Additions To The List

Yep, I've been inspired.
So, a couple of additions to The List:

Get to at least 50 on at least three separate "Best 100 ________ of All Time" lists.

Get to 100 on at least one.

Books to read, plays or movies to see, songs to hear, cities, art galleries, or GPS coordinates to visit, once in a lifetime experiences to have, sex positions to try, I haven't really narrowed it down yet. However, I do have one limit. I can't just make up my own list for the purpose of making this any less time-consuming or difficult. (i.e. picking 100 books I've already read. Ta-daaaah, I'm done! Checkmark!) No. That defeats the purpose. It has to start out as someone else's list. That said, I will allow myself to combine lists (have you got any idea how many Best 100 Books of All Time lists there are?) by some formula I haven't yet thought up, if I ever think up that formula. For instance, top ten from ten different lists, with repeats replaced by items further down the list. We'll see how it works out. This could be one that'll take years to finish.

Happy reading, working, and playing.
Daydream Believer

Walk On the Moon

My bags are packed, I'm ready to go.

Holy fucking shit.

Pardon my french. Am I excited? Out of my mind. Am I scared? Out of my mind. Terrification. So terrified it's terrific. Why is it always so sunny in this rainy city when I'm on my way out?

This is my one small step. I'm flying solo and flying free. This is the part where I show everybody, myself included, just what kind of stuff I'm made of. What an adventure. This is what I'm in it for. This is going to be amazing.

I'm getting the heck out of dodge.

Keep Dreaming,
Daydream Believer

Ave Mary A

Drinkin' wine and thinkin' bliss
is on the other side of this,
I just need a compass,
And a willing accomplice...

A willing accomplice is the big thing. Hashing all this out with Bear, it kinda makes sense again. I'm not going crazy, not yet anyways. And I can want the picket fence one day, but not right now, and the fact that I don't want it now doesn't mean I don't want it. Nor does the fact that I won't give up the rest just to have it.

I've been looking for something,
Something I've never seen
We're all looking for something to be.

I felt bad for flip-flopping. Changing my mind again. But the more I think about it, and lord knows I talk about it enough, to enough people, the more I think that the two aren't mutually exclusive. I'm not flip-flopping then, but tweaking, shifting, working out the balances. Figuring it all out. I don't feel that heavy dread, the despair, the loneliness, at least not right now. I wonder where the natural end would be.

Stay tuned for the next episode.

Dream on

Ad Astra Per Aspera

I was talking to Ace the other day and without really meaning to, I kinda crystallized what I'm trying to do here. Here as in this particular blog, and here as in during my life and work. Kinda trippy stuff. All because I was defending myself from an in all likelihood imagined verbal assault on my value and worth. Because I blog... yeah... I'm still sorting it out myself. Anyhow, Ace said that he wouldn't want to have his thoughts on the internet, because someone might read them. I kinda see this kind of thing as a microcosm* of The Golden Record. In August and September 1977 respectively, NASA launched Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 (Yes, Voyager 2 was launched before Voyager 1). Each one has a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk with a greeting intended for any life form either Voyager might encounter. This (1977) state-of-the-art technology contains a number of sounds and images meant to portray earth and give anyone or anything that might find it an idea of where the machine containing it came from. Similarly purposed plaques were placed inside Pioneer 10 and 11, which were the first two human artifacts to escape the solar system. Each of these spacecraft had a scientific purpose, which throws off the allegory slightly. The idea behind the plaques and later The Golden Record, was to throw something of ourselves out as far as we can just in case maybe, someday, someone will find it and find something they can understand in it. Is it a little bit out there? Absolutely. But there isn't much that makes more sense to me than the drive to connect, to communicate, to reach out. Even if in forty thousand years by some strange turn of fate or physics, one of the Voyagers comes hurtling back to Earth in a twisted mass of flaming metal, there's still a time capsule in there that maybe someone will understand.

This is a present from a small, distant world,
a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music,
our thoughts and our feelings.
We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter

*for some reason, my favourite word lately

Sondheim, Uta, and Kurosawa
Sondheim- Stephen Sondheim, American composer and lyricist. Born March 22, 1930. Known for the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, and composing the music for A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. Also Sweeney Todd, Into The Woods, and A Little Night Music.
Uta- Uta Hagen, German-born American actor and acting teacher. June 12, 1919-January 14, 2004. Author of Respect for Acting and A Challenge for the Actor. Notable for training, among others: Matthew Broderick, Al Pacino, Whoopi Goldberg, Sigourney Weaver and Liza Minelli.
Kurosawa- Akira Kurosawa, Japanese filmmaker. March 23, 1910- September 6, 1998. Best-known works: Seven Samurai (七人の侍, Shichinin no samurai), Yojimbo (用心棒) aka The Bodyguard.

Keep Dreaming
Daydream Believer

Baby Write This Down

This post is completely unabridged and uncensored. Kanpai is Japanese for cheers.

So here I am, writing it down. Because somebody said I should. A parable? Maybe.

I once knew this woman, a university professor, who had all sorts of things to say, about all kinds of things. Art, theatre, liminality, juxtaposition, the importance of the live event. Every word out of her mouth was profound, a revelation, brilliance. She knew so much about these topics, and had so much to say about them, that she began to sound like a broken record. The repetition of themes, words, and phrases grew so distinct that someone made a bingo card out of them. All of a sudden, rather than quotable, she was mockable. Did she get less brilliant? Did we get more jaded? Does why it happened matter? Maybe if she hadn't had to get us through a set of exams and projects, she could have branched out a little more, brought in more new ideas, given us more profundity. Or maybe that's all there was, she was so specialized that she'd said her profound piece, and that's all there was to it.

It was profound to you, but I got it out of an Amanda Marshall song. I said everybody wants to believe that they're special, God's chosen people. She said "every soldier in the war's got God on his side, and that's why we can't stop the slaughter".

It's entirely possible that in every relationship, romantic, friendly, platonic, adversarial, you run out of things to talk about. Eventually you know what they think about religion, politics, themself, you, the future, the way the world works and whatever else is important to the both of you. And unless something drastic changes with one of you, there's no more to say. Maybe that's simply a symptom of growing apart, or maybe it just happens to everyone.

Somewhere there's a line between wanting to see them every day and seeing them every day out of habit. Usually just this side of that line there's another one, the line between seeing someone because you have something to do with them and seeing someone because you have nothing to do with anyone else. The line where the default option changes from "alone" to "with them". The line where you become their appendage, or they become yours. Where the world is small and insular, and every decision has them as a factor. You enjoy that for awhile, and then you hit another line, the one where you begin to resent all of the above.

A flutter somewhere around the solar plexus, a flock of thousand-pound butterflies, a flush, a slight sheen of sweat, a stammer, and standing there saying to yourself "Did I seriously just say that?" That place where a "Hi" can have you on a high all day, where anything is possible and it's absolutely brilliant and you swear they'll hear your heart thudding in your chest if you don't faint from the blood rushing to your head first.

Maybe I'm crazy to miss that. I know a lot of people who have said "Yeah, all that stuff is great, but I'd never in a million years trade it for what I've got." Maybe when I'm sitting here thinking that maybe I would, that's the beginning of the end. At the very least, it's probably the way I know that the decision I've already made is the right one. Not the only way, I guess, but at least one. Someone once told me that there's no such thing as a wrong choice, it's just the ones we make, and the ones we don't. That has made all the difference, according to Frost.

Sometimes I think I'm asking for too much. Maybe it is too much to ask for a job that doesn't make me cry before or after nearly every shift I work. Maybe it's too much to ask for freedom. Maybe the truth is too much to ask for in Kindergarten, when they tell you it doesn't matter what you look like, only what you do. Maybe a dual-axis spectrum is too much to ask for. Maybe a spectrum at all is too much to ask for, a middle ground. Maybe there can be no compromise. Maybe a secret is too much to ask for. Maybe being alone is too much to ask for.

Be careful what you wish for, I suppose.

A List Update:
Know/understand all the references in the musical Rent, particularly those in the song La Vie Boheme.
Sontag, Sondheim, Maya Angelou, Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham, Cage, Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes, Uta, Buddha, Pablo Neruda, Pee Wee Herman, Gertrude Stein, Antonioni, Burtolucci, Kurosawa, Carmina Burana, Vaclav Havel, The Sex Pistols, 8BC, Musetta's Waltz, Heidegger.

Stay tuned for my discoveries.

Dream On.
Daydream Believer

The List

So I've started The List. You can see it on the right-hand panel just under my profile. The List of Things I Really Really Really Want To Do At Least Once Before I Die is a little cumbersome, and I'm pretty sure that The Bucket List is copyrighted... so I'll just call it The List. 11 p.m. last night seemed like a good time to start thinking about it.

I've been incredibly lucky so far, in that I've already done some things that are on a lot of people's lists. I've had plenty of opportunities. But I've always wondered: how many once-in-a-lifetime experiences can you fit into one lifetime? I don't know the answer to that question. Like so many other questions. But I intend to find out how many I can fit into mine. And I'm pretty sure that's the important part anyways. The practical rather than the theoretical. I have lots of theories, about lots of things, but this is about experiences. This is about where I'm going, and what I'm doing along the way. The difference between the destination and the journey. It's going to be a long road, I think, and I expect I'm going to be navigating it alone, at least mostly. It seems like a good time to start figuring out what I want. Yeah, yeah, like that wasn't what I was doing before. Oh well, the future just seems a little bit more immediate all of a sudden.

Keep Dreaming
Daydream Believer