Part I: Magic

Tim's voice singing Ryan Adams lingers in my ears. It's a shame bars don't allow smoking anymore. Oh, I know the arguments, and on my communist days I support them and on my libertarian days, I argue against them. It really takes away from the whole experience. I'm happy that people take smoke breaks, so that when they walk in you can catch a whiff of the tobacco smoke and feel like you're truly at a bar.

Tonight was Kurt's 21st birthday. We fulfilled a promise we made a couple years ago to have a beer before I graduated. Tim, Alex, and Price played a mix of original and cover songs. The three of us sat alone, while the bartender talked to two patrons at the bar. Later, another group of people came in and populated the tables next to us, but we didn't know who they were. One girl was pretty cute.

That promise is funny, really. Two years ago it seemed like it would never come, as if there was an infinite distance of time and space in between the two points. We lightly mourned the fact that we wouldn't get to go out to the Ale House too often before I left for good. The summer break would turn into a permanent chasm that willl only be bridged a few more times. It is particularly ironic in that we've waited, looking forward to that moment for quite some time. Now that it's here, I wish it had never come. Satisfaction's only child is disatisfaction.

It's a shame that not many people know Sartre's quote about eternity. He advocated, like other existentialists, living a life aware of your own death so that every moment may be lived to the fullest. But then he says that without eternity, everything is meaningless. I bet that doesn't make people comfortable. I bet it freaks them out. But they scare me, because I feel like they aren't being honest. People go about their daily lives and pretend like their experiences have meaing. That frustrates me. Just because you pretend your life has meaning and that your everyday activities are worthwhile doesn't mean that somehow they actually are.

Carson Pittman interned at Georgia Southern. Fletcher and I visited some friends there last summer and I got to meet Carson. He's a pretty cool guy. He wrote once that leaving a community is like a little death. I think he's right too. Somehow leaving reminds us of our own mortality, of the mortality of our friends, and of the futility of it all. I've spent four years in Auburn cultivating friendships that will be abruptly ended with a slip of paper to hang on my wall and prove it. And isn't it bitter that in your last months in an area you make more friends?

I think Sartre's quote is pretty spot on. I think Carson's is too. I also think I am fairly logical, and the conclusion is particularly nasty. This last four years of themselves hold no meaning for me. In looking back on formerly fond memories there is neither joy nor hope. The past exists and stands against us, mocking us in the present, prophesying that in the future we will only find more occasions for disappointment, misery, loss, and despair.

The Preacher tells us that all is vanity. The word for vanity actually means vapor. That is what the past, the friendships, and the memories are. That is what now is. That is what the future will be.