November 2009

I’m trying to believe what I know, and always see with feeling.

The world is almost too full, winking with history, explosive with meaning, shape and color. Our lives cross and mix, year after year, full of love or apathy, chaotic and confused, under alternating blue and gray and orange skies. Tears fall, some yearn, some forget, and children love the only innocent and unconditional love. every evening The shimmering lights on the lake are too much; the colors can’t be caught, penned or expressed. The shapes, the power lines, the watery gleaming, the buildings’ humming glow cuts perfect boxes and slices the sky’s moody blue orange indigo. It’s brooding, I’m stuck here, and I can’t copy and paste all these songs and snapshots of you into a collage or find any coherence, because they can’t fit, and shouldn’t. we’re all librarians now, custodians of our messy digital histories, and all of our iPods strung together can’t make our sounds stop clashing. The halls of the sky are ringing, the basslines pulse warmth, and these buildings, the world, are the stained glass of a 21st century cathedral glowing, free for the mind’s taking. And I’m a thief, starved, grabbing and anxious, fleeing the white noise and traffic for the dark insides, the shimmering. Selfish, self-absorbed, taking more, but never enough.

Maybe we’re all in love, or maybe we’re all alone, and some of us just know it more than others. the truth is our voices, trying to be heard, our words lost, our sound building and resonating in each other’s din, pots and pans, text message alerts, vacuum cleaners and garbage trucks. somewhere someone is screaming, in pain or pleasure, we can’t tell from here, but it doesn’t matter, because here, here, sometimes the sun is shining and there’s organic produce and dollar menus and sunsets to be had, over and over. We’re all just breathing in each other’s exhaust, staring at each other’s taillights, wondering when we’re gonna get there. as this beautiful American daydream’s nightmare dissolves before us, we’re free to feast whenever we want, grow our gardens of entitlement, wander hillsides, turn on big screens, study, work, sit, stare, shoot aliens from our living rooms. Our technology is shrinking and clinging to us, filling our pockets, our minds with noise, weight, holding us down and bringing us together and forcing us apart - and I’m fucking tired of checking for your updates, but we’re all just turning into smoke signals and nonsense is king, so let’s just keep it all, whether it's noise or meaning. Turn on your glib superficiality and I’ll do mine, because it’s gotten too loud in here to really talk anyway.

So if you show up, show up your best, and even if you’re not sure if other people are feeling it the way you do, and you’re not sure if they care or if they can, the least you can do is take the feeling, the explosive force of it, and sublimate it, and send it back out in a beam. Take that stream and make it clearer and stronger and send it back out. If you were lucky enough to be tuned in, all you can do is hope someone else is on your frequency as you’re sending out your signals. Somebody might be listening.

Then you’ll come home with your ears ringing again, smelling like someone else’s tobacco industry addiction, and your head hurts because you’ve had too much of this easy living, and the throbbing is your fault and yours alone, and everything is slow and stupid again because you didn’t find the vein but you’re so close you can tell, it’s all just building up, waiting to osmose through a membrane into your own blood. And then you could maybe breathe and subside because it would all have aligned with you for a moment. But you’re always moving too fast or too slow and can’t sit still, and you just want another hour of sleep and another coffee might do the trick, or maybe not. Maybe you’ll get there.

We’re human beings, meant to be together or apart, and laughing or crying or fucking or creating or sleeping, nobody really knows, but there’s something more out there to be had if we can just manifest it. We must hoard our energies, create and visualize, in a world designed to make us fat and complacent, comfortable and slow, angry or weak in offices with bad florescent lighting and dreams that aren’t really dreams of corner offices and luxury cars that get scratched and impossibly high high rises. we must realize the blueprints of dangerous, heroic architecture, subliminal art, and green technology futures; the only things that can save us from the crashes and greed and improbabilities of the future’s terrifying promises of the unknown.