(no subject)
Well, I've moved a lot. 37 times, if you want to include intra-city apartment switches. Point is, I learned to live free of the tons of trivial or replaceable junk that most people amass. The only consistent things I've kept lugging around with me are my music collection and an ever increasing box that contains every single letter and photo I ever received. Being pretty foundationless with no one place to call my hometown, this collection has always been kind of my touchstone. My breadcrumb trail. Every other material good has come and gone along the way. Fast forward through 24 years of this and you can imagine that the box has grown rather massive.
Now, I married a girl who's lived in only four different homes, whose mother only recently vacated the house in which she grew up, and they were both flea market junkies, collectors of all manner of curiosities...you can imagine how our apartment in Queens would come to be chock full of stuff. Cool custom kitsch, mind you, but way too much of it and plenty of junk besides. I'm 6'5" and I like empty space in which to move. Walkways one can navigate, for clutter is nobody's friend and something had to change. Life in this house was stagnating. Furthermore importantly, we both find that much of our tastes in kooky crap is giving way to sophistication, and there's much to let go of in that respect. We decided to purge the house of extraneous junk and spring clean the hell out of it. I got rid of my share, but her contributions were herculean and I'm really quite proud of her for watching all that Clean House on the television to get properly inspired. That went down last week and the joint is comparably delightful and far more efficient.
The rest of the house done, it was time, finally, to crack open the box and go through everything. This would prove to take three separate sessions to accomplish. I swear that damn thing had to be at least fifty pounds worth of life documentation. In addition to every note and letter I ever received, all of my own work was in there too - stories, academic papers, drawings, articles, and really, really awful poetry. Years worth of journals. Odd fliers from events attended, concert stubs, matchbooks, business cards. You get the picture. All got sifted through, organized, and evaluated. A lot of stuff was negligible and summarily shitcanned, but the rest was categorized with anal precision into folders - very little wound up in "Miscellaneous Memorabilia" - and repacked neatly into new crates.
The effect of perusing these documents from the last quarter century of my life has been unprecedented and extraordinary. Though by no means did I read absolutely everything, plenty of it surely infiltrated my consciousness...the process left me dizzy and reeling down a few hundred different memory lanes. I've been crashing back through time and space like this box is the TARDIS. I'm stunned by how much of an effect I've had on so many people, I'm dazzled by how much of my life has been filled with all this passion. I rediscovered old lost friends, once so treasured and confided in, now scattered to the wind. I suddenly miss some people I haven't thought about in years. I watched cities of romance rise and fall, these disintegrating papers the only traces left to show for them. To have the total sum of it lain before me...it was like meeting, falling in love, and breaking up all over again.
To parse this stuff with now seasoned eyes was a mixed bag of amusement, embarrassment, heartache, and melancholy. Such profound bittersweet. These lost lovers, all neatly sectioned off in a crate under the bookshelf of my office, to say nothing of the artifacts of my own expression. Such horrible poetry! Badly written but impressively heartfelt songs (and many of them country western, no less, for in that genre you can be really corny). Chiefmost of the lot would be the three inch thick stack of letters to various people - often my father - that were never written with any intention of delivery, just to get burgeoning feelings off of my chest.
One thing I'm definitely coming away with from this is a deep respect for the power inside the teenage heart. We all felt our sturm und drang lives as if these emotions we were experiencing had never before been felt by anyone in history. Everything was electric. We were green with love, riding crashing tides of lust, angst and turmoil; everything was vitally important, romanticized as hell, even the pain. Especially the pain. If something didn't hurt in some small way, maybe it wasn't real. Beyond all other sentiments across all of this was a yearning for something, someone, either across the street or the country...they remain just out of reach.
Some days I still feel, despite the coming gray in my hair and the wrinkles, like a complete novice who hasn't evolved much since just past puberty. Some longtime friends have noted that they've seen me grow over the years, but it's been difficult to appreciate that perspective until this process. Such a gift I prepared for myself, all these years in the making, all this feedback in one go. I've looked at my own patterns forming, my behaviour changing, the choices I've made with people and how such choices evolved over time. I've found some answers I didn't know I was looking for. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I've accepted some forgiveness for things I think I've been beating myself up over for so long.
Nothing is quite perfect and never will be, but somehow I love where I am today. I love my life and those who I get to share it with. I'm driven by what I do with more zeal than ever. This dive into my past really helped me appreciate the steps it took to understand what love and passion is for.
So. To all those people whose breadcrumbs I've just followed home, I dedicate this number:
Now, I married a girl who's lived in only four different homes, whose mother only recently vacated the house in which she grew up, and they were both flea market junkies, collectors of all manner of curiosities...you can imagine how our apartment in Queens would come to be chock full of stuff. Cool custom kitsch, mind you, but way too much of it and plenty of junk besides. I'm 6'5" and I like empty space in which to move. Walkways one can navigate, for clutter is nobody's friend and something had to change. Life in this house was stagnating. Furthermore importantly, we both find that much of our tastes in kooky crap is giving way to sophistication, and there's much to let go of in that respect. We decided to purge the house of extraneous junk and spring clean the hell out of it. I got rid of my share, but her contributions were herculean and I'm really quite proud of her for watching all that Clean House on the television to get properly inspired. That went down last week and the joint is comparably delightful and far more efficient.
The rest of the house done, it was time, finally, to crack open the box and go through everything. This would prove to take three separate sessions to accomplish. I swear that damn thing had to be at least fifty pounds worth of life documentation. In addition to every note and letter I ever received, all of my own work was in there too - stories, academic papers, drawings, articles, and really, really awful poetry. Years worth of journals. Odd fliers from events attended, concert stubs, matchbooks, business cards. You get the picture. All got sifted through, organized, and evaluated. A lot of stuff was negligible and summarily shitcanned, but the rest was categorized with anal precision into folders - very little wound up in "Miscellaneous Memorabilia" - and repacked neatly into new crates.
The effect of perusing these documents from the last quarter century of my life has been unprecedented and extraordinary. Though by no means did I read absolutely everything, plenty of it surely infiltrated my consciousness...the process left me dizzy and reeling down a few hundred different memory lanes. I've been crashing back through time and space like this box is the TARDIS. I'm stunned by how much of an effect I've had on so many people, I'm dazzled by how much of my life has been filled with all this passion. I rediscovered old lost friends, once so treasured and confided in, now scattered to the wind. I suddenly miss some people I haven't thought about in years. I watched cities of romance rise and fall, these disintegrating papers the only traces left to show for them. To have the total sum of it lain before me...it was like meeting, falling in love, and breaking up all over again.
To parse this stuff with now seasoned eyes was a mixed bag of amusement, embarrassment, heartache, and melancholy. Such profound bittersweet. These lost lovers, all neatly sectioned off in a crate under the bookshelf of my office, to say nothing of the artifacts of my own expression. Such horrible poetry! Badly written but impressively heartfelt songs (and many of them country western, no less, for in that genre you can be really corny). Chiefmost of the lot would be the three inch thick stack of letters to various people - often my father - that were never written with any intention of delivery, just to get burgeoning feelings off of my chest.
One thing I'm definitely coming away with from this is a deep respect for the power inside the teenage heart. We all felt our sturm und drang lives as if these emotions we were experiencing had never before been felt by anyone in history. Everything was electric. We were green with love, riding crashing tides of lust, angst and turmoil; everything was vitally important, romanticized as hell, even the pain. Especially the pain. If something didn't hurt in some small way, maybe it wasn't real. Beyond all other sentiments across all of this was a yearning for something, someone, either across the street or the country...they remain just out of reach.
Some days I still feel, despite the coming gray in my hair and the wrinkles, like a complete novice who hasn't evolved much since just past puberty. Some longtime friends have noted that they've seen me grow over the years, but it's been difficult to appreciate that perspective until this process. Such a gift I prepared for myself, all these years in the making, all this feedback in one go. I've looked at my own patterns forming, my behaviour changing, the choices I've made with people and how such choices evolved over time. I've found some answers I didn't know I was looking for. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I've accepted some forgiveness for things I think I've been beating myself up over for so long.
Nothing is quite perfect and never will be, but somehow I love where I am today. I love my life and those who I get to share it with. I'm driven by what I do with more zeal than ever. This dive into my past really helped me appreciate the steps it took to understand what love and passion is for.
So. To all those people whose breadcrumbs I've just followed home, I dedicate this number:
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