There is so much disappointment.

Last night my husband said "everything is always so great at first, and then it turns to shit." We were talking about Hulu. But it's the same progression everywhere. Anticipation, a moment or two of intense pleasure, pleasure waning, pleasure dropping below expectation level, pleasure fading into a fine point of light, pleasure vaporized, a big calcified void in its place, all of that pleasure still ringing hot in your ears, its memory now some kind of aspiration, some archetype of pleasure against which everything will fall short.

In high school you learn that every "good" short story "must" dwell at least in part in desire. What a character wants becomes the driving force of the narrative, how s/he tries to get it arises in conflict. What a nifty formula.

I'm driven by the things I want. When I think about the Theravadan monks who rove in the forests, or beg on the streets for alms, possessing nothing, wanting nothing beyond the most meager means of survival--but there it is. The monks desire survival. Which requires a kind of surrender. If death is a kind of freedom, then it would stand, if my years of reading the existentialists serve me, that life is an oppression, a tiny cell. But we don't, most of us, want to die. We want life and freedom. We want.

My mother says "forget yourself." She has been saying this to me my whole life. "Don't be self-conscious." Before a performance. Before having a picture taken. I used to think it meant merely, don't act in that weird frozen way that unsettles a room. But at its most profound level, it means to die unto yourself. To annihilate your perception of yourself, and your perception of how others perceive you. To be absent the all-consuming desire that dictates how you walk, smile, eat. To forgive yourself your shame, your guilt, your hungers. To be free.

I think the necessary consequence of such freedom is sublime love.

Whereas we may all be so nice, and so appropriate, and so tit-for-tat, and yet find ourselves, when everything turns to shit, all alone. The Golden Rule has fucked us all up. It's not "be kind, so others will be more likely to be kind to you." It's just "Love." Without wanting. Without demanding, or expecting. The hardest thing to do in the world, I think, because I think to really do it, you must be part-monk. Effaced. A vessel.

The wanting must be sublimated by the doing.

Mostly I don't really want this world, I want another world.