Japanese Noodles and the Ragged Tiger
I think the hardest thing about being and living alone are the small currents, tiny schools of fish through the psyche, pockets of temperature change, dappled light and dark. There in the koi ponds they wriggle tails and shift patterns of heads and bodies. When the mood hits, it hits and sticks. It lingers like scotch tape on the bottom of a cat’s paw. Pick at it and shake it with teeth and claws or capsize onto your back and wait out the eventual weakening of the glue. Walk around for a bit and it might just come off, but it might not.
Flick, tail, flicker, orange and red blur, sunlight on yellow and shadows around distended bubble eyes and whiskers probing nothing.
I’ve spent the greater part of the last decade not only alone, but usually alone in some foreign city, working where I sleep and where I eat. As soon as the tide shifts away from this state of being, it retracts quickly, returns itself to an equilibrium that depends almost solely on self-motivation and self-steerage.
I’m in the time now after the slapback, when all of the work to understand the return has been done and all the movement required to stand in the old footprints has been made. And even though I returned this time to a place far from the place I stood in the past, it is still a city in the same realm of being. There are still long days here in the middle of the Seattle winter, long days now filled completely with self-project management. Work doesn’t exist unless I make it exist. Creation is not encountered or begun unless I choose to encounter it or begin it. Moods linger in whatever state they were last to be found, until I can determine ways to alter them, or until some small moment, unnoticed before, does it for me.
This is a slow science. It’s a forever question. There are sectors of my life to pass through, one after the other. There are work tables and small creatures and scents and colors and promises. But they are also sectional; those rooms have doors. So easy it is now to simply shut them, to walk down a long hallway and lay on the grass outside.
On days like this, it’s an easy thing to not do. If I don’t force the issue, schedule out music and writing and web work and reading and whatnot, nothing will happen, because I’m the only one around to enact motion. And it’s an interesting thing to stand in the middle of the nothing and ask yourself firmly, what is the natural state. Is this indeed the place I was meant to go to and learn from, or the place I return to because I have not gone to and learned from someplace else? Are the shoulds of my life, the plans and the goals indicative of what it is that I want to do with my life, or are they a convenient way of structuring the passing of time, living up to some imagined fulfillment, or providing some validity as to the expenditure of precious minutes, hours and years as insurance against old age regret?
I remember when I was a teenager, I loved Duran Duran. But I loved them secretly. In those days, in the setting of Junior High or High School, allegiance to Simon Le Bon and the rest of the Fab Five would be grounds for an immediate pummeling if not an immediate shunning. Albeit, I was too big to be pummeled and I was pretty well shunned as it was. But there is always room for new and interesting brands of persecution when it comes to teenage boys.
My girlfriends loved Duran Duran, as all girlfriends did back then. And through them, I had a limitless treasure trove of albums and merchandise, which I, gollum-like, knelt over and admired when everything was quiet and dark. Rio. Seven and the Ragged Tiger. Arena on VHS. These were my secret passions and I devoured them hungrily, sucked down the poppy guitar and whining vocals, feasted on the ambiguous sexuality, and turned lyrics over and over and over in my hands until they were torn and senseless.
I remember a time in the long queue for a roller coaster with a group of several couples when the background ride music switched to the dance mix version of The Reflex. The strain it took to stop my legs from moving and to purse my lips tightly so as not to mouth the words gave me a headache the rest of the day.
“Ch’yeah… Duran Duran. This sucks,” my friend said.
“Mmmmm hmmmmm,” I nodded, cross legged and teeth clenched.
Such pleasure later when I raced home, holed up in the dark basement and danced to Is There Something I Should Know. Release. And as it turns out, this was probably good practice, or bad practice as the case may be, for my later teenage experiences with women.
Flip, head swish, murky waves ripple, stones settle, shadow fish.
The point is that I can do anything I want to do with my life at this moment, perhaps more so than at any moment in the past. And that gives me much more control than I know what to do with. It gives me more hours in the day than I know what to do with. And it gives me a solitude that while very familiar and safe, does not attract the kind of magickal surprises one gets from a much different, community-based setting.
I’ve begun to develop a new way of going about my life, something I am calling “Noodling”. It has to do with freedom from anything but motion, and no sectional destinations, only sketching and tinkering and messing about with margins. And I’m seriously thinking about taking Walkabout on the road, driving up the coast of Canada to Alaska, seeking something in the journey that will give me some answers.
Both of these things are a direct result of a raging self-argument. Both of them are an attempt to walk closer and closer to the glee of a secret Duran Duran and farther and father away from self-discipline and structure and obligation and expectation. Because at this point, with the chaos of my brain as it attempts to exact control and the fire of my passion as it attempts to be heard, it’s turning out that the only solution is going to be taking the heart path and being true to living rather than true to life.
But today, less of me stares at the koi pond from above and more of me floats on the surface on a thin leaf boat, buffeted by fat rubbery lips gasping for insect legs, blinded by the patterns that wash over the moodscape like tsunamis. And more of me leans against walls and stares out windows, plays multiple games of Scrabble, talks to the moon, and watches the grey, grey heavens level the cresting waves, until sleep comes again and the glue waters down to nothing.
