Juxtaposition

I have a lot of things I want to write about. I introduced Jecca to The Shrub recently; I'd like to do a piece on the history of The Shrub, and how we've all formed this weird, "gigantic, alcoholic, argumentative family."

But I also want to write about Acid Night '05, and how it, for me, was really the night everything kind of cemented together, turning us from what was initially a bunch of college kids hanging out to what it is now. And I want to write about the first time I did DXM and the ensuing life-changing experience.. but this will entail writing about the horribly unhappy times that led up to that. There's so much I could write about, and I'm confident in my ability to describe each individual anecdote.

My concern is that I won't be able to string these anecdotes together. I don't want them to be separate from one another, because they aren't. We look at episodes from different parts of our lives, and we think they're discrete sections. "This was the time I was happy because of this or that. This one over here was the time I was unhappy because of something else." But these things aren't discrete. They all entwine together, weaving themselves into a pattern, and everyone's individual patterns all weave together in some way or another and form something even larger, inconceivably vast.

I can't really describe what I'm feeling right now. It's intensely positive, that's all I can really say. Everything is very good right now, and I'm a pretty happy Rusty at the moment. Perhaps because of this, I've been thinking about a lot of things, and reading through old LJ posts, and I've been able to see things in a new light. I won't go so far as to say I understand everything. I understand a lot more of it, but I can't exactly put into words what it is I understand.

Our lives all tell stories, like I was saying above. The meaning behind mine seems to be, thus far, about how we create our own realities to one degree or another. I'm not saying that just thinking about things in a positive light is going to turn everything into rainbows and puppies. If you're living in some war-torn nightmare scenario, all the positive thinking in the world isn't going to change your daily life. You're still going to get shot at every day. You're still going to spend your waking moments in fear of what's to come.

But you can still choose how it affects you. Obviously, the worse the situation is, the harder it will be to stay afloat. But the choice is still always there. I've been through my own personal hells, yet I still found happiness at different times, despite the darkness around me. Conversely, I've seen heaven in a grain of sand, as the poem goes, and could not reach it because of the cages I had constructed around myself.

Somehow, when you compare the years I spent with my grandmother to the past ten years or so, they both balance each other out. The former was like blips of light in the midst of a vast, all-encompassing darkness. The latter was like playing in some divine, sunlit garden, only to be periodically swayed back into the pitch-black forest surrounding it by the words of formless demons.

I know none of this makes sense. It barely makes sense even to me. What I do know, however, is that I've somehow managed to juxtapose the two themes- light in the midst of darkness and darkness in the midst of light- and, somehow, through this, I've managed to learn how to just *be*.

How this feels is beyond my capacity for description.

In other news... reading through my LiveJournal reminded me of something. I need to resurrect The Nvoblamolux Dhasiddi Du Epic.

In case I've never mentioned this before, this is, in the words of the LJ post, about "an elderly-ish man who worships a newspaper, wears a bright red bathrobe everywhere, has all sorts of weird imaginary friends, and eventually falls in love with and later marries a saucepan that falls on his head".

...Yeah. Nvoblamolux Dhasiddi Du needs to return, walking sideways and shaking his head in rhythm with the Mary Tyler Moore Show's theme song all the way.

<3.