my question is what happened to you

everyone else in the wild puzzle i more or less understand; my question of late is what happened to you to make it turn out so this way for you, to make you act as catalyst to so many emotional catastrophes without the slightest mental map of the emotional world yourself. yet all of that was ten or twenty years ago, now when i see you it's like you're a teenager trying on emotions for yourself for the first time.

it isn't that living in the suburbs has been for the best. i have real doubts that that's true. i think it's made us all crazier if anything. it has made me more aware though (particularly with these newly fierce new jersey seasons) that things grow as much as they can and die, that's all they do, it isn't that there's some overarching destiny or logic or transcendence to it, more a dumb blind imperative. the weeds find purchase whereever they can, the grass, the wild flowers all push into every place that allows the faintest glimmer of root. like how on the backdrop of those decades your soul has found a place to quiet down now, to begin some long-delayed reckoning, and in a quasi-patronizing way i'm happy for you.

now i find myself somewhere between you and a completely different person. emotions for me are a bizarre confusion but sometimes i know the names, sometimes i even know that this-is-an-emotion-i'm-feeling. it doesn't prevent that from be a disorienting grid on which i'm more likely to hurt others than not. it just tells me i should know better. maybe my dumb growth will to be more quiet in my failings than you were, to keep them better hidden from the surface of the earth. maybe my achievement will to be a better and more subtle weed in the lives of the people i know.

in death though. maybe that's where we find transcendence, moving from the dull provincial limits of blind individual growth and back into soil and carbon, into the wild dumb flowing pulse of nature. i think stereolab could have convinced me of the joy in that in a song in the 1990s, i don't really know where they sit on the subject today.