will-o'-the-wisp

"one minute I held the key
next the walls were closed on me
and I discovered that my castles stand
upon pillars of salt, and pillars of sand"

matches is stewing in thoughts, confusing illusions, and listening to the new coldplay single, 'viva la vida'. it's a soothing balm.
ah well.
am disagreeing with language lately; not sure if it is just a problem with our english version or what. perhaps m got too steeped in it during college, but he has a thousand colloquial expressions that do not make enough sense for every thousand which do. take the word 'facetious'. most people don't know how to spell this word in the first place, and they think that it means someone is just intentionally being an ass. but its root is facet, as in a gemstone, another surface, a different angle; light refracting and illuminating new accents. he would use this word all the time if this held true to its fine points, but the word means just a bit of silliness, really. literally. what an utter waste of an extremely poetic and far-reaching word. now the metaphor of a facet is ruined, what with the word being locked into the lexicon for eternity. one can't just unword a word; there is no unwinding of history, no subtle snippets of extraction to tinker with the end results. maybe he should get over it and move on~

something stopped him short the other day; snagged his mind like a sweater on a stray nail. he can't remember specifically where it was, so forget about all the story backtrackery. basically, it was an older gentleman relating how he was aghast at the pace with which his life was pulsing by. this is a notion that comes from several separate sources, so there must be something to it. why is it that life seems to go by more quickly once one trickles out of adolescence? is it that the mind shifts like sediments, becoming more settled, eroding away the walls of our conscious differentiation of one moment from another? is it that days and weeks and months become more self-same (like one another) at a certain point in life? likely the point of career-pathing, which weighs a trigger heavily on matches' mind right now....maybe he should just bail right now and hop a ship to madagascar or spain, for as long as need be to establish his own initiatives. he would be remiss if he didn't mention how quickly the last seven months in oregon have been burning by. it isn't that he doesn't have an extreme density of new and wonderful experiences, or that he feels he should have capitalized on his time in some other way....it's just very hard to describe. he hopes that acceleration is not a principle which holds constant throughout life, and that it is more of a state-of-mind to be grappled with and conquered through mindfulness. which is a word he hears too little these days~

what other propulsions could exist? can it be associated with age, in that we sleep more and play less than we used to? this doesn't necessarily hold true, especially not in the present case. could it be, perhaps, that our responsibilities, that our concerns and worries, are so much more numerous and present themselves with so much more immediacy than ever before? he thinks he is on to something with that one. the savory times are those in which one is acting of their own free initiative; fusing their own individual thoughts and cares into the atmosphere around them. "growth of the soul, growth of the mind" ~twelve days. we're so often forced into positions of maintenance these days, just keeping up with all the regular bullshit to make sure that it doesn't outpace us, that we seldom have the opportunity or the energy to pursue ourselves or our dreams. who honestly has a job that isn't involved in maintenance of some nothing, some customer or financial portfolio or product or service? who actually burns away the darkness into unexplored territories with those useful eight-hour blocks of their day? even then, they would return home and have to clean the apartment and sift through the bills and separate the papers from the plastics. so much of it is halfway mind-numbing, which he thinks is the core of the problem. it is willful sedation, and this is one poignant cause of time-slippage, of wasted hours and unnoticed opportunities.

another sentence that he heard a few days ago struck him in a harmonious chord: "it's not often the things that we end up doing that we regret, it's the things that we don't end up doing." a butchering of the phrase certainly, but the idea comes through.
he agrees almost 100%. almost. call it 92. he does so enjoy attaching hard numbers to such things.