Things

I've got a different sort of blog post in mind. However, I'll take the rare opportunity to link to a piece I had published online by the magazine Big Lucks. Everyone should go buy a copy of this magazine because I know the guy who runs it, and he's a hard worker, a good thinker, and a hell of a hard worker. Ironically, one of my main complaints about blogging is that it doesn't give me the chance to actually show things that are, you know, polished. Anyhow, the irony is that this particular piece of writing is rough hewn. I wrote it a few years ago and liked it. Here it is. Buy Big Lucks. Read fiction.



I wish that I knew about the stars. Tonight I listened to a story about Atlas, Pleiades, and the rest of the stars. I know near nothing about the stars. I live in a city. The North Star is often but an idea rather than reality, veiled in light. I cannot identify either of the dippers, or the wandering planets. The stars are a mystery to me like so many things.

The galaxy of light seems like a good metaphor for things. Perhaps I could use it to describe all the other things that I don't know, God, parallel universes, the mystery of the human heart.

The stars, can act equally as well as a vector for the things that I could know. Local politics, math, the ins and outs of the new health care law and yet choose not to. Our time here is limited on earth, and the stars help remind us of that with their light from millions of years away. It is strange, as I'm sure you know, to fathom that we could be seeing light from an entity that is already gone.

I'm taking lessons on the stars starting tonight. I'm identifying the things in the night sky, bringing names to the void as if I were a tertiary Adam. And yet I wonder whether putting a name to things, pointing to the stars and saying, yes, that is Orion, will change anything. Perhaps it is just one more thing to do as I pass the time between the mystery of life and the mystery of death.