Only a hopelessly romantic soul could find beauty in a production trip for an ad for a major oil company. But there were so many interesting people I left after the shoot was over, and I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
My brain is working slowly today on making the connections I would like to make. About the heart breaking slowness of it all, the day to day dull patterns of money ebbing and flowing and the tooth brushing and eating and transporting our bodies from one place to another.
Just having met so many souls who piece together their freelance lives, their creative lives, making time for their dreams or putting their aspirations on hold while they travel: screen play authors making words come together on laptops in vans that whiz toward the airport; musicians and comics and actors going home to start over, start again; writers waking up to wash the evening’s dishes, vacuum dog hair. All of us throwing ourselves up against a wall, a formation made of stone that crumbles from time to time to let us in a little further, to give us hope that these slamming motions repetitive and continuous and monotonous will give way to our stubborn, relentless poking.
As I drove home the other night, the almost-full moon floated up above a multitude of clouds that danced like a weird finale of costumed performers in a recital: the spiky sharp mohawked with the round fluffy tutus with the long, narrow gymnast with the polka dotted polka dancer, until the curtain ever so gradually fell on them and the road ahead of me was gray and lit only by beams of electric light.
The dull ache of the slowness of it all gave way, like the fade of daylight, to a feeling of hope for all those I’d just met, each headed on their own path toward fulfillment or disappointment to lives filled with regret and longing or overflowing with success and recognition. And even those, those who reached their goals they so naively and courageously spoke of, even they will eventually want more, and pursue that again with just as much chance of winning or losing that battle. And just the way we all pine for something, someone, some life, and the way human nature tends to always want more, and the hilarious and painful truth of it all made my chest overflow with a heavy, jittery feeling of happiness and content. Maybe it was just the lack of sleep and delirium of being away from home working for five days straight, but whatever the cause my eyes blurred up and the feeling burst out of my throat and I laughed and whimpered and kept on driving under the nearly perfect moon.
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