Mar 14 2010
San Diego
I’m going back to San Diego next week, and as we used to say back in the day, “I’m fully stoked.” Because, like, I am. Seriously.
Now mind you, I grew up there. I’m there not infrequently. But there is this thing in the back of my mind of late which has to do with this view, from the alley behind the house that I lived in off and on for a couple of years before I left:
The alley behind my house
I shot this the day before I moved to Atlanta for my new job. I wasn’t so much interested in the view from the alley, then.
The day before I left, I wandered around Ocean Beach and Pt Loma taking pictures of things that had meaning to me.
The OB Pier, 1990
It’s the picture of the alley that I keep coming back to because where I am now is so far removed from that, sometimes it’s just really hard for me to remember what led me to here, where I am today. Ideally, I’d be able to just map it all out and say, oh, look: I did… this here, and three months later, this other thing happened and there ya have it, I get it now: Welcome to Durham.
The thing: there is no better place for me right now. I could be pretty much anywhere and there would be no better place for me now.
I prefer linear to random because linear is explainable and can be managed; random is unpredictable, scary and messy.
Linear is cause and effect, timelines and Gantt charts, tasks and task dependencies and I’m here to tell you: when you are working and living to a project plan, anything can be mitigated and everything can be managed. Random is how life happens though, in spite of my relentless planning.
I can’t recapture my past. My past is beautiful and hugely imperfect. I want to make it linear and fix it and I can’t. We forget I suspect, about the messes we really were.. back in the day, no matter how beautiful or perfect our alleys and houses were.
I can’t get it back, nor do I want to, because I’m too happily attached to the present. But I appreciate my past simply because it’s the place and time where I formed the references and constructs by which I exist in the rest of my world.
What Shelli said…
Shelli in Turkey, 2010
Shelli will tell you these are simply snapshots: an instant at best. A micro-moment of nothing in particular. That it’s one of the billions by which we become the people we are becoming. Shelli will tell you that we are not defined by these snapshots any more than who we are on any given day represents the people that we actually are.
When I was traveling for work I preferred to believe that my mode of travel and the places I stayed at and the lists I appeared on were the things that defined me. That these things, these constructs were far more than merely snapshots; that I really was all that, if only for the duration of my time on the airplane and throughout all the rituals performed at the airport that got me there.
For the longest time when I was inside that, I collected business cards from people I met on the plane. We would drink, we would bond, and then the cabin lights would come up, the glasses would be gone and there was always this awkward… thing. This perfunctory exchange of business cards and numbers with people I knew I would never see or talk to again. Awkward.
I look at all that differently now. I see it more of late how Shelli does: I’m never going to be anything more or less than who I am at any given moment. All I am really, is simply the sum of everything that’s ever happened to me, everybody I’ve ever known, and every place I’ve ever been. No one instance defines me, nor did it ever. It’s… relieving.
Sometimes I come across something like the picture of the alley that unexpectedly brings me to my knees with all that it represents that can never be reclaimed. I have to take a moment and collect myself because it floors me, how immediately grounded a snapshot can make me in a way that I did not know was possible.
Because it’s all of that and at the same time, it’s nothing. It’s just my personal history, and it’s the duration of that and the sum of my time on the planet which defines me still.
Which is fortunate, since if I still defined myself by my seat assignment, my guess is I’d be screwed.