What is the most free you have ever felt, and was it at the same time the most crazy? The most intoxicating? If you did not edit yourself, would you seem insane?

One of my best friends put it something like this, “The next morning, my outgoing message list breaks my heart.” Tell me about your drunk text experiences.

• http://www.quietbabylon.com/2009/05/29/6-things-that-give-me-a-crushing-sense-of-scale/

These Secret Vespers installments are tagged with scale, though many others could be. That crushing sense is one of the hardest sensations for me to put to words. Like love, hope, and so many other pre-verbal feelings, I find I can set it up with words or art, but that’s all I can do. The rest happens in the viewer or reader.

I get sort of dizzy, sort of light-heading, and I feel sort of outside myself when the scale of something big hits me. The traffic seen from above a major highway does this to me. The ocean, especially when stormy, does this to me. That documentary, Baraka, does this to me.

But enough about me. What has given you a crushing sense of scale?

There is always another way out. Your same imagination that has you in its trap can have you anywhere else. Have you ever known someone who came to the brink, believed in the trap, then found a way free?

Herman knows all about your issues and calls you out on them every chance he gets. But who is he? Who does he think he is?

I have kept the phrases my closest friends gave me. A teenager is “a case of ginger ale”, empty praise from the human resources director is “a licorice reward”, and the rocks that reach out into the bay of the small town where I grew up are “where the dragon fell asleep a thousand years ago”. I can barely describe how painful it was to choose what to keep and what to leave behind. These phrases are the best things I am keeping.

Is it crazy to take a bus this far? I cannot see myself doing it by air—too clean, too impersonal. When I arrive I will step straight down onto the broken asphalt of the parking lot. Austin, I will move my lips. I will be in the thick of its air and its smells, its dust. Change comes up at you from the ground, it doesn’t feel right any other way. This ride is centering, a stench coming from the lavatory, a rhythm maintaining the brink of nausea, a boredom that makes all my music and all my books seem boring. I only wish it could take longer. I wanted this so badly.

I want to find who you can be now that I have washed my context clean. I want to feel a rush of nerves, to laugh with you without knowing where such laughter leads, to kiss you and have no idea that a kiss can be so thrilling. I want you to give me a phrase I have never heard before.

I found my flute and started playing, worse than when I was seventeen. I have never been more pleased. A year ago I spoke with old friends only on the phone, only while I was in a cab. Now I spend hours with them for no reason at all. I used to eat at pricey restaurants I hated. It cost just three dollars to feed myself today and I used my spare time to learn to juggle.

The world is ninety percent poor if we judge it that way, but other things are equal.

I want to know what you would love to lose if everyone else would, too. I want to stay up all night with you and throw that stuff away. And when all this mess is over, I want to dance with you. I want to dance like light on the rubble of our ruined city.

What are the ways you might pull yourself apart, and what do the results look like? This is the second in a series of six installments beginning here: http://secretvespers.com/2008/07/21/pieces-part-1/

Have you ever been drawn to something destructive, lost, or hopeless? Today’s installment is the first in a six-part series of harlequin images.

Should your friends encourage you to change, or to stay the same? Which do you think is more helpful, more dangerous, or both?