A Wrinkle in Time

I love the body.  It's wretched and beautiful.  To identify with something physical that has actually endured the years that you claim to your name is something that is nothing short of profound.  It is proof.  It is the manifestation of all the ideas, all the poetry, all the lusting, all the hatred, and all the love.  It is physical and cannot be denied or accepted, except by another in physical form.

Without it we'd be left to an existence, well, not far from the internet and The Matrix, whoa.  As cool and anonymous and free and unattached and fun as that may sound, there's nothing to hold onto.  And honestly, it actually would be a little different than the internet we have now.  Because here, we have something to hide.  I have a physical incarnation you are denied in experiencing me through this medium.  I have two eyes you will not meet.  If we all were just bodiless voices drifting around a void talking and musing and posting and friending and liking and responding, then we'd be meeting each other in full.  I'm meeting you in a percentage.  Here, I'm only part of what I really am.

But getting back to that grip hold.  I cling to my physical existence.  I pull my hair when thinking.  I scratch my ever-growing, never-stopping scruff.  I cover my mouth with my hand when looking at things and don't know why.  I fidget and function and twitch and watch and track and listen and hover and follow and jump and sleep.  I am a jukebox and a Richter scale machine.  These things may seem rudimentary or dull, but they are the key to my being outside of my mind.

It's not my mind that knows the touch of a loved one.  And it's not my mind that can smell their scent.  My mind can't chase after them.  It can't speak to them, and it can't receive their words.  It is my hand that knows their touch, my nose that finds them in the dark, my voice and ears that lets them enter my psyche with ease, and my eyes that I overvalue but still take for granted while watching them walk toward me.  We are assembled with every gadget and device and yet we still insist on muting our senses in favor of something spoon-fed to our minds (no offense internet blogs).

The extension of the physical form out from our minds is truly a gift, and there will never be enough dancing, singing, and sex to celebrate this.

Now that that is there.  I will say that our head can turn against our bodies.  Not that this should be news to anyone.  After preaching the glory of the corpus, I can't pretend that I don't worry about flab lapping up against my hips, threatening to trigger the beer gut in a matter of months/years.  And if I couldn't control it in time, there goes my health and my life span and my potential fatherhood, let alone years to play chess with other old crotchety men in a park as a balding, gray-haired ol' man.  These are the threats on the table.  We can take them and fear, or we can leave them and live. 

Perhaps that's too simple, but really, what is it all but atoms and molecules and compounds and bullshit.  We grow, we shrink, we scar, and we heal, or try to.  I intend to try and push myself to stay healthy, but in the end I'm going to end up battered and beat-up anyway, so it's not like I'm trying to preserve myself for some pristine natural history collection.  I'm using this shell, this thing, until I can't any more.  It's going down with me and I'm going down with it.  And in the meantime, I'll put it to rest.