A state of confusion address -OR- À bout de souffle.

I’m lost in the woods.

We all are. The only problem is, I can’t seem to find a clear path. This is where I find myself, and unless I’m even stupider than I was previously aware of, this is where so many others find themselves as well. Endlessly wandering, trudging and drudging and drudgering on. Making up words to cut in our lawn. Dearest friends, I salute you.

I digress.

digress
v 1: lose clarity or turn aside especially from the main subject of attention or course of argument in writing, thinking, or speaking.

Or do I? When one is already lost, can one stray? If there is no beaten path, how is it that we can tread from it? Can I make any sense from something born of nothing but the purest confusion, the threads of uncertainty wrapping countless strands around my ankles in a sordid attempt to drag me to my demise?

I did it again.

Same question, different paragraph. I’ll leave you to suss out the answer. Me? I’m too lazy.

Right now, all I can do is take the cowards way out. No invention, no renovation, no nuzzing. I want to write, to cloud up the cleary sky. To help me feel out the road ahead, to get me where I’m going, even though I haven’t a clue where that might be. I’m so far off course, I haven’t the foggiest whether or not such a notion frightens me. I can’t even see it. Odd. Odd indeed.

I’m aware that these rambling bits of non-paper give forth nothing but questions, where they might claim to give forth answers. Contradictions, contraceptives, spectacles testicles wallet and watch. I’m not a Catholic. I’m not a believer. I have not a clue what I’m supposed to watch for. If anything.

I saw her face, and I’m a believer.

Believe in what?

And there, my friends, is the reason we ask questions. Obviously.

…

“Captain, what we do?”

Editing movies is what I’ve been doing. Tens of Fifteens of hours, spent sitting and staring at the tiniest of windows, letting the palest of unseemly glows cascade all over my welcoming face. I sit there, clicking on the mouse, tapping on the keyboard. For hour. After hour. After hour. And yet I cannot move. I still keep myself there, still sitting, still staring, still working. What can I possibly be doing? What can be accomplished by staring into the heart of the machine, the deus of the machina, fingers still dancing in ways that only those who know will bother to understand?

Sense.

That’s all it is. The job of the editor is to form some semblance of sense, something that I can do, despite all the meaningless words that jumble themselves about my hands. I make sense for groups of people who don’t exist. I work the lives of men who have never breathed, for women who have never thought, for dogs who have never woofed. Dreamweaver, truthsayer, master of ceremonies. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, he prefers to remain anonymous. I sift through their confusion. I grasp at the sense.

Yet I cannot manage it in any real life capacity.

The perverse nature of the thing is not lost on me.

But I’m fascinated by it. By the nature of that sense, where there is none. Godard, how on earth did you do it? You were a genius, that much is certain. But the means to your end still eludes me, leaving me just as lost in my own private patch of grass.

You made a movie once, you pretentious bastard of a Frenchman. You made a movie that I despise so much, that I can do nothing but love it, love it with ever fiber and tendon that twinges in my body. À bout de souffle. Breathless.

The rules aren’t merely broken, they’re casually tossed about with the carefree grace of a child mishandling his brother’s favorite toy, knowing damn well what’s going on, but without giving anything that resembles a shit about it. It’s madness. It’s pure madness, the creamiest goodness of it, the madness that adorns all of heads and hearts but we hide away most of the time, leaving it to lie alone.

“There's no need to lie. It's like poker. The truth is best. The others still think you're bluffing, so you win.”

I want to know how it’s done, how it’s down, how it’s immediate, how it’s an accident, how it makes us believe, how it makes us think, feel, breathe. Or don’t.

Love and life, hate and death. Beautifully stupid and stupidly beautiful. Jean-Luc, I must salute you. I sit here, in the darkness of my cave that I feel so comfortable in. Stupidly smitten and oh so confused because of it, your hodge podge porridge pot of deliciously raw nonsense that adds up to so much SENSE comforts me. It inspires me. It reminds me.

Parking garages fascinate me. I hate parking my car. I hate listening to people thunk over the dividers, I hate the pointless honking of people who are getting nowhere. I love them irrationally when the cars are gone. I told you once, of the joy that comes from sitting on the top level, hearing the whistling of the wind as your eyes tear up at the slightest glisten from the tiniest star. Beautiful. That’s on high.

Let’s drift below.

The lower you go in a parking garage, the warmer it gets. The feeling within them is different from the cave metaphor which people often stamp upon them, while they grumble in the confines of space 13c, level 5a. The deeper you go, the warmer it gets. Soothing warmth. Embracing warmth, that drifts about your limbs, taking you along, moving you to the place you must be. There’s a metaphor here. A backwards one, a descent into the origin. But I’m not going to say it. We’re all lost here, but being found is something we do alone.

I sat in a parking garage recently. Nearly alone on a mid-afternoon. Alone with me, myself, and I, but of course. My back was on the ground, my eyes focusing on the patterns unfolding in the concrete above my head. Greek masks were there, showing me the tales of comedy and tragedy, playing out the classics of Sophocles for the trinity of me. Until it stopped. And I went deeper.

I could hear my footsteps. They echoed along with me. The walk of a live man.

I walked, down and round, merry go round broke down. I walked to the very core, to the resting place of a dozen classic cars that I never cared enough to understand. I didn’t. I don’t. They weren’t what I sought.

“Phil, go stand in the corner.”

Thank you Joey.

I went to the corner, to the very core of the entire structure, the heart of the entire building. To the pitch black chasm that rested there. What did I find?

A piece of wood, lodged between the gap. Holding it apart, holding it together. Which, I cannot say. That’s hardly the point. All that matters is that it IS there. I'm still in the woods. But the path exists, somewhere.

Somewhere.

And because of that, all must be well.

Au revoir les enfants.