suivez la piste amigos y comrades

suivez la piste was actually the title of a french textbook in high school. you never really know what is going to stick in a teeny little cranium such as mine, but apparently there is a scant amount of seating reserved for "foreign language bits" i love other languages. it's an affinity i developed far too late in life to make much use of. but i discovered that for one such as myself, being able to communicate even a little bit with someone in ways other than anglaise, was super freaking cool. which is even in and of itself something of an amusement. you don't generally applaud say a 5 year old with basic verbal mastery, lol why should i be so bloody pleased to pronounce shei shei or mille grazie like it was my freaking thesis. so yeah, thanks babel.

communicating is a bitch when the language is shared, does that mean communicating with people who don't likewise have the same foundations and experiences and vocabulary is even tougher? because we are different? or does that make it easier?
is love different in hindi than seik? is "te amo, mi amor" any less stirring to the 16 year old experiencing first love than "я тебя люблю мой дорогой" is to the elderly russian couple down the street?
because of words?

there are people on this planet who would argue so.

which is in and of itself a shame. having gotten to know a few international types pretty well this year, i am struck by so much that is same, not different. mi guitarista, vicente is constantly reminding me of the ills and troubles facing his countrymen, as do several other people in sa and even europe. dammit. i wonder if a point could ever be made -not in mime so much as caveman gesticulant. after spending a night talking down a german pal who had suffered an unusually painful breakup last week, i found that i couldn't adequately convey what i most wanted to impress on him--not that it mattered, but in the grand scheme, he wasn't alone with that pain. you can be alone in more ways than you can count, and truthfully, regardless of what the brochures might tell you, it's pure uncut fact. benji sings how we are all the same at the beginning, so wtf happens next is a cosmic prank call. you can't change some things. you can effect change and even affect change (2 different things, campers) but ultimately, as mongo says, "mongo just pawn in game of life." thanks mel, thanks mongo, sorry for the not so precisely exact nature of the quote....

my train of thought is already derailing onto tangent tracks to numerous to mention.
but communication remains the crux of the cross today.
people get so hopped up in their little preconceived worlds and dealings that they drag everyone and everything around them into it, expecting all to fully acquiesce to their expectations.
its not like that.

today i spent the day with my daughter and mid day got dragged via text into ostensibly created drama that served no other purpose than to well, create drama. i already had a drama going. one of my own, and far more real than any internet escapade. long story short, my former pal would not could not accept the plain and simple fact that something or someone else was a priority right then and i could not focus on wtf he was presuming my attention issue meant. basically more or less the same mentality that insists on having the last word, rather than say, an actual discourse.

"look at me, i'm bart!"

why do some people crave a dramatic denouement over patience? i get it with children of course.
i'm something of a hedonist myself, and i get the gratification imperative. but people of the internet! citizens of the real, take a collective chill pill sometimes and remember, everyone you see before you, you don't truly know. you talk to people, start to know them, but it's still not the same.

the person you see in front of you in traffic, in that ugly suv might not be the wealthy owner.
it could be me, the crazy bus riding biker, delivering someone else's expensive car to them. it could be the wily carjacker or the soul-dead child of a white collar motherfucker mid runaway.
the woman who has just been informed that her cancer is back,the man whose wife has died or left him. you don't know. i don't know, but people still LOVE to assume and presume that their world of problems spills over to everyone elses, granting them braggers rights and priority in a neat little predictable fashion.

i wish it worked so neatly because i wouldn't be at a linguistic disadvantage in a world like that.
i wouldn't find myself scouring the neighborhood for a tiny little ball of fluff i have come to adore.
i'd be camped out in the magical world i'd formed around my wishes, enjoying the ebb of flow of things as i want them, rather than struggling to not go under while the current tosses me about.
some people are in the raft, some people are on the bank, some are in the water.
(ok some of us are screaming, giggling and laughing as we go over the side, but try to ignore us, we crazy!)
we are all trying.
some just not as obviously.
i wish so many things.
i find myself captivated at times by what could be, could have been, isn't, will never be.
sometimes the enormity of such things is dwarfed only by their irrelevance.
my big picture could be your background shot, or a pointillismic dot.
yours could be my favorite story, my bedtime fantasy, or just as easily something stuck to the bottom of my shoe. i'm sorry for that, because one thing i know for certain is there are far more people worse off than me than better. but that's not cause for relief or joy to me.
it doesn't change the shadow on my brain, the balance in my account of the tears in my eyes.
i want more, and not just for me.

ted was right.
a person's a person, no matter how small.