most of what I intend amounts to scribbles & flashes
most of what I think is a reaction
most of what I feel feels itself and has nothing to do with me
(though I bow to it nonetheless)
and most of what I know is worthless
unless
you believe that there are consequences
that meaning is real
and that intangibles such as mood,
presence, calm,
connection,
and existence
comprise the only actual value,
like I do
Thank you, John!
It is easy to get lost.
Each life contains within it a countless number of long-lost stories. Time, memory, and circumstance all operate such that most of the things that happen to us pass unnoticed, undocumented, untold.
The adaptive sense that forces us to push on and move through events, people, places, and times, sees to it that things keep moving, that we keep moving, and there are innumerable benefits to this.
But another result is that things fall through the cracks along the way and get lost. Things happen around us and to us and the result is something like a piece of molded clay; impressions are made upon us, and into us, but we keep moving on. There is accumulation, some good, some bad. There is growth and there is damage.
It can also become very easy for a person to get lost inside of him or herself, sometimes for years at a time, in the name of creating something true, but possibly losing sight of the original point of the entire endeavor, which is always simply to express; to express something that felt too significant to simply let fall through the cracks and get lost.
So, like many other works, this story contains within it another story; the story of its own making, which is just another analog for growth, and which, in its own way, is every bit as real, as complex, as painful, difficult, hopeful, and joyous as the original story.
A young man sits at a desk in a small, nondescript, windowless office in downtown Boston. He has just arrived, a new temp worker, just a few months out of college. Two superiors hover around, both female, both blonde. The younger of the two, just a few years older than the boy, is mildly attractive, and a decent conversationalist. The older one, fair-skinned, slender, and more than amply endowed, looks and acts like the stereotype of a 1950’s airline stewardess.
Within a few weeks both females take an unmistakable liking to the young newcomer. Nothing overtly sexual; one is married, the other engaged, and both seem to possess an uncommonly high degree of moral fiber relative to the modern-day society in which they live. But our boy nevertheless starts to feel the faint tingling of a particular, familiar sensation, at once thrilling and endlessly comfortable. It arises from before memory, like something written in the code of his DNA. It is the one feeling that, if he’s being honest, trumps all others; adoring female attention.
But it is stopped dead before it can be felt by all but the deepest and most resilient layers of his consciousness. In its place arise pain, anger and fear. It is a feeling that he no longer trusts.
Before long, the young man listens to headphones for the better part of each workday, as he mindlessly performs his duties.
A few months go by. Some days he actually falls to pieces inside. Not at a memory of her, or at the sudden immediate pang of irreplaceable-ness and finality. But slowly, listening each day to the throbbing, repeating, vibrato’d guitar hymn of the Rolling Stones’ Let It Loose, he begins to feel a distant ember of hope returning; the faintest stirrings of reassurance that it will all, eventually, turn out ok.
Top 10 Artists for Summer 2012
Thank you, Ariel & CyberPR for including me on this list, very pleased to be here. Best wishes for a great summer to everyone, Dave
Free copy of the CD to all in attendance!
Story album artwork by Jeremy Bronson & Julia Liu
Fontana’s is located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, at 105 Eldridge Street between Broome and Grand. WEBSITE
