My Time as a Human

My friend Wikki was feeling that most bitter of sorrows last night: the desire for a mate. There’s something about having someone to cuddle and rant at that makes the rest of life easier to live. I can’t say that I’m not dealing with a bit of the same thing. When the weather is beautiful there is nothing better than feeling the soft touch of a hand to hold, and the way a simple squeeze shivers up my arm and into my chest. At the same time, I know that soon I’ll have to get back to work and my energy will be dispersed enough to leave that same hand waiting, empty, far too often. Wikki knows this too but she couldn’t imagine finding anything that would fill this genetically engineered hole in her heart. Here’s where I’ve learned at least one way to hold off this forever distracting desire.

Zod 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 Zod, 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 Zajj 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, Wizza, 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

Our driver met his wife one night when driving a client home. He had several suitors at the time, as he was an attractive guy with a car and a job that paid well. When he pulled up to the house he saw this girl and said, “that’s her.” “I didn’t care about caste, money, or anything,” he said. “I knew instantly that she was the one.” He went on to explain that he knew, too, that he wanted to marry a simple village girl. He didn’t think the educated city girls would ever put up with his schedule as a driver. “They would complain and get upset about my coming home at 2:00 in the morning. My wife, she doesn’t mind at all.”

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.

One of the greatest gifts my parents have given me is my ability to deal with a wide range of living conditions. Summer vacations were tours of the U.S. in an old Chevy van. My favorite spot was the “way back”, giving up the relative comfort of the bench seats where my sisters slept for the joy of flopping amongst piles of camping gear and supplies. On the extremely rare nights that we got a hotel room instead of camping, I was the one sleeping on the floor in my sleeping bag, developing even further my flexible lifestyle and affection for cold, hard sleeping surfaces. I naturally evolved into the guy who slept under the drum kit, rolled up in my leather jacket, even when the party was at my own house.

One of the many unique components of our house was a full sized pipe organ my parents scavenged from an old church. (Actually, I believe the first organ they got had already been scavenged and they picked it up off of a guy who was building a house himself.) The console sat on the floor below me, but the pipes were right next to my room. My mother would practice as I lay in bed, the soothing sound of air blasting through massive metal whistles coaxing me to sleep.

All told these adventures crafted some handy life skills. I can sleep through any kind of chaos and noise. My favorite way to crash is in the middle of a raging party or listening to someone learning to play the piano for the first time. When I was on a documentary crew and had to sleep on the floor of a trailer so tragic dogs refused to stay with us, we all rolled up in sound blankets like human burritos and I was happily dozing in no time.

Then I arrived in China. Weishi and I were picked up at the airport by a massive exuberant family who tossed us into cars and got us back to the apartment. We were surrounded by laughter and fed incredibly delicious dumplings that they had been cooking all day and then, suddenly, everyone was gone. The apartment fell instantly silent and there we were. Despite all of the love, I felt strangely uneasy and I couldn’t quite figure out why. I stepped out onto the balcony and looked around. Something about the place, as quiet and peaceful as it was despite being in the center of Beijing, made me very nervous. Then I discovered the switches.

The buildings around me were simple blocks of grey cement. Birthed during the communist era, they were not unlike low income housing projects. It suddenly occurred to me that if I was in a similar environment in Chicago when I grew up, I would have to worry about being shot. Here in China, however, this was just how everyone lived. Somewhere in my chest the first contextual interpretation switch popped and I relaxed immediately. Moments later the second switch, this one for “camping mode”, made the general level of cleanliness and lack of sophisticated tools fall right into place. The boiled water bucket bath was a luxury compared to cold river water. A pile of blankets is all I really needed. The tension lifted, clearing my eyes to see all of the magic that was China for the remainder of my visit.

By the time I reached India these switches had become so loose and fluid that I didn’t even hear them snap. I brought a sleeping bag and my own lights and supplies and was perfectly content hand washing my clothes or sleeping without heat. Oddly, I’ve even come to relish the challenges of living in different ways. It was only once the second camera crew arrived, however, that I realized how far I had come and how privileged I was. They were completely unprepared for the environment and were so caught up in their struggle to deal with the lack of Taco Bell, Starbucks coffee on demand and hot showers that they spent the majority of their trip blinded to the wonders around them.

So I have to give another couple of bonus points for my whacky upbringing. I hope my sister subjects her kids to more of the same. I’ll certainly do my part to make sure that whenever they come to visit me, I’ll be sure to clear off the floor and set up a drum kit in the corner.

The sunlight splashed yellow and orange streaks across the clouds as they rippled and tumbled away across the sky, slowly turning dark and thick until the pale blue background began to force its way through. Beside me sat a girl with white streaks through her hair like the clouds. Our legs dangled over the back of a deceptively nondescript minivan as she sang children’s yoga songs. Her voice was full and beautiful with sincerity and, occasional, a light humorous tone just teasing the top of the dark notes. Day had arrived.

The wedding guests who had bothered to go to sleep began to emerge from tents, trucks and vans. Many were already cleaning up chairs and tables. Others were removing the last of their clown makeup or swapping tutus for cargo pants. Just outside the gate I was introduced to the bride’s mother and her mother’s boyfriend, Zack.

Zack turned out to be an engineer and a kindred spirit in our nonsensical love of old British rag top sports cars. It’s a rare and glorious moment when I get to flash my giant brass MG belt buckle and get any response whatsoever. He’d actually owned a whole series of them, like a junkie who never learns a lesson. The older those cars get the more driving becomes a tap-dance of thumping and shaking to get gauges and lights working. You never get them all at once so you have to prioritize: headlights at night and speedometer during the day.

“You know, I really had a great time last night,” Zack said. “I met so many wonderful people and everyone was really enjoying themselves. I’m 71 now. I think when I go home I’m going to give my notice and retire.” He looked past me at an old silver airstream trailer as a purple haired woman emerged. “What year do you think that is? ‘59?”

On top of being fed fruit from a bowl on someone’s head and watching the launch of a series of high altitude fire balloons, my night was filled with a wide array of discussions ranging from healthcare, dance, active speaker calibration, potential collaboration with my film work, and an extremely detailed telling of the most incredible acoustic performance of all time. The one conversation that came up repeatedly, however, was how magic this couple was together.

Some wedding ceremonies are simply eclipsed by the surety that I have when I see the couple together. My eyes were tearing even as they went through their vows, including “and I will call you on your shit…” I have seen these two fight and turn it around with not just incredible speed, but grace and humor. I’ve seen them love and support each other and have plenty left over for their community and friends. I’ve seen her raising the child next door as an wonderfully confident and skilled nanny, and I can’t wait to see what kind of child they raise together when the time comes.

For me, it feels comforting just knowing that a union like this one exists. As much as I need to roam, it’s strong relationships like these that let me leave assured that everything will be just fine when I get back.

Wedding photographs by Ori Sofer