Sometimes, Love Means Shopping For Decorative Gravel
Even if you married a neutron star in high heels
Oh, come with me my little one, we will find that farm
And grow us grass and apples there and keep all the animals warm
And if by chance I wake at night and I ask you who I am
Oh, take me to the slaughterhouse, I will wait there with the lamb
-Leonard Cohen, Stories of the Street
Weekends can be hell
If you let them.
It’s one of several gifts given without asking to our favored species to be able to turn anything into heaven or hell, when really, everything is only ever in-between. Conditional and tangential, one thing operating off the next, chaotic molecules bombarding each other with themselves until galaxies form by accident, and here we all are.
You should listen to your fears. Not because they come true; they usually don’t. But they tell you who you are.
I was definitely still a teenager when I first heard the Leonard Cohen lines quoted above. And I still feel a teenage sneer forming on my lips when I think of them now.
Who would want a life so banal, such an abdication of the ferocity of what life really is? A ruined prize, snatched one breath at a time from the red jaws of…
