My Time as a Human

As Mike, a cashier at Wheatsville, handed me a can of black beans I looked up past his grin to behold the end to a long search. It was crushed and mangled and the blue cotton had been crudely splatter painted by the sun, but it was none other than the perfect replacement hat.

My previous “normal guy” hat served me well for many years. It was just the right level of normal to get me through airports, police stations and other places requiring discretion with my culturally conflicting hair. It was also dear to my heart, as the logo on the front came from Enchanted Rock, a natural area near Austin revered by native americans and modern rock climbers alike. A wiry French speaking Tahitian man wears it now. After spending a night drinking on the beach with him, he gave me some amazing pearl pieces he’d pulled from the ocean and hand carved himself. I wanted to give him something of value to me.

Mike found his hat under a seat in the back of an Austin bus. He ran it through the washer and up onto his head where it had now been sitting long enough to have its own cowlicks. The patch on the front was circular and read, “City of Austin - Founded 1839″ in light blue letters around a yellow and red shield. It was crude. It was simple. It was about my favorite place on the earth.

Sadly, he didn’t have many leads on finding another one of these gems and so began a quest, one of many in the collection of ongoing quests and missions that carry me through life. It wasn’t until about a year later, working as a theater manager for the SxSW Film Festival, that I saw the hat again. I immediately abandoned my post to run across the convention center and grab the man lucky enough to be attached to it. He worked for the Austin Department of Public Works, maintainers of my city and the secret source of the hats that are blue. While he at first feared for his life, after hearing my impassioned plea he said, “hell, I’ve got another one in my locker. I’ll just give it to you.”

When he returned I told him that I wasn’t going to pay him, and at even the suggestion he held up his hands. Instead I wanted to give him something equally cool. My wallet had carried a treasure for six months, waiting for the right moment. I pulled out the crisp two dollar bill and gave it to him.

That exchange, the fact that he gave me the hat as a gift, is part of what makes it so valuable. It’s a thread woven into the cotton that hugs my head and rests gently above my ears in reminder of the simple kindness of the people of Austin, the city who’s name it bears, the city I love.

My dad’s father died when my dad was still a teenager. It was a fact that, as children, was so puzzling and mysterious and incomprehensible that we simply couldn’t grasp it. He was never overly willing to talk about it. He told us that it had made him sad and nothing more.

One day while poking around his closet I found an amazing old felt fedora and begged him to let me use it in the high school play. We were doing a production of The Sting and even with a couple of paint drops around the edges, it was perfect. That’s when I learned that it was the last thing he owned that had belonged to his father. When he at last acquiesced, I was extremely nervous that something might happen to it. Now I’m even happier that something did: it picked up another story, another thread, another piece of what makes things like old hats so magical. I’m glad that my new hat is well on its way.

[ed: It should be noted that the blue hat is, in fact, one of two normal guy hats I have. The other went with me to India and can be seen here. It has a Mad Penguin logo on the front, and is probably the coolest gift my sister has ever given me!]

As always, it seemed like such a great idea at the time. I mean, there we were, at the close of Burning Man 2005, with a pile of leftover propane canisters, some funny looking blimps of some other flammable gas, a crane with a winch, and a two ton iron safe. Could nature allow this little group of humans, with plenty of inflammable desert space in which to burn things, spend more than a few hours without combining this collection of objects so clearly given them with but a single purpose?

The idea was that we would create a circle of canisters, put a gallon milk jug filled with white gas in the center (after soaking everything around it) and then ignite it all with a flare from a safe distance. Safety being such a high priority, the crew wrapping chains around the safe took their time carefully wrapping and adjusting them so that it could be lifted securely and evenly.

We all stood a good distance away and made a circle around the point of impact. The gas was poured. The flare popped into a bright red spot of light and quickly carving a beautiful arc into the center of the pile. Flames bloomed like a flower greeting the sun and the crowd responded with cheers. Seconds later there was a rattle of chains and the safe plunged into the center, its impact a soul satisfying, ground shaking thud that send a whoop of flames out and up in all directions. Again we roared with pleasure and the gleeful cackling that only explosions can bring.

Most of the flames licked the edges of the safe and then slipped back beneath it, but there was one spot where a tiny light continued to flicker as a canister vented burning gas as rapidly as it could. I remember hearing a dull pop right before I was thrown to the ground, the left side of my face and eye thick with pain. Now it was my turn to vent shock, fear, and surprise in the form of shouting and cursing. Within seconds, I got through the screaming and went into the calm analysis and rescue mode that seems to kick in for me in the face of intense crisis and natural disaster. I sat up cross-legged and began to study my face slowly and carefully with my hands. I couldn’t see and my head was pounding, but the cut that crossed my eye didn’t seem to have penetrated it too deeply.

At this point, two first responders arrived and started running through a routine I’d learned myself as a Flipside Ranger and first aid student. I chuckled as they tried to calm me and assess the situation in much the same way I had learned, but was also appreciative that they were so fast and alert. A scarred metal Mad Max style art car, itself a flamethrower, hauled me over to the medic on call. He had been prepping since he heard the explosion. “Yep. Thought I might be seeing someone soon.”

The impact of the shrapnel had forced blood to pour in behind my cornea. While likely not too bad in the long run, he thought I should be checked out by a specialist. It was already about 3:00 AM but someone managed to find a tow truck driver who had come out from Reno. He had just discovered that the car he was supposed to tow had vanished. He agreed to drive me the two hours to a hospital as long as his boss didn’t find out.

My face was completely wrapped in bandages and my head felt large and dull. As we bounced along the Nevada back roads I lamented that I would never be able to see the driver, but for better or worse I was able to listen to his increasingly more intense cell phone calls. The first was to his boss who had sent him out on this harebrained mission in the first place. The truck was, apparently, running out of gas and there was nowhere to buy diesel that late at night in the middle of nowheresville Nevada. The arguments escalated to the point where his boss refused to meet him with fuel and told him “good luck, stop bothering me, I’m going to sleep.”

There was only one way that this conversation could end. It was interrupted and replaced with another that began, “What?! Keep breathing baby! How far apart are the contractions?!” His girlfriend was about to give birth.

He dropped me at the first hospital we found in Sparks, still some distance from Reno, for fear that he would run the engine dry and not get me to any hospital in time. I forced him to accept what seemed like twenty bucks for gas, wished him good luck, and stumbled my way into the tiny ER.

There wasn’t much going on that late at night and so the doctor was thrilled to see me. He brought in a whole line of nurses so that everyone could take a look, holding my eye open and excitedly moving a hot light around the wash of color that served as my only indication that the eye was beginning to function. “Look! See? It’s a textbook example!”

In the end they decided I still needed to see a specialist, so they dumped me into a cab and sent me to an ER in Reno. The cab driver was a native. My adventure/stupidity tale wasn’t enough to even get a rise out of him. “Yeah, I grew up out here. I’ve done way more stupid shit than that.”

The last doctor I saw gave me some pain meds and told me to take it easy. “The blood will get reabsorbed on its own and you’ll probably be fine. Just don’t let that blood clot break by doing anything stressful or you’ll be in real trouble.” I thanked him and went out to the lobby to wrangle some kind of ride back to the desert, where I could help break down the Dicky Box art project and haul off our lumber and gear.

I had the wrong number and never did get through to my girlfriend at the time, who was back in Texas. I decided it would just have worried her anyway. Action Girl came through early the next morning though, and as I sat in the lobby watching the blurry sunlight arrive through my hazy red lens she called me from the road outside. In order to get some kind of vehicle to come pick me up, she had agreed to drive a load of medical supplies and donations out to the red cross to be sent to hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans. Apparently this was also the first time she’d ever driven a semi trailer truck or a huge flatbed, and she had no idea how to park it. “I’ll keep circling the hospital until I see you. Just jump in as I go past!”

Fortunately my friends were kind enough to tie me up and refused to let me do anything stupid until I got home to Austin. There I managed to recover OK, although to this day one pupil is slightly larger than the other. I lamented this at first, until Silona pointed out that David Bowie has the same thing going on. Rock star eyes and a good story. Bonus.

I’ve thought about getting Lasik for my eyes. When I travel I worry about being trapped in a country where I can’t speak the language, suddenly blind because my glasses have been crushed somehow. The trouble is that without having safety glasses to protect me from the shrapnel, squash balls, wood chips, leopard pee^* and nail shards that have tried to get to me all these years, I’m not sure how I’d survive!

^*Yes, really. I was about 8 years old. But that’s a story for another day.

I’m not typically one to be overly concerned about the physical appearance of my functional physical possessions so when my van, Bebe the Bimbo Box, was turned into a golf ball by hundreds of hail divots I originally wrote it off as an aerodynamics enhancement. It was only after I noticed the cracked windshield that I started seeing dollar signs and let my friends convince me that after throwing money into the insurance system my entire adult life, it was time to cash in.

There were so many cars waiting for inspection after the massive hail storm in Austin that I had to set up an appointment two weeks in advance. When I rolled it into one of the four inspection bays I parked next to a shining 1940s era pickup with no visible damage. Clearly the idea of cashing in was getting around. The next car I saw had received a bit less of a peppering than mine, but the car was much newer and nicer. The well dressed Indian woman who drove it away was aghast that they were quoting $3600 worth of damage. That’s when I started to get nervous. Bebe is only worth about $4200.

Bebe’s original role in my life was as a cheap ride to Burning Man. I had a crew of people eager to wander lost through dust storms in a waterless desert wearing tutus but none of them owned a car. When I looked into rentals it was quickly obvious that I could do a much better job buying a van, writing it off as a business expense (I planned to shoot more footage) and then selling it as soon as the tax year rolled around on January 1st.

When I found her Bebe was being sold off to earn money for a Cancer nonprofit. She just needed just a bit of spit on a rag and an alignment to be road ready. I looked no further. She’s a Honda Odyssey, the first model made in 1995, and so at almost 250,000 miles still had plenty of life left to get us to Nevada and back.

The adventure was executed perfectly, with only one brief gaff when the speedometer went out and I was lead to believe that we’d prematurely donated all of our transmission fluid to the barren texas landscape from whence it came. We got to Burning Man and back without a speeding ticket and on returning ripped out all of the protective plastic we’d carefully taped over the interior. With the playa dust out, she was beautiful and ready to sell. There was only one catch: I had fallen in love.

I mean, come on, Hondas have troopered me through thousands of road trips and, unlike my Accord, I don’t have to wake up in the trunk in a ball when I sleep in the back! Better yet, Bebe has a rear bench seat that folds completely into the floor. With a little mattress I can almost beat out a VW Microbus with 60X the reliability!

Bebe is also the ultimate stealth vehicle. The bumper stickers on the back are all about “jr. high honors student” and, “My kid is in the high school band”. This was, at first glance, all very amusing until we found the note in the glove box, the clue that revealed the truth about the van’s true role as a carefully crafted mob cover vehicle. The signed note read, “please excuse Sylvia from school today, she isn’t feeling well.” It was all a little too perfect.

At last the bouncing little inspector who had been crawling around my dear friend and tapping on an electronic tablet returned. “There are more than 200 dents in the hood alone. You’re looking at about $7000 in damage. It’s probably totaled.” At first, my heart sank. But the future isn’t so bleak just yet. Apparently if the cost of repair is greater than the value of the car, the insurance company will either buy the car from you for its value or give you some chunk of the money to get it fixed and refuse to offer comprehensive insurance in the future.

I’ve spent a lot of years and extra money sticking with State Farm based on their reputation for treating customers well when it was time for money to flow the other direction so I’m hoping this will work out for the best. If all goes well I’ll be able to fix the windshield, resign to the fact that I’ll never be able to sell her, and thereby justify turning Bebe into an outrageous art car!

Please feel free, dear reader, to flood me with suggestions for what that might look like..!

In one of my favorite moments of irrational young angst, my (lesbian) friend Shannon, who was being inundated by suitors, reached such a peak of confusion that she cried out in genuine dismay, “why is this girl sending me flowers?!” At the time, I was the one laughing until it hurt. Now, years later, we laughed together as we talked about the process of aging.

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.