We begin again and end again, begin again, end again, begin again, hoping that this time it will hold a new secret, a deeper love, a more refreshing swim, a tastier mussel. Is it the search and relentlessness we seek and enjoy? Or is it an end in itself?
What if Buddha was wrong and it wasn’t the quenching of desire, but the flaming of it? Not seeing Jessica Biel on a magazine cover and wanting her abstractly, but seeing her at a party and catching her eye and wanting her, and then going up to her and telling her that she looks familiar, then getting her phone number, taking her out for dinner and holding her hand. That, on a smaller scale. Or a larger scale! Justice is blind. You get what you can and want what you deem attainable. Plus who’s going to sit underneath the lotus tree their whole life, shriveling up, losing teeth and begging for a grain of rice? Not me. I’m going to get them to offer filet.
They mailed me a book and I don’t want to read it. It’s about the technology industry in Israel, why Israel has so many innovative people. It’s a lot like that book called “Cosmopolitanism” they sent me before I moved into the Residential College at NYU, which I also didn’t want to read. It professes a worldview to define what happened in the recent past w/r/t a select group of people.
Len had read “Cosmopolitanism,” I got about halfway before he told me it wasn’t worth finishing. And we had some meeting on West 4th where I met my other floor mates, Leo and Cecil and Chris and Jeremy. We lived on the tenth floor in that fluorescent halled building with its maple wood floors in the rooms. And that fat dude with the t-rexy arms whose bed Matthew cleared off when he came to visit and sleep, the hundreds of pairs of jeans that he owned…That was the beginning of a chapter — that was when I started to have fun in college, when I was a sophomore, four years ago. Now I’m preparing for another chapter to begin.
On Monday I’m going to Israel on Birthright. I’d like to go to Jordan and Egypt after that, Turkey and Greece after that, although I have no real plans. India, Ukraine, Thailand, Germany, who knows where or how long. In the meantime I’ll be writing.
Daniel the Writer 