Left right side to side
Eating letters with your mind
A bit smarter now
Like that, they break my fourth wall. They gaze directly into the camera and break the boundaries between observer and actor. My suspension of disbelief is now increasingly difficult to sustain. This is the feeling I get when people look at me and I’m not expecting it. I feel they are intruding upon my world of make believe. The director, I think, did not instruct you to do that. Cut!
And yet, suspiciously, despite my perception of the world, Erin says this of me:
“You’re one of the only people I know who’s actually living.”
At 11:26 pm I see a Denny’s. I turn the car into the parking lot and park by the front doors. A large neon sign is brightly lit in the night sky that says “24 Hours.” It pulls me in like a fly to be zapped. I sit at the bar and order an Oreo milkshake. I have this “dairy thing,” Karli calls it. In fact, she has so assertively coined it my “dairy fetish.” But I can’t argue otherwise. There’s something about yogurt, ice cream, milk, egg nog, cheese, pizza, and basically any other combination of dairy product that just soothes my innards. Milkshakes especially. I like to go to all-nite diners and order a milkshake and write. Many people might consider it an atypical place to derive inspiration, but they aren’t actually living.
I know what Erin meant when she told me I was the only person she knows who is actually living. But really, it’s just that I love the general magnificence of things: an old man sipping black coffee; this is beautiful. His life, his history, whatever-the-fuck, it doesn’t matter. Right now he’s a faded grey man sipping coffee at Denny’s at a time when no one ought to be drinking coffee. His flannel shirt is wrinkled. This man is a mobile tableau, the Mona Lisa in real-life, in Lynnwood, WA, in po-dunk butt-fuck nowhere, in your chair now.
“You’re one of the only people I know who’s actually living.”
A photo of me clad in vest and trim pants, festive buttons pinned to my arms, dancing and singing with my guitar amongst a crowd of passersby evoked this response from Erin. I was living in the middle of the city, awake in a crowd of sleepwalkers. I digress; it’s not so much that I’m living and no one else is. I make movements and am aware of them as I make them, or at least I try to be. I consciously begin making the memory as I am simultaneously experiencing it. I guess this means I’m really living, but I’m no more alive than you.
Where do my interests begin to conflict? Am I both the director of this film, and an actor in it? I think this is the confusion I seek to reconcile. I’ve often tried to define myself on one end of the observer-participator spectrum, but maybe this spectrum is complete bullshit.
For that matter, who says I can’t be the director, screenwriter, actor, and composer of this film? No one? Good. I don’t anticipate simply living my life is likely to make me much money, but hey, it’s a start. And really, I’m no more alive than you.
