In response to the entirely founded but entirely confused rumors blowing about campus at the moment, I am not engaged to be married. I AM NOT ENGAGED!

My namesake the woodworker is. That he has my name is the sole foundation for this pernicious rumor.

If anyone gives me another congratulatory hug, I will...

...never mind. I'll do nothing. Nothing....

Art is an imitation, as Aristotle says in the Poetics, but an imitation of what? One might think that a drawing or a painting is an imitation of what we see.

And that is true, but what we see is not just what registers on our retina. There is an experience connected with seeing, without which "seeing" means nothing to us. The experience of "seeing" is drawn from the collective sense, from smell and touch, from all the senses operating under a certain condition at a certain time.

I can draw a picture of a house, but unless I can hint at the experience of standing there in the pouring rain staring despondently at a locked gate, I have not produced art. The cold wind, the dampness of the air, and the sinking feeling of mistakenness (or of the victim) are all present in the experience and somehow have to be expressed by pencil or brush strokes.

An atmosphere can be created by using emphasis and texture to provoke memories of certain experiences. Bold, contrasting strokes and washed out colors often evoke the feeling of hard light and heat at high noon. Smudges and pastels evoke the feeling of staring down a valley in a drifting mist.

These are the kind of things that go to make art. It's an imitation of what the whole man sees, not just the eye, and sticks in your memory like an experience does.

Art is such a necessary thing for those of us who need to encapsulate the lessons we have learned, for future reference, lessons that for the sake of propriety or privacy cannot be stated in blunt terms. Yet art is only for artists, and is not always at the beck and call of convenience or mood.

(the orange eyes are drilling hotly into my back, I can feel breath panting behind me, it closes the narrow gap one pair of drumming feet desperate to escape and two pairs desperate to capture. One pair vault duck and slide spitting gravel clawing aside two pairs swinging wide and regaining the chase. The only thing keeping them behind is my will, only my will to stay ahead to stay above not to let it take over my life...)

You might like the gypsy life
You judge your progress by the phases of the moon
Get your compass and your sharpest knife
People love you when they know you're leaving soon ...

- John Gorka

I have nothing to say, really. My thoughts run in circles and I watch them run, lazily, knowing that they don't really matter...like children before they grow up...

The graduates that I used to know, who helped me through a rough childhood and mentored my struggles, are here for a visit. I look into their faces and try to see who they used to be, I remember the good times I had with them, the good times that are irrevocably part of my past and whose import I have not yet realized.

I smile and hug them and say hello how are you and listen patiently as they tell me. About their jobs, their homes, their wives or husbands and their lives.

And they look at me curiously, wondering who I am. And we both know that we may as well be strangers now, for what we shared then we share no longer. It's back there in the rearview mirror, a pleasant memory, but no more than that...I am sad, somehow, sad that the feelings I felt about them then can never come back. I'm standing on my own two feet now, I'm independent, and I have my own life in my own two clumsy hands. I now realize what my dad meant when he said not to worry about making friends in college, because I would never keep in touch anyway. There would be no reason to.

I have failed them, those "seniors", those friendly people who took me under their wing, an awkwardly old and ignorantly wise freshman. I have not passed on the gift of friendship they have given me, I have betrayed their kindness. I have not passed on the tradition of caring tacitly intended to be handed down from one class to the next. I did not have it in me. I did not have the moral strength to extend the same welcoming hand to my younger brothers and sisters. And I am ashamed, but unrepentant, for I cannot be other than who or what I am.

"changing it rests" as the fire and love and strife dude used to say, what was his name - Heraclitus? Heraclitus knew how to put it. The sand dunes blow into each other, shift and slide, but the desert stays the same, always changing and forever the same.

(wow. This was a long post, for a bitchy one.)

(Oh, and vacations really suck. I hate vacations. I intend to avoid vacations in the future. I simply don't know what to do with myself. Half of my two life activities, reading and working, are gone. It's awful!)