11 September post facto.

The bench looking out 
onto the desolate intersection.
 
Yesternight was a sad one, But alas, there are some life lessons embedded within any struggle.  You could say I saw it coming: those are the worst.  After spending an hour and a half reflecting and writing on the Eleventh of September and other matters pertinent to my post -I lost it all.

Scene 1: I am sitting in my tableless apartment, upon a wooden stool at the counter.  My internet connection ceases.  It doesn't matter, at this point, that my computer plods along at a slow clip -all I need to do is finish my blog and post it.  Time: 10:30.  No problem though because when you live in a mountain resort town, hot signals move through the downtown streets like a child skittering across pavement on a hot day.  Hotter than street lamps; more solid than the posts they dangle from.
  
Scene 2:  Walking downtown -only to the outskirts,  I sit down on a bench that overlooks a deserted intersection: one man bikes by, a blinking light strapped to his head.   An over sized jeep speeds to a stop, continues through the intersection, travels down to the next adjacent road, turns around, and comes back through the intersection; the charioteer, obviously a man of purpose.  I hear a couple yelling in the distance, the doppler in full effect.  I can't make out the words.

And as they move further away, the amplitude of the sound waves increases with each pedal stroke; I beg them to come back (or at least within earshot) so that I may determine the upshot of this dispute.  Moreover, I have yet to determine the instigator but I assume that because the girl's voice is the more demanding of the two, it was the boyfriend who overstepped the boundaries of flirtation.

Facebook Five Hundred Challenge

Word of the Day.

Simulacra (plural to simulacrum): 1.  Slight, unreal, or superficial likeness or semblance

2.  An effigy, image, or representation.

Used in context (taken from an Updike article in New Yorker): "His errant protagonists move, in their fragile suburban simulacra of paradise, from one island of momentary happiness to the imperilled next"

66 Friends.  Five more days to go.  434 Friends needed.

"Get by with a little help from my friends"

Jimmy

Identity Immasculated

The Word: Virginity. Dictionary.com's (what better dictionary is there? Probably the OED, which I would've used if the college I attended for four years didn't throw me out to the wayside and divest me of using any of its electronic resources) definition: 2. the state or condition of being pure, unsullied, untouched.


Today I lost my virginity. I held out for as long as I could - definitely not something I was ashamed of or eager to loose. I felt like one of the few and the proud. But maybe there's a point at which we hold onto something not from a moral platform but to raise ourselves amongst others through a vague and vacant sense of moral superiority: a separation of ourselves from those more depraved. And the desire becomes one not of experience but of avoidance - a way to maintain an identity.


Its funny that we use the word lost, because it seems like something we gain - a valuable experience. But I feel as though I did lose something - a part of me, a childlike innocence - a quixotic tendency to resist the mindless current of the mainstream. I wish I could've held out longer but I was forced; well, not forced, but pushed against my will. Today is the 9th of Sept. 2009. A date I will always remember. It is the day I disrobed my familiar habiliments and donned a new identity. Today is the day I joined face book.


My excuse (everyone's has one): its for a job application to travel around the world. Fully funded; 365 days; 192 countries; the job: documenting the "simple moments of happiness" Have I sold out? Maybe.


Five friends and counting,


Jamis


p.s. If I friend you please don't reject me: a face book friend is worth a tenth of a real one but being rejected is ten times as hard.