Thus with a kiss, I die.

"I felt I was on fire, with the things I could have told you
I just assumed that you eventually would ask
And I wouldn’t have to bring up my so badly broken heart
And all those months I just wanted to sleep
And though spring, it did come slowly, I guess it did its part
My heart has thawed and continues to beat"
--Conor Oberst from June On the West Coast.

My head hurts. I'm tired. I spent most of the day with my grandmother whom I love dearly, but she was in terrible sorts today and it was a miserable awful time. Ugh.

And then I got to thinking.

And Bright Eyes played through the speakers in my car as I drove around the dark cold city. And it is perfect.

I am choking with things I never say to people. I am suffocating on sorry's for what I never said. For what I should have said.

In that spirit, I will write more later, its freezing here, and I can barely feel my fingers or think straight. The cold has always incapacitated me in one way or another.

Goodnight.

Later...

I've just finished watching Shakespeare in Love, and I might state that it is always bad for me in the most wonderful way to watch or read anything even involving Shakespeare. It seems to me that he embodies the passion and the feeling of all that it is to be human--to laugh and cry and love. A passion that is no longer present in our modern lives of productivity--it seems to me that the Industrial Revolution did more than mechanize the world--it mechanized our lives and the way we think and how we act. We are machines, with no time or care to see the beauty and tragedy of life in all its aspects.

I feel that if I were born a little under a hundred and fifty years earlier I would have fit well with that age. The sheer decadence and celebration of life and love, the decay of the past rotting beautifully, poetically with the tragic modernization of the present. No wonder so many great thinkers and writers came out of the late 1800's and le fin de siècle. It must have been magical.

I think that is the real difference between art and fingerpaintings, between scribbles and sonnets--its the total embrace of every aspect of life--the good the bad, the celebration of being human and unashamed to feel and to think and to be. We are not machines. We are not engineered to perfection or vastly productive robots--we cannot find our true worth in how much we make or live up to the high standards we have created for ourselves--and for this we are guilty and shamed for simply being human. We have suppressed the very spirit that makes us. God did not make us mechanical, he made us flesh and bone and heart. Above all heart, and love. A machine cannot love. It cannot think, or feel. I am glad that I am not one. I am glad that I dont ever want to be one.

I can take people thinking Im unproductive, or a failure by their standards if it means that I know the true nature of life, the magnificence buried by debris and love it passionately for all that so many never see.