27 May 2000 ~ Judgment Day...

I finished reading my last Tom Robbins novel -- I've just got a few more to read after this. But I copied some of the last one, "Skinny Legs and All," because I wanted to send it to my friend Aengus. And after I typed it up, I realized it was really very beautiful and I wanted to share it with everybody else:

from "Skinny Legs and All":

...Ellen Cherry was just thinking about how no amount of money could buy security, and if it could, it would be a bad bargain at any price, since security was a form of paralysis, just as satisfaction was a form of death; she was thinking something in that category when the sixth veil flew away from Salome's likable, lickable breasts, and abruptly her mind was occupied with notions of time, history, and the afterlife. She saw that the past was a recent invention, that people sacrificed the present to a future that never really came, that those who tied all of their dreams to an afterlife had no life for there to be an "after" of; saw that time was a meadow not a highway; that the psyche was an all-night restaurant, not a museum or a church; and that on every conceivable level, belief in a hereafter was hazardous to health. Moreover, the world would not be destroyed, at least not until the sun pooped out in about two billion years -- and by then there would be other options.

"But what about Judgment Day?" Ellen Cherry found herself whispering.

EVERY day is Judgment Day. Always had been. Always will be.

"Anything else?" Yes. Just this. The dead are laughing at us.

"Wow," said Ellen Cherry Charles.

I love Tom Robbins. If I made a list of my heros, he'd be at LEAST in the top three.

I'm sorry I haven't been writing much lately. I start a second job on Tuesday to support myself and my housemates, because my housemates only give me money when I threaten to throw them out.

I have been working on rehearsing for "The Vagina Monologues" which, guess what, isn't going to happen after all. I won't get into the reasons for that; it's just not going to happen and nobody's happy about it not happening, so don't pre-order your tickets. I'm sorry.

I have been spending some quality time with Peter... I've missed him. I suspect there are still parts of both of us that desperately need one another, but I guess I can only speak for myself, really. But lately, seeing him, being around him... it reminds me of good times a long, long time ago... I knew they weren't really gone. I knew that Peter and I weren't really gone. I love him. It's pretty rare now that I want to, like, choke him or anything -- I guess we just needed some space. And time.

I've been kind of sick. I'm going to go to bed now.

Oh yeah...

At 4.43 or so this coming morning, I'll be twenty. I guess that's supposed to mean something deep or important, but I can't think of anything deep or important to say about it. On my last night as a nineteen-year-old, I'm going to fall asleep holding my pillow and planning what to wish on my birthday candles tomorrow night. But I already know my wish.

On my last night as a nineteen-year-old, I'm going to read my book and fall asleep. That's it.

~Helena*