllable (took me even longer to hear the phrase to describe it with). I was missing the fact that existential disconnect is a great vantage point from which to observe. To step back and sit still and notice all the cogs and how they connect and make each other turn. So that's all I did for a while. I sat back and watched the cogs turn, followed the tangles in the pattern of the "gossamer threads", observed. But I wasn't of anything, you know?
Somewhere along the way that just became the way things are. Now my whole life is "while I do my thing in the background". I sometimes feel like I'm just lurking in the shadows of social existence. Not, like, the seedy shadows. Just, you know, right around the edges of the periphery of where the light ends. Just far enough between in and out to dart back and forth relatively unnoticed.
Most of the time I don't look at it as something negative. Most of the time I'm perfectly happy with the little cocoon I've built for myself--my own private little observatory. But sometimes, like tonight, it hits my skin differently and the aloneness turns it a certain shade of blue.
But what can I do, Bluebird of Happiness? Life will go on. I'll wake up tomorrow and go to Astronomy and by the time my mind and body have both fully adjusted themselves to the fact that I'm awake and moving around things will be back to beautiful until it's time to do it all over again.
G'night, moon.
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