We fear this sort of thing – this dying of too much pleasure, too much joy – but I think it is only fear. Perhaps it is the fear of losing the goodness that kills us or at least kills our joy.

Movement and change, that is what is constant, nothing settles, nothing stops and nothing stays perfectly the same. We have to train ourselves to adapt to change and movement if we want to be ready for life.

It is curious that so much of education is NOT that, so much of it supposes that one reaches some plateau and just relaxes. That you should work your way to some goal and then it is happily ever after in a still, repetitive same-ness.

My God, Claudius is the ultimate mansplainer. He tells Laertes all the things he didn’t want to know, all the things that surely Laertes knows better than Claudius and a whole mess of bullshit. Claudius uses speech as a weapon. If he just keeps talking, eventually his target may just surrender.

Uh, Claudius? That’s ROMANTIC LOVE you’re thinking of. Familial love generally isn’t categorized with sparks and fire. Sparks and fire do die out, it’s true. But familial love is not a fire. It is more like an ocean that is always there, always something to return to, even when you cannot make the trip anymore, or the ocean dries up (heaven forbid,) it will always be there – the tide going in and out, sometimes providing solace, sometimes picking you up and throwing you into the sand. Familial love doesn’t die – even for those members of a family that might not deserve one’s love. I have a friend whose mother has always been quite wretched to her and last year she finally made a break. Last year, she was 42. It takes decades to shake one’s self out of dysfunctional horrible love – to extract one’s self from that ocean, if you need to.

I am mostly fortunate. The unkind members of my family were largely outsiders and so only temporary. When I return to the ocean, it is mostly to sit by it and muse.

Time sits on his throne. He rests his long pointed hands, jointed like the hands of a clock, on his legs. His face round, his nose, like a sundial, eyes like little stars – they move in his head like constellations. When he opens his mouth, galaxies fall out.

His tasks keep him very busy – beginning love takes quite a bit of his time, as it were – there is so much love in the world, really. Every time a child is born, a love affair begins between parent and child and so many are born every minute, it is no wonder that occasionally, Time misses one out and a child is born who cannot love or a parent does not get their jolt of love at the birth. Time usually tries to make up for his mistake by giving them all love elsewhere later – but he knows it is not as good.

Then, too, he is charged with bringing friends together, and lovers. Sometimes he even touches a shopkeeper and her customer, though that is not the strongest dose.
Pets, cities, co-workers, strangers with expressions that move other strangers – it is a massive job for Time to accomplish – there is no end of love that he begins. Even if it’s just the love of coffee in the morning.

Love for a father does not usually have to be earned. Most people are born into it, loving their fathers whether or not their fathers have done anything to deserve it. Love for a father has to be wrung from a person, by neglect or mistreatment. People love their fathers even if they do not like them.
I love my father, and he’s done nothing to shake that could or should shake that love loose. My love is well earned. Meanwhile, I have known many children whose fathers really did not deserve their love and admiration – but they had it anyway.

You know who was probably a painting of a sorrow and a face without a heart? Probably you, Claudius, when you went to your brother’s funeral of which you were the cause. I’ve recently learned, due to the current political climate, what a standard gaslighting procedure this is – It is a pretty effective way to accuse someone of something.

Claudius sure knows how to ask an inflammatory question. My god.
This one reminds me of kids I’ve known, usually somewhere on the autism spectrum. It makes me wonder what would happen if you played Claudius on the spectrum. Would he engender some more sympathy that way? Would he make different kinds of sense? He’s smooth enough to get social interactions right a lot of the time but the times where he steers wrong, those are pretty wrong.

The problem with this migraine situation is that there does not appear on “out of this” to be. Now that it has reared its head, it appears that this will be my new normal. This is the situation now. I have moved into a place where my doctor says a migraine once a week is pretty good actually, compared to other migraineurs. There is no eliminating them entirely. Even if they vanished, they’d still be an ever possible threat. There is no cure. It’s just the this that I will never be out of.

The picture Claudius is painting of Hamlet is incredibly infantilized. It’s like – he’s this child wishing and begging for his friend to come over to play with him. As if they were going to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or jacks or Cowboys and Indians or Danes and Swedes or whatever games the children of Elsinore might play with each other. Wishing and begging are not particularly adult behaviors.