win and tonic

My mind would spill out my ears should I ever have the opportunity to make my interactions at any convention as dense as (read: even moreso than they already are) I would like, easily overpowering the earbuds that act as corks during my meditative drive home. Seven generously lonely hours were startlingly appreciated while I processed and divided a whole new set of memories comprised of the faces of my favorite people in the world brought together by a passion for making and consuming nourishing things.

If I don’t make an active attempt at keeping my emotions in check they’ll overwhelmingly spur me to brashly and unrealistically set out to build an impossible empire of sorts where I can spend all of my time with all these people, forcing their slow orbits around the globe to swing more forcefully in my direction and selfishly declaring that we should all be together, which is to say, everyone should surround me all of the time. I’m not going to quit my job and move to a big city where one pocket of friends I see mere days out of the year reside, but in the days of post-con depression that I’m thoroughly entrenched in (the fact that I’ve been home for mere hours yet notwithstanding) that are sure to follow, such things seem unreasonably attractive and perfectly rational things to do.

Old adventures were relived this weekend with a high success rate, and many, many new adventures were found.

Most of them have specific names behind them, and I will likely gush thanks in their general direction for years and years.

The energy of creative (and therefore terribly handsome) people propels me to new, even greater heights every year, inspiring me to contribute more to the world somehow, as if I had the power to do so for some stranger in the world in such a specific way that any of my heroes (if I may use such a word) have to me.

Then again, with seven billion of us, it’s a statistic inevitability that anything anyone produces will delight at least one person absolutely - but to have one person so consistently make things that delight you and then putting a face to them, hearing words come from their lungs and witnessing as their ideas are formulated in real time not just near you, but at you, swells me with some strange muse-like creature that makes me unable to consume anything new. I cannot read, cannot converse, cannot listen or breathe any new air until I release the pressure of this new energy.

On the drive home while I was thoroughly enshrouded in my decompression chamber of semi-sad music and asphalt, my mother called with updates on my dying aunt, and I literally screamed at the phone before answering it. I had no more room. I was busy sorting through the mess in my head, making it more orderly, and placing it on hold and pushing it aside, snapping back to the real world with real problems amounting to more than “which friend do I engage in next” is necessary, of course - but I selfishly wanted to continue to wallow in the come-down from the sheer euphoria found in being surrounded by folk I adore so.

I want to, or at least feel ready to, put even more nourishing things in my brain out of fear that if I let the things between my ears settle, they’ll slip through the cracks and precious details will be lost before I have a chance to record them. Spying my stack of books fills me with a kind of hope, sort of, but another, completely sovereign fear says No, More Will Not Be Good.