09 December 2006

what trouble?

Are you blogging to avoid doing something? Release your troubles!

Hmm. Possibile.

When I do, I'm probably blogging to avoid doing ... well, anything productive. To comment, to complain, to share weird things I've found online while avoiding life.

If I'm at home, then I might be blogging to avoid writing, or Christmas shopping, or the weird grayness of reality that sometimes creeps in when my guards are down.



Oh, yeah. I'm also a comment whore, so blogging is clearly a cry for attention, recognition, etc.

When it comes down to it, blogging is just cheaper than therapy (though, granted, Boston University has a fairly progressive outlook, and offers counseling to whoever may need it).

As for specific troubles in need of release, I can't think of anything at the moment. Troubles have a way of blurring on a Saturday morning.

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And rather than trying to dredge up whatever those presently forgotten troubles may be, I'll instead leave off with a passage from Chapter Five of Rice's The Tale of the Body Thief that frequently comes to mind--and no, I don't know why it struck me so much. But it did.

"... 'It was God talking to the Devil and telling the Devil that he must go on doing the job. And the Devil didn't want to do it. He explained that his term had already been too long. The same thing was happening to him that had happened to all the others. God said that He understood, but the Devil ought to know how important he was, he couldn't simply shirk his duties, it wasn't that simple, God needed him, and needed him to be strong. And all this was very amicable.'

'What did they look like?'

'That's the worst part of it. I don't know. At the time I saw two vague shapes, large, definitely male, or assuming male form, shall we say, and pleasant-looking--nothing monstrous, nothing out of the ordinary really. I wasn't aware of any absence of particulars--you know, hair color, facial features, that sort of thing. The two figures seemed quite complete. But when I tried to reconstruct the event afterwards, I couldn't recall any details! I don't think the illusion
was that nearly complete. I think I was satisfied by it, but the sense of completeness sprang from something else.'

'From what?'

'The content, the meaning, of course.'

'They never saw you, never knew you were there.'

'My dear boy, they had to know I was there. They must have known. They must have been doing it for my benefit! How else could I have been allowed to see it?'

'I don't know, David. Maybe they didn't mean for you to see. Maybe it's that some people can see, and some people can't. Maybe it was a little rip in the other fabric, the fabric of everything else in the cafe.'

'That could be true. But I fear it wasn't. I fear I was meant to see it and it was meant to have some effect on me. And that's the horror, Lestat. It didn't have a very great effect.' ..."
(page 75)

The rest of it is there for clarity's sake, but that's the part that my mind always recalls: That's the horror ... it didn't have a very great effect.

Turn the page ...