I’m a little slow to start this morning. I suppose this isn’t that different than half of my other mornings. I wrote a title last night before bed – swagger. It was going to be a short playlist of the songs I listen to as I walk around Memphis. There are days I feel like I need to walk as though I own this town. Not because I really need to own it, but probably because I know I’m alone here and need to own that feeling a bit better. Last night I went to the Green Beetle, had a couple of beers and a burger and got a frosty boozy drink to go (my friend, Lisa, said I needed to try the bushwhacker). The drink was ok. I popped my earbuds in and bopped on down the street back to my apartment. My go-to songs right now for a swaggering saunter are “Help Me Stranger” and “Meet Me In the City.” I’ve posted them before… here they are again.
The depressive side to the swaggering manic is usually Wild Child. I save that for weekend mornings like today…. When maybe I want to be a little wistful, when I want to plumb the depths deserving of fine words and poems. This is how we get comfortable with loss, let it curl up next to us like a trusty pup. Here’s a live version of Wild Child’s song “Bridges Burning.” I’ve seen them two or three times no. Her voice is amazing.
This morning I’m lamenting the lack of authentic connections. Last night I started another online conversation with a seemingly kindred soul. The entire process is so strange. I have seven or eight people I’m talking to. Seven or eight people in various stages of discovery – some I connect with once a week, one or two people I talk with daily (this includes some of my new friends Lisa and Stacy). I’m not sure I’ll actually meet any of them. Not because I’m opposed to meeting, but I think so many of us are casually looking that none of us find or make time to meet or look too deeply. In some cases the mental calculations prevent us from taking a chance – they seem to have a complicated life, they live too far, they’re too busy, cute – but cute enough?, they don’t seem interested, I’m not sure I’m interested, etc. etc. In a lot of cases the conversations stay so on the surface that they never gather momentum, never create a spark. In some cases they go straight to the therapy session – mutual tales of woe. This is dating in your 40s. I’m trying to think of the proper visual analogy of all of this poking around, all of these test conversations. The best I can come up with was I remember the plumbers that came out to our office at United Way…. they needed to find where the drain pipe was buried in the ground. The guy had a pointy metal staff that he inserted in to the ground at various spots hoping to strike the metal pipe below. Prospecting. I’ve had dozens of prospecting conversations… and now I’m thinking about the other end of those conversations, those women also having dozens of prospecting conversation. The disturbing image is of a bunch of naked, fat, and blind mole people wandering through underground caverns, arms stretched out and waving, feeling our way along the walls, occasionally bumping in to another blind, fat, naked mole person doing exactly the same thing… fumbling to feel the contours of each other’s face – is this a mole person, is this my mole person? What are their features? At times, we completely walk by each other, get just enough of a breeze as we pass to know, or at least suspect, there was someone else within our proximity.
I’m still thinking a little bit about the comment on the blog. The worthy of my love statement. I think, at the heart of that statement is the belief that we shouldn’t love anyone (or waste our time on anyone) who doesn’t or can’t return our love… Scroll through the Facebook pages of your more forlorn friends and you’ll see plenty of “inspirational” quotes to this effect. The power of walking away. How does unconditional love fit in to this worldview? I’m reminded of a Steinbeck quote I recently came across, “nothing good gets away.” The more and more I come back to this topic, I find myself embracing complexity…. good and bad and lots of in between… love and hate and lots of in between. I think it was Stephen Dunn who wrote in one of his poems it’s ok to swing wildly to the left and then back to the right in order to find the center…. this is how we learn to dance.
My final thought for the morning – because I’ve just opened my volume of Dunn poems and re-read with that familiar sense of yeah, this guy gets it, and now I want to get on with my day (exercise, coffee shop, reading, prospecting). I’m thinking about the process – of love, of writing, of meeting someone new. It feels like I’m caught somewhere between magic and math (you can bet your ass that’s gonna work it’s way in to a poem). I want to believe in a type of divine inspiration which can’t be forced. But I also want to believe that there are things we can do to set the tone, the mood, the table for a great meal. I’m trying to think of what has preceded a great conversation or relationship. What holds me back when I sit down to write, what prompts the words to flow. It seems like if I could identify these things, I could master writing, love, friendships. How do I create the conditions for flourishing? Aren’t there ways to till the soil, prime the pump, create the necessary mental foreplay to produce and create? So begins another day caught between lots of competing ideas: satisfaction and lust, growth and decay, solitude in a crowd… finding ways to, as Dunn says, “create a corner in the middle of the room.”