Message Recieved.....Errors with Page:If I were to describe my current condition with one single sentence, it would be like this: I've been doing a lot of thinking, and homework, and thinking about why I'm thinking too much to do homework, and why I'm not drinking to keep from thinking long enough to do some homework, and thinking about what it means to think and why it is that while homework requires thinking, it requires a kind of thinking that I, a thinking thing, tortured constantly by thinking thoughts of many kinds hasn't the ability to do anything with his homework other than think about why what he is thinking about is keeping him from thinking about getting down to it--more or less. I guess that's a long sentence but what are you going to do. duffontap@hotmail.com.

Regarding the Unachievable Nowhere Prison of Time:

Every really good story about people begins in a cemetery. Cemeteries are the sole location of that blessed finality that we are driven toward whether we are conscious of it or not. It is the place where the chaff of careless and dispassionate living is blown away to where it will not exist, and only that which is worthy of being a memory is made really real. Any amount of value may be applied to life as it is, caught in the present. In all my prodding I have not managed to get one person to agree with me when I say that life has no value—except through the sponsorship of a necessary Being. Life as we know it just has that undeniable feeling of worth, a feeling of a worthwhile end. All the living however cannot compare to the reality that is made upon the moment of death. Nothing in the future is as significant—for eventually everything is a memory. That is the destiny of everything that is known. And so it is with a husband and wife who lie side-by side in the cemetery plots that their lives have served to fill. They must have lived good lives. A poorly lived life is likely to lay with strangers on all sides. The stone may read: “Donald Evans, Born: 1894. Died: 1967,” and nothing more. That is a tragedy. Only what is written in the memory, or engraved on a headstone is of lasting value. A eulogy may contain the few most profound lines a life can own.

Live in the present. Live in the now. I write this, trying to conceptualize “it,” that present that they are talking about and it eludes me. The idea haunts me, and it eludes me. I am not experiencing a “pure” present even now. Concentrating on the present I find that it is characterized by, rather, that my mind is overwhelmed by, two things: Memories and Anticipation of future Memories. I wrote this to you and you will receive it. I will remember you always. Your picture is here, a gray memory, and I remember the first time I saw you. I don’t remember you coming in—you were just there—lovely. I remember thinking, “she is lovely.” I remember California. I remember coffee-shop conversation. I remember snow, and always you there. I wrote this to you and you will receive it. It will never be outside of Memories and Anticipations because this is the world that it is being born into. Like you and I it is becoming a bundle of memories—two-dimensional gray memories.

And what shall we do to this end? Webster found this present no easy task to define it would appear as he tacks the word “now” into the definition several times, almost as if the now he had just mentioned was no longer valuable in explaining the present. The irony is that we would wish to believe that the present is just that—now—not the future and not the past. But what is the significance of now? If we are to concentrate on the exact moment of time that we are experiencing, than such a measure of time would be so small that it would be impossible for anything significant to have occurred in it. Instead, the significance of the present must be seen as a stage in time—a stage of variable lengths characterized by similarity—in which the past and future are balanced in a certain way.

We were walking in the rain. At any given present, taken as itself, we would not have had this friendship that we are so engrossed with. It is in the moment that a single raindrop, and no others, of all the torrents may have been absorbed into a body—each of its molecules scattered, orphaned, losing their identity and then finding it again in the context of the whole. It is so with us, thoughts, moments, cares reaching toward infinity, have found their identity in us, as we have met—and called each other “friend.” It is when we live in the past—remembering that we have walked and talked so many times before, and that our hearts have met on so many of these times together; and living in the future, anticipating the pleasant memories we will have of this occasion, that we can be who we are in the present—and now that present is so terribly significant, as that location where our hope in the future and our good memories of the past have met in this pleasant balance.

Regarding emphatic statements about my own identity, or trying to build a semiotic profile of myself:
It’s Thursday and I have found myself to be located in Langley, British Colombia at a Value Village—I’m told it’s Canada’s favorite thrift store. The parking lot is full. I pulled in ten minutes ago with my little sister Kristin, who insists that I hear her opinion about everything I wear. I am wearing something that I have found suitable in clothing myself with….not something that is relevant to me in any existential sense. That is why I return to Value Village two times a week. I need to replace all the clothing that is doing nothing but cover nakedness. Some clothes speak for the very core of the existential center of my being.
Men’s Shirts, Large. I go to the section marked thus. One of the particular reasons I shop mostly at Value Village and not at Zumies, or J. Crew is that the sections are marked by gender. There is nothing absolute about clothing, gender and myself, except that I absolutely do not want anyone to think for one moment that I think I am defined by women’s clothing. Perhaps I would be but I still dress as a man—I am fairly sure that I am most perfectly described by men’s clothing and so I continue on in this vain—dressing as a man. I move down the line of shirts. There are perhaps two hundred shirts, although I have never counted, not even once. All of these shirts have been worn by someone before, probably a man, who probably stood in front of the mirror one day and realized that not only was the item of clothing not speaking about him from his very existential center, perhaps it was no longer worthy of covering his nakedness, or her nakedness—though I hope not. Or, perhaps the spouse or significant other of this person standing in front of the mirror that day had a very different view of who the shirt-wearer was that the shirt-wearer himself had and had the power to get the person to take this shirt off, put it in a box marked “Value Village.” At any rate, I am looking at clothing that has spoken for someone, covered his or her nakedness, and finally found unsuitable for doing either.
I fly through the shirts. I’m not looking for just any shirt, I’m looking for a special shirt. I’m looking for a shirt that’s going to speak for me. Speak for me from the very center of my being. I’m looking at the front of each shirt. I pause, look at the buttons, and move on. Fifty shirts, a hundred shirts, and there it is. Pearl buttons. That’s me, I say. This is a concrete statement about who I am. For a moment, perhaps for a day, perhaps for ten more years, I will be the one who wears navy blue, pear-buttoned western shirts, with light blue piping. I will put on the shirt and say in effect, "I am.”