Joy, Death, Misery, and Beauty: My Friday Night

Tonight I met James and Mick for an epic walk from the city to the Payneham Community Center. We took 110 minutes, half of it barefoot. What fun!

It brought back those childhood days of darting through sidestreets with friends in the dusk while everyone cooks their dinners and the moon rises and the sweet spring air intoxicates the senses til you are wild and tired and vital all at the same time.

We arrive with flowers in our hair.

Afterwards at Al Frescoes Cafe Zoe and Dave and I sit and talk about death.

Deb, Dave's beautiful wife, died just over seven months ago on February 28. Dave goes into detail, describing how his beloved's pelvis melted, for example. I force myself to sit still and say nothing. I feel so young around Dave and Zoe.

And Zoe has an medical operation next week. She asks me for some classical music to recover to and I have the pleasure of having on me a cd called "The Most Relaxing Handel Album In The World... ever!" It's exactly what she needs, and that makes me so happy.

Later, after a pizza and some reading, I take the last train home. The carriage is full of under-23 year olds.

What can I say? Obviously I am disgusted and repelled by their ill-dressed, unformed, skinny bodies, that stink of alcohol and poor hygiene. The nonsense they speak lacks even the virtue of being happy nonsense.

Misery is cool if you're born after 1985. Clever animals lost in the cracks of the world, the Y Generation are post-literate casualties of a cultural marxism that makes it seem as if all human values died sometime in the 1980s and now only senseless pleasure remains.

It makes me angry. I think of my own years of willful ignorance... I can't think clearly in the stink.

As soon as I get home, I put on Mozart's Requiem and think of the dead I love, and the living I care about. I listen to the Kyrie on repeat. Mozart's Kyrie is a fugue, which is a musical form but also latin for "flight" and I remember hearing that kyrie on my walkman while I had a terrible cold and I went running at night and I ran like a dog, trying to run from the body, sickness, and fear of death. I think of the young people in flight from reality.

As I listen to Mozart’s kyrie,
I cannot run fast enough,
Cannot bow low enough,
Cannot honor the spectacular
Human world enough

To outrun, outrun, outrun
(Forever and ever
Kingdom and the mystery be
For thine is the Glory
For this is the) Death.