Tired

This post will sound a little depressing maybe.

I had a really super time finding clips of stand up comics this week. However, not many of them were fit for your young ears, so I didn't post them. I wanted to do a post in tribute to Late Night comedy, too, my other favorite kind of comedy. There is just something so refreshing about somebody who can take a piece of the crap from life and form it into a beautiful crap sculpture that makes you laugh so hard you cry. Life is beautiful and its crappy; you laugh sometimes, you cry sometimes. Anyway, I wanted to share a lot of comedy this week because it's one of my very favorite things, but toward the middle of the week something in my soul dropped out from under me and I started feeling discouraged. All of a sudden I kept seeing this vision of myself as a sad clown, and that's just sad, so I wouldn't let myself continue.

So this is what I got for today instead. There's more integrity in it.

Today I was snoozing in my lawn chair outside while I watched the kids play. How is that possible, that I watched them while I snoozed? Oh, it's possible. Suddenly, a giant bumble bee landed a foot or so from my feet on the ground. I opened my eyes and looked at it and was at once both facinated and repulsed. I was annoyed that it had the nerve to land by me. By me! And then the fear kicked in and I almost squashed its big fat bumble bee guts out with my flip flop. Thwack! I thought about it, saw myself doing it, saw the guts smooshing out. And then the bee started crawling around on the ground, and it looked so cumbersome a task, using its tiny legs to move its bulky, bulbous body around, that I instantly felt sorry for it. I had the strangest desire to offer my assistance to the bumble bee, though rationally I knew there was no assistance I could give it. I felt compassion for this insect that only and instant ago I had wanted to destroy.

And I thought, "There must really be something wrong with me, to be able to go through that range of emotions so quickly, almost instantly. And for an insect no less!" And, I thought how eerily close my reaction to the bee is to the reaction I have toward people sometimes, too.

And for some reason, this made me think of that Counting Crows song on August and Everything After, Round Here. A tired song, I guess, played too much in its day, but some of the lyrics haunt my soul sometimes, loose, irridescent, moaning, trapped ghosts that awaken and bump about restelessly in my chest until I say, "Yes, yes, I remember," and sing them back to sleep.

Step out the front door like a ghost
Into the fog where no one notices
The contrast of white on white.

And in between the moon and you
The angels get a better view
Of the crumbling difference between wrong and right.

I walk in the air between the rain,
Through myself and back again.
Where? I don't know

Maria says she's dying.
Through the door, I hear her crying
Why? I don't know

She says, "It's only in my head."
She says, "Shhh...I know it's only in my head."

But the girl on the car in the parking lot
Says: "Man, you should try to take a shot
Can't you see my walls are crumbling?"

Then she looks up at the building
And says she's thinking of jumping.
She says she's tired of life;
She must be tired of something.

I always thought this song was written about me, not this Maria person it talks about. The song is probably about drugs or something, aren't they all? but it always spoke to me. I think Maria would have had trouble sharing air with the bumble bee, too.

Song's on the player if you want to hear it.