Rockport

Summer In The Cape

Greetings from Cape Cod

You'll Never Belong Here

New York.

It's a beautiful city.  Full of beautiful people, buildings, streets and museums.  So many dazzling lights and smells and voices...

But you'll never live there.

In Los Angeles nobody really walks anywhere.  Those that do might look at one another, offer a glance or a smile...

Not in New York.  Everybody walks and nobody cares.  Everyone has somewhere to be, something more important going on, some reason not to stop and look.  Only visitors are interested in people-watching in a city swarming with so many faces... how can so many faces become faceless?

You will hear things.  Languages.  Music.   Accents so thick they spit in your ear.  You will see things.  Culture.  Fashion.  Women so unique they seem to walk around the corner and disappear into magazines.

They can't see you.  They've got somewhere to be.  If you wait 5 seconds, someone else will come around that corner -- again and again, endless repeat.  There is no short supply of interesting people to cast your eyes upon.

You will be a ghost in New York.  Invisible, you are free to roam anywhere at anytime with a golden ticket that can take you to any borough, any island, any other world you'd like to try.  Parks and pubs and clubs you've never seen before.

But you don't really belong in them.  You're passing through even when you're standing still.  No one can see you in New York unless you're a crazy person... and they've learned how to disappear the crazy people, too.

It's an invisible city built on vapor desperation.  Desperation.  You can't see it but it's everywhere.  Everyday is life or death or something like it.  That would probably explain why the parties are so good... so I'm told.

You will visit old friends.  You'll ask how they're doing and how they're enjoying the city.  You will be proud of them and tell them how incredible it is that they're doing it, making it, living it out here.

But you will look at your calendar and wish you could be on the next flight home.   Home.  You didn't know you had one until you came here.  But you do and you miss it like hell.  Because back home you still have a reflection waiting.  You have mirrors with great laughs that make you feel like a million dollars... while New York somehow makes you feel a million dollars in debt.

It's a beautiful city, but you'll never belong here.  Because somewhere in your lifespan, against your own intentions and plans, you decided you like the sun, you despise humidity, and you like your ponds a little smaller.

Happy Adventures to you.  Now go home and kiss your front door.

God vs The Universe

This is what God looks like in my head.

This might explain why I don't believe in the idea of a creator.  I believe in a spiritual force that provides a challenging path that we alone have the power to follow or ignore.

I call this force The Universe.  It doesn't have a face.  It doesn't have a sex.  It doesn't get angry or punitive or dictatorial.   This force at it's core is love.  And to reject love is to reject God.  Hell is the absence of all good things.  The absence of love.

God is supposed to be love, is he/she not?  And love doesn't have a face.  Or a rulebook.  It's just a force that we are lucky enough to tap into during our brief blink of an existence.

It's a part of us.  We just have to let it in.

Trust.

Revolving

Vampire

"The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his."  
 - Tanner's monologue from George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman"

I'm only a third into this play and already Shaw has illustrated some slightly horrifying truths about the self-serving mindset of artists.  We tell ourselves that no matter what we endure or experience, somehow it will feed our imagination; coal for the creative furnace which will burn the past into something warmer, something brighter, in the future.

We are storytellers, and we are always hunting for a moment worth sharing.  Feeding on those around us.  Living to collect memories.

But sometimes you stop and wonder if your collection of moments is building toward a sum of its parts.  Maybe it's not.   Maybe memories just boil down to that thing that happened to you once.  Nothing more.

I say this because I used to be very concerned with my NUMBER.  As if the number of people you sleep with has some bearing on the depth of your human experience -- your expertise on the nature of love, sex and relationships.  I'm not advocating sexual addiction, just a healthy dose of romantic experience in the time you have to be selfish and free... your youth.

So why is it that lately... I can't remember the goddamn number in the first place?

If it's so important, why am I blanking on certain names or certain moments?  I used to think sex was so important.  I thought I was behind the national average and trying to catch up.  But I'm only 30 and already I feel like some of those moments have gotten blurry.

Strange.

Sometimes I think I'm just competing with my idea of what a normal man is supposed to be.  He's supposed to divide and conquer like Attila until he's tired and old and ready to be responsible.  It's that point in the future -- when man is fat and content, when the lover and the fighter is replaced by the husband and the father -- when he will look back on his collection of moments and feel sated.  Satisfied.  Finished.

How many moments until you're finished?  How many hearts get broken?

Now I've tried to be a good (vampire) person, even though the definition is vague and dangerously subjective.  But I have hoped that my experiences are going to add up to a full life, and the old man I turn into will  have broken his curse before devoting himself entirely to the happiness of others (namely a family).  That's the plan.  Feed for half of your adult life, then build for the rest of it.

Even I know this plan is hardly foolproof.

Someone recently accused me of being "a man of many interludes". If you've ever been accused of being an operator by the opposite sex, you might feel a disarming mix of flattery, denial and existential angst.  It's not a sin to breakup, but if you're always the one leaving, you start to question if you're never going to be happy. Perhaps you've simply been engineered to consume and destroy.  Cue the guilt.  You're a walking curse. A vampire..  The kind of person people warn their girlfriends about.  You claim your innocence, you claim good intentions, but deep down you know there's a trail of bodies in your wake.

Maybe that's some kind of badge of honor for some people, but  the game ends sooner or later.  The tools you wield to make people fall in love with you will fade:  Your looks.  Your wits.  Your youth and energy.  It's going to leave you.  And when it does, maybe nobody loves you unless you can compensate with status.  Money.  Power.  Respect... things romantics claim are irrelevant while biology insists otherwise.

And we're hoping we're married by then, aren't we?   We hope we slide under the door just in time because we only want to be alone by choice, not by the force of nature that makes us lepers in the eyes of the young.  

(I suppose we could dovetail into abandonment issues or whatever clinical term best reduces a person into a schematic of faulty wires and damaged psyches.  But let's not even bother.)

I don't want to be a vampire.  I want to be a person.  I want great moments in my life to inform my work, but I don't want the hunting to overshadow the living.  You can collect moments and memories, but you can't collect people.  When they're gone, you can keep the photographs, you can listen to the songs that remind you of them, but you don't get to keep the woman in a bottle.  She does not belong to you.  All you have is your perspective on who she was and what she mattered to you.

So you write a song, or a script, or paint a picture of the people you've known and the way they changed you, or failed to change you.   Because these moments get lost so easily unless they are immortalized.  Repurposed.  Shared.  And fed on by others to inform their own experiences.

That's as close as an artist gets to keeping what they've lost.    This is our religion, our sense of meaning.  Our belief system.   And when we cannot express these experiences, when we worry that they will all be lost... well, it's a terrifying thought.

And thus, we feed to live.