letters: existential edna

dear readers... i have become increasingly interested in reading old letters. the art of sitting down and writing to someone brings me alot of joy. for some reason letters always say something. emails seldom do and have rendered letter writing a dying art. forgive the indulgence, but seeing how i've essentially just completed my m.a. and appear to be embarking on new adventures, this email i found myself spending all day yesterday writing seems to provide a nice assessment of my head space at the present time. i publish it, as a letter might once have been published, for your curiousity and amusement... (as always, names have been omitted to protect the innocent.) --evil

existential edna,

thanks so much for your last email. alot has gone on in the last month so i hope you'll pardon the lengthy response time. i was in prince edward island for a time... also, my research essay has kept me rather busy but is about to be submitted in its final incarnation on tuesday. and surprisingly i have been enjoying myself in ottawa enough that i accepted a summer job with one of my professors on an interesting project which will involve alot of travel and feild work around eastern ontario. however, it's just a four month contract so it will enable me to move back to Van with some money in the bank.

i also started smoking cigarettes again -- ack!

in your last email you left me with a pointed question regarding the power of the unexplained. i've been thinking about this for the past few weeks, wondering what prompted such a question -- i assume that there must have been something. i reckon the power of the unexplained is possibility. or maybe potential would be the better word...the potential for something to blow your fucking mind, to pleasantly surprise you, to bring you to your knees. on second thought, maybe that is the power of the unexpected.

i reflected on your question this afternoon in crack park, a nice (but very seedy) park just a hop, skip and a jump from my front door. i was recovering from a pretty wild evening which raged into the wee hours of the morning and represented very much the end of an era for me. the last seven months i have been working at the graduate bar at b-list university (think koerners pub only more ghetto). this job really represented the the culmination of me finally becoming who i want to be as opposed to who i thought i had to be. last night, we kicked all the riff-raff out of the bar at the stroke of twelve, locked the doors and let 'er fucking rip. me, my co-worker bunny (a great friend of hot suzy's) and about ten others drank and smoked ourselves silly and danced and laughed and hugged and carried on until we passed out on the floor of my living room around 6:30am in front of a roaring fire...

sitting in crack park this afternoon, leafing through some marshall mcluhan (feeling... anxious?) and still drunk and stoned from the night before, i became almost euphoric in away. i looked around at the neighbourhood, the tennement houses and the brick masonry, and realized that all of it is unexplained in a way isn't it? human life is unexplained so far as we know. the ability for you and i to communicate in such a way, remains largely full of questions, wouldn't you say?

i think we should embrace the unexplained. too often through my reading and schooling i've had great mysteries explained, measured and rationalized, and seldom have i ever been pleased with the result. most recently i read an article which asserted that so-called *existential crises* experienced by people in their twenties are merely symptoms of "late-capitalism" and a population of disillusioned twenty-somethings looking for a way to reject the corporatization of almost every single element of human life. now for me to read this was frustrating, becuase it seemed to trivaliaize it somehow, cheapen it... to take that time, that phase, the search for those answers on who you're going to be, of self-exploration, and chalk it up (with a shrug) to capitalism. "yeah yeah," went the argument, "of course people have existentital crises. it's a new form of rebellion in a world where the revolution is dead." fuck off.

sometimes it's nice to remain among your own delusions.

for isn't that what the masses want to do? the somnambulant -- the sleepwalkers -- mcluhan speaks so ill of? is not the weekend quest into the shopping mall and the big box store in search of material satisfaction evidence of mass delusion? isn't this what advertising does? rebirth through new possessions! you too can be born again! nowhere is that more visisble than my parents house. i hadn't seen my folks in a year and a half, yet they couldn't tear themselves away from their televisions sets. they both retired after supper to their respective t.v. rooms while i sat alone reading books in the living room. welcome home.

fuck, this has become a bit of a discursive effort...despite this, i hope you can glean something in the way of an answer to your question here. perhaps you've already found your answers. rilke once said that we must not worry so much about the questions, but enjoy the journey of finding the answers. did ever read rilke?

i remember _____. he was married to the alaskan woman, wasn't he? i found him extremely attractive. jajajaja...

never settle -- thank you for this.

evil