Be Here Now

Does it mean to be placid?  To forget about the assholes, the half-brain tail-gating you into the red light-filled intersection?  Does it mean that you should forget?  Be walked over?  Grow humility like other men grow balls?  Find a way to consistently turn, aggressively turn, away, behind, upside down?  Does it mean that you should forgive everything?

Or does it mean that you should purposefully castrate the planning mechanism in your brain, forget about causality and effort and strife and become learnedly helpless, but calm in that sea of non-regret, finding a paddle too much effort, because the concept of a future would be too heavy a burden to bear?

Perhaps it means a kind of non-thought.  A sucking up the pieces and molting them into a new skin kind of thought, a meta-metamorphosis, one that consumes so fully so as to invert, to churn into, and transform the utterly alien into acceptably prosaic, the banal into a kind of mystic glitter?

Whatever it is, I wonder, and spit, and keep on walking, looking only so long at the river as possible before going off to class, piecing together the fragments of myself from high school into college, wondering how those cool academics could be so goddamn cool, and emulating them with the kind of obsessive force that meant I'd do whatever it was they thought I should do, even and especially if it involved iterations of being here, now--or then.