Project: Get Happy Now

So I've come to the realization that I have been, quite flatly, immature. I almost would say as immature as a little whining brat, but the legitimateness of the frustration I have felt has seemed more complicated to me than really really wanting to stay on the monkey bars for an inconceivable amount of more time, but maybe not. I've figured out a way to channel these surges of frustration through jogging mostly in Audubon Park- a kaleidoscope of lives circling a track, from the creatures great (giant, wooly mammoth mutts) and small (a hawk literally descended in a swoop from a tree stage right to stage left). And this is good. Very good.

But I feel that I can dig down deeper into the gold mines around me that I take for granted. Adventures await beyond bars and beer and broken glass. Arabella Street, for example. I've always had a fascination with it. It glows with magic at the dusty corners of Magazine. Have I done any more than peer down and cross? No! With the tools I have at hand, I feel compelled now to use all this gurgling energy not to choke me but to fuel me around my town. I've always depended on other native New Orleanians to take me this way and that. Well now I don't want to be ashamed when I cannot tell my roommate how to get from A to B. I want to sketch a map of everywhere I've gone, know its heart, shake its soul, by writing it through to you.

A project is in the making in my veins. A sense of grasping all the wonder of the moment in its time, in the infinite vastness that moments will keep coming. This gives me hope. This simple joy in discovery.

How did I get here?

I can hardly believe I once saw New Orleans gilded with gold. The surface melts away, melts away. I literally felt as if my eyeballs were being ripped apart by a fork, zig-zagging and pulling down and out of my head. The inanity of it all. Freshman college life in the Big Easy. Who could've imagined a more perfectly raucous and all tomfoolery forgiven place to sign your soul away to beer, drugs, sex, "freedom?"

I'm resisting it all, feeling crushed, mutilated, insignificant, lost.

I crave something deeper. I truly believe that I just want to love. I want to love the place I'm in, to smile at the girls walking down to the community hall bathroom. No such love allowed within the bitchiness hierarchy etched in the female bones at the beginning of time. I want to love our football team, to cheer them on no matter how many field goals attempted and failed, no matter if the most exciting parts are just getting a "First down... Tulane!" No such love with the deadened dreary faces, sitting frames slumped into stadium seats... just me and my precious roommate standing up. If I sit down, I give up on them. And the students just don't care. I want to love the city I'm in- all her charms and gumbo of personalities and talent. But all the freshman class seems to pin to their chests and mouths are the cups and bottles and glasses of alcohol and stickering about five bars each night, every night. I want to love so badly...

Perhaps the only way I can love here, right now is by forgiving them all. I've turned my eyes and throat to God, asking him why I'm here, why didn't I fly away from here when I've cursed the chains I've had on me in my home since I was about eight years old. It was because I wanted to love. But does love have its limits? I don't think so. Wherever I am, I can love.

Let me love!