Thursday night, I expected to be northbound on the Chinatown express. That never happened.
When I had called my friend in New York, who is leaving Saturday morning for the life he has built for himself in Vancouver, Washington (what must be the 9th or so life by now (for the record, I’m still on my third (accidentally got a career and it’s really messing with my bohemian tendencies))) he told me he and another friend had the night previous talked me up to some girl I would meet, and to such ridiculous heights that I simply could not, even on my best day, stack up.
“Me and Ali both said that if we could simultaneously be you, we would,” he said. I am not kidding. Nor am I boasting. He told me this minutes before I was to catch the bus.
Meanwhile, I am unkempt, shaggy, with every nail too long and a face that, for some reason, tends to disintegrate in this kind of weather, just above the lip. I required some serious grooming if I was going to even come close to this kind of hype, and 10 minutes simply wasn't gonna cut it. So I decided to do what must be done: make myself as close to presentable as possible (without "product" as, let's remember, I am heterosexual) and leave in the morning, after drinking a large enough quantity of scotch to put me under early. Well, we’ll see how that goes.
All of which is circumstantial. The point is that I ended up next to a television when this movie, “Shopgirl,” came on. It’s not a very good movie, but it stars Steve Martin and Claire Danes, so it’s close enough, I suppose.
I wasn’t really paying attention, except for the last line, where Martin says something like, “And if he could, well, that was life,” during a helicopter shot of Los Angeles, I think. Little cars going about their little lives on little, tiny highways. Tiny little windows twinkling. A microscopic view.
“That was life.”
I guess it was.
But even that is not the point.
The point is that we are here, and then we are not, and that is life. And while we are here, there is an almost insatiable drive to leave something of ourselves behind. That’s called a biological imperative, and it’s why you’re here right now, reading this.
Hello.
It’s also why we carve our initials into trees with our sweethearts, or into cement with our friends. It’s why we make art, and music, and poetry. It’s why we create. It’s why murder is so abhorred. It’s why death is so protected against. It’s why the mothers of the slain cry out even while professing they know their child is with Jesus now. It’s why Jesus wept.
(Funny thing about Jesus – check out what Josephus has to say about him. Not the one paragraph that historians believe was later inserted, I mean the other story. It’s pretty good.)
Anyway, it gave me an idea for a movie. A hyper-real movie about a girl none of you ever knew and will now never get a chance to meet, and human nature, and loss, and leaving something behind. I think for the first time, I might have learned something about life before it was too late to be of any use. I’m going to start writing it as soon as I get back.
Oh, and I might have an interview with a musician, too – Kristen Gass. Real moody Ani DeFranco- type stuff. You can check out her debut EP on cdbaby.com. It’s probably not very spendy and you’ll be helping out an independent artist, so…
So. Anyway, I gotta get on that scotch thing.
Ok. Bye.