TITHONUS' DIARY!!


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are you ready...
2004-02-07 - 1:58 a.m.

Well, I'm under strict instruction from lighthouse to write something, regardless of the fact that I have nothing to say. So, uh, here I am.

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How about that, huh?

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Yesterday or the day before or something I got a letter from Z, that person who used to be a friend and who I now avoid like the plague and periodically go through spasms of guilt for avoiding like the plague. Anyway, I saw the letter sitting there ominously on the steps and I opened it up and it was a poem about how he hadn't seen me in a while. I just skimmed it to get the gist of it and then stuffed it back in its envelope. I wish he'd just take a hint. I find it painful even to be reminded of his existence. I mean, look, I know being a social outcast is difficult and painful - hell, I should know, because in my time as a country boy I went through social outcast hell, I mean, he's got no idea how bad it can get... where was I? Oh yeah, being cast out is difficult and painful, but basically there are two options when you are shut out of a social group; you can either deal with the reality of your situation, or you can sulk about it. Sulking is a reasonable option for a few weeks or months, maybe, but five years is really fucking pushing it. Argh.

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And in the end, you know, dealing with reality isn't that bad. Solitude is a blessed state, in some ways; there's a reason Sartre said "Hell is other people". Solitude is the precondition for the vast majority of creative work. It's awful in some ways too, no doubt about it, but there's something equally tragic about the person who can't hack any solitude. You know Elvis kept a "gang" of "friends" around him at all times, he called them "the guys", and basically these people were paid and fed and looked after in order to ensure that Elvis never ever had to be alone. That's a vision of hell, don't you think?

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The other thing is, making new friends, difficult though it might be, is actually a necessary part of life. Even hanging on to your old friends requires, in a way, that you make friends with them over again, from time to time, because people change, and if you don't give your friendships room to change then your friends will grow out of the friendship and you'll be left hanging on to some nostalgic vision of how things used to be and why aren't they like that anymore, where did we go wrong? And the answer is that you didn't go wrong, you just didn't go anywhere. "You cannot go down to the same river twice", as I so love to quote, thankyou Heraclitus.

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Well, for a person with nothing to say, I sure rattle on, don't I?

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"Are you ready for this thing called love?

Don't come from you and me, it comes from up above

I ain't no porcupine, take off your kid gloves" - John Hiatt


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