-from the notebook

Genuine Wild West

Yay. I'm art directing a New Jersey western out in May's landing.

not special / just unique

I had only lived in New York for a year, and in the streets of the city the faces are starting to melt together for me. So many times I have just stopped dead in the street on 5th avenue, the blur of bodies moving around me, thinking, knowing that I’ve seen an old friend pass by. I’ll sneak up and get a closer look and then realize it’s just a variation on a theme I have come to know.

Upon my first meeting with friends from Vermont when I first moved here I mentioned this new phenomenon. One of them, who had grown up in midtown, said that it was just part of the sad truth of becoming a city dweller.

“Everyone” he said “starts to look the same.”

I was taken aback by the statement. It seemed so negative in the grand scheme of things. Though I might have had similar thoughts, I had been coming about it from a very different angle during my time here.

More and more during my short time on this little hurtling orb of ours I am struck by everyone’s lack of specialness and everyone’s beautiful and precious uniqueness. Let me explain.

As any misfit teenage boy who’s read Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club will be more than happy to tell you: “You’re not special.” They’ll say it with a sneer and probably do something adorable like skuff at the dirt with the toe of their enormous sneaker. If you get the chance tell them that it’s true, and that it’s beautiful. Because the thing is, inherent in this startling lack of specialness is the reality that we are not alone. Everyone you meet is fighting a battle. Fighting to make a living, to fix our broken relationships, to get to know our kids, to find God, to forget our past, to remember the names of the people we’ve wronged, to figure out how we’re gonna pay for school, to tell her we love her, to take the first step to sobriety, to take the first step out of the house in fifteen years, fighting to find a reason to fight anymore until the fight itself stops being a fight and just becomes living and everything is so overwhelming you wonder how we can even take it anymore and we wonder why people aren’t screaming in the streets and we marvel at the fact that gun metal ever grows cold. And then, when we least expect it, somebody says a kind word, or holds a door, or holds our hand, or trims our hair on a rooftop on a Friday night. It makes you so happy that you just start being. For a whole couple hours you might even just walk when you walk, just eat when you eat, and laugh when you laugh. And then it starts all over again.

Every time you’ve been on the subway and felt contempt for the people around you, someone else was also contemptuous. Every time you thought you were alone you were swimming in a sea of sameness. There is no escape from the great unifier of the human experience and it’s one of the greatest gifts that we receive.

You’re not special, you’re just unique. That uniqueness is your birthright and your curse, the fact of its existence does not elevate or denigrate you. It just simply is what it is. It took me a year of this city to have that lesson ground into my heart. Like a bittersweet mantra it reaffirms itself with every walk down an avenue or rocketing journey though the subway system. The faces may blend together but the people themselves still seem real to me. The city, a coral reef, and all of us building our lives around us. Lives and missions that are somehow simultaneously shells and billboards. The sounds of the city speak it to me: You are not special, you are unique. Love, move, work, play, sleep. And again, and again.

The Kids Are OK

By now I’m sure that you’ve heard about my generation. We’ve grown up hearing that we’re all special and now we are uniquely unequipped to deal with the harsh realities of the world. You’ve heard that we’re technologically addicted and we exist in a word that is increasingly physically cramped and more and more spiritually and emotionally isolated. The beauty of info-share and the slavery of the baud rates suffuse our lives. The newspapers have told you that we’re happy to pose and preen and pretend to be either corporate or counter culture but we’re really just riding on coat tails. That we are too concerned with the creation of our own separate “public” selves to cultivate a private one. I will admit that I have met my fair share of shallow people, but they don’t seem to be limited to the under thirty-something set. There are people who certainly believe that for them the rules do not apply. However I think that it has more to do with the fact that these few (yes few) are crippled by their own hand. Mostly, I am surrounded by people who are desperately trying to do the right thing in a world that is changing so rapidly that the older people that we would have followed don’t even know what to do. Sometimes we are forced to move blindly, and that can look like floundering to some people, even if at the end of the day we’ve moved forward after some sideways shuffling. People forget I think, that this is an untrodden landscape. That the end times have come and gone and that this is the world that we have to forge on our own. And there are no straight answers. And there are no straight paths. And that being a settler in an alien terrain is dangerous, especially when you don’t know what to pack.

Here is my list:

Bring your ideals
Bring compassion
Bring practicality
Bring patience
Bring hope
Bring vigilance
Bring strength
Bring spirit
Bring humility
Bring stewardship
Bring energy
Bring self evaluation
Bring love
Get down

.move.