Remember the RFUC (Really Fucked Up Club)?
Well, I didn't... and how stupid of me to have forgotten. But all things come full circle and we face the past eventually, with an eye toward to future. Man, those were the Golden Days of high school drama. I'm not sure what's more tempting, to paint two years up as a "long" time ago or as if it were just yesterday, breathing over my shoulder. I guess I should explain.

Last night for some reason (and I don't dare call it a stupid reason) I put my old burned file disc into Frederick and took a look at the past. I have a lot of letters to friends and loved ones stored on there and, to my surprise, found that I had saved my icq log for... every conversation I think I I had with Justin from 9/99 to 8/00. This meas I did the saving on 8/11 but probably didn't have it in mind before that date. I didn't have a lot of things in mind when we started talking. But looking through this log was really.... enlightening... in hindsight. It's no use quoting from it or even dropping anecdotes, anything that would mean something is probably too complicated or too much of an "in-joke" to explain but... damn... it was like taking a trip in a time machine. 1999 was when we just met and had five word conversations. "See you this weekend?" "Ok." He saved me from my family in Seattle; made me appreciate them for who they are. We started dating Spring 2000 under...uhm... circumstances rivaling Dawsons Creek (you really have no idea... or maybe you do?). So this log went from when we barely knew each other through the end of the summer before Freshman year of College... the entire evolution of our relationship from the humble beginning through the most intense part. I couldn't stomach the whole thing, there was just too much there- it was too long, too intense sometimes, too strange others. Sometimes I had no freakin idea what we were talking about. Other conversations brought back times and days and feelings I'd entirely put away. It's funny how you forget. Hindsight really is twenty-twenty. But what really struck me, and why I'm glad I came across the log, was the uncanny feeling of dissociation. It was like reading someone else's life. Like looking at a book and wanting to yell at the characters. "Hey, stupid!! Hey, hello!!!" Like knowing the characters like part of YOURSELF but still being someone entirely different. God, how I've changed.

It's amazing. I always feared changing. I liked myself how I was back then. Every now and then I get some glimpse of myself through some letter or poem or stream-of-consciousness that I wrote some years ago and I wish I could have my mind in that moment all to myself. I read these things and I envy myself for writing them because sometimes I feel so dry. But I know I write things like them still so I haven't completely changed. Maybe it's not change, Kat. Maybe it's growth.

People are funny. We do insane things for insane reasons. Once again, I deign not to say stupid. I don't feel stupid right now, I feel wiser. I found another log too. One between other people, two friends at the end of a line. I hadn't been able to read through the whole thing (though it's short) on any occasion in the past, I read it like a picturebook this morning and I saw. I understood everything said and I knew that we weren't as blind as we let on. It didn't hurt though, this time. It wasn't hopelessly tragic. It just was. And I got it, finally. It's a wonderful thing, not living in denial. It's a wonderful thing, this learning but it's a terrible thing getting here. That's why I say people are funny. We aren't stupid, we're really quite smart. We know and we can't stop anyway. We're in perpetual motion. We are forces of gravity. Except we are alive and craving the experience. When common sense tells us to fuck off and go mind our businesses, we stick our feet right in. When familiar wisdom says "you know that's bait...", we take it anyway. Why? Because we have to. That's what makes us human. (In particular, me, as I've learned.) We gather information from experience and often, we tend to ignore information given to us that would substitute for our direct experience. We need it firsthand. We put ourselves through hell just to know what it looks like. That doesn't mean we're masochistic or sadistic... it just means we're alive and we keep on living. Better for it all? Who the fuck knows... just... different, if we're lucky. If we pay attention. So this is what it's all about, paying attention. You have to pay attention because it's all circular and if you didn't pay attention the first time you were supposed to learn something, you have to get your ass kicked by it again. This is what hindsight is. I have to admit, I'm a little confused though... if we do grow and we do use the past like a pathway (I daren't say staircase or ladder, since god knows it's not all up) but we're still perpetual motion machines and we'll STILL do things for our own sakes, what's the point of having hindsight at all?

Hm. Well, as usuall, writing it out it seems to make more sense. You learn from what you do, right? You do what you haven't learned from. So the more experience you glean, the less likely you're to be a perpetual motion machine and the more likely you are to be sage. If someone were ever to tell me to stop dwelling in the past, I might have to cap them. I'm not dwelling in the past. I AM the past. Every moment that passes becomes a part of me. To understand me, I have to understand these moments. There are a lot of moments, some more important than others. Some I question on a daily basis, so much that they are still an active part of me and integral to determining not only who I am but who I'll be. This is why I study the way people interact, why I collect them and keep them in my pockets... because we are so funny and so worth it and so real. So what does this mean for those we call "truly wise," say, monks? They start off life by learning from conventional wisdom. They're cloistered and sheltered and somehow still come to enlightenment... but not by gravity, not by the laws of physics. I've always respected that lifestyle because it's something so different from the way I work. But at the same time it's so ethereal, so far from life itself. I wonder, then... is transcendence worth it? You tell me. I much prefer getting my hands dirty.

"The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth,
the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air,
to soar into the height, take leave of the earth and his earthly being
and become only half real- his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"

Milan Kundera- The Unbearable Lightness of Being

It makes one feel old, seeing the circle. But that's what life is. It is moons and cycles and birth and death. We grow and change but we're still young and old at once, going somewhere and never arriving. I'm not a member of the RFUC anymore. I don't even feel like one. Right now, I live a normal life, save some unchanging pshilosophical and romantic quests. I'm both satisfied and unsatisfied. I'm stable and unstable. Right now I don't feel change coming but who knows, it could be here tomorrow. It could be here in the moment that is now. I am always on the brink, whether I see it or not. I'll probably hook up with some RFUC members later in another time, in another place... and we'll have reason to join forces again. After all, all things come full circle...