A Day in the Mind of Sean L Nelson

One should always trust one's first intuition. You see, I just made oatmeal. I held the spoon somewhere near my mouth and sensed it was too hot so I went to write this while it cooled. However, on second thought, I just barely tasted it. It was indeed too hot and burnt the tip of my tongue. This will no doubt have cosmic significance.

Today, I went to the Goodwill and bought myself a decent pair of jeans for $5. On my way out, I saw a woman's wallet on the ground. It was open so that I could see credit cards. I couldn't see if there was cash in it. I took it to the clerk. Now, I was wearing a backward baseball cap and my silver chain. Well, there was this old woman ahead of me in line. When I returned the wallet, she made a big to do of it. She told me what a good thing I've done. At one point she said, "You didn't... you didn't..." It made me feel good that she thanked me. I'm actually a rather scrupulous person, which is I'm still so bitter about what the Justice Department did to me.

But the thing that really makes me happy today is that Kitty, my lesbian friend, is pregnant. I've known for a few days but it's just now sinking in. It gives me something to live for and a great amount of hope. It's been a long winter but maybe spring is finally taking hold. Kitty has a partner, a "butch," and they are really the sweetest family. They each have a kid of their own and parenting is the center of their lives. Laura is in college to be a nurse. They don't have much money so she sometimes donates plasma to take the kids to the mall, etc. I'm not contractually obligated to send child support but I pray that I will be in a position to offer help.

after note: As I was walking to the library to write an essay on Richard III, I saw an Asian man juggling five red balls. He would juggle them tightly and then unbelievably high. You could tell that you struggled somewhat but generally he seemed to be on top of the situation. Finally, he spun around as the balls were in the air and caught them all. I approached him and congratulated him on his accomplishment.

His accomplishment gives me a new faith in humanity and in myself. No other animal is capable of that sort of discipline and precision. I am a thinking man and, in some ways, we live in a dark age. It is my role to so often play the cynic, to try to bring men back to earth. But I'll take this juggler as a sign to move more in the direction of optimism, to put more faith in the values and intelligence of my fellow humans. Also, I will take risks to put my own dreams on the face of this earth. And that does not always involve trusting one's first intuition.

after note: I've been working on that essay. We have to choose a single soliloquy and write a rather precise essay on it. I've read all the options and selected Richard's final soliloquy. I've also looked up the three words I didn't entirely understand in the Oxford English dictionary.

In the play, Richard has just had a nightmare in which the ghosts of those he's had murdered have visited him. Waking up, he gives a speech about fear, confidence and conscience. I took a few things from it. For one, nothing is perfect. Though the speech is brilliant, the ending is lackluster. There is always room for improvement.

But what really struck me is how Richard talks about how, if we cannot love and believe in ourselves, how can we expect the world to love or believe in us? So often, I let socially minded people talk me out of my bloody ambitions. But I won't have it.

How did that juggler gain his achievement? Through discipline and through following his heart? If he'd spent his days chasing girls or assenting every time a friend asked him to the movies, could he juggle five balls? If he listened to the discouraging cold or his rumbling belly, could he juggle five balls like that?

I am just as ambitious as Richard and just as under siege. And my conscience does not even weigh against by bloody ambitions. Why? Because I have been greatly wronged and abused by many parties, many of which are worshipped by mainstream society. I have a moral right to suceed in my enterprises.

And how should I achieve such success? Well, in the back of the library where I like to work, there is an art work on the wall: a lot flat metal shapes against a blue wall, a sort of combination of the modern style with that of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Looking at it, you see it in the context of the tables, chairs and mini-couches under it. To its left is an unfinished section of wall, grey and dusty.

The point of my digression is this. We must launch our enterprises to match their surroundings. I attempt success in a society that is duplicitous, shallow and treacherous. In order to create my art-work, I must be ruthless and cunning. Only then, may my goodness and wisdom be a light to the world.

Ah, but I must not forget the good parts of our society and suit my actions also to them. It is precision of choice that keeps five red balls in the air... and how much depends on five red balls in the air!

after note: It is now 9:30 and I've spent the last 45 minutes or so working on my Richard essay. I've gotten a respectable amount of work done; more than half the essay. But it strikes me how much work life is. It's such a struggle to knock one essay out and it's such a small part of what I have to achieve this term. And then I'll get worse grades than people who wouldn't survive a round with me in the intellectual boxing ring.

But everything is just like this Richard III passage I'm writing about: It's shallow and then tragic and then darkly hilarious. You see, my Mom used to have this little statuette of a round-headed character sitting down and looking glum and comic at the same time. The base has a saying: "Ever have one of those lives where nothing goes right?" When I was a kid, I saw this with a mixture of wonder and intellectual contempt. It baffled me that my Mom could reflect on her whole life as if she were separate from it. But as the years go by and I see more and more of this world, I am no longer baffled by much of anything.

It's not that I now "understand" this life but just that I don't need to understand and call into question what it even means to understand something. The other night I gave a shivering bum one of my well-loved fleeces; the part of me that did it hides well below my conscious self, with whatever makes my heart beat or my mouth salivate. In the end, everything turns into pleasure and pain, separated by The River of Consciousness and it stands to intuition that river runs into God.