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Michael Joel Hall

This is the Subject Line

Chapter Heading
by Hemingway

For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devil's tunes
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.


Amazing, it still fits...

Before, it was about the pressing feelings one conjurs when they are embarking on a decision. Intellectual intercourse and the idea of entertaining a new voice; Was I to accept the request for rekindling of relationship fires, fires I never extinguised internally, from the only boy I, at the time, had ever loved with all my heart? The one that I had loved infinitly, but also the one that had done a complete emotional whitewalling and had repeated a vicious cycle of leaving and regretting? I had trusted this boy on countless occasions with my trust, and this new voice was whispering "drive to him." Something inside me knew that "him" wasn't the boy who wanted to rekindle.

The poem, for me, had a lot to do with correct decisions and the fear associated with the haze of indecision. It was a battle of inner bravery yet exterior cowardice....Which voice do I obey? The idea of even going to see this new boy was a betrayl... but it was also *right*, and you cannot betray those who let it happen to themselves.

Drive, Drive, Drive Away.

this boy who was my best friend... I wanted to go listen to him talk for hours. I had cell phone bills that clearly showed I was practicing. I wanted to drive the hours it took to visit him, just so I could lay next to him, knowing that at some point in the night he would scoop me up and twist me into a pretzel, hugging me as tightly as he could. I wanted to feel it in every chakra of my body that I was wanted and loved.

I've never known more than when I was seventeen, and there I was eighteen. I could have made the decision so much more properly had I been forced to six months sooner.

I heard this poem in my head the first time I made the drive home.

I felt like I was doing such wrong. I couldn't help but drive to see him every second I got. To stay for as many weekends as possible. To envelope him the way he enveloped me. I can still smell his presence when I close my eyes, a phantom of pheremones that I wish more often than not to forget. But the voice was right. I needed to make that drive.

That poem is so different now. Its bigger, meaner. It's begun to embody a gorgeous, worldly woman with all natural hair-care products and a biodegratable poly-cotton blend power suit. She is the the corporate gaia, red tape incarnate. And, this poem comes to mind every time I'm forced to reflect on one of her assaults.

I was so much stronger and smarter. I wanted to be so much "more." But, now that more seems like so much less.

Frankly, things felt different the first time I thought about this poem. One emotion and one person had the potential to fill the world so much darkness... this vast, loud darkness-- and I thought I had somehow bested it.

Its different now, I said, some how flipped inside-out. The logo seems to be on the inside.

Before, it was one emotion affecting the world, now its the world affecting one person.

I wonder I'll ever flip it right-side-out? I think my eyes have readjusted to the very loud dark. I know that black bleeds with just a little water and I realize now that that's the only color corporate gaia paints in.

I don't get a sense of accomplishment from helping very rich people get very richer anymore. I can strike out on my own right now and start at some shmuck corporation... I know I can. But muthafucker, I know I won't be happy being a corporate tool, and I don't mean to be a sqwaking cliche.

I think that my ambition has changed. I'm so much more driven to being happy, as opposed to my happiness driving me to my ambition. I think my goal sets are very different, and I kinda fear that. I wanna be happy with making 24,000 a year and doing really engaging things. I don't know right now whats going to fulfil me at 45 because I don't know whats fulfilling me right now.

I don't know if anything is.

God, to be 17. I've gained perspective in the past couple of years. Frankly, though, I think I liked it better from over there. I can still remember the smell created by lovers body against me, but I can't taste ambition. Yet I can feel my powers rageing beneath the surface, ready to be used for something... Not love, not work, but what?

"It must be stretched before it is to shrink" -- Lao Tsu.
Tuesday, January 13, 2004 · 9:03 pm
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