(This post was mostly taken from a rare journal entry of mine back in August 26, 2003. It was just returned to my thoughts by this interview with Eugene Peterson.)
It seems to me that the masses of the American public, myself included, desire to live their lives in the magical moments of a movie scene. By this I mean that by our own creation of picturesque perfection and scripted scenes of everything from bliss to torture within films, our own hearts have learned to burn for the extreme experience and, at some mostly-ignored level, to scoff at the mundane day-to-day life that we generally exist in.
The romantic notions of an ideal moment: the memory recalled when you walk past a girl in a department store wearing the exact scent of your first love -- your high school crush -- and the lump that subsequently catches in your throat for a split second. Or a certain place that flashes an image onto your retinas and instantaneously pushes back through time into your childhood and the intense melancholy of a middle school memory. Or a line in a song... it was that very song you always danced to in his bedroom late at night, after his parents went to bed.
It's those moments that make us feel something and remember somewhere, and what we remember about that place always seems to feel just a little more right -- a little more like home, and a little more pleasant -- than whatever it is we're currently experiencing. And it feels like a movie, because for whatever reason, we remember it as being perfect.
Oftentimes, my life seems to be made up of endless droning moments of monotony spiked with occasional glimpses of something better. But these memories are never that; they are a kind of a romanticized version of my actual life, usually told with some phenomenal mental cinematography and soundtrack.
I wonder if it has to be that way. I wonder if, for some reason, human beings are indeed cursed by a need to be incessantly miserable, to not accept a reality that would be just a little more fulfilling. Sometimes I think we create our very own desert of the real, and we revel in our lonely, collective misery.
Also, are these magical perceptions contingent upon limited exposure? If I didn't have the mundane, would I appreciate the magic?
For example, I am totally enamored with the magic of New York City (a direct result of film, as I've only been there twice), especially in the winter with light snow falling and tall buildings jetting skyward on all sides. I can hardly even imagine anything more romantic. But if I lived in my very own dingy Manhattan apartment, would the city's movie mystique intrigue me so much? I'm not so sure it would.
Sometimes I think that when I'm walking down the street it sure would be a lot more meaningful if I could get some different camera angles and a good soundtrack playing in the background. Maybe one of those 360 degree sweeps around my oh-so-pensive facial expression and the way my brows are furrowed just-so, and a soft fade in of Josh Radin's song "Closer." Yes, that would almost be perfect... just perfect.
//
Josh Allan Dykstra
Ah, the car pool.
Now, I understand that "pool" has different meanings, but for me it just brings to mind an image of the old community swimming pool back home, lined with fading chipped baby-blue paint and car grills and headlights bobbing up through the water. The scaredy-cars are cowering near the edges, and a Honda Civic is doing a flip off the high-dive. If nothing else, it's entertaining.
I was driving this morning on a pretty major highway in Denver, going to meet a friend for breakfast. It's technically rush hour, and I hate traffic. I'm approaching a stretch of the highway with a car pool lane (See 'em swimming!? Ha! Cracks me up.), and I'm getting excited for the traffic to thin out, open up a bit -- you know, give me a little more elbow room, alleviate my claustro-roado-phobia. So I get to where the car pool lane starts and wait for all the cars to thankfully move the hell out of my lane.
But nobody moves.
It suddenly occurs to me that nobody is pooling. My next thought is, "Why would they?" I'm not, myself, currently, "pooling," and how many people do I know that actually would be able to go to work together? I start counting, and stop quickly because I can't think of anybody. Then I get sad, because the obvious implication is that every single person on the road in front of and behind me is alone in their car. I start wondering how much brighter their day would be if maybe they had a friend to ride with them on their way to work. Maybe home, too. I know I'd like it.
Being unemployed, I'm alone most all day, every day, at least during the day hours (because that's when everyone else works). I don't really like it, but what choice do I have? "None," I tell myself. And I'm not sure most of these people around me on the highway do, either.
But, you know, I bet our lives would seem a bit brighter if we could find a way to not be lonely.
//
I almost hit a college student with my car today.
I didn't, though, so don't worry (I knew you were worried).
Apparently, trying to get directions out of the (very) tiny screen of a Palm Pilot and driving are two things that the male brain should not attempt to do concurrently.
So, I'm in Boulder, Colorado. It's a beautiful day (sunny, about 65) and I'm driving past CU, so you'd think that I'd watch out for college students (especially college students in crosswalks), but noooo, I don't. So I almost hit this college girl, a relatively attractive female (if you're in to that kind of thing), and in that half a second between scouring my palm pilot, looking up, noticing the girl, and hitting my brakes I get a sickening feeling in my stomach... but not because I almost plowed her over.
My lack of moral standing notwithstanding, at that very moment, for whatever reason, I felt ill because I knew I would give almost anything to be a college student again.
I'm not sure why I thought that, really. When I was in school I couldn't wait to get out, move on with my life, not take any more finals, actually DO something, etc. But now that I'm out, it seems that I kind of want back in.
I suppose it could be the fact that this thing that naïve people tend to call the "real world" is really just a pretty big drag. It's just so much of a letdown. In college we're trained to be thinkers and dreamers, and we're told (or maybe it's just what I heard) that once we get that diploma we'll be free to mold the world as we see fit. But now I see, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the "real world" simply exists to feed itself. The vast majority of it isn't challenging, it isn't forward-thinking, it isn't revolutionary, and it panders to the lowest common denominator in a lame attempt to placate the masses with some deranged form of what we imagined real life to be.
I could be angry with the college I went to for the obvious setup for disillusionment they fashioned me with, but I'm really not. Somewhere (some days I have to dig pretty deep to find it) there seems to be this idealistic hope in me that refuses to die. Now, I realize that I'm only in my twenties and I've got a lot of years left for the world to try to kill it, but I do rather enjoy dreaming and hoping for a world that is just a bit more beautiful than the one I live in.
And that's why I love college students. They don't really know any better than to dream lofty, pie-in-the-sky dreams, and in my current "enlightened" state I think that bliss sometimes really might be ignorance.
//
I'm not sure what happened to me.
You should know, before I begin, that I'm one of those people that saves every email they've ever written or received. So, as you can well imagine, approximately half of my 40GB hard drive is taken up with email (just kidding, but it's really no laughing matter how far back these things go).
I was looking through my Sent Items folder and realized that I had doubles of every email I sent between the dates of March of 1999 through October of 2000 (or thereabouts). Being the technological guru that I am, I realized that was a rather large amount of emails taking a lot of space that didn't need taking.
But that's not really what happened to me.
So I'm scrolling down using the clever little wheel on my mouse (those Microsoft geniuses!), selecting every other email so I can rid my sanity of these duplicate space-takers. As I scroll, I am reading some of the email subjects... and they're funny! I never knew I was funny!
There are emails with obscure Austin Powers' references like, "No, Mini-Me, we don't gnaw on our kitty," nonsensical crap like "Wadaladabingbang," and even frightening apocalyptic things like "IT'S THE Y2K BUG - WE'RE ALL SCREWED!!!!!" I've even got one with this subject: "Mini-RE: It's a flu shot, I don't want you getting sick..." -- can you even stand the wit?? Mini-RE:... man, I just crack myself up. (Keep in mind these are just subject lines; can you even imagine the infinite depths of humor that could be contained in the email body!?)
But that's not what happened either.
As my wheel continues it's journey upwards toward the more recently written emails, I am getting the impression that I am, sadly, getting less and less funny. I am just not as jovial... I might be getting actually, kinda, boring.
What happened to me? (There's the question.)
I'll tell you what happened: I "grew up." I started conversing with quote-unquote "adults" and thus, had to obviously rid myself of the extraneous wit. Professionals have no time for such nonsense, you know.
The only problem is that I think I liked myself better before -- that person who wasn't afraid of smiling, of being a little goofy.
In a fantastic movie called Finding Neverland, Johnny Depp's character, J.M. Barrie, has a conversation with a boy named Peter that has adult syndrome -- he's grown up too quickly and acts older than he actually is. Barrie creates an imaginary world where Peter's dog Rufus becomes a bear in the circus, and Peter says "This is absurd. It's just a dog."
Barrie replies, "Just a dog? Rufus dreams of being a bear, and you want to shatter those dreams by saying he's just a dog? What a horrible candle-snuffing word. That's like saying, 'He can't climb that mountain, he's just a man,' or 'That's not a diamond, it's just a rock.' Just."
It's just a bit of silliness, really.
Well, I should hope so.
A little more silliness sounds pretty good right about now.
//
So, I just finished writing (literally, just now) a new song called Soul, and, oh, am I all about moody songs right now.
You know the kind: the beautiful and terrible poems set to music that elicit visions of nostalgia and fear, of joy and hatred. (If you need artists, reference Damien Rice, Patty Griffin, or pretty much any artist on the Garden State soundtrack.) I'm not sure if my songs live up to this, but it is certainly something to aspire to.
I've noticed that humans have a gross tendency to scrutinize each other to the point of weakness. Where the line of fair expectation and ugly realism meet is where life seems to get really blurry. It's a mess, really. We all carry the paradoxical weight of expecting idyllic behavior from everyone we encounter while gladly giving ourselves free passes to behave however we see fit.
I don't claim to understand this instability, but I am certainly repulsed by it, especially in myself.
To me, everybody who inhabits this strange planet has roughly the same amount of "broken," and to expect something less or more than that is simply foolishness. Remembering that isn't easy, though.
Somewhat conversely, I think everybody also has the same amount of "soul" -- the passionate essence which comprises the "who" of "who we are." Most of us spend more time burying, hiding, suppressing, repressing, or ignoring that soul than we do trying to release it, but it's in there.
I know it.
//