Friday, July 25, 2003
WTF?
Sometimes life sucks so fucking
hard.
You know, sometimes, I don't know how, it sneaks up on you, but it happens, it happens for sure, you can feel it like physical contact, the wires connect, the electricity jumps and it hits you and whammo.
I knew this guy once. He's from the East Coast, raised poor, his wife too, when they first met, she lived in a place with honest-to-goodness crackwhores in the stairwells. Worked his way through grad school putting up A-frame homes for a living, patented an engineering invention, cashed in big time, moved out here, bought a plot of land in one of the rich neighborhoods here in San Diego, a mountain overlooking the beaches, and built a house over 6 months with 3 Mexican immigrant laborers. The hard work paid off - it's frigging gorgeous, a stunning masterpiece. The view is even better. My jaw dropped every time I went over, so I would hold off on going out to the backyard until I had finished my work, otherwise I was useless and would just stare.
I hope I never live in a house like that.
The family got so used to the view over time that they could only appreciate it when conditions were absolutely perfect - no smog, clouds, flat ocean swells, ugly tankers, smoke... in short, almost never. Every time I was over, I would say wow, what a nice day and mean it, they'd say yeah, well, it's a little smoggy in the north and mean that too. And when it finally was a fabulous postcard-worthy Southern California day, it's not like they were impressed by the beauty, not really. They were observing how beautiful the conditions were. Like an autistic savant, they could only see the components of the picture in front of them, not the picture itself. Like the research study where people stared into a mirror until they lost all ability to recognize a human face, could only see the triangles, circles, lines and shapes that made up what they saw.
That's just human nature. You get used to beautiful things if it's in your face ever day. It blends into everything else.
Screw that. I don't ever want to get used to a beautiful sunset. Or a deep kiss. Or a good conversation. And so if I have to suffer through serious suckage in order to hang on to those things, then so be it. Because life's like Vanilla Sky - you can't have the sweet without the sour. That's where I'm going. I'm trying to appreciate the lesson behind why things suck so very, very hard. Like it did a few hours ago.