Monthly Archive for December, 2003

Year’s End

Published
by
Jonathan Lipps
on December 30, 2003
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments
The Oracle could have been talking to me (actually, she was: remember, I’m Neo)–”I think you’re waiting for something”. It’s true, I’ve been waiting for something. You see, recently I’ve taken to waiting until my thoughts are something of a unified whole before I move to compose them into a weblog entry. This is all part and parcel of the ideological shift that took place in the move from Blogger to MovableType, when I decided to put childish things behind me. The problem is that, far from unifying, it seems that my thoughts these past weeks have been slowly decomposing, fragmenting and breaking off into little pieces of Mentalese that fall into the sink and down the drain while I’m cleaning dishes. Every so often I try to master a few streams and get them into some coherent form, but I’m too weak.

It doesn’t help that the flood of events has mirrored this pattern: every now and again something will happen, but it doesn’t have any relationship to anything else that’s happening, and then I go to sleep, only to wake up to something even more unrelated, like a dream about wizards who turn into animals and the realization that I’m sleeping beneath some very odd peach-and-burgundy floral-print comforter and matching sheets. Why are they on my bed? Who knows; it’s how it was when I got home and I’m too lazy to change them.

Or my good friend will come over and we’ll hang out and he’ll tell me how he’s engaged to a girl I’ve never met. And I’m happy for him and that’s worth writing about–engagements are worth writing about as a unified whole because now 5 close friends are getting married before the summer of 2004 comes to a close (before I’ll have even found a job, probably), and i’m so incredibly happy for all these people. But then I start feeling a little depressed that I don’t even have any prospects, and how I probably won’t have any for a long time because I’m so self-centered, and I don’t really like girls anyway, at least not the right kind, I just like being infatuated with them, and I have no idea what love is. And if I don’t have any idea what love is, how can my friends, and they’re all headed for disaster (I’m actually jealous), and I told you so…

…and I’m glad you never listened to me, even if I had actually been so stupid as to say something instead of just think it and then watch it fall out of my head and fall to pieces and wash down the drain and isn’t it cool how the drain makes a little water tornado? I hate tornados. Fuck tornados and all that destruction…and that earthquake in Iran…fuck that too.

Or I could have tried to get some unity of thought about Christmas, and write some pompously literate-sounding thing about the Incarnation. If I ever make it sound like I understand how God could be born in a manger in some actual place in our world, or why he would do so just to die for us, please do something hurtful to me. I don’t understand it, but it is real, more real than most things I do understand and I need it more than I need closure this afternoon, some semblance of reason, defragmentation…

This year has drawn to a close with a whimper and a sigh, without definition or plan for what will be different next year. No resolutions forthcoming, no energy to take regret and turn it into progress. Just a kernel of praise and thankfulness to God that I am still alive, and a lot of pain. Pain from loneliness and a desire to be with someone, and a desire to be alone, to sit and let rain fall on my head and turn to snow and then melt and then the sun comes out and maybe some branches start growing and ten years later I’m a tree. I need to see myself grow somehow–it might as well be into a tree, since I don’t have enough motivation to actually put my sins to death or become a more loving person or stop being addicted to expanding myself instead of Christ in me.

It’s funny; I never realized I came back from the quarter wounded. Tired, maybe…lazy, certainly. But wounded…that would explain the fragmentation, the lackluster way I’ve taken in images and events and why I’ve been sick with the flu and why I resisted pulling together any thoughts to make a more hopeful weblog entry. But where is the hurt, how deep is it, who did it, and can it be healed? Maybe 2004 holds the answers. Maybe it does. 2003 certainly did not. Odd years are like that, I guess.

C˙ni en Èdras,
LaÌren weth th·nod,
¡po orÈt nov·wer

Cedar Hill, TX

Published
by
Jonathan Lipps
on December 16, 2003
in Uncategorized
. 5 Comments
Occasionally, maybe even most of the time, I seem to forget that I have anything resembling roots. You know, childhood streets, trees that you climbed often enough to have favorite spots in, elementary school friends that you see making out at junior prom: in other words, a history, or the necessary result of being somewhere long enough for something to happen. I suppose my pride at being from so many places all over the states and even overseas has translated into a subconscious averaging-out of my locational story. Though it is true, I don’t think of myself as having spent just under half my life in a little Dallas suburb, because how can I let one place overpower all the others?

But, and perhaps not regrettably, reality in this case cannot be denied. Or at least, I can’t visit the place where I spent my formative (and thus undesirable) years and not feel an incredibly subtle mix of emotions. There is the surprise I mentioned in the previous paragraph, of how familiar everything seems, as if living somewhere for 10 years isn’t enough to make things familiar. Then there is the uncontrollable rush of images and stories and names that flood back into my mind, stories I thought I’d forgotten and names I’m sure I haven’t thought in 5 years–little modules of myself that have always been there but are suddenly noticed again, like little alien homunculi floating around in my mind. There is the unavoidable confrontation between myself as I was when I lived here and myself as I have become (and where did all my in-between selves go?).

Since we are on the eve of the release of Return of the King, it might be appropriate to draw a bit of an analogy to the hobbits’ return to the Shire. Just like Hobbiton, it seems that the fires of industry have consumed Cedar Hill. I don’t know when it went from being a small Texas town of 10,000 to the capital of Suburbia, with 30,000 inhabitants happily segregated into families with 2.5 kids, a cat and dog, and 1.5 Starbuckses, but some day it must have happened, to the utter surprise and chagrin of all (though I notice a lot of dry eyes, so maybe the town itself was in cahoots with the Big Bosses, conspiring to Barnes & Noblify my memories). Needless to say, the sense of familiarity I talked about is tempered by a jarring sense that something is different, and I’m not sure I like it.

Maybe the moral of this story is, you can always go home (even if you don’t realize it is home until you get there), but home is never the same. Towns change, landscapes change, people change–too many of your high school friends, though they never really left like they needed to, have somehow become the opposite of who you expected. Some are married, some are pregnant, some are off on what seem like permanent trips out of reality. Of course, that’s a bit superficial, since I’m often not too in touch with reality either, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a core people recognize. So it is in this case.

These past few days have been a wonderful experience, visiting with family and friends in Dallas and Austin, if only for the very awesome reason that I have completely and perfectly regained a Texas accent. No doubt I will lose it just as completely in a few days, when I continue on to Orlando for the Christmas holidays, but I honestly thought I would never again have used “y’all” and “fixin’ to” in the same sentence. In fact, I think the drawl I have developed in the past 24 hours is more pronounced than any I ever had when living here.

Well here is to you, Cedar Hill (as I switch figuratively to a personificatory monologue), to memories good and bad, to the overblown class, racial, and pastime distinctions that ruled my high school (dumb petty shit), to the friends I haven’t talked to in forever but am able to hang out with now as if I never moved to both coasts, to Mr. Jim’s pizza, to the wonderful haven of Dangerously, Ignorantly Nationalist Christian Fundamentalism that is North-Central Texas, and to the weather that changes its damn mind every two seconds. I’ll admit that you sucked me back in for a while, and that I was completely unprepared for both how you have changed and how you haven’t, how you have grown and how you haven’t. I’ll have to give you a bit more respect, I guess, more of a place in my story as I tell it. But for now it’s goodbye, and maybe I’ll see you again in some years.