I wake up every morning and have to take a few moments to figure out what is real, and what is dream. Every morning. I wonder if this is the only day I am alive, and all I know is preprogrammed material written by strange Gods that delight in stories about humans. Maybe they made up the whole thing. Humans. Earth. Music.
No. Music is real. That is certain.
Regardless, I wake, and the day begins.
Coffee. First thing. Every day.
Except for the days when it's not available. Which usually means I am doing something different, something new and exotic. So no coffee days are okay.
Write in my journal. My morning pages. My attempt to make some sort of order out of the chaos. And the doors open, my mind wanders and leaps in confusion and joy, and all these possibilities present themselves to me.
And I accept as many as I can.
Except for days I don't.
Those are the sad days. The days lost to worries and angst that never gets me anything but a sense of stolen time.
Even if this day, this life, this existence, is a simulacrum, an advanced computer program, I dig it. I love it. I revel in it.
I think, therefore I am.
And I am alive.
I think at least a hundred times a day.
Here's a song. It's "Free" by Flo and the Machine.
I find meaning everywhere. Not just in books and music and movies and myths, but in moments I witness as I stroll through this world.
Meaning. Clues to Life. Reassurance. Omens good & bad. All over the place.
When I was all of twenty-four, I moved to NYC for the first time, pretty much sight unseen. I had stood on the tarmac at JFK once when I was seventeen and looked out to see the silhouette of the Twin Towers in the distance, but that was as close as I had ever come to Gotham. I stared at those towers like they were a distant castle in an enchanted kingdom. I ached to move there.
I had wanted to move to NYC for as long as I could remember. The first time I saw the original King Kong, around 5 years old, as I watched my favorite simian stomp his way through the Big Apple, I thought to myself "I am going to live there when I grow up".
I never really grew up, but I did get older. Went to college. Found theatre. became a theatre major my third year. Graduated at 24, went to the Barn Theatre and got my Equity card, got a tour for a dance show to Japan, came back home to San Jose, California, loaded up my little Hyundai Excel, and headed East.
I got there on Halloween.
And the shit hit the fan in every way possible. I was broke. Alone. And for the only prolonged time in my life (so far) depressed. I felt like I had somehow fucked up my journey. Like my spirit guides had all abandoned me. I was the poorest, and skinniest, I have ever been. The cheapest thing I could do for entertainment was go to the MET, which was free for people who lived in the city.
And I came upon this painting of a girl, lost. Like crazy lost. No hope. What the fuck will I do now?
It cut me to the core. I had no idea what the painting was of, only that I felt exactly like the girl. Lost. Confused. Doomed. Turned out to be a painting of Joan of Arc, right when she hears the voices for the first time. It's intense.
I found meaning. Clarity. Beauty wrapped in sorrow. I was still depressed and lost, but a tiny bit less lonely.
Recently, we went to Disneyland. I never went there growing up so it's always held a sort of sacred magic.
Never is not quite accurate. I did go there when I was about four, for one day, with my father, shortly after he and my mom split up. I remember the Haunted Mansion, the rocket ride, and Pirates of the Caribbean. It was the last time going there until I was seventeen. The Mix of having gone once with a father who I would not see again until I was twenty-eight, mixed with not going again for my entire childhood, gave the whole place a mystique that remains to this very day. I walk into the Magic Kingdom, and I am good, the world is just and kind and fair.
However, on the last trip, I noticed something about Pirates.
It's really a descent into Hell. Not in a bad way. More like I'm Dante, and the ghost of Virgil is taking me on a tour of the Inferno. We start on a boat. We float through a bayou at dusk. A banjo plays in a beat up old shack. I imagine an old pirate, playing one last tune before checking out. We enter darkness. A talking skull warns us we are about to see some weird shit. Then we drop off a waterfall, go through a cave full of strange colors, drop down another waterfall, and come upon a beach with a couple of skeletons. A seagull sits on the head of one, a crab waves its claws at another. I am fairy certain the gull and crab house the souls that once filled those skeletons, and they are realizing they are now dead and stuck on a beach in Hell. Next, we pass a weird bar, full of more skeletons. A pair of them play chess, stuck in stalemate forever. Another sits at the bar, holding up a bottle that pours clear liquid into into the skeletal mouth. The liquid turns red as it flows into the empty body. And the thirsty bag of bones never quinces its thirst. A Pirate Tantalus. Next, we meet another skeleton, trying to escape an eternal storm.
And then shit gets really weird. We float into a room full of treasure. A well dressed skeleton lays in bed, looking through a magnifying glass at nothing, searching for a clue like a spooky Pirate Sherlock Holmes. And a voice tells us we are now cursed for having seen the treasure. Then we pass a skeletal torso in a glass case, that becomes human as we pass it.
And now we are with the dead, lost in their memories, playing out their mistakes and misdeeds over and over and over. Battles. Late night drinking parties where we end up talking to cats and pigs, or scream at each other, or tie things to frightened people whose homes we have just destroyed. On and on, each scene stranger than the one before. Finally, we go through a burned up ship, past some shockingly drunk pirated shooting at each other while surrounded by boxes of gun powder, and then the final thing we see is a rather detached, lost Jack Sparrow mumbling about how we are all pirates.
And a voice tells us Dead Men Do Tell Tales.
And we, the Dead, are sent back to the world.
Maybe I read too much into things, but that's just how I'm wired.
Today, I find meaning in my morning walk. In my coffee. In writing this blog.
Now I am off, to explore America via a pilot that is a a variation of an old script of mine called "Lunatics and Assholes".
Perhaps I shall get it made, and some young lost soul will watch it and find meaning.
Perhaps.
And now, a tune for your listening pleasure. It's the first track from this album I love so much when I was in college, a collection of Disney tunes reimagined by Hal Willner and performed by some musical luminaires. This is Stay Awake, by Suzzane Vega. It's creepy and cool.
I'm standing on the shore of Shaver Lake, California, high in the Sierra Nevada. It's the last full day of Camp Chawanakee. I'm 14 years old, surrounded by hundreds of fellow Boy Scouts, watching my troop lose, by a lot, in a row boat race. The boats are these metal row boats we all use to get our rowing merit badge, and can also check out during camp to head out to Thunderbird Island. There are about ten boats in the water. The race is to row out with a crew of four to a buoy in the lake, circle it, and come back. My buddy Jay is in the boat. He's two years younger than me, but my best friend. We met on a kayak trip, discovered a mutual love of the Stones, the Kinks, and other stalwarts of what is now called classic rock but was to us back then simply music we dug. Jay is the funniest kid I have ever met. And always does shit you would not expect. He looks like a miniature businessman to me most of the time. Short hair, horn-rimmed glasses, a resting face that looks like he is considering the stock market. But he is the antithesis of that. He is the kid who will convince you to sneak out at night and toilet paper someone's house. To sneak a beer out of the parent's fridge. And the entire time, you laugh your ass off as you do something that will for sure get you in trouble. For instance, once, while we were hanging out at his folks place, he thought it would be fun for us to take his dad's Cherokee Chief out for a spin. He was 12, so of course he drove. How we didn't get noticed and pulled over is still a mystery to me, but a lot of the grown-up world seemed crazy then, and still does to this day, so it wasn't all that nuts. When we finally returned to his house, his father was waiting for us in the garage. And we lived to tell the tale.
So there I am, on the shore, watching Troop 339, the pride of the Pioneer District, getting lapped by several other boats.
And I see Jay look over at the boat in the lead.
And I know exactly what he is planning to do.
Because when you're tight with someone, that's how it goes.
Jay puts down his oar, stands up, and leaps out of the boat, swims to the winning boat, grabs the side, and manages to flip it over. The scouts in the boat leap out, into the water, and the winning boat is now upside down.
Everyone in the race is able to swim, and are all wearing life jackets, so we are fairly certain no one is going to die.
There is a moment of silence, and then the entire crowd roars with laughter. It's just too funny not to. I don't know why. Maybe it's because something about the look on Jay's face makes it clear he isn't a sore loser, he is just not having it anymore. He sees the ridiculousness of his situation and has decided to change it.
The kids from the now upside down boat swim over to Jay's boat and flip it over.
In an instant, everyone in the race is out of their boat, flipping other boats over and howling with joy.
I have this image burned in my brain of Jay standing on the back of the boat he flipped as it sinks into Shaver Lake's murky depths. His hands are raised over his head, and he is, for that moment, a God of Chaos here on Earth.
And we lived to tell that tale too. It probably helped that the lake wasn't too deep where the race took place, and all boats were retrieved.
Some shit you just can't make up.
So now, it's here. Today. And Jay is fighting another ridiculous situation. One involving cancer. And I want him to leap out of his boat and swim and sink that fucking boat.
If there is anyone in this universe who can do that, it's Jay.
Here's a song. It's Jumping Jack Flash by The Stones.
