“I was just thinking - I used to go here. Back when it was a school.” Two snaggly teeth grinned out at me from under a cap way too warm to be wearing on a day like this.

“Sure not a school anymore, huh?” I exclaimed, continuing to slurp at my chicken noodle soup I’d bought from QFC.

“Yeah… I was just trippin’ out on that.” He looked around in what seemed like wonder.

“Kind of sad, actually,” I said, indicating the mass of pointless stores ‘Wallingford Center’ had been turned into over the years.

“Yeah, and that library down there. It used to be a police station. First one I was ever in.”

We laughed and just before he walked on, he said, “Things have changed so much. It’s hard to believe.”

*

I spent most of the day in bed and most of yesterday too, slightly sick. A little bit of a sore throat, but really just needing to take some time out from the world. Things really have changed so much. In a week’s time I will be starting a new life down in California, with no money but also really no problems. Or that is, no problems beyond the ones I allow my fevered brain to invent and destroy night by night.

The morning I left for my last trip down there - the one that convinced me I needed to move down there - I walked by a newstand, the Seattle PI I think. The headline read, “A New Life Begins on I5.”

They meant a baby or something was born I guess somewhere along that stretch of highway interlacing cities in the Pacific Northwest. But I read things how I want to read them. When a news headline tells me I’m about to start a new life, well I tend to believe it.

The thing I’ve come to realize most keenly as of late is that there are two phases in life. There is one phase where you spend all your time dreaming and chasing your dreams (maybe those are two separate phases, I don’t know). And then there’s a phase immediately after that in which you have the ability - a doorway opens up, a golden window in the sky - and then you have to actually start living your dreams.

I think people discount how nerve-wracking that can be. Reason being that the shift from desiring to actually living requires the radical re-wiring of your entire brain, of your entire way of living, of the patterns by which you have defined yourself. How do you go from being a “dreamer” to being a “liver”? But that makes it sound like we’re talking about liver and onions or something. We’re not. That would, though, probably be a lot simpler thing to talk about.

I was trying, just now, to find a quote by Cassevetes that Garrett sent me once long ago. Maybe back before I even moved out West. It’s hard to remember those days at all anymore. They have been over-written by what seems like much more potent stuff. But that quote has stuck with me - whether or not I can find the actual wording of it online.

I’ll just have to paraphrase it then, but it went something like: Life is the part that you spend all your life rehearsing for, and then one day actually start living. Well, there I’ve gone and mangled it. So why don’t I throw some other quotes at you I found during my fruitless search for the actual wording. I like this one:

“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”

This one’s alright too. Maybe I just like it because it’s attributed to Neil Gaiman and that guy is seriously onto some shit…

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you.”

It’s so stupid, these feelings. I want to spend all my time talking about it, glorifying it. I feel like if you have access to this then you must be an avatar for it in this world. You must be love’s champion on earth, bringing the “good news” to all those hearts who are too jaded to hear it or believe in it anymore. But all the words, all the talking, all the pictures, all the YouTube videos - even the word “Love” itself - pales to nothing in the lightness, serenity and perfect completeness of those moments of utter weirdness, of utter stupidity, of sitting on white rocks in a moonlit alleyway drinking Kona Porter.

And what else is there? I have spent my whole life searching, my whole life dreaming. The schools that once taught us have all been turned into shopping malls. Time to leave them behind. The police stations that once contained our youthful indiscretions have become public libraries for us to share the wisdom gained during our former incarceration. The captives are being set free. Things have changed so much. Time to change with them.

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