Twenty-Eight
Hey, listen, I know I haven't been around much lately. I know I've said a lot of things -- made a lot of promises -- and I haven't always come through. I know I've been bad-tempered and difficult at times; and I've lied about what I really wanted out of life, as we all do, and I've spent my time and money on the wrong things and I've been drunk and emotional and talking too much about Jesus and destiny and what the hell I'm going to do with myself after all these wild and wobbly years in which I've never once seen fit to do the right thing. And I'm sorry. But sorry is a waste of time and space, and time and space are commodities I seem to have less and less of, and so I'll just call for forgiveness, and for aliveness, despite it all.
On the morning of my birthday I woke up alive and alone in a foreign city: afforded one more day on the wild wide plural yonderin' earth to drink stove-top espresso and sweet-talk myself into thinking that it's all right and it's all good: although scattered through time-zones and all across the breadth of the shrinking globe, the loved and loving still left after all this gypsying and bad manners are pinging through the social smog of networking sites to wish me a good one from Sydney, Seattle, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Beijing. How did we all come so far? How did we get so close? The wireless heart picks up the signal, just in time; we transmit our soft data through the noughts and ones and wires, and the pixels pop and plunk and squeak into our lap[top]s; any number of little boxes and inboxes to open, any number of little gif[t]s to accept.
And meanwhile, somewhere in Lower Austria, the work-in-progress that is Jesse Darlin' (big-mouth, autodidact, improviser, rent-a-muse, human being, piece of meat, imperfect lover, failed wife and self-mythologising autobiographer) turned twenty-eight in the glaring grassy margins of meatspace: flagrantly in the face of some -- but not all -- of the odds. In the face of the wide sky and the dying day. On a hilltop above a quarry in a sculpture garden on the concrete banks of a little amphitheatre above which the magically-inclined nerds of the Metalab were remote-controlling their robotic flying candelabras into the evening blue. It was a grand night of getting stoned and enjoying the Schadenfreude of those little robots nose-diving into the dust, something like watching animals pace their nine-yard circles in a zoo, but humane, because machines have no feelings (of course; and although there's a poetic joy in imagining some kind of ghost in the machine, there's a far greater joy -- or sense of abandon -- in knowing that "no animals were harmed during the making of this film"). I was thinking about robot zoos, robot ballets, robot choreographies, making little dancing haloes with laser pens; I was flying in the sky, no remote control. It was good to be there. Good to know I still can; old enough to be young again, and about time too.
I used to have dreams in which I could fly. Flying was a discrete skill to be learned and mastered, like riding a bike (directly concerned with release and momentum and the zen-fine balance of both). It took years of dreaming to really be any good, but in the end I was soaring above the highest of the high trees in the perpetual end-of-summer light, thinking all the time, shit, I'm really far up now. And never fall. And then I stopped dreaming of flight. That was the year that I turned twenty-five, and got married, and I tried -- I really tried -- to go straight, and as we all know, that didn't work out either. At least, so far. So far: so good.
June 28th, 2008; Vienna. The sky was raspberry blue on that morning, and I ate raspberries and raw mint out of a plastic tub with my fingers. Those raspberries, you know, they were given to me fresh and damp from the tender wet garden of an eminent Austrian media journalist whose name it probably wouldn't do to mention. He took me out for oysters and Pinot Grigio and told me about his wife, their children, their lovers, his garden, the house in Greece, the radio surveillance techniques of the military; and there was a sadness in his mouth and eyes -- a profound resignation, to be accurate -- which is the saddest thing of all. And I got to thinking about the choices we make in life, and how it's possible to make the wrong ones, whatever that means. All that white wine and salt water in our big brash mouths, talking the old out-for-dinner jive like the consummate pros we both are, he and I, and all the time the sadness salty on the tongue and the tide just behind the eyes. It was a sadness I understood -- could taste -- sage and tobacco and moonshine and blood and brass. I shrugged it on to my shoulders, as though putting on a man's jacket on a cold day, offered in the spirit of chivalry and good old-fashioned romance. Romance! As though any of us would honestly dream of doing that thing, any more. Now I know better -- don't I? -- I know what it's really all about; and thank God. Now when we look into each other's eyes, we know how we kid ourselves, and sometimes we go there regardless, just because we can, and because -- quite frankly -- we should. But despite all that, even now, there are those love stories which last the duration of a train journey or a single shared cigarette, a dinner date, a lifetime of half-platonic blue-balls adoration, a song performed live in which one of you is on the stage and the other -- penetrated, open-mouthed -- dying of love, and forever unseen. My mother, fifty-eight years old and still kickin', has powered through the bloody aftermath of a thirty-year marriage and a subsequent string of unfortunate relationships, which goes to show that the bruised heart hurtles onwards despite it all. It's a divine momentum, the concentric spinning of the mortal coil. Once I got depressed because I couldn't see how there could be any meaning to any of it, and then my Dad, drunk, quoted me Camus: "The only question we should be asking is why we're not killing ourselves." And we're not; despite it all. Touch wood. So far, so far, so far: so good.
And so what's left at twenty-eight, when love is just a bundle of chemically-determined hormonal signals and I don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing or what any of it means?
Why, you are, of course.
And - more to the point - I am. It's beautiful.
Here's to it, chaps. I'm raising my glass to it all, to you, to me, just as I did at my virtual birthday party last year: to the ongoing chaotic principle, to the questions that keep me alive. To that old itch that won't scratch [my darling, my darlings]. To the wireless node of the heart, crazed with neurological sparks and condemned to flight and flame and the fate of all those things that don't exist. Who gives a flying fuck? We're alive, you [reader] and I. Perhaps not in a week from now, but now.
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
- Prayer, Galway Kinnell.
On the morning of my birthday I woke up alive and alone in a foreign city: afforded one more day on the wild wide plural yonderin' earth to drink stove-top espresso and sweet-talk myself into thinking that it's all right and it's all good: although scattered through time-zones and all across the breadth of the shrinking globe, the loved and loving still left after all this gypsying and bad manners are pinging through the social smog of networking sites to wish me a good one from Sydney, Seattle, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Beijing. How did we all come so far? How did we get so close? The wireless heart picks up the signal, just in time; we transmit our soft data through the noughts and ones and wires, and the pixels pop and plunk and squeak into our lap[top]s; any number of little boxes and inboxes to open, any number of little gif[t]s to accept.
And meanwhile, somewhere in Lower Austria, the work-in-progress that is Jesse Darlin' (big-mouth, autodidact, improviser, rent-a-muse, human being, piece of meat, imperfect lover, failed wife and self-mythologising autobiographer) turned twenty-eight in the glaring grassy margins of meatspace: flagrantly in the face of some -- but not all -- of the odds. In the face of the wide sky and the dying day. On a hilltop above a quarry in a sculpture garden on the concrete banks of a little amphitheatre above which the magically-inclined nerds of the Metalab were remote-controlling their robotic flying candelabras into the evening blue. It was a grand night of getting stoned and enjoying the Schadenfreude of those little robots nose-diving into the dust, something like watching animals pace their nine-yard circles in a zoo, but humane, because machines have no feelings (of course; and although there's a poetic joy in imagining some kind of ghost in the machine, there's a far greater joy -- or sense of abandon -- in knowing that "no animals were harmed during the making of this film"). I was thinking about robot zoos, robot ballets, robot choreographies, making little dancing haloes with laser pens; I was flying in the sky, no remote control. It was good to be there. Good to know I still can; old enough to be young again, and about time too.
I used to have dreams in which I could fly. Flying was a discrete skill to be learned and mastered, like riding a bike (directly concerned with release and momentum and the zen-fine balance of both). It took years of dreaming to really be any good, but in the end I was soaring above the highest of the high trees in the perpetual end-of-summer light, thinking all the time, shit, I'm really far up now. And never fall. And then I stopped dreaming of flight. That was the year that I turned twenty-five, and got married, and I tried -- I really tried -- to go straight, and as we all know, that didn't work out either. At least, so far. So far: so good.
June 28th, 2008; Vienna. The sky was raspberry blue on that morning, and I ate raspberries and raw mint out of a plastic tub with my fingers. Those raspberries, you know, they were given to me fresh and damp from the tender wet garden of an eminent Austrian media journalist whose name it probably wouldn't do to mention. He took me out for oysters and Pinot Grigio and told me about his wife, their children, their lovers, his garden, the house in Greece, the radio surveillance techniques of the military; and there was a sadness in his mouth and eyes -- a profound resignation, to be accurate -- which is the saddest thing of all. And I got to thinking about the choices we make in life, and how it's possible to make the wrong ones, whatever that means. All that white wine and salt water in our big brash mouths, talking the old out-for-dinner jive like the consummate pros we both are, he and I, and all the time the sadness salty on the tongue and the tide just behind the eyes. It was a sadness I understood -- could taste -- sage and tobacco and moonshine and blood and brass. I shrugged it on to my shoulders, as though putting on a man's jacket on a cold day, offered in the spirit of chivalry and good old-fashioned romance. Romance! As though any of us would honestly dream of doing that thing, any more. Now I know better -- don't I? -- I know what it's really all about; and thank God. Now when we look into each other's eyes, we know how we kid ourselves, and sometimes we go there regardless, just because we can, and because -- quite frankly -- we should. But despite all that, even now, there are those love stories which last the duration of a train journey or a single shared cigarette, a dinner date, a lifetime of half-platonic blue-balls adoration, a song performed live in which one of you is on the stage and the other -- penetrated, open-mouthed -- dying of love, and forever unseen. My mother, fifty-eight years old and still kickin', has powered through the bloody aftermath of a thirty-year marriage and a subsequent string of unfortunate relationships, which goes to show that the bruised heart hurtles onwards despite it all. It's a divine momentum, the concentric spinning of the mortal coil. Once I got depressed because I couldn't see how there could be any meaning to any of it, and then my Dad, drunk, quoted me Camus: "The only question we should be asking is why we're not killing ourselves." And we're not; despite it all. Touch wood. So far, so far, so far: so good.
And so what's left at twenty-eight, when love is just a bundle of chemically-determined hormonal signals and I don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing or what any of it means?
Why, you are, of course.
And - more to the point - I am. It's beautiful.
Here's to it, chaps. I'm raising my glass to it all, to you, to me, just as I did at my virtual birthday party last year: to the ongoing chaotic principle, to the questions that keep me alive. To that old itch that won't scratch [my darling, my darlings]. To the wireless node of the heart, crazed with neurological sparks and condemned to flight and flame and the fate of all those things that don't exist. Who gives a flying fuck? We're alive, you [reader] and I. Perhaps not in a week from now, but now.
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
- Prayer, Galway Kinnell.
posted by JD at
09:03
1 Comments:
The only question we should be asking is why we're not killing ourselves."
~ i would disagree and say we are=
we are always already dead.
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