“Something that you feel will find its own form”

Tue, 17 May 2011 20:13:30 +0000

Jack Kerouac wrote “Something that you feel will find its own form”. I’ve stared at this sentence incessantly over the last few days to interpret the meaning Kerouac intended or narcissistically trying to mold its meaning to exonerate me from the despair I feel. “Something that you feel will find its own form”.

I am undecided on what form this feeling has taken. Scholars of life have posited that love and hate diverge so completely on the scale of human emotion as to be almost indistinguishable. As I stop and apply this theory to my own life over the last five months, I conclude that this idea is true. I have loved (or so I think it became, frankly the thought that it is love might be ridiculous) so absolute that the line separating the two emotions is blurred. Circumstances dictate what I would call this singular emotion at any given time… love and hate compete but remain the same feeling. This thought is disturbing… that the chasm that divides love and hate is not as wide as we profess it to be… that we can be so enamored and yet frustrated with someone that we easily sway from love to hate to love to hate… all in the same breath… the same moment in time. Both love and hate demand that they are given freely and totally and without reservation… it is when we give only so much of either that we fail. To that end, I did not fail. I love… and hate. The feeling will figure out its form.

“Something that you feel will find its own form”.

This same pavement…

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 04:34:56 +0000

Adversity has cast a shadow over the last year for me. Professionally, personally, emotionally, spiritually, physically… all the ways in which we seek to affirm ourselves as happy and content. Having just about enough of it, I set out in my long forgotten car and pointed its wheels towards the highway. Past the glowing red Wrigley Field sign that made me so excited to be in Chicago but now stands as a symbol of all the things that make this city oppressive for me… on through the outskirts of my old Logan Square neighborhood to the cusp of Portage Park and finally onto the artery that leads to the city limits. Northward I drove… no destination… no purpose other than a need to see something besides the streets that have become a prison to me. Something was leading me somewhere and I didn’t really know or it didn’t register until I was sitting outside the gates. I watched as they walked in gleaming dress whites with no stripes and no ribbons, no haggard weariness of the life they would soon come to know. I was here on this same pavement many years ago… a young man with nothing… no education, no aspirations… no future. I had come to this place then to save my life and here I was again to seemingly do the same. I entered these gates a lost soul the first time and emerged many years and many oceans later a man with a purpose and validation… an education, a world view and a chest full of medals. What will become of me this time… at this common starting place for what feels like two separate and vastly different lives? I don’t know. I don’t know.

Undistinguished things…

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:15:20 +0000

I long for Winter. I long for the cold and the eerie feeling as I stand alone outside in the early hours of morning… the silence broken only by the hum of streetlights and the sound of my breathing. I crave the mental hibernation that comes with Winter… my mind free of beauty… replaced by the drone of workaday life… reveling in ordinary, undistinguished things…

About a dog…

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 05:38:39 +0000

A friend’s dog passed today and it made me think about the loss of my own right before I moved to Chicago. I talk of having another… but the fact is there will never be another like him. I wrote this when he died… I hope it brings some comfort to those mourning a loss tonight.

Every morning for the last 4 or so years… day in… day out… my first instinct upon awakening was to stare at Guinness for the few seconds it took for my eyes to focus and for him to take that next breath. It was a ritual that he and I shared although I’m sure he knew nothing of it. Some days he would sleep on… other days I think he could sense my presence and lifted his head from the pillow in an “I’m still here” acknowledgement. Maybe a bit of that or maybe a bit of “What are you looking at?” that defined the type of dog that he was. He was, above all, his own man.

Guinness came to me broken and battered. He had been left to fend for himself in a world where dogs of his ilk do not fend for themselves. I took him in and believed that I was doing a good deed by giving this dog the life that he deserved but never had a chance to live. I was going to teach him that his life could be so much more. That he could be loved and he could feel safe enough to love back. He was reluctant at first, seeing me as nothing more than a food source… but over time I was able to gain his trust. He loved me… but his love was always tempered with his assertion that he was still Guinness, mighty warrior of the forests of Chapel Hill. I gave him his space… and welcomed him into my heart on his terms. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

It is with that turn of the tide in his trust of me that Guinness became less the student and more the teacher. He had endured so much in his life… he had trusted and been let down. I’m sure that he had been loved before but somewhere along the way he lost that love. I felt so connected to him in that way. I have always felt like our lives were similar. We were underdogs. I had loved and been given up on… tossed out into the world to make my way or die… and somehow stumbled upon redemption and a will to live. Guinness was the embodiment of everything I’ve ever felt in a scraggly package of oily black hair and graying beard.

In this world of more and more… the bigger home and the nicer car… Guinness taught me that life and happiness could be boiled down to a good meal, a soft place to lay your head, and the touch of another being. He taught me that you can be lost and then found. Moreover, in a sense, you are never lost… it just takes someone to find you.

I know as I look back and remember him; someday I will truly understand why he was sent to me. But for now… he was a good dog… a good soul. He was my friend and I miss him terribly.

Written on the way to Chicago…

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 20:39:18 +0000

This was written 3 or so years ago when I had decided to move to Chicago. It resonates now for different reasons and for different places… I found no clarity on Kimball Avenue or in those brown eyes.

There comes a moment when we realize that as much as we seek it… clarity doesn’t serve us. We wear our illusions of who we are like an expensive suit… the acknowledgement of ourselves outside of our mind would render us… unfashionable. The demons of clarity have attacked me from all angles… signaling the beginning of an all-out assault on my sense of what is sane and what is surreal. What passed for sanity no longer applies… the surreal becomes the sane.

I’ve entertained advice and opinion on my life and direction… some solicited, some not. The underlying theme that each has conveyed is safety. Do what is safe… don’t interrupt the comfortable path… don’t stray from society’s sense of normalcy. Is this what we have become? Are there no more Kerouacs? No more Hemingways? Is there no more romance in the unknown? Do we fear our inadequacies so much that we cease to test ourselves? Clarity says that these people are right… I do not subscribe to this definition of clarity. Clarity for me comes in staggered images… fleeting snippets of a life not yet lived. I see clarity in the deepest of brown eyes.

The days of true adventure… true peril and jeopardy in love and life are gone. The days of the tramp steamer and moving freely across the globe are over. We seek to confirm ourselves by ascension up the corporate ladder… not by seeking love and desire. Corner offices are empty places. I will seek my confirmation from the back of moving van bound for Kimball Avenue like a 1^st class passage on the Cairn Line shipping out of Southhampton 1910.

In a letter to a friend…

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 03:32:07 +0000

Well… I didn’t exactly say I was happy. I do recognize what makes me happy and try my best to weed out the people and situations that are burdensome but I’ve found that those are the things that make up the majority of my existence. I have no patience for most things anymore and leave them behind. The things and people that I want have no patience for or want of me. It’s a cycle that is only comforting in its predictability.

I commend you for what you’ve accomplished. It had to be what you wanted at some point in your life. It has to be good on some levels to make you stay. I feel like I’ve never had the things that I’ve desired, never lived the life that I truly wanted whether due to circumstance or to the unwillingness to change or the lethargy that sets in after what feels like a constant beating.

I don’t deal in “what might have beens” anymore. I learned in the last few years that there are only “never wills”. And that makes them even more sad.

Without Context

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:39:58 +0000

I wrote this a long time ago and present it now without context…

“What I have now is a patchwork life built to the specifications of the next minute… the next hour. So often we wrap ourselves up in this idea of future that we cease to live for hope that tomorrow will be better. I like my life… could it be better? It absolutely could. But my life is about the decisions I’ve made… for better or worse and I don’t regret making any of them. I do believe that life can change in an instant… linger 5 minutes more at the coffee shop… write another email… take a different bus. The results could be glorious. I think that the moment you recognize your life in that soundtrack… when you hear the music of beautiful eyes and knowing glances… the drone of our ordinary day sounds like a symphony.”

I read that today and I think “What a fool”. We all live with regret. For the people we were or never were… for the decisions we’ve made for the hope of a soft bed that breaks our back today. We regret love that never was… or the love that never really was. Why so much regret without action? Is it a fear of being alone? Do we exist in a vacuum of apathy sucking the corners of our mouths upwards in a permanent grin? So many questions…

I need a westbound boxcar and rucksack for my dreams…

ROI

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:23:04 +0000

As I am prone to do with any writing space that I start devoted to specific things, the purpose of said space will be hijacked from time to time to address whatever thoughts or ideas that are clanging around the superstructure of my brain. I can, however, relate this post back to art as it is prompted and inspired by the recent Jason Reitman film “Up in the Air”. I am not going to bore the reader (all none of you) with another tedious review of this film. That’s been beat to death over the life of this film’s release and my skills in the movie criticism realm are lacking. Kudos to Reitman, Clooney and cast… blah, blah blah.

For those who haven’t seen it; I will say only that the overwhelming premise of the film in my opinion is the study of one man’s isolation from what society deems as normal when it comes to the relationships in his life. He lives in a high-altitude bubble of his own making, taking what he needs and eschewing the notion of a life held down by property and long-term relationships. It is in direct contrast to what we have been programmed by society to want. Societal norms indicate that we should want the 50-year marriage and the little house on Main Street, driving to work every day in our late model car and having Bill and Sue over on a Friday night for daiquiris and Wii Bowling. We do want these things… we want them because we are told to want them.

But do we? Do we really want to live a life that is empty on some levels so that we can adhere to what the collective says will make us happy? To what society deems acceptable and network television friendly? Are we so afraid of our own happiness that we cease to seek it? These are questions that I ponder often, not because I don’t see the merits of finding someone to share your house and heart completely, but because I know that I see different things in people that I meet that fill the small crevices and cracks that inevitably present themselves in even the strongest of foundations. The dilemma that we face is should we take the good and the bad… or only the good? There is a case to be made for both scenarios… whether we can stomach the consequences of either is what scares us.

How is it that we make the majority of the decisions in our lives on a simple return on investment (ROI) model and can’t seem to do that when it comes to our relationships? We weigh our lunch order on this principle… our method of transport to work… our choice of beer or wine at dinner. All of these decisions are judged by how satisfied they make us feel. Generally, we don’t give these simple things the opportunity to make us unhappy. A bad bottle of wine at dinner is not ordered again just to see if it might be better this time or to give it a chance to prove itself. Why do we do that with people? Why do we offer ourselves up to disappointment? What prevents us from living a life based on our true desires at any given moment… not the overall far reaching need to not be alone at any time. Do I want the good… or the good and the bad? Is the good worth the bad? These are questions I can’t answer yet in the space of this one post and will certainly revisit them as my mind works out the numbers. I appreciate that you’ve indulged me as I ask them.

“Our battered suitcases were piled high on the sidewalk again…”

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:49:38 +0000

“All you have in your closets are suitcases you will never use” she said as we joked about the state of her apartment and her apparent wish to fill every corner of it with something compared to my propensity toward bare walls and guitar cases as furnishing. I was taken aback… not by the statement itself but by the sheer truth it conveyed. I’ve pondered her words over the last few days and attempted to assuage the hollow feeling they have left inside me. I could rationalize the jarring authenticity of them by rolling out the stale excuses of the last year… detailing for the millionth time the circumstances that have brought me to this place in my life. I could continue to whip small hills into stiff peaks and comfort myself with mediocrity. Who is this person I’ve become? I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live. Today I find myself doing just that… frantically searching the ground for tiny bits of a broken life in an ill-fated attempt to make it as it was before. It never will be. Its time to pack up those fucking suitcases and live.

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am…” ~ Henry Miller

Uniform Grey…

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:41:20 +0000

… is intended to be about music, art and design. We’ll see.