Truth

I don’t know why I’m here.

I don’t mean that in an existential sense; rather, I’m not sure why I’m typing in an online diary when my general inclination isn’t to keep up with one.  Oh, I’ve tried in the past; I still keep various floppy disks around containing old personal diary websites, from when the Internet was new and sites like opendiary and myspace were still unrealized.

It took the Internet awhile to bear fruit. Now, look at it–a wired world, a connected world, where you can eavesdrop on strangers and invest personally in people whose names you may never know, whose faces you may never see, and whose embrace you may never feel.

Ostensibly, my reason to join this was because occasionally I wished to write a comment on a friend’s diary and needed to be a member. It’s hard to resist the lure of the text box, however; its siren call has overcome my reticence and prompted me to spend a goodly number of minutes attempting to think of a clever, appropriate name for whatever this turns into. One entry, five entries, six thousand eight hundred and twelve entries? I have no idea.

Still, it will let me post comments, and increase my access, so it’s win-win. 🙂

Yes, I realize this isn’t terribly interesting.

To make up for it, I’ll share a quote, from a wonderful book by Cormac McCarthy, called No County for Old Men. It’s a wonderful book that I kept picking up and putting down, because his writing style is….unique. Just getting around the complete lack of quotation marks was proving a frustrating endeavor, until one day I opened the book and instead of reading the book, I merely listened to it.

No, it wasn’t an audiobook. To this day I haven’t tried those. I have too much of a love for the written word, for the heft of a novel in my hands, the texture of the cover and the scent of the pages. It is like unto myrrh.

Rather than reading, where the eyes dominate, I let myself drift. I listened to it. I let the characters speak, rather than be read. I was my own audiobook. The characters stirred to life, and the phrases and dialects that seemed stilted and awkward were suddenly natural conversation.

It’s hard to explain, but suddenly, I grasped why people liked his work.  It was a paradigm shift that I didn’t expect, but I welcome it. Thus, when you read the following passage, try it yourself. Close the eye, and remember, joy is in the ears that hear.

My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth.  He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were.. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it.  Don’t haul stuff around with you.  I guess all that sounds pretty simple today. Even to me. All the more reason to think about it. He didn’t say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say.  And I don’t remember that he had a lot of patience with havin to say things twice so I learned to listen the first time. I might of strayed from all that some as a younger man but when I got back on that road I pretty much decided not to quit it again and I didn’t. I think the truth is always simple.  It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it’d be too late.  By the time you figured it out it would be too late.

When I wake up, I know who I am.

If nothing else, that’s reason for what I need most each morning: Hope.