Pink and Green Hippo On a short bridge to nowhere

Friends are only friends so long as you know them. There is an awkward gap between when you knew everything about someone and not knowing very much at all. Not knowing their schedule, their new habits, their new ambitions, their troubles, their interests. Since when did Evans become the most decorated underwater basket weaver in Vegas? The gap between knowing someone and not knowing is a tricky thing. It starts slowly, like ivy over a bridge. You barely notice the ivy and then it has covered the bridge and your yard and is coming up the porch steps. Days turn into weeks into months or seconds into hours into days. Your connection is changed and by the nature of the change is difficult to fully appreciate. An everyday update is weekly check-in and suddenly a year or two has past. What do you say? Say I forgot you. Say we forgot each other. I am changed and you are changed. Say hello. Say I have missed you. The longer you or I wait the faster the ivy grows. Soon we will not even remember to look. I love my friends, I miss them and I mean it. The tragedy, humor and stupidity of my condition is that some days I see perfectly and clearly the solutions to troubles like these and it is 5:00am in the morning and John is scowling at me for staying up and my friends are all asleep. My own brother wanted to know why I never called him. It was in part because when I thought to call he wouldn’t appreciate being woken up with my intentions or ideas. My best ideas and intentions come when I am least prepared to follow through in any tangible way. I say I will call and I don’t. I forget and get embarrassed. It is difficult to explain to the one person who knows me best and most. If he doesn’t get me then the people that do or did or will are rare indeed. I write, but not as much as I should to hone any craft. I am prolific if nothing else. I try to imagine what would be appropriate or usefull to anyone. I try to imagine how or why a blog would be anything other than an archive. It will be an electronic conjoin of the binders and binders full of stuff here, going unread and unfinished. I wonder if I am ever going to be brave enough to be useful to anyone else. I am very good at trying. I am very good at noticing opportunities to make change. Sometimes I am very good at knowing what to say. I am very good at connecting to a disproportionately diverse number of people. I fit it. I find an in. I find a way when I am cornered with real people in public in unavoidable situations. I make friends easily and lose them often. I am diametrically both shy and outgoing. I talk louder when I am nervous and have never managed to back down from a confrontation that required bravado or potential bleeding. I am not afraid to die but terribly afraid of failing to live. When it comes to being behaved I can offer that I am always behaved. Sometimes badly behaved, but what is it the HAVE in behavior? Can I have all of me? Every part, even the terrible bits and the grisly parts? Is it possible to roast the whole beast and enjoy every bit? Can I let you see me, hear me and expect that you will be anything but disgusted? I have intimate conversations with people that I know are just listening to me go. I understand that I am often much more invested in my idea of a relationship than the other party. It used to torture me. With some help I have learned to accept what happens. I have also learned to enjoy every bit of happiness I get from people. Though I am married and happier than ever with my husband, I have had the distinct honor of being in love over and over. I find myself drawn to people as powerfully as I am disgusted by them. Stupidity, cruelty, waste, excess, sloth, abuse, racism, sexism all the isms – those are the things that make me angry. Those occasions when I see my worst in others I am openly disgusted, with them and myself. How will I ever dim down my eyes and live in the shade? I don’t crave the white lights of hyper reality and beauty and bliss and I certainly don’t want to live in the dreary, dreamy, dark without hope. How can I hate people and have so much optimism about their possibilities? I dream of indifference. I would love to not notice. It would be nice to be an emotional amputee. I would love to not see jowls and feel hatred. I would love to hear the voice of man and not be moved by his words, or timber, or cadence. I would love to smell smells and just notice, not smelling something and being slingshotted into the past into a past place or hurled forward into the oblivion of possibility. What life is this that I live in the never still between? I take a moment to feel sorry for myself and then the opposite comes as certainly as a coin has three sides. Tales negative, heads positive and the narrow rim of the coin is neutral. I wait for my coin to land on the edge. I type and get excited by a new descriptive way to say the same ideas. I repeat myself in frustration, with fear that I will not be heard or accepted. I feel sorry for myself just long enough to make another way to describe what is happening. Then I realized of course that I am truly more blessed than any one single woman I have ever or will probably ever meet. Healthy, pretty children who are quick-witted and not retarded. My husband gets angry, gets scared, gets disappointed, gets sad for me but then he does the one thing I can’t imagine anyone else doing – he gets over it and we keep going. He sees me and hears the things I say when I am really mad. Angry mad and mad mad. The mad mad can be terrifying and exciting. If you jumped out of plane most everyone would be terrified, unless you could slow your life way down and notice that you are falling out of the sky. You might be able to respect and appreciate your position in the world. You might be able to appreciate your ability not to freak completely out. My life is not like jumping out of plane or like a box of chocolates. I am still finding new ways to describe my life. Why would I try? Because I want to hear from someone else that they feel like me or hear like me or smell like me. Perhaps there is another person who can describe a thing without using three dissimilar adjectives and two ors.
My hippos are pink and green. On the Omara Reserve in Kenya the animal that is more feared than any other is the hippo. Yet the hippo is often displayed in our culture in a cute, endearing manner. Hippos are nocturnal creatures that seem in many ways to be polar their environments and polar to their expected image. Hippos spend all day in the river resting while other animals are out and about. Hippos spend most of their lives in rivers up to their ears and eyes but do not have the ability to swim even if their lives depend on it. Hippos when pressured to be out in sunlight excrete a body fluid that acts as a natural sunscreen. They make their own sunscreen! It is an amour against the African sun. Hippo jaws can exert 1800 lbs of pressure and have razor sharp teeth. With all of this fierce ability hippos do little beyond kill more people every year than any other predator and nap. They can sleep semi-submerged. Still these hippos protect their young with such devotion and determination that you can’t help but be drawn to them. They are enormous, fat, discolored ugly and all things I generally disapprove of in humans. At first they seem to be lazy and slovenly and fat and just useless. When looking further a person learns that hippos aren’t lazy, they conserve energy when it’s hot out and go out at night when there is less chance of incident and more opportunity for food. Fat hippo bodies are perfect for river life and their shear girth gives license to behave any way they want. If you don’t believe me imagine a big fatass black lady eating at the mall with her kids acting up. Are you going to correct them, aggressively? Imagine being annoyed with that woman and not saying anything. Imagine seeing some conservative guy telling her to pay attention to her rowdy kids. Imagine her on the rise up out of her chair all wild and crazy. That is sort of how I see hippos and sort of how I catalogue events in my life. Was the calm green hippo handling business or did the crazy fun pink hippo come out and play? In blood? Where was I going again? I just drifted and spent a few moments watching tv. A character just said, “Success is the best revenge” I don’t have much success so I can’t say how I’d like it. I can’t imagine I wouldn’t like it but failing a good bit seems to be working out for me for me, right now, today. Goodnight, good-day and good God I started on ivy covered vine and ended up here. Right here.