What do you have tattoed on your arm?
It was nine years ago I was laying prostrate in a bed hating my life. I knew that the life I was living was not the life that I had imagined for myself and I knew that I had only myself to blame. I knew what I wanted to do but I didn’t know if I had the courage to do what needed to be done. There were too many people living who would be too disappointed with the choices I wanted to make and I couldn’t stand to disappoint them. The bottom line, though, was that I was disappointing myself and I knew it. I knew I had two choices, to become myself or to continue trying to live a normal life. I laid in bed for several days and I bought myself a black notebook. I determined to write myself into my future. I didn’t know how I would get from that bed to my future but I knew that words had something to do with it. I began to write everyday, I read writers who would in turn inspire me to write. I met the Beats and read Kerouac and Ginsberg while strolling the streets of North Beach. I met Sartre and DeBeauvoir and read the words of the existentialists while drinking cheap wine in some holed out café. By the end of that black book I was writing free form poetry and planning to quit my job and use my savings to enjoy my unemployment in the comfort of a New York flat. Well at least for the summer before graduate school. Somewhere in the middle of a hot and humid July in the middle of Greenwich Village and a Sartre novel I saw myself in my future and I knew that I had no choice but to follow that road. I’ve never looked back. I went home and got “Courage” tattooed on my arm and I never stopped scribbling into little black books. Some months ago I had the fortune of visiting one of the bars that I haunted that summer and I could take some solace in the fact I had accomplished everything that I had dreamed about doing while I was getting wasted so many years earlier.
It all boiled down, I think, to believing in myself, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the courage to seek out the courage that I needed. There were so many reasons not to believe, to want to give up, to settle. There were so many people who would have been content with me as I was. Taking the road less traveled meant possibly hurting the people that I loved. Well, for me it meant living my life in the dark, literally. I couldn’t be who they thought I was, but I couldn’t let them know.
Such is the life of art. All of the words that I have produced have come at a great cost; but the life I’ve lived has been an enviable one. I still feel pulled every now and then to give up all this nonsense. To stop writing, to close down the station, to focus on more adult pursuits than blogging on the Internet. But I haven’t forgotten that feeling on the bed, I haven’t forgotten the promise I made to myself in that little black book. I haven’t forgotten the feeling in that Greenwich bar. Sometimes, though, it’s a little fuzzy.
It was particularly fuzzy this Winter after a big move and a huge job promotion that found me at a very tender age, at the apex of the public university system, the author of books and the inhabitant of a post as a professor of cultural studies. Instead of being energized, I was mostly tired and set in a routine of bureaucracy and time. I set out for Arizona where I learned of the attempted suicide of a close family member. Driving across the desert highway literally racing time I thought about my life course, what I had earned and maybe what I was at risk of leaving behind. All I could write were lyrics and poems. All I could think about were the power of art and music and words and how they lifted me out of the gutter when I could have slid through into the doldrums of life, or even worse, ended it.
So you see it’s not about a radio station or a record label; its not even about writing a lyric or a play or a philosophical tome. Its about living, its about the battle to live freely, for whatever short amount of time we have to do it.
I’ve done a lot of cool things in my life. Blogging to a virtual community of artists and intellectuals and friends has to be up there near the top. I smile at the privilege even as I type. I admire you all and the roads you traveled to become who you are. I know you understand my story, and you may even share in essence even if the details are dissimilar. What matters is that at the end of the day we have all found ourselves in this place. You with these words and me trying to make that tattoo on my arm prophetic, and not a mockery. |
