This Was Probably a Waste of Time, Too

Enough with all the cliches and lines of thought that display only a propensity for cutting corners and a strong dislike for understanding. In your wildest imagination you are described as a woman, breathing in fully the questions therefore begged of you and the responsibilities inherent to your new position. In blinding reality you are a girl shadowed in the locker rooms and hallways and carpets thread bare by the children before and since that were, and likely still are, exactly like you stand now. You're armory of borrowed ideals proves full of little more than wasted spit and wasted time, a reality wherein the bystander to your charade is overwhelmed with the quandary of which scenario is worse: the one in which you squander your days lamenting the evils of man and his long reign over the order of society, or the horrific truth that remains the only honest product of your many footsteps drenched in hate, the fact that all you've done is waste time, an offense for which there exists no forgiving judgment. I suppose one can merely hope that you may someday speak more softly from whatever spot inside you still loves the beauty in rain filled leaf drums and that illuminating waltz between steep cliffs and eternity.

Sirens

The way it goes in moments like these is that infinite curiosity and possibility and the shimmer of chance and it's suspicious scent of fate, in conjunction with the chatter of new souls whose eyes foretell all of the aforementioned, together comprise a score for the seductive, romantic, recklessly intoxicating pursuit of that which is so often hard to grasp: the New. Using little more than half a moon and the cool, salty night breeze that you can still taste if you close your eyes and try hard enough, under door frames built by the hands of a long-forgotten generation, moving with the best of strangers and friends who knew you long before you had nights like these.

Gasps around long bouts of tastefully awful pool magically occur in the imagined living room of the King of Water Street, the legendary emperor whose shadow remains, all of these years and nights and children and bittersweet memories later, largely responsible for tonight's stage. Uma Thurman serves your brew, stoic with perfected indifference yet romantic with age and those exquisite, perfectly arranged possibilities. Twenty-five feet "away" is where you really take off, though, cornered between the King's study and the now-dimming lights of tantalizing sail boats and the adventures that surely occur with regularity (but not too much regularity, for what could possibly be worse than the routinization of a once-loved adventure) aboard their pristinely salty decks. Lost, however briefly, in the smoke and shadows of shared understanding, your night begins to reveal, with increasing speed and momentum, the significance of this moment spent in the emperor's living room, under the phantom spell of events that shatter all plans and preconceived notions of how you're gonna get your Fill. Later you'll move much too quickly back across the water, drifting away from the King's castle and its smoky corners and table light cribbage and the supernatural joy of seeing another through that same foggy lens of dashing adolescence. And with a sad resignation you'll greet the heartbreaking acknowledgment that there is nothing more temporary, more devastatingly fleeting than moments like these.

Another Fourth

The prickly plastic of summer nights spent poolside, dreaming with muggy stars of concepts far from understood - indeed, beautifully misunderstood - evolved, naturally, into the intimate sharing of vanilla evenings and the clarity that lies in honest, beautifully flawed human connection. Through the glass and smoke came the intoxicating spell of community, of shared understanding and the holy comfort of an unbreakable foundation. And now here we are. The glass is here, as is the aluminum and the smoke and the evidence of lives dedicated to the steadfast preservation of days like today. Happy Birthday, America.