Manifest Destiny

A pile of post-its. Sickly yellow, bruised purple, swampy blue-brown.

Ideas, thoughts, musings. I am always so impressed by people who do things like climb Kilimanjaro or study for MCATS. "Good for you, you good citizen, you, you do-er!" I think. All I do is think, write things on post-its, in notebooks, on scraps of paper that constitute my life. I think about the rhythms of time and how our minds process them, the sound of heartbeats, the space between echoes, between people, physical and psychic, the space between ourselves and the things we want.

This is a luxury. I think about colors - the color of poverty, or the color of sorrow, the color of regret.

I don't think sorrow is consistent throughout the ages, throughout time. Urban sorrow has a color of its own, a particular timbre, a particular light. It is dirtied-bright colors. Filthy magenta, putrid turquoise, dusty orange. Think of fabric on an urban third-world clothesline. Maybe this is the color of poverty, of dearth, a separation between what is and what could be.

Time, the expanse of it. Is time for you like the hallways of an old Victorian house in Angeleno heights? For me, time is about planes reflecting light, hard angles, surprising turns. The stretching creak of sounds both mechanical and organic. The struggle of these two entities, separately and in relation to one another. I grew an inch this past year and I thought about the stretch of my bones, the joke my body is still playing on me, "30 and still growing!" it winks.

Growing, itself, sometimes feels like a joke, in those moments where everything seems futile anyway, and one has to question the wisdom of sprouts, shoots, leaves, bone, thought, the Universe, expanding. For what? Something that we don't even understand. And through such austerity! And with such audacity! Like this: in Havana a tree growing out of a five story building, through concrete and pavement, towards some sort of light. What choice do we have, once we're thrown here into this thing and forced to grapple with one another?

Everything crystallizes in airports, don't you think? The echo of the PA, the sound of movement, feet, planes, golf carts. Crystallization in transit, we are bugs trapped in amber. For a moment. There are moments of clarity in airports, or if you are seeking a cliff's notes version of this, slightly lesser clarity, go to a train station. I recommend Union Station. But I warn you, it might make you think of Jack Nicholson, or 20s Hollywood glamour, or mission architecture, or whatever associations your neural pathways are prone to. And then the clarity won't come. Airports and train stations are about unfamiliar spaces, and familiarity is everywhere, like a niggling relative who keeps calling you and inviting you to picnics you don't want to go to.

Do you meet people in airports? I meet people everywhere. Airports, coffee shops, on the street. A psychic once told me that my life was about serendipitous meetings. "Isn't that what everyone's life is about?" I asked skeptically, "Isn't that what this planet and consciousness is about?" There are moments where this feels highly unfortunate. There are times where I would rather not have it. There are moments where I would rather saw these unwieldy limbs off. Like the audacity of that tree! What was it thinking, even, growing out of a fifth story apartment?

But if I were an island, I would reflect on my misfortune. I would be lonely, I suppose. I would ponder the futility of a world with no connections.

I think about those movies where people get amnesia, the "Where am I? Who am I?" question of a groggy recovery. What is time to a person who has lost all memory of it? Arrive at an airport and its not even like they lost your luggage, but that your luggage arrived empty. "What happened?" you ask yourself.

And what sort of interpretation of time is this? Not an old Victorian house, its ornamented comforts, its chandeliers and bay windows aflood with light, but flat planes, smooth surfaces, time reinvented.

Motifs. People used to experience amnesia in movies. Or die of heartbreak. Now aliens attack the Earth and they are assholes. But so are we. If not aliens, then vampires. Freemasons. Werewolves. Dead people. Zombies. The enemies distinctly not within. Hollywood, I am so positively bored with you, and on the eve of Oscar night too! Oh yes, I loved that Hurt Locker and that Up in the Air. Regardless...

How do you contextualize a singular incident into the larger story of your life? Or is it even worthwhile to consciously do this, if your unconscious is doing its own work doubletime? I rely on my unconscious to tell me everything and I suppose this is why I'm still alive. I can only speak for myself, not you, of course. Perhaps my intuition is a placebo that I take religiously every day, every morning when I get up, like some useless vitamin. Like the Kool-Aid! not just Kool-Aid but the Kool-Aid. What Kool-Aid are you drinking today? I am drinking the one I drink most days. The I'm ok, you're ok Kool-Aid. I have drunk it for years. When you are not ok, I just avoid you and go hang out with people who are ok in order to feel ok myself. Or spend time with myself which is when I feel most ok. In my head. Positively entertained, and alive in a world of my own creation. I am not in denial. I am not a denial-ist! I just like my Kool-Aided equilibrium. The gentle rhythms of my independent existence.

One of the hardest things to accept when you like being by yourself is the Venn diagram nature of the world, of relationships. But it's like this, the circles are all different colors and sometimes they puncture and there is a spillover of color, emotion, consequence! Best to stay in your own perimeter, no?

The above is how my parents talk, asking no? at the end of a sentence. This is how immigrants talk. I like it, and so occasionally I do it. With a kind of authority. It punctuates an idea without room for ambivalence. You might as well say, "Best to stay in your own perimeter. No."

So how to negotiate? Spillovers and Kool-Aid, the need to draw circles around yourself, the need to sometimes be in airports, running into people in airports. Last week, a B-list celebrity at the Albertson's buying toilet paper. I felt bad for him. It's not like I make direct eye contact with people in the checkout line when I am buying sanitary napkins or toilet paper either but it made me think of spillover, of public domain. You are always in this realm of public domain! We are all public domain, our actions, our behavior. Somewhere, someone else maybe knows. I thought about this when I saw We Live In Public as well. But I didn't like that Ondi lady. Later Jo told me that she was a shady documentarian and so I revove this into my already cynical story of her. Woven stories are like a shared blanket that we all sleep under at night. I don't know how I feel about sharing my blanket with someone, much less so many someones. But at moments, it is comforting, I must concede, to be a part of something.