(Thursday)

Here is the epiphany I had on the train, late, two nights ago. Sometimes I feel so connected to everything that I feel I am carrying every single ache suffered by every person and leaf and blind shrew shaking on this planet, and it is heavy heavy heavy and I am drowning. I carry these pains and they weigh on me, claw at my ankles, swallowing my lungs. Here is the epiphany part if I am the whole world and all of its pains (if I am not just a mass of ego and narcissism) then if I could figure out how to be happy even while feeling it all then I would be on to something truly revolutionary (and sometimes I am already; I am happy a lot of the time; I am a revolutionary). Then I got to thinking maybe that's the ticket: If every person on this planet could figure out how to be happy despite all the pain that they feel (we all feel), then we'd live in a world full of joyful people-- a joyful world.

It's overly simple, perhaps. It's not a new idea and it's one I've had before, but two nights ago it felt all over again like an epiphany. It all comes back to personal responsibility, as I've been thinking for a few years now. But then of course there's the small issue of being human, the fact that humans contain within us anger and filth and vicious, drunken outbursts from the gutter-- and this is no less who we are nor is it any less worthy of our consideration.

At any rate this evening I dined on rice cakes and salsa and cleaned the apartment but stopped before I washed the dishes. They will wait for another day.

There is a bug or perhaps a family of bugs (I have yet to determine) living behind the stove in the kitchen. So far I am slightly nonplussed when one or the other of them crawls across my fry pan where it sits on the front burner, but invariably the little critter makes the trek back behind the stove before I can find anything with which to entrap it. Besides if I put it outside will it die in the cold? Will it merely find its way back indoors, this time with a vengeance? Is there really anything wrong with sharing my kitchen with a bug or perhaps a family of bugs?