The New Me

I have moved house. Jung might suggest that I have symbolically begun to inhabit a new self, and I have chosen to celebrate my revamping my blog which has been languishing pitifully over the summer, like a dried out garden whose appointed tender has been off gallivanting irresponsibly.

As August descends so does that exquisite feeling of endings, dread, poignancy...the Back To School feeling that haunts me in August years after the academic calendar has ceased to have a bearing on my life, other than the way that this month inevitably feels like the last few minutes of a long back massage - great pleasure that is hard to separate from anticipation of the End.

And in fact, this heavy idea I began with, this pursuit of happiness, seems to have dried up and blown away. Who knows if it will be back again in another form, tumbleweeds or convection currents or a particle caught on trade wind that lands in your eye, but in any case I find myself gazing at the bookshelf I have full of books about happiness, finding it, keeping it...with a feeling similar but not quite as strong as disgust.

Perhaps I have finally talked this topic to death, or at least a measure of zombie- like living deadness, and I feel too bouyant and distractable and dilletantish to go poking my nose in that dusty old tome. I want to chase butterflies and fiddle all day while the ants lay in their supplies! I want to go for a long pointless bike ride and stay up late watching inane youtube videos! I want to have a second, third, fourth, fifth childhood, whittle sticks in the backyard for no reason, tell ghost stories, travel by catapult and parachute!

Yea, I walked through the valley of the shadow of death and it was a DRAG. Now I want to get motion sick rolling down hills and climb into waiting hot air balloons. I want to play hookey and splash in the creek and go riding on the trains with the hobos, finally, after all those years of wanting to, gazing wistfully out of the classroom window where I diligently learned my times tables and the price of achievement.

The New Me stays up late drinking wine with friends. The New Me might try to get in on this party of puppeteers getting into nonsense in Fishtown. I google cruises to anarctica and the beautiful empty facade of former hotel the Divine Lorraine. I will write odes to crumbling places and host parties and string up lights.

Somewhere in a dingy apartment on South Street in the recent past the Old Me still sits, looking for answers in books, curled up with desperation or despair. I want to send her a post card that says "No Regrets" and "Wish u were here" with a picture of an old old man on the front, but how do you mail something to someone for whom there is no known address?