Today my friend Mark is getting married. About a third of my friends from college are, now. This doesn’t bother me: only I’m getting old faster than I realize.

No, the truth is I realize it. How? Love, now, attacks me. I fight it off: I refuse to think about certain people. One in particular: I refuse to think about her all the time.

Brian is in town for the wedding also. I drive to Beaverton to pick him up and we go to the Portland Art Museum to kill time. Knicknacks and gilded toys from Tibet; beautiful and pointless paintings; and all sorts of native american baskets and tools and so on. In one of the cases there’s a basket made out of film stock. I begin to ponder why we moderns have “art”; why we give name and theory and acres of print to the instinctive act of putting paint on canvas. Such that if I were to make anything I would be unable to be unaware of the symbolism eating away at its insides.

Only, of course, if the symbols are meaningful in themselves; if they speak even to someone who has never thought about them. I mention this and articulate it poorly. Brian points at a mask we’re looking at with big mean teeth and a great big smile. He says that one theory is that cognitive dissonance (happy/scary) is inherantly fascinating.

Which of course is yet another layer of theory but we amuse ourselves by saying, “happy/scary” a few too many times.

And there’s another mask that’s happy/sad. I say nothing, but I recognize it instantly. I know no name for it, but I know how it looks when it sits in my brain. And it comes when all the standard assaults have been made; when I am distracted and unaware: when I happen to hear or see her name. When, for whatever reason I see in passing, in memory, the peculiar shape of her soul; then even though she’s thousands of miles away it’s happy and sad to think of her.

Often I barter this happy/sad dust for desire, or for words.