There is a man here who's name was once gypsy. Then it was guru, a homage to a slight arrogance born of being able to see things that the mundanes never would.
Everyone beautiful I've ever met has fallen prey to that arrogance, and frankly it is forgiveable.
When it goes away.
When it doesn't, you become one of the mundanes, lost in yourself rather than lost in money matters.
In any case, you're not making the world beautiful anymore.
Ahhh, but this gypsy-man, who I jokingly argued with and told that he'd stolen my self-nomer, who announced that he'd been a gypsy and living on wreck beach with the hippies long before I was born.
Granted.
"But I did it with more intensity. I had an army. I had fury. I had blood on my hands, my own..."
So did he, and for all I know, ten times the flood of tears.
He still talks to the seagulls.
I want to go with him tommorrow, remember the sky through his eyes.
He's been where I am now, he's had children, he's leading a team and is lost in corporate meetings more often than I.
Today the meetings were thumping so hard they nearly drilled through my soul and I skipped one becauseIcouldn'ttakeitcouldn'ttakeitcouldn'ttakeit and I keep telling myself that I'm here because I like the aura of child prodigy they've hung about my shoulders, and Jack says he's here because he's got kids and he puts himself away for eight hours a day...
And neither of us are lost to the money yet. He just bought a sailboat, escapism he called it.
My car is a year newer than his.
He bought me a QO of hash for my birthday, and we talked of the secrets whispered on the wind and how missing the sunrise now might just not be so great a loss.
because it is still inside.
it is still inside.
And he's not famous, or going for the throat, there are younger people here higher up in the echelon, and some people look down on this white haired man leading his small team of crypto kids, but he knows secrets.
And so I asked him how not to forget them, and all he could tell me was "they're just inside of you, and they always will be"
And I'm crying now, in my lab with the temperature down too low again, I'm crying because I remember the sunrise rebounding from door-stoops and creeping under the bumpers of cars parked overnight, and I remember how it spoke to me.
Yeah, I'm crazy. They look at me and grimace slightly.
But not everyone, and I think I remember that once upon a time it only mattered that the people with the visions were the ones that could see me.
And for now, I'm drowning. I'm learning about the bills and the paperwork.
I'm learning about balancing geek with dreamer with ski-bunny with partygirl. I wish I could do them all perfectly, but I will steal what is important and not worry that no jock or geek will love me.
Because I only want the wanderers.
I'm learning how to work more efficiently.
I'm learning how to live and breathe and I'm so much more tired than I was when I was 15, 17, 19... Sometimes in the cruel hands of brief bouts of self-pity I tell myself that I've already lived too long.
But that's bullshit, because I haven't figured it out yet. I haven't built my path yet. I haven't reconciled the leather couch and the car and the high-beamed ceilings with the dreamer and the bleeding heart.
But I think I still care. Everytime I pass the pile of videotapes and see Ally Sheedy's face, I answer with her. "I care."
A little too much, and I'm a little misled, but now that it's not hurting, the lucidity of fury is gone, but it's been replaced by the slightly more reasonable serenity of one more layer of skin.
In a few of the right places.
Thank you gypsy Jack, and I'd really like to go talk to the seagulls with you tommorrow.
I'm in a mundane place right now, and I know I need to be here, because I still want to create and see what possibilities are out there, but I'm not going to be here forever.
And I need to feel some magic again.
The party was monstrous, and there was magic there, but I think I need an older reminder.
A reminder of the greater why, and a reminder of what to hold on to the most tightly. And I can assure you, it will be neither barstool nor cappuccino maker.
Partying is a reprieve, not a goal, and a gleaming kitchen is an easing of conscience, not an end.
And you're right, Mu'adib. I can smell the ocean from here.
I just forget sometimes in my flurry of contrariness.