The world felt light like a feather tonight. No five layers of fabric to keep us warm, a sweater and a jacket sufficed. How light the jacket felt! Like a feather light. Even the buildings, their tons of layers of bricks glued together with the sweat of thousands of workmen long gone, were but tiny pixels in this azure ocean of miniature trampolines and kissing lip corners, teeth peeks and sweet saliva. A bird was singing on this first day people were talking spring. Still faraway, but a dot on the horizon, is the day skirts will touch the saddles and ice cream vendors will end their hibernation. A magnificently shining dot where we will wrap ourselves in each other, be birds and kiss like a feather light. Sweet saliva, sweet world.
Got home yesterday night, switched on the tv looking for something subtitled to watch while brushing my teeth and saw this:
This is just a small excerpt from the awe-inspiring 1970 documentary Woodstock, and somehow stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the film in the sense that here we have a young couple not necessarily wanting to be part of the action, dissecting from a distance not only the festival but their own generation almost like philosophers watching over the masses. Theirs is a lost generation, as the young man puts it, imprisoned by the urge to be free. Rather than a genuine state of mind that can be attained as much by squatting alongside a country road as by switching the batteries of your camera in a skyscraper elevator, freedom had become a conceptual goal that could only be reached through the well-defined channels of drugs, music, Eastern spirituality, free love and what have you.
Woodstock wasn't the proclaimed gateway to nirvana. It ended in the mud and fatigue, with junk and debris of untraceable origins scattered all across the field. It looked like a battlefield swamped with indefinable ‘stuff’ and here and there a human body crawling without any apparent sense of direction. Yet another lost generation had reached its culmination, there on the muddy fields of Bethel, NY. The proverbial bang they went out with: the roaring howl of Jimi Hendrix’ guitar.
On the other hand, it sure looked like one hell of a party, and graced the world with imagery of which even Hollywood wouldn’t be capable of, and yes, perhaps in essence every generation is lost, anxiously looking for a common denominator that connects & bonds us all in the comforting warmth of borderless unity, a global herd, although probably in the end
(...) everybody's looking for some kind of answer, where there isn't one.
In my world, invisibly walled, she was wearing something red. I couldn't clearly point out what it was exactly, but it was something red. A classic heart-shaped earring maybe, with even maybe a matching heart-patterned dress. But no, that would be too much. Too fifties-diner-style, drinking a milkshake, no matter what kind, as long as it is pink, on the way to a drive-in cinema, where night fills lungs. I'm playing the air guitar to an old tune and I see the bar tender looking at me, thinking "he's got it", while an hour ago I was just plain sober and he was just plain bar tender. Now, however, we share a connection, one that can only last as long as I'm in the bar. Only difference is that he probably knew her for real.
Today's visionary parade of words and images, bits and pieces of nothingness, details that matter, kids that draw outside of the lines, crushed beer cans aside the pavement and the flickering letter of a neon billboard dream portraying plastic androids, emotional wellbeing advocated on an incorrectly spelled piece of paper in the mailbox, keys ringing and chiming before the keyhole is found, a lover watching moonlight from the wooden kitchen floor, a cockroach hidden behind the washing machine, all brilliantly polished in domestic CGI, paradoxic nonsense covered with fur, sweet n soft and straight from the caramel ice cream vending machine, can you hear its noise, it's like a mother giving birth, such sweetness about to appear, about to be consumed, eaten by this world's giant belly. I'm exploding.
Welcome to Breadcrumb Crater, established in 1999, the wooden sign said. It was placed right between the two largest oak trees of the forest in such a perfectly symmetrical way that you wouldn't be surprised if someone were to tell you the trees were planted right next to the sign. But then again, the sign said 1999 and these trees looked like they had been there for ages already. For all we know, they could've been planted hundreds of years ago by two native American love birds as a token of their never ending, undying and unconditional love. At least that's what I liked to believe when I first put my backpack down against the trunk of the largest oak tree. Wouldn't it be nice in an ironic kind of way if this had been the one the girl had planted, I wondered. Quite typical of me actually, to start dwelling in my own auto-generated thoughts and swing a boomerang right into the usual stream of consciousness which should have been directed at the goal of my journey, but at this particular moment it obviously wasn't. Maybe it was because I had already walked such a long way, with my eyes and feet pointing towards this sign, the next intermediary stop. I had reached that stop now, overwhelmed with joy, relief and most of all a strange kind of exhilarating tiredness. The kind that keeps you up at night to talk and talk because you know before dawn you will kiss her, and you know that this talking only builds up the tension even more. Sure, you're tired. Sure, she's tired. But you're both immersed in this great energy streaming passed your every vain, like a non-stop rollercoaster after closing hours with the lights out. That's how I felt. The air was fresh & healthy in a non-hippie kind of way: straight in your face unbreakable. My eyes meandered along the contours of the tree crowns until they reached the circle's starting point again. My dizzy head needed a cigarette. I tried to blow the smoke through the imaginary circle I had just drawn with my eyes, but gave up quickly and threw myself against my heavy backpack.
It came back to me today when I was mindlessly browsing through one of those women's magazines: a rather hip 'n trendy lingerie designer posing under a cobblestone bridge by day. It wasn't so much the picture that brought it back, it was the notion that at least two people (the designer and the photographer) had to be standing there, by day.
It brought me back to those days in high school when we rarely got to see the world outside the school walls. Actually, there were low-maintenance pine trees in front of the walls. Cover-up nature. But whenever we did get the chance to go outside during school hours, I was jealous of all those people and their freedom to go and walk about, do their thing on the street, simply be part of the city. The same envy sometimes overwhelms me when I see journalists on tv waiting at the steps of some court house or a guarded gate. Inner city jobs are different; sure you'll hate the rain and bus delays and buses that -in all their haste not to be delayed- rush through puddles along the pavement, but you'll come across scraps of paper, roof top poetry and people you'd never see in OfficeVille.
Maybe tomorrow I'll deviate from the daily A > B and back > A route, to recalculate.
