the pros and cons of going through e-mail memories

pro: coming across a simplesimon mailing and, as a result, going back and rereading most of the mailings from days gone by. found this one, one i'd forgotten but, upon re-reading it, remembered precisely where i was and what i was doing the first time i read it. and how much i loved it then, much as i do now.

an excerpt:
i saw a movie once where a writer
was trapped in a room
with all the characters he'd ever invented,
made up, created, destroyed.
loved, hated, and felt nothing for.

i believe that the majority of life is
making up what's going on, is looking
at the faces around you, and giving them
each meaning - every love and every hate
and everyone you feel nothing for. give
them each some part in your mind, in your
history, and in your place, and leave them
there.

everything that happens is a story of a
story and none of it has ever really happened.
it is all colored by the color of your cheeks,
by the doves that flew by yesterday,
by the birds that come
tomorrow.

sitting in a room with an illusion of illusion
the shadow of a shadow
and the faint memory of smell

con: you find other emails, from a time that seemed complicated then, but seems ridiculously simple in retrospect. and you wonder why an encounter can't be as simple and happy as it was. why you laugh with delight when you think you're not in eyesight or you tell yourself you don't give a damn. yet you mask your exhuberant smile with feigned maturity during the moments you inexplicably build up when really there's just no need and you wind up feeling ridiculously self-conscious and phony. you feel as if you're playing some game you don't know the rules to without realizing it until after the fact. therefore further distancing yourself from that former simplicity.

and you spend time analyizing when there's no need and you promised yourself you wouldn't. and you wind up overdramatizing something that's so ridiculous and juvenile to begin with and realize that you shouldn't analyze, you shouldn't dramatize, you shouldn't anything. you should just fucking grow up and get over it. "leave them there," indeed.

anyway. tonight's town meeting? 28 MINUTES! words cannot describe how happy i was. somehow i have a feeling tomorrow will not treat me as kindly. c'est la vie - i'll take what i can get. because it's all good in life!