Thanksgiving

The world got simpler today, for a few hours, and I am thankful for it.

Love is a simple thing, really.  All the justifications and ramifications of our actions, the trials of everyday and the coping mechanisms and the suspension of disbelief and the power of belief are all various dressings which are applied unconsciously, freely, when interacted with people connected by blood, and time, and kinship.

The amplitude involved in understanding each other completely within the well tread routine of facial expressions reaches an asymptote where all there is is comfort.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, often, our conversations day to day are highly skewed by our mood.  But when you see people you know well that you haven't seen for quite a while...mood has less of an impact than the familiarity of past interactions, gives way to a sort of watermarked nostalgia embedded into the way we communicate with old friends.

Yesterday night, I hosted a poker game with some folks I hadn't seen for a month or more.  Ken had helped me moved a month ago, the Kevins and Steve I last saw...a couple months ago?  They met at my place for a poker game, along with Alex Davis and Tanner Bright, co-workers and the latter being my roommate, and everything just seemed to fall into sync.

Ken, Murph and I set the tone early with easy talk and jokes, and everyone was able to fall in line with the discussion and get lost in the easiness we took the barbs.  Even with the newer faces, it all felt natural, and for a while I forgot everything else in the world.  The only burden was whether to raise or call or fold, and it wasn't a very heavy one.

Tonight, Thanksgiving, started with reading to my nephew, asking him questions about is well-worn Curious George book, trading tutoring stories with Barbetta's teaching conundrums, helping Jennifer whenever I could and talking e-wrestling with my brother Nick.  Even when politics and work and business came up, I felt so at ease...the conversation would go where I knew it would, with a few surprises where everyone had learned, deepened their knowledge sources, where time and experience had wizened with context their insights.

Then, reading Jeff Normann's latest works, my great friend appears to become as great of a writer.  I feel his voice in his writing, more than it has ever come across before, and it all reminds me of our late night/early morning talking over coffee the day he left Sacramento on his last vacation from Korea.  He was there beside me again, telling me his thoughts about the culture shock, his perspective on the connections between the world's of the east and west, their perilous sense of work ethic, self-destructive obedience, and there, there in his writing he was with me again...but deeper.  He shows me his world without preaching, his images are stark and tangible...I breathe in his conversation and forget myself inside his prose, like I did with Patrick Rothfuss, and, occasionally, George R.R. Martin (usually during Tyrion and Dany's scenes.)

Interacting with those you know best is like re-reading your favorite book in that every time you come back to the work, your increased experience and breadth of understanding allows you to find new things in the people you know best...and appreciate them more.  Even more so, because they too are learning, and your shared amplitude is so great, you can walk alongside their energy, run with them as they run with you, and realize in that movement that all those adornments we live for day to day are just dressing, icing: if you ever felt incomplete, or lost, these moments remind you of your velocity.

I am going somewhere.  I am moving forward even as the seasons cycle as do my relationships.  This is not John Barth's mobius strip...yes, there are loops on the roller coaster, but it is not an ouroboros: it's a Sonic the Hedgehog level, and these moments amongst our closest friends and family are the accelerator panels that scream us into a blue haze across the scape of our imagination, our imagination the filter of our future, for what we believe is the scope of our vision, our bubble, which expands quickest, and best, when shown a path by those closest to us, that have access to our hearts, to inspire the soul with the synapses' rhetoric: our neurological pathways are worn to folds over time, and it is these we are closest to that saunter the treads of our life's crossing.

I am blessed by my friends, my family, those who I am coming to know and those I have long known.

Happy Thanksgiving.