Going for a Drive

This is what it means 
To be alone
Tear out my heart
Feed it to lions
Oh, For this one wish 
I beg you this tonight
Show me no mercy
But spare me my pride
I'm going for a drive

"You've done harder things than this," I told her, trying to gently talk her through the tears.



I should have said, "Take a deep breath, this is the pain. This is the part where you need courage."

You may need to go on a drive.

Because to let these moments of destiny and pain and truth fall upon you, without permanent hurt, you'll need to breathe, to think, to be alone.

Because this pain is going to expose you. Strip you. It's going to offer the world a view of your weakness and your humanness.

And it's going to dare you. Dare you to squint into to the icy, windy, empty unknown. The frightening place where the you in you is naked and alone, begging to be clothed and defined.

Where the you is really you. Brilliantly and shockingly disconnected. A place where tennis rackets and Mercedes and Amex cards are without meaning. The place where only true affirmations can be told.

My words simplify those of poets and philosophers. And I'm right.

Because this is the you you lost, you traded. The you you were.

And it's been covered, layer upon layer, in yoga pants and tennis skirts, martinis and marriages, children and homework and false affirmations. Quiescently, it's been waiting, all these years, to be rediscovered.

And it is a force that will not, cannot be, denied. It's entangled with the other quantum versions of you. The mathematical certainty that your soul exists across 10 dimensions, maybe even 26 dimensions.

But I can promise you this. It has a destiny. And sometimes it is pain that redirects you toward the path of your destiny.

And like the man who knows he cannot escape destiny, sometimes you just need to go for a drive. Allow the world to flow past you. Allow it's realities and possibilities and intricacies to flow into your mind, to widen your vision. Look into the sky and see the stars.

And as you drive, you'll perhaps find peace. Perhaps you will begin to understand why you may need to give up your heart. Give into the pain. The hurt. But know that while the universe will show you no mercy, it has a plan for you.

And while you may miss the Mercedes, it's far better to find your bliss riding among the stars.

So, on your drive, have courage. Trust in the universe.

Know that your destiny is beautiful. In one way or another, it is as glorious as the heavens. As the infinity of the stars.

The ones you'll see above you. Out there on your drive.  

1972 and our Better Angels - Terry and Peter's Dialogue

I hope to study further, a few more years or so 

I also hope to keep a steady high - ooh yeah yeah yeah...

Mid-century American history was, for a time, thought to be a confusing maelstrom of politics and violence, of war and peace. A time when radical ideas emerged. When the past clashed with the future.

But now, the history of that generation is viewed through a different lens.

Here, in the future, the veil has been lifted. We see the complex contexts of communism and colonialism. We can better understand how the brutality of the war reflected strategies adopted by generals from World War II; holdouts from a time when it was considered acceptable to firebomb civilian cities.

We've always known that our soldiers were heros - fighting and dying in a place that many considered the wasteland of a generation. Now we know it unconditionally.

But there were others who we might also remember differently - now that we can look at the past through a future lens. That there are other heroes - ones who fought in their own way: for our soldiers to live, to come home. They painted signs that said "make love, not war." They protested, held hands and put daisies in the gun barrels of the National Guards.

They didn't know what we know today. They did it anyway.

From the sign-painters and protesters, the nation's conscience began to appear; radiating from our nation's younger, better angels. It flashed on college campuses; in protests, chaotic disruptions, gatherings and, sometimes, with a certain violence. 

This new collective conscience was coalesced, memorably and beautifully, by art and music.

It had a soundtrack by Jim Morrison and The Doors, the Who and the Rolling Stones. Joan Baez.
Poetic voices. Hippie symphonies. Beautifully blended chords and bass tracks and keyboards.

Like the Who's classic tantrum about teenage wastelands.

It had a screenplay written by Martin, Robert, Timothy and others; an historic collection of philosophers, fearless dreamers and existential thinkers.

And with that, they created dialogue.

Nixon famously despised it - and later, to his regret, he simply disregarded it. Dissonance was attacked with rhetoric, racism, belittlement and shame. Mistakenly - and purposely - righteousness was cast in the context of drugs, pot and ignorance.

But the coffins kept coming home, draped in flags; and the cameras rolled. The images indelibly imprinted and energized the young, beaded and bell-bottomed. The result was a movement that would define their generation.

From the past, the words and music can remind us - in an instant - of just how special those days - those moments - really were. They were us at our best.

And even though perhaps we didn't know it then, we do now.

For me, there is this... "Dialogue parts I & II," written by Robert Lamm in 1972. It featured Terry Kath and Peter Cetera of the group Chicago. Terry, on his lead guitar, sent Lamm's words and chords across the studio to Pete, who responded with bass guitar and a kind of glorious inspirational naïvete.

It's goose-bumpingly stirring. To sing along and replay this anthem, over and over, is to glimpse moments in 1972 when heroes came in more than one form.

"Dialogue" Click here to listen to Dialogue Parts I and II

Are you optimistic 'bout the way things are going?

No, I never, ever think of it at all

Don't you ever worry, when you see what's going down?

No, I try to mind my business, that is, no business at all

When it's time to function as a feeling human being, will your Bachelor of Arts help you get by?

I hope to study further, a few more years or so. I also hope to keep a steady high - ooh yeah yeah yeah

Will you try to change things, use the power that you have, the power of a million new ideas?

What is this power you speak of and this need for things to change? I always thought that everything was fine - everything is fine

Don't you feel repression just closing in around?

No, the campus here is very, very free

Does it make you angry the way war is dragging on?

Well, I hope the President knows what he's into, ooh I just don't know

Don't you ever see the starvation in the city where you live, all the needless hunger all the needless pain?

I haven't been there lately, the country is so fine, but my neighbors don't seem hungry 'cause they haven't got the time

Thank you for the talk, you know you really eased my mind. I was troubled by the shapes of things to come.

Well, if you had my outlook your feelings would be numb, you'd always think that everything was fine. 

Everything is fine.

The other side of the world

"I'm watching a really scary movie tonight," I texted, around the globe, to earth's brighter side.

"It's the Sixth Sense," I typed, watching Bruce Willis on the screen.

Willis' character, a child psychologist, believed he was treating a boy who sees dead people. But he himself was unknowingly dead.

The movie is simple and haunting, a screenplay by Manoj Nelliyattu "M. Night" Shyamalan, who grew up in Pennsylvania - but is, interestingly, also from the other side of the world.

"Yuk, scary movies," she texted back. Her final text that night.

I almost responded with, "Yuk, spicy food," as a retort; that our cinematic and culinary tastes were equally mismatched. But I didn't.

She knows.

On her side of the world, the sun was shining and she was amidst relatives and guests crowded into the kitchen, sharing curries and languages; crowding each other in a din of voices and cultural comfort.

Here, the skies are filled with a bright crescent moon and a million stars. The tiny lights of fireflies flicker among the endless rows of corn. The train occasionally flashes past, blasting a horn that makes the coyotes and raccoons howl out near the river.

It's just me and my scary movie.

Across the room, pencils, watercolors and markers are scattered across the counter, waiting for the next inspiration. My Macbook is there too, waiting for the next entry, like this one.

I keep pausing the video, exchanging texts with my children. I'm alone, but not really. I've been able to feel alive and well on my side of world, even if it's just me.

But I remember feeling so different. Just packing for a business trip could make me feel lonely. I remember, SO many times, being homesick and heartbroken, leaving for the airport as the kids rode their bicycles down the driveway, waving goodbye.

The pain of leaving was as powerful as the bliss in coming home.

They were days of parenting, of pressure, of sleepless nights. Of baby pools and beaches and water wings. School lunches and homework help. They were days of happiness, of being a part of something greater than the me that I was before.

When the tsunami arrived, every day felt like I was just about to leave for the airport.

And so, I learned to do this thing.

A thing that protects me from being broken-hearted. I somehow learned to live inside of my head. A place where I could paint the landscape, instead of living in someone else's scary reality.

And there are times when I feel like Bruce Willis, the psychologist living in a world he believes is real. Where other people are scarred and scared and different.

But one where he is the ghost.

And so, here I am, on the other side of the world, listening to crickets and watching a scary movie.

And I try to imagine a place that is filled with too many people, chattering in different languages, talking over each other, eating and laughing and being way too close.

Even though it seems so foreign, so alien, it's where I was before. And I liked it - I really did.

But that was before I became this ghost.

A happy ghost, here, among the rows of corn and all these summer fireflies.

Here, on the other side of the world.

A hundred blues, a thousand skies

Not all creative souls are crazy.  And not all crazy people are artists.

"Genius comes from pain."

In recent decades, there have been a number of attempts to find a firm empirical basis for that idea.

Some correlative points have emerged: There is research suggesting that people with bipolar disorder, as well as the healthy siblings of people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, are more likely to have creative occupations.

People with certain genetic risk factors for schizophrenia have been found to be more creative. In 1989, Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., who herself has bipolar disorder, found a high prevalence of mood disorders among a group of British writers and artists. And in 1987, Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., found a higher rate of mental illness among 30 creative writers than among 30 equally educated non-writers.

Recent research from Austria builds upon this idea. A 2013 study found that people who scored high for creativity and people who scored high for schizotypy -- that is, behavior suggestive of schizophrenia but not diagnosable as such -- "share an inability to filter out extraneous or irrelevant material," Fast Company reported.

So that's why.

People say we're distracted. That we notice everything, absorb everything.

Dad was like that too.

We see clouds and fixate on their shapes and colors. See a hundred different kinds of blue, a thousand skies.

Our days are filled to a level of happiness in the way a teacup is filled from a firehouse - empty from the filling. For there is too much sun, too many voices, too many colors, too much sadness.

Too many people to perceive, their subtleties and existence that stream, 4G, into our heads.

We find our happiness in the admixture of change, of revolving experiences and visions. We live our days through senses, for our minutes and our days are colored by the swirling reality of the moment.

And, as I've said before, we see ghosts.