Look Both Ways

There was a time, when the sky was darker than it is now, that it was hard for me to say hello to someone and mean it. I don't even know what hello means, so how could I possibly mean it even when I meant it? I've never thought of that before. Something I have thought of is that hello, when you give each syllable an equal stress, sounds like someone was interrupted during a conversation about hell and was startled. "hell, oh". It's a resigned kind of surprise, like when you've been waiting to hang out with a friend or a girl or a girl friend or a girlfriend all day and they call and say that something came up and they have to watch a movie with their family. That kind of oh. It's funny to me how the spacing difference between girl friend and girlfriend means a lot. That's like when people say that they would be really interested in someone if their spacing weren't so far apart. I've said that, and I was dumb. This isn't a lead-in to talking about girls. I just thought that was interesting. Sometimes, when people use words, they don't mean what the words mean. People love to say that they don't believe in such and such a thing, but when they say that I think they mean they don't like the idea of such and such a thing. Like when someone says that they don't believe in deforestation or eating at fast-food restaurants. What they really mean is that they don't like the idea of those things, and I wish they would just say that and leave belief alone. It has enough to think about already. If you think about the words you use, I'll bet you'll find that there are more of them than there need to be. That's how it always is for me. At the end of each day, there's a whole pile of words that I have to step over to get into bed. I've spent most of my life full of verbal clutter and linguistic angst, as if my happiness depended on getting one more story or joke or saying or reference to a book that I may or may not have read out before the light went out. Like I said, I'm dumb, except that the last time I said that I said "was", which probably made you think that it had ended, but you shouldn't think that because I was using the imperfect tense, which means that it hasn't necessarily ended, and not the preterite, which means it has ended. Don't feel bad about yourself, you couldn't have known. This isn't a post about the benefits of silence. My dad would like it to be, and if he were writing this it would be about that, but I'm still on the fence about how I feel about all of the lonely silence business. I like the idea of it, but I get lonely too quickly and so I read a book or listen to music written by other people who are writing about being lonely. This post is just about saying what you mean. The reason that there are more than 100 words in the English language is because there is a never ending demand for linguistic specificity. You could be vague, or you could say exactly what you mean. You could say that you don't believe in driving a car, or you could say that you don't like the idea of driving a car because the noise scares you and that there was that one time when you were on a road trip with The Black Keys blaring in your car and you had to go to the bathroom really badly but couldn't find a place so you just peed in your car. I would understand your aversion to driving if you told me that. I don't know many things, but I know when people are hiding something. To be more specific, I know when people are trying to avoid talking about something. I don't know when people are hiding a body in their trunk or when they are hiding ice cream from me. Well, I usually know when people are hiding ice cream from me, but the part about the body is true. I don't think that I have a right to know everything that someone else knows or has done. I just mean that if you want to tell me something, say it. Don't take 3 hours of beating around the bush at a house meeting to talk about why its wrong to have alcohol in the Young Life house. There was only one Young Life leader living there anyways, and he had a bottle of Bourbon in his closet and I know that because I drank some of it and he was the one getting upset about the alcohol being in the house. People are funny. One reason that I love my mom and my dad is that they say things that they mean. I don't always agree, but who cares. I think that people live most of their lives in front of an imaginary audience whom they don't want to offend, so they don't look at the cute girl sitting across the room and they certainly don't go talk to her, and they look both ways before they get upset or excited or interested. Their loss. Say what you mean, and don't look both ways before you do.