Lines traced and tried

Sooner or later, I will become my parents' son. We are all products of our parents, and the lines on our faces converge along our parents' path.  I'll get my mother's quick mouth and propensity for blind trust, and in some ways that I haven't accepted, I'll get my Dad's temper and paranoia.  I don't have those things yet.  But I'm getting there. I'm definitely getting there. 

I am constantly amazed at my tendency to heap syrupy words on my stillborn thoughts, choking them with easy manipulations of gushed emotions before they are fully grown.  That comes from Dad. And I am more amused because I have a love of self-sacrifice, and how its claws permeate all my relationships.  That comes from Mom.

Not to mention that I'll get diabetes and heart disease from both of them.

I was looking at some blogs of people where time has long since passed our friendship — and it was like looking into a time warp. I remember being 15 years old and playing my favorite game – pretending I could see the future.  And in pretense I saw this exact moment, now, not in all its details but assuredly in its conceptual truth. I saw my friends as they are now.  I saw how their skin grew puffy and slagged as realities of aging corroded the fibers inside.  I saw their thinning hair and how their faces grew larger, rounder, obliviating the hard definitions of youth.  I saw the stooped shoulders and how their parents lined faces prophesied their children's fates. And it startled me, going through the images on the blogs.  Because those once laughing eyes are laughing now, reflecting an insincere world with guarded optimism; they eyes had so much practice at perfecting the laughters that lines have camped along the edges, and as lines circled and creased their faces, the secret of their spontaneity was gone. They've adapted to happy lives and some of them even have kids, but that virility and the glow of unbridled dreams and hopes were absent from their faces. They now were fitted cogs of this great machine, when once upon a time, they were smooth, pure and ready for the shaping.

And then I looked at my image and compared it with years passed.  Jebus, what weightiness! Seems like expectations and doubt and all the other things have dragged me down a little more each day.  We follow a set path with our remaining hours, like geese southward to warmer climates, not knowing that the best days of our lives can be here and now, not understanding that time is a remorseless & blind prosecutor, whose only goal is to indict us of living – whose sentence of the ultimate justice is the dark void.

Know what irks me? How I can see the number of people who have viewed my profile on Friendster, but I can't find out who they actually are cause they are on anonymous views.  I know there are stalkers out there! It's the classic Pandora's box syndrome.  Friendster is tantalizing me with this factoid– and it's probably best if I never knew the number of people that were looking at my profile in the first place. Yeah, yeah, take your vanities comment and suck it.

josh i look at your profile everyday, so 30 of those are mine.

Posted by: kyle | October 24, 2005 at 10:05 PM

Aw thanks dude. I'll make sure to change it up once in a while now.

Posted by: j.fisher | October 25, 2005 at 10:50 AM