Monday, March 26, 2012

'Nobody Said It Was Easy...'

"Nobody said it was easy…" I went to bed thinking about the phrase in Chris Martin's song, The Scientist. In the context of the song, he's talking about a relationship, but the phrase, can be applied to most things in life. And sometimes, it's not easy. Yesterday was a very hard day. I was uneasy and filled with anxiety. But like so many days, weeks, and years in my life, the landscape I've lived upon is one of extremes. I didn't intentionally set out in life to live an extreme life, it just happened. When I say extreme, I don’t mean that I'm a NASCAR driver, I mean that it's obvious to me, (and probably everyone around me unless I'm being extremely self absorbed) that my life has been full of peaks and valleys. Where I am from in Southern Utah, you can go from 6,000 feet to 11,000 feet in fifteen minutes, and back the other way down the road, you can be at 2,000 feet in twenty. And it is an extreme landscape, filled with sandstone canyons, beautiful orange and blue vistas, and in the higher elevations, black and brittle lava rock. The beautiful high desert landscape there is probably one of my favorite places. There are days and nights when I have been there— that, the air, the sand, the desert life, the slot canyons, are so raw and pristine that it hurts. As though the beauty is somehow penetrating my skin and eroding me away from the inside. Yes, that is extreme, but there are lots of people out there who may feel things a little differently, may feel pain differently, may be overly empathetic or maudlin about any situation, and may just react to it all very differently.

My day started yesterday morning watching a lecture, Why We Believe in Gods by Andy Thomsen, a scientist and a psychologist, (a lethal combination) and immediately upon hearing the lecture, I went into an existential crisis. My point here is that first, there are probably not millions of people listening to a lecture like this at 7am in the morning, and secondly, most people, (if they were watching this lecture) would have a mechanism in their brains that have a filter to find some reason to give it balance. I sometimes find that I have no balance at all, and suck it all in as though it is the last thing I will ever hear and it could be the key to unlocking the great universal questions. Without going into the complete lecture, the basic premise of it was that the human brain is conditioned to use religion as a mechanism for survival, which in itself doesn't seem so bad, except the science of it left me reduced to that black awful state of eternal nothingness when we die. I hate that place! Its like the Woody Allen movie, (I think Radio Days) Where the teacher is talking to the parents about their child's unwillingness to do his homework, because he says, "The universe is expanding, what's the point?"

I went and saw Kris Kristofferson Friday night. And, the music was great, but what I was struck with was the weariness in his body and his voice, and I kept thinking, "He's running out of time…" And then that leads me to the same existential conclusion in myself, that I'm running out of time. I was cognizant of the music, but I was more cognizant of his feelings…and, as I said, the weariness of life. Earlier that day, I had an audition playing at a bar, and as I was dressing to go, I thought, "Good God, my body hurts, my hands hurt, I'm blurry and jaded, and I am going into some bar to play for two hours…" I want to point out that my thoughts on the matter could appear to be very self-absorbed, but to me they are more of a point of introspection, that I have to survive and find ways to do it. It was just a plain weary weekend, and of course, I couldn't stop shuffling my feet to move onto the next thing. I understand the cycles of life notion, that many people choose to evolve it and live it in levels that sort of fleshes it out in hopes of collecting things for the long haul. For whatever reason, I've never been able to do that, I've never been able to say, "When I'm fifty, I'll get this, and I'll have this, and I'll enjoy my family, etc." I've just never been able to do that. It's not that I am not goal oriented. My goals, however, also run to extremes. I've often talked about the notion of delusions of grandeur here in my writing, and the ever present desire to simply believe so many of them, and in doing so, get very close to achieving a certain aspect of them. And so my body often hurts, like all my trucks and little things that I have not lost at the end of about ten or so years, I've driven them so hard they look like hell but they somehow keep going. I still play the guitar I bought in 1984, and it has a string that buzzes and the fret board has worn down to an extreme place, still, it sounds like no other guitar, and sometime when I'm playing it, I will get that feeling as if it’s the only 'thing' that really knows who I am. Again, the extreme introspection, and the guitar will have the feeling of being alive at that moment, in my hands, and leveling out notes in the dry desert air. I suppose I'll have to be content with these things that I notice. My guitar could use a good overhaul, but alas, neither one of us can afford any kind of overhaul at all. So, all we can do it put on new strings and play them in such a way that makes a certain kind of music, and perhaps, something that is a hybrid that doesn't exist anywhere in the world at that particular moment. Can we live for these things? These moments? I think so, but I'm sure that in the end, we need a little more to keep us living and moving forward. My body is full of pain right now, my brain and my soul are in a similar place, and yet every once and a while, the culmination of all of it kicks out a note that is pure, but extreme, like a singular siren, in the middle of the night in New York City. Wow. The writing is tough today, but some of it is done. Now the shuffle to other things…


1 comment:

vooman's voice said...

Loved your Blog...Hey, it's not over until it's over. I think your heading down the right path right now. I heard a great sermon at the Spiritualist Church about the progress of our thoughts that make up the future. "Who here, when they can't sleep from thinking too much, is "thinking about their thinking?" "We can be in control of the thoughts we think. They are your thoughts. Make sure you are programing yourself in the way you want to be and expect great thing to happen." Fran was her name.
Aunt Linda...