Alone

I am slowly discovering what it means to be alone with your dreams. I haven't been this alone since my early 20s, when everything was tortured and simple and wrought with danger and possibility. So much has changed within me, but mostly time has passed, my time, and I can feel each day like the running down of a meter. My life.

I am not afraid of the alone. I like it. I keep my own unpredictable hours, my idiosycratic habits, my wet towels and stone cold mugs of over-steeped tea. I am never bored, and not really lonely. But sometimes the vastness of my own life looms cavernous around me and I am cowed by all that I am, all that I must do, and the fear, of course, of missing that gold ring as it comes around again. How many chances do we get? Will I even know it when it comes? What is it? What am I here to do?

I have run from this mission for so long. Hidden in the warm, uncomplicated embrace of past loves, most of them unworthy. I knew on some level all along that they were mostly there to protect me from myself. The enormity of this space in which I now sit. I did not have the tools to navigate in the dark, I had not submitted to the tyger. I would have done anything to hide from myself.

But no more. I want to be here. I want to be here in this difficult place and I want to find out what it is, what it really is. I have to focus, breathe, be here. I have to discover what it means to live in the forest of the night.

I hate rules

Just saying. I may be frequently inappropriate and pay only passing consideration to social morays, but wouldn't the world be a better place if we let go of those ridiculous games, those rules, and just said what we think?

Back

I'm back.

Back from the extended dreamland that was the last eight months of my life. I feel like Keats as the nightingale disappears over the hills leaving him standing, dazed, in the summer darkness.

I don't know anything. I don't know where I am going, or what my life is going to be like, or what I will do. I just know that the decision I made was no decision. I could have tried to compromise my heart and my soul but I could not have sustained it. I would have become increasingly insufferable, betrayed by my own flesh that would have risen up in revolt against my feeble capitulation to comfort.

"The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul and walks smiling at its funeral." -Khalil Gilbran

I choose love, always choose love first. But it cannot be love that owns me, restricts me, prescribes itself to me like a self-medicating doctor diagnosing me with his own illness. Because I can't, no matter how much I might desire it, be confined in the safety of a loving cage.

So it is off to Los Angeles again. One less ligament in my hip, a few more months on my body, but still able to sit on my own head and making remarkable progress with those cursed handstands. It's time to open up all the way, cast off all doubt, plan, believe, and be free. I am not fearless, but I will rest in the palm of my fear and feel the warmth of its skin and know that I am alive, for now, and I will not be crushed.

Drinking Vodka on the Rocks

is something I should not be doing right now.

But I don't know how else to cope with what is moving into me, through me, right now.

Tomorrow, nice and early, I will be submitting my source of my power, the center of my strife and struggle, to scrutiny under Magnetic Resonance Imaging. My hip. My darling hip. It shakes, it quivers, it bends and undulates. Why does it betray me now? Why this pain? Why does it make me stop?

What will I do?

How do I cope with this? What do I do with all that is inside me, clamoring to escape? Who am I, without my movement? Who am I without my dream? Who am I if no one understands the depth, the profundity, the pain, of what it is I am losing?

A painter I heard about quit painting because he said that no one cared if he kept painting. Six months later he started painting again because no one cared that he stopped.

No one cares about what I do except me. But I care so much it is tearing me apart. My dreams are me, and I am them, and they are the reason for my sentence in this slowly deteriorating flesh. If I can't pursue them with every fiber of my being, I do not know what will become of me. Except vodka. Vodka on the rocks.

Hip Troll Sighting

So I just got back from seeing the superduper grand poo-bah of injured hips at Stanford. He immediately dismissed my vastly inferior x-rays and had me get a set of new ones. Much to his surprise he found a small troll crouched atop my femur gnawing irritably on the bone and making rude gestures at the technician. This explains the problem, of course.

The troll is in the shape of an impingement. That means that I was born with a little trolly knob on the head of my femur (see, it IS all my parent's fault) that, in most normal human beings, probably would sit unperturbed into my decrepitude. Alas, because I am crazy (that is definitely my fault) and insist on doing improbably things with my joints, my ligaments, particularly on the right side, have loosen up like overused bungee cords and now the femur is rattling around in the socket and the troll is gradually wearing away at my cartilage, labral tissue, nerves, and other important and tragically fragile bits. This is more pronounced on the right where the ligaments are sadder, but I also have the problem on my left hip, along with some calcification (baby trolls?).

While physical therapy may help by supporting the joint with muscle instead of the sad ligaments, if I want to resume my normal abnormal range of motion and avoid the long term risk of arthritis or (ack) hip replacement, the troll has got to go. This means surgery. The extent of the surgery will be determined after a really unpleasant MRI in which they inject dye into my hip using a needle that makes me flinch just imagining it. Recovery time is 4-8 months depending on how much troll has to be scraped off the bone.

I think I can still do handstands throughout. I'm going to start training handbalancing with Angelo next week. Hopefully the troll with not object overmuch and it will keep the tyger from gnawing at other delicate bits for the next... how many months?

Grrrrrrr....

Says the tyger. It's been long enough.

Long enough spent resting, eating, feeling safe and cozy. Now I can feel the pacing beast inside me and it occurs to me, not for the first time...

Maybe I'm one of those people who will never "grow up". I talked to my mother on the phone today and she is shoving writing jobs down my throat, assuring me that I just have to find the right job, something really interesting, and I will be excited and passionate about it. She sounds a little desperate when she says it, desperate to convince me, desperate to believe it herself?

But I don't believe it. I may end up working some job type job for a little while right now to facilitate the healing of the hip, but passion? For writing about other people's lives, other people's dreams, for other people's publications? I used to think that being a journalist would be such a fabulous job, but that was before I found this life I have now. And I can't go back.

I can deal with many of the recent changes. My gym for instance. Only a few months ago I was aerobicizing away amidst herds of lanky models, carefully tanned actors, and grizzled producers. The Hollywood sign floated tauntingly outside the massive plate glass windows and everything was gleamingly fluorescent, new, painfully trendy. Up and coming DJs set up their rigs to spin dub step and mash ups for the hip hop and stripper pole classes taught by professional dancers. Half the breasts in the changing room had surgical assistance in maintaining their buoyancy.

Now the creaky hand-cranked windows in my gym look out onto a quaint bagel shop and a used electronics store with a broken neon sign that flashes intermittently. My fellow fitness-seekers are mostly dumpy Chinese housewives and retired cops on crutches. The one set of loudspeakers was, during the brief moment I removed my earphones, playing Lionel Ritchie. The pace of the average workout taking place around me is desultory that I frequently wonder why they come to the gym at all. As usual, I stand out a bit, which isn't necessarily a problem, but when combined with my broiling frustration it makes me feel a bit like the high school kid I used to be. Testy.

I love my home now, it's beautiful. It is far more beautiful than anyplace I anticipated living in the near future. I have a boudoire, and I sleep in a bed fit for royalty.

So I find it odd that I am so restless. Who wouldn't want what I have? And yet deep inside the tyger paces and growls and I have to get back to work soon. I have to get back to the struggle, the birthing. It's the only way I know to get this thing out, and if it stays inside me it will chew its way out through my ribcage, eviscerating me along the way.

Dreams Composted

Bless me reader for I have sinned, it has been almost two months since my last blogfession.

I am sure you are out there, disgruntled, muttering, "And what kept you, eh?"

All two of you who even know about this blog that is.

Well, bugger, I'm not even going to offer you an apology. Life over the last two months has been like a high speed luge ride. You try typing when sliding down an icy maze and speeds so fast they make your hair hurt. Not that things have been bad, mind you. Just full of rapid unexpected change.

There's an oxymoron, unexpected change. The very thing that we should always expect, regardless of any other belief or hope, is change. And yet, still we toil away building our sand castles beneath the breakers and profess such outrage when our moats and turrets are swept away.

So here I am, bewildered but not beaten, facing a whole new set of challenges. Yippee.

Because I am sadistic and capricious I'm not going to go any further in describing the mundane circumstances of my changed fate. Instead I'm going to write about a dream I had about a week ago that has been lingering about my semi-consciousness  in hope of more attention. I should mention that I frequently dream in Gaudi-like worlds of fantastic beauty, terror, and overabundance. Often my dreams barely tilt their hat at the confines of what we like to call"reality" and instead take off into a Jungian, Campbell-like world of symbols and grandeur. Sometimes I am not myself at all, but a spirit hovering about the life of another person in another time, watching as they meet out their days on this earth from cradle to grave.

This dream was somewhere between the two. As you will quickly deduce, it is heavily based on my own life, and yet not my life, not this world. I love it.

Here goes.

I was born and raised in the circus. Nature and nurture combined to make me a superlative performer, skilled on multiple apparatus, and a riveting showperson (was I male or female, not sure). I loved my life, my rising stardom, the glittering world of show in which I was something special.

Then one day I fell. Just an accident. The kind of thing that isn't really anyone's fault but makes people shrug and say... "sometimes these things just happen."

It happened to me and I was damaged, permanently. All my hard work, all my dreams, my entire identity was gone. Having no other skills or knowledge of the world I was largely unemployable, but my friends at the circus had pity on me and employed me has the janitor at the training facility. All day I mopped floors, cleaned up sweaty towels, fixed leaky toilets, watching the young and able-bodies aspirants around me as they hoisted their bodies into divine positions, over and over again. The younger ones did not remember my days of glory, and ran by me without a word. Some whispered stories about me behind my back, others talked to me with that barely concealed impatience that is reserved for those who everybody knows is without use or purpose in life. I was numb.

Then, while cleaning out a back room one day, I came across an old album of clippings, photographs, and writing. Limping off to a secluded corner I began to read it. I was clearly the property of Alberto, a Mexican stiltwalker who was a good friend of my father's).**

I did not know my father well, he had left when I was still a small child and gone to perform in Europe. We never heard from him again. Going through Alberto's book I found pictures of my father taken long after he had left, pictures of him with Alberto in a colossal and  exquisite theater, somewhere in Europe. At that moment I know that I had to go find my father and restart my life elsewhere. I could not continue to be defined by this injury that I was allowing to shape my body and my life.

How I arrived in Europe, and which city I went to, are both unclear. Something my imagination will have to fill in should I decide to further work this story (which is clearly why the story came to me in the first place). I disembarked to find the city decimated by a new drug that had hit the streets and spread through the region like the plague. It seemed to be something akin to Ayuhuasca or San Pedro. It stripped away all ability for pretence, making people raw. One would expect a city of barbaric animals but the drug also gave people the ability to see the divine. They were living between worlds, surviving on grace alone, wild in the streets which had broken through with plants, trees, and jurassic vines that embraced buildings, lampposts, and the skeletons of unused motor vehicles.

I saw grand society ladies huddled around campfires with thugs and grizzled warriors. They looked right through each other, into each other, and saw each other's past lives like reflections in a pair of mirrors, only changing slightly with each repetition.

The city made me feel alive like I hadn't felt since my accident. More alive. The ground beneath my feet was breathing and I slipped through the streets, between the phantasms that were the city's residents, in an ecstasy. I knew that I was in pursuit of my destiny, the reason for my existence.

With the help of an old map I found the theater. It was towering, seats covered in napped old red velvet stacked in tiers up into the darkness of the distant domed ceiling. Somehow trees had grown up within and around the theater, replacing its walls and part of the roof with towering trunks and canopies the size of a city block. The scale dwarfed even the tallest man, and yet it was the perfect stage, rigged with vines and lit by speckled spots of light from the distant sun or moon.

I knew that my father was here, somewhere, still at work creating spectacle, leading the people through this underworld journey. I just had to find him, and find my part, the part written for me.



**Note: My father actually did have a friend named Alberto from Mexico who I believe became a politician in his home state. He helped my parents replaster the ceiling of my childhood home by walking on stilts instead of relying on a ladder.