Friday, July 23, 2010

Did she love him, or did she feel nothing at all for him or for any other man, being, as she had said that afternoon, free, like the wind or the sea?




I don't know many things but I know a few. I know that I am an artist, I know who my real friends are, I know that I don't give myself enough credit, and that my intuition, if I'm really honest about listening to what it's saying, always takes me to the right place at the appropriate time.

I first moved to Austin accompanied by my dear compadre, Clay. I remember him sprawled out on my bed as he returned gradually from a magical day trip. Oh, Clay, the charismatic drifter who befriended everybody and nobody on his gallivants around the world, his routine hitching around the country - no one, of course, was surprised when he ran off to join the circus. So you know, he's laying there all blissed out, with big child eyeballs (like cartoons ones shaped like big raindrops) thinking to us about his approaching 26th birthday and he says, "I always figured that I'd be done wandering like this by now. I'm closer to thirty than twenty and I just thought that I'd be settling down, you know, maybe thinking about getting married and starting a family or a job or something." (Clay, by the way - if you're reading - you actually did say this though you might deny it or forgot about it by now).

So now here I am two years later on my porch, across the street from a seedy college apartment complex and an elderly daycare center - and I'm exactly the same age as he was in my room that day. I'm still in a dead end service industry job that's completely unrelated to any of my passions by a long shot, doing art in my tiny roach infested bedroom, and I haven't come close to doing a crumb of what Clay had done by the time he was 25 (not to mention loads of other people I know and envy at least in the way of travel and spontaneous living).

I went to California recently and had dinner with another friend from back home who owned house, completed his doctorate, and had been sober for a year after returning from Detroit, Michigan which had landed him in a rehab center. He was stable, set up, worked something like 14 hours a day, had a cat, a girlfriend, a surfboard, a condo so close to the ocean you could nearly spit on it from his window. He told me that other friends had jobs at museums, or traveled the country with art exhibitions, were married or getting married, whatever, and I thought; I make sandwiches with no tip jar for a living, have an art degree, just broke up with another boyfriend, live paycheck to paycheck.

But he also told me that for some reason, he felt that twenty-five seems to have some combustible effect, "that things all of a sudden start to happen" at twenty-five. Maybe it's because we realize we're sick of living in roach infested houses, working menial jobs for just enough pay to pay the rent and bills and buy six packs of beer and cheap wine. Maybe at twenty-five we become honest about our potential and our mortality and our resentment or desire for our solitude. Or maybe we're just bored.

So. Twenty-five. I know in five years I'll look back at you, if I'm still around, and say, "oh how you were so young and beautiful and free of responsibility!" But here at twenty-five, I look to thirty, and beyond - tomorrow, ten minutes from now and say, "it's now or fucking never."