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Something is moving in my chest -- could it be a pulsing pomegranate, a bloodred drum? Yes, I think so...
I went to a really cool place once.

Among them, wandering in that great forest,
and with her wound still fresh: Phoenician Dido.
And when the Trojan hero recognized her
dim shape among the shadows (just as one
who either sees or thinks he sees among
the cloud banks, when the month is young, the moon
rising), he wept and said with tender love:
“Unhappy Dido, then the word I had
was true? That you were dead? That you pursued
your final moment with the sword? Did I
bring only death to you? Queen, I swear by
the stars, the gods above, and any trust
that may be in this underearth, I was
unwilling when I had to leave your shores.
But those same orders of the gods that now
urge on my journey through the shadows, through
abandoned, thorny lands and deepest night,
drove me by their decrees. And I could not
believe that with my going I should bring
so great a grief as this. But stay your steps.
Do not retreat from me. Whom do you flee?
This is the last time fate will let us speak.”
These were the words Aeneas, weeping, used,
trying to soothe the burning, fierce-eyed Shade.
She turned away, eyes to the ground, her face
no more moved by his speech than if she stood
as stubborn flint or some Marpessan crag.
At last she tore herself away; she fled—
and still his enemy – into the forest
of shadows, where Sychaeus, once her husband,
answers her sorrows, gives her love for love.
Nevertheless, Aeneas, stunned by her
unkindly fate, still follows at a distance
with tears and pity for her as she goes.
You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now:
for the varied style in which I weep and speak between vain hopes and vain sorrow, where there is anyone who understands love through experience, I hope to find pity, not only pardon.
But now I see well how for a long time I was the talk of the crowd, for which often I am ashamed of myself within;
and of my raving, shame is the fruit, and repentance, and the clear knowledge that whatever pleases in the world is a brief dream.
I am someone who, by and large, lives as if I have just woken up from a pleasant afternoon nap (the causal agent of which was probably a particularly long passage in Hume's Enquiries) and am currently listening to a nice chanson. By this I mean that I am usually tranquil and a bit stupid from having just woken up (and also, incidentally, from not having finished the Enquiries) and that I’m usually, literally as well as figuratively, listening to a nice chanson.
Occasionally I stray from this and act like a complete and total moron – the reasonable lethargy that so typically characterizes me having genetically mutated into only somewhat adulterated madness, due to maybe some kind of transient virus or phantom, or perhaps inclement weather – but that usually doesn’t last too long, and I finish by beating my self up for a few days and then, finally, taking a rather lengthy afternoon nap – when I should have been reading, of course.
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If I could choose, I would write like Salinger and Nabokov mixed and melded into one festering, beautiful mess; I would make films like Jeunet and Gondry and they would sublimate. I'd paint like Dulac and VVG, I’d draw like Escher; I'd sculpt like Rodin and think like Einstein, and not in his numbers (though that'd be nice) but in his words and in his dreams. I’d have balance like Calder, I'd sing like Freddie Mercury and Billie Holiday (boiled together in some euphonious stew), play like Tiersen, and write music at all, to tell you the truth. I'd parle francais comme une vraie francaise, I'd noi tieng viet like my grandmother once did, and when someone would ask me "Nihongo ga dekimasu ka?" I'd say, with confidence, "Hai, nihongo ga dekimasu."
But first it seems I have to figure out what the hell I'm doing, which isn't as easy as it sounds.
A man named Thomas still has my copy of Amelie.