Abraxas

This much is true:

1. My husband left for the Caribbean yesterday, where he will be sailing in the Heineken Cup regatta in St. Maarten for the next ten days.
2. We are renovating our house: new shingles, new bathrooms, new deck, new paint.
3. We have three cars now and only a two car garage.

At the same time, this is also true:

1. My husband is sailing as crew: an all expense paid trip to help someone else win a race.
2. We borrowed money to renovate our house in the hopes that someone will buy it so we can go back to renting. The house goes on the market April 1.
3. My mom gave me her 14 year old car so we can sell my new car and get rid of the payments.

I realize now that the sun never truly goes down. It's just an illusion caused by the world ceaselessly spinning.

This time last year: my favorite game. This time last year Bryan was in the Caribbean for the same regatta. I did not go because I could not take the time off from work. While he was gone I blogged about buying a new coffee table. To buy or not to buy: that was the question.

This time next year: a game I dare not play. But I'd be lying if I didn't hope for the strong Caribbean sun to slap me flat across my face.

I never did buy a new coffee table.

It's going to happen quickly now, the process of downsizing. Selling the car, the house, the dream if I am to be dramatic about it, and let's face it: I blog, therefore I am (dramatic). Still, it feels strange, this anti-Jeffersonian unfolding of moving on down. Somehow it seems antithetical to being American, although I don't remember anyone ever promising me anything. (But if Bryan hums the theme song to Sanford and Son one more time, I will scream.)


This time next year: I don't know. We are shrinking from a double-income household with a hefty mortgage and car payments to a single-income household (for now), no mortgage, no car payments, no debt at all. (Of course no new coffee table, either.) I feel both free and restrained, light and beaten down, hopeful and dashed.

The sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.~F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I love this quote because I am often plagued by cognitive dissonance. If I have to be dreadfully confused, I might as well feel smart while doing it. (Although I'm not quite sure if the same holds true for a mind stuffed like a pinata with confetti-like bits of thought and cheap candy...)

Of course one question has been answered for me. To buy or not to buy. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune... Not quite what Shakespeare had in mind with that soliloquy, but there it is all the same. I will not be buying much of anything, have not for awhile now, and yet the fortunes I hold are still outrageous. I have and have not, those damn opposing ideas again, Abraxas with his truth and lying, good and evil, light and dark rolled up into one neat little package tied up with tongues. What do I think about all of this? I don't know. Everything, I guess.

Already in this post I have referenced Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Carl Jung, The Jeffersons, Kurt Vonnegut, Bogart and Bacall, Descartes, Sanford and Son, materialism and nothing. And yet I am pretty sure I have not said much at all. (It would be so much easier to post a photo of a vagina and be done with it.) What is there to say when you are losing everything but still have all that you need?

Quite simply, Abraxas was a supreme being, a hallowed and accursed word meaning both life and death. The name contained great mysteries because it contained the seven Greek letters that when computed numerically equaled the number 365, the number of days in a year.

This time last year, next year, same time. This time. This much is true(ish):

1. The sun does not rise and set.
2. It is an illusion from where we stand.
3. A silly perception in thinking that we are still.
4. That is all.

*click on images for source.