With no small sense of wonder, I watch myself say hello to the waitress, a nerdy young Vietnamese woman with enormous black rimmed glasses, and I watch myself order food. It is absolutely incredible to me. My body is clenched so tightly with pain that I can barely sit up in my chair. I just climbed down out of the back window of my house, following my suitcase and guitar, to avoid seeing any of the people, the loving friends, gathering outside my bedroom door. It would have been too much. Too painful. How are the words, “and an order of spring rolls” coming out of my mouth? But there they are. Moving out into the air between us. Independent of everything that is me they emerge and elicit a smiling response from the waitress who dashes off to bring me the first food I’ll attempt to eat since yesterday, well after the sun has set and I looked into her eyes for the last time. After I touched her hands for the last time. After I held her in a tango embrace, both of us crying, trying to remember every detail of her eyes, her nose, the curve of her hip, just touching and holding for the last time.

The waitress stops by later and, bending down to look up at my face, which I can’t seem lift from my chest, says, “You’ve got the look.” I freeze. I don’t want to talk about it. Is it obvious? Does she know? I don’t want to talk about it. I have nothing to say. Just move along and stop noticing me. I’m not really here. I’m sick and you might catch it. Maybe I can just run for the door. If I rip a handful of money from my wallet and just throw it on the table… “The look of someone who’s pretty full,” she says.

I glance over at the pile of uneaten food before me. The bowl of my favorite noodles. The pile of spring rolls. “Yeah, I guess I’ll need some boxes,” I hear myself say.

As always, follow the photo link to the photographer’s site.

Da Gu was an extremely tough woman. She never once let her physical ailments get in the way while spending time with us, and she insisted on making us tea and having ranting, passionate discussions with me. After growing up in China as a child, she had traveled to England to study english literature. She returned to work as a reporter and, ultimately, editor for the China Daily, China’s english language newspaper. Her use of the english language was so far superior to my own that I felt almost as ignorant saying hello as when I tried to discuss American history and politics with her.

Da Gu’s ex-husband was a literature professor, and apparently just as tough, opinionated, and stubborn as she was. They had been divorced for more than fifteen years, and to the day still took the time to argue with each other. She explained that two people so strong willed could simply never make it work. What she said next etched itself forever into my brain. “But if I was ever going to get married again, it would only be to him.” Weishi assured me that he had said the same thing to her.

Several weeks after I left China, the cancer finally won out. Someone likely scattered the smooth stones that took in so much pain, leaving them, too, to rest. I wonder how her ex-husband felt now that she was gone. To me those almost, but not quite, solvable problems that linger forever are the most tragic. Is there a point when they should have given in and cut off communication forever? Or was it the dynamic struggle that made what was left of their relationship so irresistible? Maybe, once again, the only answer is to continue to ask.

Granted, no one is hitting or stabbing anyone here, but I myself am pretty much incapable of saying these kinds of things to people, and I have to admit that it’s a bit surprising to hear, even in the context of a relationship that’s souring. But it made me think about what it is that I do in those situations instead of lashing out openly. I’ve certainly been the one being left behind, and there is an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness in the rejection I feel when it’s clear that someone I love is separating from me.

Telling someone they are ugly, fat, or stupid is a quick and dirty way to put someone lower on your hierarchy when you’re scrambling to keep their opinion from mattering. On the flip side, at times in the past I’ve made myself completely unappealing by wildly struggling to anticipate, and be, everything that my significant other must have wanted, turning me into a driveling, pathetic mush. More commonly, though, I think my unconscious strategy has been to transform the process into a cerebral challenge and a story I’m writing.

The challenge is to solve the puzzle by gathering all of the pieces of data and using them to construct an understanding of why the breakup is starting to occur. This understanding does in fact have a lot of value in helping work out problems, but it’s also a really great way to emotionally detach from the details as each is categorized for analysis and placed in a box.

As things move ever more quickly towards their inevitable conclusion, I craft the events into a poetic story and start adding it to the collection of stories that make up my life. By doing this even as it occurs, it gives the event purpose, meaning and value. The breakup and suffering become, in fact, a process of creation, the very thing that makes the blood flow through my artist veins.

In the aftermath, this stage becomes crucial and I am very disappointed if I haven’t harvested my intense emotions for poetic profit. Fortunately, this does no harm to my long term relationship with my former girlfriends. Better yet, by avoiding pawning their iPods, burning down their apartment buildings or, worst of all, calling them ugly I’ve so far been able to emerge with some interesting scars, a nice little musical repertoire, and some incredible lifelong friends.

As an artist and highly social being it’s not something I come in contact with all that often. My friends range in age from twenty to forty and I rarely know where they fall in that spectrum because their level of enthusiasm, creativity and experience are much more relevant to me than the number of years they’ve had the option to engage the world. All too often I’ve met people in the their mid twenties who are so much more comfortable with themselves and have explored so much more of the world than others who have never stopped in all of their fifty years on earth to look into a mirror.

Because of this, I was completely unprepared for my first confrontation with the concept of aging. My friend Monkey had a birthday a few years back. He’s about ten years younger than me and swore that nothing could wear him out. His birthday gift of total athletic exhaustion started with a morning of intense martial arts sparring and then he was handed off to me. I set up rounds of squash, wrestling, and swimming which have all done a pretty good job of exhausting me in the past if I do them long enough. I hadn’t actually wrestled since high school, but at the time even a feisty little guy like me could be brought to the point of complete immobility by the drills we did.

After a few games of squash I started going through a series of takedowns with Monkey when suddenly something happened. I stopped. Not because I wanted to. I had his head and shoulders locked up and I was about to flip him over for a Russian Roll when suddenly… I couldn’t go anywhere. I heaved and sputtered and finally had to stop for a second, apologize, and start again. It happened a second time. And a third. It was freaky. My legendary boundless energy had, for the first time in my recent memory, completely run out.

At first I was in a panic about the weird illness I must have picked up. Now it was time for my older friends to laugh at me. Apparently, the ability to spike in energy, that impulse push, was the first thing they noticed fading. I immediately melted down and frantically began listing every activity I could start learning now and still do when I was eighty. Clearly, I was almost incapacitated and needed to study Go, Tango dancing, and bridge ASAP.

The word “age” suddenly meant the slow death of all things precious to me until, during my conversation with Shannon, she used it in a very different way. She talked about how happy she was to no longer be twenty, and sent into emotional overload by the irrelevant details of life. She talked about perspective and self confidence. Perspective is something I grew pretty quickly and is something I am proud of having been able to offer others for a long time. But then I realized what had changed for me in a positive way.

While I’ve always been comfortable and happy with who I am, only recently have I been able to see how much my experience has given me some pretty formidable skills. I woke up one day while on the project in India and realized that I was, in fact, a complete badass of versatility. Out there in the field, after having memorizing several technical manuals on the plane so that I could shoot confidently with new equipment, I was having partial German conversations at midnight with an engineer in Germany so that he would send me a firmware patch for our equipment. I was hacking code. I was setting up backup systems. I was working really well with people, often without the benefit of spoken language. By the end, I was already learning some of the language. I was shooting some great footage from extreme positions and often while running. I could have fixed our jeep if it had broken down. I could have built a house from scratch. In two weeks I’ll be performing Indian music at a wedding. All together it feels really, really good to finally realize the value I can provide. Now I just have to tag this realization with a word, its source, that thing that has caused me so much angst… aging.

Photos are from a photo booth set up by the excellent photographer Steve Noreyko.

Rob Hanczar was the crazy kid all through Jr. High. He wrote absolutely brilliant short fiction in our writing class, but was known to fail any class he didn’t care about. At one point he decided that sloths were particularly funny and became an encyclopedia of sloth knowledge, just to get in as many obscure sloth references as possible. Late into High School, when I had just started playing guitar, I found out that he had been playing electric bass. I know instantly that he was going to be an amazing and completely out of the box creative musician and I jumped to form a band with him that lasted well through college.

One night I remember sitting with Rob, drinking a cheap beer and discussing life. We were talking about how much we loved playing music and he said to me, “You know, sometimes when I think about having to choose between sex and playing my bass…”

Most people put sex, and through implication, relationships, highest on their lists. Unlike Wikki, however, I’ve found some experiences in life that rival it. My friend Jonathan March was being indoctrinated into a corporate culture, and the new recruits were each told to share an emotionally intense moment. He started describing the time he played acoustic bass with an orchestra in a particular hall and as he recalled the event, tears began streaming down his face until he couldn’t speak.

After playing blues guitar live I was often accosted by women who appeared to have been overpowered by a mysterious force, their eyes melting and their brains bent on seduction. It was baffling to me, but my girlfriend at the time, Lisa Kvasnika, told me, “You are so intense and focused when you play. You’re putting so much energy into the guitar, that I want more than anything to be that guitar in your hands.”

When I’m improvising a solo, or even a whole piece with a group, I start to get lost in it. I revert almost entirely to the right brain, feeling out where each moment will take me next. I’m not thinking about the fact that as I stretch up into a bend the drums are dropping just enough to make that note want to sing a little longer before sliding down into a whisper, but I’m feeling all of that happen. As my fingers play through a range of gentle to intense the strings tremble, snap and shiver in response. I don’t think I have to push this analogy very far. The rise and fall of intensity. The rush of adrenaline.

Of course there are other intense experiences that give me similar feedback. When I’m rocketing down a hill feeling every twitch and shift of my body turn the snowboard into a knife carving snow I feel it. I aim for a pocket of moguls and hammer them, leaping into the air and flexing the board on the hard turns as I land, my heart dropping as I catch long air, landing with a fwap before cutting smooth arcs again, my legs vibrating over the rough spots.

But when the lonely nights arrive, my nylon guitar is the old friend that has always seen me through. I can spend hours working out a new piece of music or crafting lyrics that, when sung, carry the emotion I feel up a level, from my chest and out into the room. I think it’s telling that I’ve rarely, if ever, played the songs I’ve written this way for anyone else. I think they are written more to feel that emotional connection with the universe, something outside myself, than a way to get attention or respect. Cuddling with the universe, as it were!

I encouraged Wikki to find something that would feel this way for her. I’ve tried to encourage many people throughout my life to explore these other options. Ultimately, the desire to love and be loved is probably too great but at the same time humans are just too unreliable to depend on for all of these needs. Finding a passion outside of human relationships has made me a stronger, more independent person and I think that, ultimately, this is the best foundation for any real loving relationship.

click on the image to see the photographer’s page on flickr

Despite the limited set of requirements he’d used to select his bride, they were actually quite a cute couple. He went home early whenever he could and couldn’t wait to see her. We all went out to dinner a number of times and they were forever telling in-jokes and pausing to giggle with each other. I started thinking again about arranged marriage.

Zeet and Zameet, our fearless director and producer, were also a couple. They were married quite young during a mad sequence of events wherein he started teaching a youth group just to get a chance to talk to her, she was almost killed in a car wreck, and in a groggy haze of pain meds at the hospital she said, “Why are you here? You hardly know me! If you’re so in love with me, fine, marry me.” He of course replied, “yes” immediately and, dumbstruck, she responded with, “Wait, what just happened?” He spent the next year helping her learn to walk again, a feat the doctors didn’t believe was possible. Of course, they didn’t think she would live either. She now runs for exercise and they’ve been happily married all of their adult lives.

Of course, that’s a great story. But the fairy tale version isn’t the most interesting, it’s what happened next. They began fighting, having various issues that are naturally born of close proximity to in-laws and the limited relationship toolset of youth. Things got so bad that she moved out. Despite this, they each knew that they had to stick by their vows. They weren’t going to quit the marriage they had agreed to. They struggled though, learned from the process, and today are like chocolate and peanut butter.

These two examples confirmed something for me that I’ve been wondering for a long time. How much does it really matter who we choose to marry? I’m beginning to believe that, given a resolve to work things out, people are capable of crafting relationships that evolve and merge because they have to. Perhaps our ability to pick and choose, along with the relative ease of divorce, is actually hampering us and making life more difficult. (This, of course, discounts abuse, addiction, and other such factors.)

Barry Schwartz and Dan Gilbert both have excellent TED talk videos (and, I believe, books) that discuss the counterintuitive reality of choice. Humans are actually happier given fewer options, or when they are stuck with a choice they’ve made.

I’ve almost married several times, once going so far as to be engaged to a wonderful woman. I think my exes are much better off without me but that doesn’t mean I don’t still love them dearly. One of the big factors in the eventual breakups was my unwillingness to be ready to have children. While the idea of having to focus on children horrifies me now, I know deep down that if I were forced to have them I would find my own happiness in that world. I know myself well enough to know that I can find ways to be happy in almost any environment. Would I be as happy driving rush hour traffic to bring a toddler to school as I am running through fields in India? Right now I don’t think so, but of course I’ve made myself happy in my current life already, and the hormones that kick in during child rearing aren’t in effect. Maybe I would be.

In order for our society to develop and advance, we have learned that we must band together and combine resources, often necessitating the use of extreme measures to overcome our primary objectives. These stiflings come in the form of religious or governmental laws that tell us not to reproduce every time, and with every one, we can get our hands on. They also tell us not to kill anyone who tries to spread their genes in our place, or who cuts in front of us when waiting in line for a Wii. Some even restrict eating, perhaps as a way of training and “keeping in shape” for the resisting of sex.

Now that I have been single again for a while, I am reminded of the many ways the primary directives are compromised by the limited ability of our primal brains to understand the bigger picture. When single, the most powerful motivating force in my known universe is cute women. They are like curvaceous chunks of P-238, and when I get near one I start bouncing and wriggling with all of the extra energy. I write more creatively. Music pours out of me in my isolated moments. What I’ve learned, however, is that for me they often have a great deal more potential energy than kinetic energy. Unrequited love produces far more artistic output than a stable isotope. This means that my directive to produce art is in conflict with my directive to maintain a stable relationship (stable relationships being necessary for the care of young).

As it turns out, this works out in a practical manner as well. Through experimentation, I’ve learned that there is a cycle of response to a lengthy absence during a long term relationship, typically taking place in the span of a month:

• Week 1: “This such a great opportunity for you. I’m so excited for you! Have a great trip!”
• Week 2: “Wow, I really, really miss you!”
• Week 3: “You know, now that I have more time I’ve really been exploring more of myself, discovering who I am and what I want out of life. I feel like I’m really growing as a person.”
• Week 4: “Who are you and how did I let you ruin my life?!”

Now, it’s useful to have a few humans with this novelty directive in your gene pool, because they’re the types to hop out into the cold without a towel, jog over the next hill, and find out that there’s a hot tub over there. They also provide amusing sounds when everyone is back in the pool again. You just don’t want to have too many of them, or let them mate with your daughters, potentially leading to unstable offspring.

So I’ll keep poking my head over nearby hills, bouncing up and down when girls get near, and try as I might to avoid it, end up in some form of relationship again. But it gets rough being built like a pinball machine, designed to bounce back and forth forever. At some point the magnets will refuse to fire, the lights will flicker, and the last ball will trickle through the unresponsive flippers and rattle into the pocket for the end of my game. I can only hope that at that point I, and everyone around me, had some fun along the way.