I was walking through my building at work here in the Sears Tower when I saw a woman looking really sad, leaning against the glass window and looking down at the street below. I began to imagine things about her and her life that I'm sure I pulled out of thin air. Anyway, I never write poetry, nor do I have much use for it unless I put some movement to it and stick it in Too Much Light. But this one didn't seem appropriate for that. So maybe it can live here for awhile:

Do not dream of flying
Or tearing flesh away
Or falling those ten stories so your husband will
Remember
Those forgotten curves
And insulated nooks once touched with trembling
Hands.

Hold fast to your floor.
Keep your hands at your sides
And insulate your dreams
Of death
With musings melancholic.
It’s what all the grownups do
When they wish they could fly.

I begin this Web Log happily. I'm getting married on September 9th. I am embarking on a lot of new stuff this year and so far enjoying it tremendously. And I like life a lot, even when I hate it. And I hate life a lot--mostly because I'm an idealist who is chronically disappointed by my fellow humans. It's all beautiful is the thing, even the pain.

So yesterday I heard someone say "I'm all like..." And I think there was nothing more. She met her friend like that on the street. I was walking downtown, she was walking in the other direction and she saw her friend whom she was supposed to meet and she said really animatedly "I'm all like..." and then made gestures and a face.

Damn.

Time, popular culture, is completely losing me. I have all these friends who say that they're out of touch and they don't watch television or they pretend not to understand what others are talking about when they discuss T.V. shows. If they were really out of touch, they wouldn't think it was cool. They'd begin to feel scared and old and isolated. I feel that way sometimes. Outside and scared. I'm only 30 but I'm always several steps behind. I think at one point I actively avoided things of a pop-cultural nature and turned my nose up to them. But now I honestly can't get interested.

It's hard because I write and perform for Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind in Chicago and sometimes I feel like I'm not very well-equipped to communicate with my audience. They stay young and I get older.

Boy this is sounding a lot more depressing than I was intending. No matter where I look, on the television or into the eyes of a passing twenty-year-old gurgling "I'm-all-like" to her friend, I am in awe of every moving molecule that creates this soup of vanity and passion. Every life and every voice spawns millions of actions and reactions that change the world with every syllable and every shrug. And all of us are important. All of us are famous. Each of us is in fact, the king or queen of a thousand-thousand generations to come. While we're here I hope each of us can find at least one moment during which we let go of our vanity and our longing for more love, more attention and more money, to simply appreciate the vast mechanism of which we're a part. Signing off...