How they Operate

One way or another, we’ve all come out on the better side of something. Some of us are married now, others to be imminently, and yet others are still figuring all of that out. Yet we’ve lived enough to learn a few things and be confident enough to say them out loud. And it’s funny, the more we do it, and the more we share it with one another, the more happens between us and the more we become more than just the raw sum of our parts.

I love it that Gomez and Neil Finn and Mick Jagger and Pete Townshend always say what they feel out loud. You know, it totally helps other people out: the average bourgeois joes like me and my husband, who both adore this band (me just a skosh more than him), and who thence don’t have to say everything out loud all the time, even if we feel it in every fiber and figment of our beings.

For that’s what we have in common, having landed here on the opposite stream, maybe gasping for breath and traumatized or maybe just happy to be alive and awake. Somehow it’s love that has landed us on the other side. We’ve all seemed to find a way to conquer the weakness that kept us from going deeper instead of going elsewhere or away altogether.

And here they lay their souls bare and talk about the contradictions of love and what it means to choose to stay, which I think is just great and tells me all over again that we are part of a tribe. Okay, maybe it’s a boho tribe (boho=new bohemian – which I see in popular parlance as a sort of an artsy bourgeois version of the yuppie, am I right?) but there’s some real feeling behind it that I recognize and want to share.

It’s like our wish back in the 1980s to put MDA on our leaders’ cornflakes some morning – we knew if we could do it (not that we even remotely dreamed of really doing anything so nuts), we could solve the world peace problem. To be able to turn off the part of our brains that says “other tribe: bad, my tribe: good” and just see everyone as part of “my tribe” can be a miraculous thing.

And music brings people together. Art brings people together. And as long as that’s true, I’m going to keep on this path.

Oooh, nothing ever quite goes as you think it will.

This morning promptly at 10 we met a smiling man in an official position and he was quite willing to say nice things about the world and about our project until a moment when he insisted we turn off the camera (and to our cameraman M.'s discredit, our cooperative, professional, and friendly official had to ask twice and it felt like a dirty trick when M. mumbled something about unplugging the camera before he really turned it off). Then our smiling man said: Off the record, I'm leaving at the end of this weekend. My position is no more. It was all a sham: My board raised no money for me to work with, no feasibility study was done before I came, our lame duck of a governor has no power and no credibility left in anyone's camp, and I've done all I can here. I am going home to save what is left of my marriage. He was all at once devastated, bitterly disappointed, hoping he still has a hearth to which he can return, dreading "moving house" this weekend, and dreading flying his dogs many hours next week. But he was stopping on the East Coast on the way home to see where some settlers landed because he has a family member of the same name who was in the party of people who looked for survivors of that settlement. So he'd always been compelled by the place and was planning to spend a couple of weeks reflecting and recovering there. What a bruisingly short and abrupt bump in his career he allowed us to see all at once. I'm amazed no one cried. (He even said something about hoping never to return to jobs like selling cars as he'd had to do in the past.) But he had lined up a new project in yet another country to which he could look forward. We all hugged -- even he and I although we had just met and were unlikely ever to meet again. By 10:30 we were out the door and waiting for the elevators. When the three of us reached the lobby floor, M. had to work at shoving the elevator doors aside with his hands; the buttons we pushed had no influence on it. Not long after that, we emerged onto the street once again, on our way back to our own worlds.

And so goes another of a million stories in the big cities.

Listen to this!

You are invited to Tallest Giraffe Productions' first event:

Why spoons? How many are enough?

This was a playlist title at one point, but I have decided that "enough spoons" deserves its own blog space. It has great meaning to me, as someone who at times in my life had no spoons at all. And now I have enough spoons for me and everyone else. I have spoons in all sizes. Serving spoons and mixing spoons and slotted spoons and plenty of tea spoons (I even like the ones with someone else's initial on them) and even a tiny spoon for ice cream. It's a great life, let me tell you.