LUDIC LOG

Short one today, as it's late and I'm exhausted. Nothing complex or insightful to say: I will simply explain why life is sometimes worth living.

Sometimes, you will go to a great concert by an dynamic and skillful band that is more concerned with playing interesting music that appeals to their own tastes than in selling their songs to a beer company. And they don't ignore the audience or pretend there isn't one; instead, they treat the audience like someone in the band, or a friend, and they take them along for the ride and let them figure out where they're going, playing to each other but for other people, and they're not self-indulgent, just curious as to how they can surprise each other.

Or, sometimes, you will spend time with some very good friends, and you will have conversations that are smart and clever and easy and funny and where you get a good feeling because your friends know you and you know them and you know what one another will enjoy, and you strike ideas and opinions off each other like an anvil, and it burns bright and hot and sometimes you argue but you never fight, and you think how goddamn lucky you are to have friends like that, that you can wrap yourself in like a quilt. And you drink and you like drinking, and how it makes you feel, and you think you could talk forever, but you don't, and that makes the time you talked all the more fine. And you remember that no matter how out-of-synch you are with the world, there are a few people like that, if you just look for them hard enough.

Or, sometimes, you will go to a baseball game, and you'll luck into having the best seats you've ever had or ever will have, and you get to sit with the scouts and hear people talk baseball who actually know what they're talking about, and you'll get to see your team win, and justice be done, and your little rally superstitions work, and it's an absolutely perfect night, even with the rain delay. And you drive all the way home, but you don't take the expressway: you drive the side streets, all the way from the South Side to the North Side, and you soak in your beautiful, insane city, and think about how humans really are capable of creating beautiful things. And you'll think about the game, and the concert, and the fantastic Ecuadorian restaurant you ate at, and you'll appreciate, as you drive steady and unhurried, that there are certain advantages to living in a big city.

Or, sometimes, you'll play a song in the car, and you and your friend will talk about how great the band was -- you'll just lose yourself in the music. But you haven't stopped thinking; you haven't stopped being ironic or critical. You've just let the music take you to a good place that you both are happy to be. And there are people who share your perspective on things, or at least are happy to hear it; and they give you their thoughts when you give them theirs, and sometimes it's funny or shocking or crazy or exactly right or totally wrong, but it's never boring. And the world is full of amazing people and beautiful girls and great books and big ideas, and you know that nothing is disallowed to you: you can think of anything, you can talk of anything, you can live in this huge world and everything in it is yours to make of what you like, and what you do with it and what others do with it may be completely different, but the choice is yours to make.

And so sometimes, it's good to be alive.