Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Gravity pulls west

I'm visiting my brother this week in Northern California. This trip, like all trips out here, is a dangerous one. For me a trip to California is like that one sip of whiskey taken by a recovering alcoholic. It something that i have acquired the taste for and I know I will eventually do anything to obtain it, to scratch the itch. 

It's a junkies love that brings me back to California. After too long with out it's sun rays and blue skies and ocean breeze I enter a sort of fevered state.  I tend to let myself be buried by the unending gray winters of the midwest, frost bitten by the lonely short days. If I don't try my best to make it out west once a year I start to feel the roots dig in. The familiar bars and labyrinth of suburbia's  that swirl around the sunken in midwest loom overhead and a slow panic sets in.

I'm not sure what the pull is for me, but it seems to be almost elemental or subconscious. Liken to a migratory sense placed in birds, the pull isn't something that must be assembled from stories heard or dreams dreamt but rather it is something that must be suppressed until the most opportune time then sprung like a trap. 

It's not that I desire to flee out west to make it as an actor, or musician to which I would inevitably be a waiter or a bartender. The truth is I'm not sure what I believe this state has to offer that isn't available in Missouri, but I know that sense there hasn't pilgrims in this country they have sought to travel west. Suffering stifling tragedies and overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds for centuries sojourners have made the tracks with the sun and cast their trajectory toward the west. Some successful and others only to meet their demise a days way out of safety - maybe this is the pull; to measure myself against some other vision of myself. To test what success or what tragedy I can withstand and to know in the end where the wonder lies and which direction is home.

2 comments:

Tim Heitz said...

Good stuff man.

I likey your talkey.

Sorry, I just thought I'd say the most unsophisticated thing I could think of to sum up my feelings for your very sophisticated observations.

Anyway, of course-- I'll be back.

Tim Heitz said...

you gonna write anything else?

i challenge you to write something--anything--at least once a week.

dare you, even.

don't be a chicken.