"Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander the boulevards, up and down, restlessly while the dry leaves are blowing." --Rilke

Specifically, I remember a weekend in Columbus, OH. The Hardcore Boys had moved along, and I had new roommates in a beautiful new home. It worked out that everyone was gone for the weekend, and my mind, the endless meaning-making machine that it is, took this as A Sign...I spent two days in a hammock, awash in loneliness and poverty, sobbing. Come Monday I was sought out and loved by the amazing people that 10 years on I still consider my main people. That weekend, though...I remember. It is helpful to remember that set adrift-ness. This is not who I am, but how I was raised, and my memory of this is why I am known as the Clinician That Can Deal with These Fucking Borderlines. I know what it is like to feel no center, and try to create one--I was raised in that world, and visit infrequently. It's probably bad luck to bet on such things, but I wager that I will never feel that alone again.

The counter of that is quiet, and reflection. I am a product of my age, and quiet is not easy--I call to Catholic saints, I ask Thomas Merton to help me out, but when someone text messages, I answer. Until this last week when my leg exploded in shards of numbing pain. I ignored my back pain weeks before, and this was nerve damage revisiting. Meaning-making monkey brain has decided that this forced paralysis is to remind me of quiet. I keep saying that I want less drunkenness. When I watch the kids corner a threesome, there is a clear internal voice that tells little Midwestern me to get a cab. Friends are mad, text messages fly, but in the end: I was not cut out for this. I am wholesome to the nth degree, by no choice of mine.

The job is another factor: you cannot imagine. I may not be bright enough to synthesize a child jail. Right now I have thoughts and encounters but there is no production--I have nothing to offer in the way of insight. I think I'm in a fallow phase, and so is this adorable little blog. St. Renegade is on a manhunt and a meaninghunt, saying goodbye to the Glee Club and to the Party Crew, and finally finishing "Rising Up and Rising Down." I beg forgiveness--to blog readers, to Chicago friends, to the whole world that asks anything of me. I'm in, like, pre-hibernation. What comes after, who knows.

Until then, I write about songs here: http://yourfavoritetune.com/songs/