Amongst the bleak landscape, a small island of perspicacity. Afternoon baseball involving a pair of teams that occupy some of the same territory I’ve crossed over, ornamental music and sunlight through the windows and glass doors. Tranquility assured for at least a few hours. Thoughts become languid pools running deep that shelter previously unknown forms of joyous prayer and thankful tides of sweeping warmth. Wiser folk than myself have spilled a lot of ink trying to describe the slow moving arc of meaningless pleasure. All I can offer is the slight addition of a mood rarely captured by half remembered quotations pulled from a million different works of brilliance. This is what it sounds like when throaty voices affirm the countless suggestions that islands such as this afternoon deserve entire oceans of watery context.
It’s unfashionable to discern love as the feeling of peace and comfort, and with good reason. There is nothing quite so shocking to the sensibilities of the community as a comfortable soul, even when the comfort is short lived. In my case, the sensation feels of capturing the beautiful notation with a few rusty phrases crimped from a mind that is as somnambulant as it is voracious. After walking through the doors of a moodless afternoon set apart from long stretches of time anchoring the scenery like heavy rocks, there is fond simplicity in still life portraits reflecting from the mirror hanging on the wall. As much as I want to know with certainty that the scene I’ve created in my mind is truly the beautiful treasure it appears to be, the uncertain nature of the question lends credibility to the whole frame. At their best moments of inspired satisfaction, the potentates of old had afternoons like this.
The warmth and joy of the moment is transitive. I’m watching a crowd watching the baseball game (which I too am watching…does that make me part of the crowd? I can’t make up my mind, the arguments seems to support both conclusions….) while a parade of various artists runs through the catalog and out through the speakers of the stereo. It’s an amusing sort of vociferous transition of identity. I leap from sun drenched Florida baseball stadiums to cold Canadian concert halls to chilly and overcast Northern Virginia afternoons with an ease and comfort that astounds the senses. It is no particular skill, nor is it anything owned or monopolized by any individual. I’m taking advantage of a peculiar mix of technological marvels and humanistic pursuits. For a few seconds, I am the joy of a long fly ball in those precious small moments before gravity and the wind conspire to end my flight a few feet short of the wall. I don’t mind. It’s a long season; there’ll be more joyous afternoon excursions into supposition. It’s nice not to argue about transcendental issues or have to parse recombinant possibilities of costly mistakes…
For some finite period of time, the hassles, trials, and tribulations are but minor chords in a much larger concerto; in the middle of the day, the whole scene exhales in a show of solidarity. A translucent extemporality feels like a runners high while confusion hovers to the side of the scene. It’s a very contemporary enjoyment; much of happiness is contained in time, seeming to burst from the tiny and simple into pictures of stunning complexity and beauty recognizable to any number of deities. There is nobody to thank in terms of the patriarch, just an over-arching tranquility that could be called thankFull.
When the song ends, in a moment of quiet, I hear a lawnmower hammering out a sound the belongs to summer by butchering acres of green fingers into a pleasing even height. An approximation of happiness colored green and smelling like the hottest month of the year. There’s more afternoon, and with luck, another one tomorrow. That’s got to count for something. I hope…
