music makers

Where are you?

I've been thinking about my dreams lately. My dreams have always been vivid and bizarre, but right now they are really striking me. This may be simple because I'm currently well rested and am sleeping as much as I can stand (though not always straight in a row).

Last night I dreamed that I been just woken after some sort of ten-year hibernation, which for some reason meant that I had to hang out with some lesbians talking about the photo book their talented friend had made of photos of them after they had all been in Usher's wedding, which was held during a timeout in a baseball game, out on the diamond with the players still on the field ("I'm not a player, I just crush alot..."). The book was ridiculously thick and had been simply titled "L", which one of them told me the producers of The L Word didn't like, but you can't copyright a whole letter, right? I just wanted to know where exactly I was and when i got to go somewhere else. I found my computer and was able to check my messages, and my inbox was full of messages from all kinds of people I wanted to hear from, but one stood out. My Liz had sent me a picture. No message, just a picture of her smiling and laying on a couch in a loose yellow dress. She used to avoid wearing yellow because her skin was so fair she said it didn't look good on her, but it did in this picture. I was preparing to send her a picture in return and more came from her. Her sitting, her again on the couch with a couple of friends, always smiling.

The pictures had that sort of over saturated color that pics from the 70's sometimes have. Before I could respond with my picture, stumbling trying to decide what kind of picture to send- old or shoot a new one, silly or just smiling, flattering or plain?-, she showed up at the door. What had sort of been a room in a mall like supercomplex was now a converted version of my grandparents old living room, and I invited her in and we hugged and began talking immediately. We stumbled over each other trying to explain the last few years that we have been apart (that whole ten year hibernation thing sort of evaporated like things do in dreams). Nothing really that we talked about was all that important, but I remember feeling so relieved to have found my friend again.

When I said "My Liz" earlier, I mean the Liz who I was friends with in highschool and became better friends with in college. I called her my Liz to distinguish between the other Liz's in my life, who became known as Mason's Liz, Lisa's Liz, and Sculpture Liz, each according to how I came to know them. Once Sculpture Liz took offense and told me she was going to make t-shirts which said, "I'm my own Liz" for all of them. I never meant to offend and don't mean to now. If I have ever met anyone who was their own person it would be her.

The dream was remarkable in how comfortable it was just sitting and talking and realizing how much I've missed her. I hope I can find her again.

that fine line between acceptance and resignation

(again, this is a dredged up draft from sometime last year, which I think I didn't publish because I thought that the characters it was written about would read it and take it personally and if posted with the knowldge that it would likely be read by who it was about, then it would necessarily end up being a message to them. I didn't write it as a passive aggressive message to anyone; I wrote it to sort out bits of my mind. Now that time has passed and I can't remember who I was thinking about when I wrote it, here it is. Originally writen 7/7/06.)

We'll see if I can manage to curb my tendency to write too long-windedly, and just stir a little bit into the murky crud which has been swirling through my mind. The last little bit has been a bit crazy.

I've never been an expert on sane living and never will be. Which suits me fine as I don't think many of us find ourselves surrounded by a sane world, and playing at pretending it is just an invitation to the devil, as two friends of mine have recently found out while succumbing to his second favorite game, the-way-it-is-supposed-to-be. This is the trouble with the devil: he doesn't really make you do it, so fighting and hating him won't get you anywhere. He's never been the one who commits the crime, only reminds you that you could.

You can lose your temper. You can run from your actions consequences. You can leave the consequences for others. You can push loved ones away and snuggle up to ridiculous fictions and believe it is all true. But the devil didn't make you do it, he just doesn't pretend letting it all go is impossible.

Southerners tend to grow up fairly intimately aware of temptations and the general crudeness of the world. We also tend to play fast and loose with our interpretations of reality and how we care to look at the world. Read any Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor. Don't for a second think I am disparaging an imaginative outlook and interpretation of your surroundings. You can construct any fanciful kingdom you care to live in, just be sure to be careful not to build the foundation on shifting sand or put any of the struts and beams where inconvient bits of harder, more solid reality might come crashing through.

This is, as my convoluted ramblings often are, going to be taken wrongly by the folks it is obliquely about. It isn't so much meant to be just about either of them and their delightful jaunts away from sanity and responsibility, but settling myself down while watching things spiral out of control around me. Here is where I find myself in that slippery place, wanting to reach out and grab and steer and save the ones around me that I love. Grab and scream and tell them they are making mistakes and how they can fix it all and hold their hands while they do.

Which of course I can't do. I can't fix it all and have enough trouble holding it all together myself. And I've slowly accepted that. Watching friends over the years self-destruct here and there, slipping over brinks I couldn't pull them back from and trying to put myself between them and whatever pain was headed their way... and by and large it doesn't work, until they ask for it. It isn't some external devil which I could ever slay. Until "you could..." and "you'll just fuck up eventually, so why not now?" and "they/you deserve it" lose their siren pull, there is no mast stout enough to bind them to.

So again I'll wander along, try to keep up and tell them I love them and pray the next time they are looking over some more desperate precipice that they won't take that next leap.

right now...

I am missing New York in a serious way. Just got back on land off the boat, but we offloaded in Hilo (on the Big Island), so I'm staying in a hotel til I fly back to Honolulu in the morning. The peaceful moment with a room to myself (you have no idea what kind of a luxury that is in my life now) is great, but I was just surfing around on the internet and saw a friend from the city in a magazine spread (he's not normally a model, so it was unexpected). The familiar face and all the time alone in my head conspired to send a fucking tidal wave of homesickness crashing over me.

I'm not the homesick type.

Right now though, I'd kill to be sitting at Nowhere at happy hour eating a chicken and cheese fajita from the Chinese/Mexican place next door or sitting in my underwear on tuesday night at Rbar watching cartoons while Carter makes flavored vodka or to be at one of the boys' apartments watching America's Next Top Model with the crew. Damn. I miss my friends, I miss my haunts, I miss my garden... easy tiger. Let's not get carried away.

This last trip I had my first get-me-the-hell-off-this-boat moment since taking the job. Don't worry, I still love it. I've got some awesome pictures of tapertail ribbon fish and cool critters puked up by lancetfish (which I'll share later). The job I love and I still like Hawaii, but I just had that moment when you know you need a break.

So I'm going to take one. One more trip this go round and I am taking a fucking break. Sort of, if traveling through San Francisco, New York (yay!), Seattle, Portland, Puerto Rico, Montreal, and D.C. in two months with two weddings in the mix is what you consider 'taking a break'.

This is something of the conundrum that my wanderlust has always faced: I really like settling to a place and getting in a routine. I'm a hell of a creature of habit. I like seeing the same folks again and again and doing the same things again and again. Really. But I just couldn't stay happy settled down in one spot, at least not so far. I've never actually really been able to envision myself in any kind of life work that lets me sit in one place. I really can't quite visualize it. That may sound kind of silly, but I mean it. I can imagine myself somewhere for a while, but only with an eye on the horizon. It has sort of always been that way.

Every career or lifestyle I've ever pictured myself in has been one of constant motion, do this here and move on there. As a kid I was always sort of inside my head and pretty awkward at interpersonal interactions. Really fucking awkward, and I seemed to have a knack for making friends with people who always moved away. I'd become best friends with a kid, and then realize that his parents were in the airforce and the next year he'd be gone off to Iceland or Germany or wherever. This isn't some lament about my childhood, because I totally had a great childhood and don't bum about any of that. Like I said, I was an oblivious kid who just kind of did his thing and changes like that didn't strike me as odd or tramatic, I'd just be friends with whoever else showed up. Even though I was staying in the same place, everyone around me seemed to be moving to and fro, and I always knew I wasn't staying there.

The point being, I'm suddenly wondering whether or not this combination of stable environment that I loved but always dreamed of leaving combined with the constant flux of friends and associates is a big part of why I feel the way I do. Maybe this is why keeping on moving feels so comfortable to me while plans for permanence send my circuitry haywire. I'll lay down roots and lay them down deep and fast at it, but I can pick up and move just as easy. It suits me and the way I seem inclined to live, but then I have moments like this where I am just missing my friends. I'm happier with my job and the trajectory it is pointing me on right now than I have ever been, and the what-are-you-doing-with-your-life? moments had been killing me before, but damn I'm miss my life in New York.

I guess it should tell me something that living in the city for not quite 5 years is the longest I've lived in one place since I was 17. Actually, come to think about it, that will probably be the longest I live in one place before I am at least 40 (which suddenly doesn't feel all that far off).

Anyway... enough of you silly homesickness. I'll sleep it off and wake up tomorrow and hit the ground running and smile about it all.