Are You Feeling Better Now?

My favorite Decembrist song has always been Grace Cathedral Hill. It is poetry about real life. The songwriter is trying to find some sort of cheer in an atmosphere that stinks of fish and beer, in a world that will never belong to him. Small things, a candle, a hotdog, a paper halo, can make the people in the song feel better for awhile, but the foul smells and decaying buildings still assault their senses, making the world tedious. We can never always feel good. We can only feel better for a little while.

Sometimes I think I am a bad Christian because my life seems to go in circles. The older I get, the more everything that I see and hear and smell seems the same. Sometimes I find a new world in a book or a song to distract me, but usually there is a sense of suffication. Wanderers used to be able to escape the sense of sameness by perilous dangers into unknown forests and oceans, but now there is no unknown besides the void of space. Sure, there're drugs and booze and sex, but how long does it take for those things to get old or kill you? Why bother becoming callous to yet another world?

You can say that I'm to introverted, that I don't think about God enough, but God and Love and Transcendent Ideals aren't constantly invading your eyes, your ears, your mouth, your nose. If I put out my eyes so I don't see the big plastic M at yet another intersection, I won't be able to see the lightening flashes either. I've never liked television adaptations of the classics because when I read there are pictures in my head that are better than the ones on the screen. It's kind of hard to see God in my head except as a stereotype. I have a hard time not seeing Jesus in flannelgraph, with a blue robe and a white arian face. My earthly senses make me miserable because they keep me from focusing on the transcendent but they also provide such large compensation with beauty in music, in faces, in trees.