To have boundless capacity for joy is the greatest tragedy in the Shakespearean sense.
Because to feel joy so intensely is to realize that the sky is so brilliant a shade of blue and that no one can see it in their race to quell.
To quell.
To quell everything, because somehow when they were kids and they experienced their first disillusionment with the world, with a loss too unexpected and too big to lose to restless dreams, the first time the realized their father fallible, or their mother malicious.
It's been happenning since the first onset of politics, the first king, the first man who's brilliance turned to ambition and not poetry.
(I sit and play in a business world and I hate them all for it but what hurts most is that I can see how much they hate themselves...)
And ever since then, as a child of six or eight or ten, you looked up and saw how brilliantly it can hurt and you decided to run away and hide in lipgloss and matchbox cars and all things Cool.
I watch you hide, I see other people watching the same game with bemusement, watching the mallrats hate themselves, and blame the world for it...
...and indeed the world is at fault. The world in it's entirety and Atlantis is lost because we've let it slide in a moment's weakness, and a few of us are still trying to build true autonomous zones free of not only your judgement but your influence on what we need and want and feel...
...but every twist and turn there is a Laywer, there is a Disapproval, there is a Law a Wall an Obstacle and it's not the obstacles that get in the way
but how ugly the masks are of the people who put them there.
And you can take your MPAA and your American Government, and your lying constitution and I watch you try to stifle the joy in the rest of the world with it because you've forgotten how to understand that joy
and you resent that it lives outside the limits you have bounded yourself with.
And I can see the joy and sometimes I remember it so clearly that I can see the molecules dancing in the air, sometimes the moments of utter uberhuman clarity knock me back and make me wonder if it is epilepsy, or psychosis, or that time I took more than the clinically determined dangerous amount of acid and if it has changed me and the disjointedness I feel really is the sociopathy that people claim it is.
Indeed, I am maladjusted.
But Steven often reminds me that I am maladjusted because I need to be.
Because I need to see the joy
and because I can handle the pain of watching you try to tear it down.
You can't
But it hurts to watch you try, to commit crimes against humanity, to commit legal crimes against joys that you have deemed illegal.
Madame Justice, you have slept in a wealthier man's bed and I loathe you for it, but I loathe you because I can see you crying.
Madame Justice, you have left me for a prettier man, but you are not the True Name of Beauty.
And so I am crying, wracking myself with tears and dirtying my skin, because I remember the first time I was disillusioned, and the last time a handful of hours ago, and I remember them and leave myself vulnerable to them again and again because I will never forget the first time I looked up and couldn't believe how magnificence towered above, and around me.