I realize that having a blog is a responsibility, to take care of a living, breathing organism that is social relation. I don't very much dictate my life to those around me, or reiterate it to myself, and I can only pardon the gaps in my story. I award only moments, momentous or not. But what else can an instance be? I cannot capture these things with my camera, but perhaps with words I can convey a sense of where I have been, and where I have come, without much lengthy extrapolation. Experience takes time to assimilate, and I cannot be pressured to dictate. Perhaps all you will come to understand out of reading someone's blog is that they have been sitting down to contemplate the words to translate a life experience, or to create one.
In any case, I am not responsible with my relations. Whatsoever. Ironically, it is for that reason that I find myself out of Europe and in the Caribbean.
I bounce around the world, airplanes, trains, buses, bikes, slippers, whatever gets me around. How can I keep up with all of this? In the past month I have gone from Berlin to Holland (Utrecht, Amsterdam, Delft, Rotterdam) to the bottom of my glass and the inside of my head, back to old New Jersey, found some New Hope in renewed friendships, and here I am in the Dominican Republic, three and a half hours from home, with even less of an idea of what home is to me anymore. A perfect Sunrise Villa directly on the clear ocean, my family and I swimming in swarms of lizards, sea urchins, and gin and tonics. It would be hard to convey the perfection of this place. The hot sticky air is perfect. The spiny urchins like so many sea mines threatening to explode upon contact, thrilling all the same. Yesterday I swam with a remora fish as I wondered if I should take its presence as an indication that sharks were nearby, and if so because of the fresh wound in my side from scraping the ancient corals that make up most of the coastline. I love it. And last night, sheltering myself under coconut trees on the beach as the bonfire fought bravely against the rain, and local musicians cowered in a cave in the name of Merengue. Snorkeling today I saw cuttlefish, a spotted eel, and a whispy sea star among other wonders in the beautiful setting of this island. I've been buffing up my chess game and my tan, trying new fruits and Dominican cuisine, relishing in the languor and strains of life, all positively ecstatically elastic.
And modernity has come down to playing beach resort videogames at a real beach resort. Somehow fitting, somehow mismatched, somehow disturbing, though it brings comfort to some. We are all content with fantasy. We all have space to be filled, collections to amass. I'm getting off the internet now.
Sempervivum
11 August 2009
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