Press "Enter" to skip to content

[(almost) retro twenty twenty-four day one nine five]: who should i look in the eyes, and for what length of time

taidoka 0

Welp, I gaffed, thinking my last “blogging every day” post, #172, published on July 12, 2024, was published on time, so I should look for pictures from July 13 to reconstruct what I was doing. And so, I was going to start a “retro 2024” series of blogposts to get back on track.

BUT, post 172 was late, so it ACTUALLY should have been posted on June 20th. But, IT WASN’T, so, WHATEVER, I had already pulled up images from July 13th and sketched out a blog post in my mind, SO, here we go, NOT QUITE RETRO 2024 yet.

Wait, why am I doing this, other than my obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which really should be “compulsive disordered obsession” (CDO) so not only would the acronym be alphabetical, but also the phrase would no longer need a hyphen as it was no longer a compound-word adjective?

Because it gets be back on track, that’s why! Don’t bother me, don’t bother me.(*)

Anyway.

Back in July of 2024, my wife and I were on a trip to downtown Asheville. Before Magneto destroyed it (oh, wait, my fact checkers are actually saying it was ravished by a hurricane) Asheville was one of our favorite getaway destinations, being only an hour and a half from our home in Simpsonville, South Carolina.

And there, we found Cary Gray’s Poetic Experience, where “he asks, you share, he writes.” After walking past it half a dozen times, I decided to sit for a session, where Cary asked questions about me that revealed my interest in robotics, my history of love for science going back to the Greenville County Library and their great big spinning globe, and my neurodivergent social anxiety disorder.

Cary ultimately put that into a poem, which he later physically mailed to me, laser-cut onto a set of boards that I have hanging in places in my Library. I apparently don’t have a picture of one of these, and am not going to hold up this blogpost, but I one quote sticks out in my mind:

“Who do I look in the eyes, and for what length of time?”

That’s the story of my life, I think, or at least the story of my inner mental life when I’m interacting with other people. I loved having eyes with lenses flexible enough to support the use of contacts, but now that I’m on progressive lenses, I enjoy taking them off when I’m talking to people, so their eyes blur out just enough that I don’t have to be self-conscious looking at people and can just be there present in the moment.

And I’d never have gotten a laser-engraved plaque bearing the words “Who do I look in the eyes, and for what length of time,” a plaque that now hangs in a place where I see it almost every day, unless I had stepped outside my circle for a little poetry reading.

So. Step outside your circle. You never know what benefits it might bring.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The Poetry Experience, in Asheville.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.