Maura spends her time in a cave scratching away at the written word in a manner that, every week, seems more like an enactment of the allegory of the cave where a frazzled redhead emerges from the hole under a building to head towards the rising sun.
The Other spends her time trying to convince people to do good things, a challenging job well suited for altruistic people such as the Other. After a hard days work she likes stopping over at my apartment for dinner, another job that the Other performs with the utmost expertise.
The Center of the Universe, spends his time reading silly stores about Canadian history, trying convince himself to selflessly save the world, and baking far too much.
Though, the one thing that the poet, the philosopher, and the historian have in common is that they find their hearts wishing, at least once, for the providence of being able to skip to the idyllic future and jump into the arms of some one hanging by their legs from electrical scaffolding or some artistic soul willing to inspire me into doing greater, being better, and not being afraid of taking the world everyday from a different point of view.
I remember sitting in the cottage and thinking how wonderful it might be to have our courtly loves and romantic bildung, yet the only thing I ended up working for was survival and clinging to aspirations of some Gilmore Girl life, filled with friends, sassy children, and a sophomoric cohort of academics making nerdy jokes at each other at some cafe in Manhattan. We have churned our way through the creme de la creme and finally have been homogenized back in with the rest of the milk. Now, we find ourselves (having survived) making our way through boring classes hoping to settle into translucent dreams of badly drawn boys.
This is what happens to us socially oriented positive people wanting to make a lasting impact on the world. We fight for others to keep our translucent dreams from convincing us to start a process of birthing 15 children or running away to Europe.
Regardless, I think this is all a good thing. I can't wait to see 15 children calling me uncle or say that I've spilt tea on the carpet of one of the most well known Czech literary philosophers of our time. I'm actually quite excited. What I am not excited about is the fact that I am thinking once again about moving back into this diaspora--we want to return to that infinite longing that is our home.
We've talked about what's going to happen next year as I stay in the emerald city to accumulate pieces of paper that certify me in topics appreciated more by the clergy than anyone else. And as the one-two punch head out into proverbial "world" and have gotten into the habit of establishing our future in an outline that involves me in some domestic role taking care of the children that the poet produces, I sit here waiting for it to happen.
This community is one of the few I have. It's one of the few places that I can "I" can actually situate myself. That I can actually believe in an I, rather than a "we" formed by discursive powers beyond our control. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on this place, this setting where I am that guy in the tree suit.
We are all, at some level, souls disenchanted with home who decided that we were going to make a new one. We have our ties back to the desert, the land of milk (but not honey), and the suburban wasteland, but our home isn't geographical. We float off in our heads colliding with each other someplace in between the internet, cell phone signals, and coffee shops.
I've always been perplexed by the homesick, and it's becoming clearer now. While I have my family back in sweet home San Jose, the space that's between the poetic rock and a philosophically hard place is the discomforting place where I belong. We have no history of driving long distances into the middle of nowhere, listening to the romantic songs of our generation. Rather, we have relatively short (or long) meandering car rides to costco at odd hours of the morning listening to Irish folk music while making illegal turns. Our adventures have been through imaginary story lines created by bff history professors at UCLA reinforced with emphatic usage of verbs of being. Who the hell are we?
We never grew up. We're still playing in our imaginations, building forts out of cushions and low thread count sheets. The bitterness we've tasted is as real as it is literary and the catharsis that plagues our lives is as historical as it is fictitious--the dust of our former relationships clings to us, physically in Maura's car and viscerally in words exchanged in between sips of carefully measured cold water in oversized pyrex measuring cups.
How ridiculously quotidian are we? Our bildung was not made by restless decisions but by rational maturation driven by some desire to get out of where we were originally from. And now that we are here, we want to spend our lives in the imagination that our childhoods never forgot. It's depressing how much imagination fades as we get older.
To be fascinated by fanciful farfetched images makes one awkward, and so we've become tweedle dee, tweedle dumb and a gender-bending Alice, minus the opium. Children forever are we--getting jobs and playing house, never leaving the blissful state of our dreams.
