That Old Magic Feeling

 Matt Domino ruminates on September in New York City.

That Time of Year

 The summer is almost over, so its time to announce the 2012 World's Coolest Dude nominees.

Chaos and Creation

Matt Domino on watching "The Dark Knight Rises" after the Aurora Massacre.

Boats Against the Current

I have mentioned before that there are only eight things one can ever write about.  As stupid as you may find this idea, it is true.  I’ve touched on many of these different themes on this blog, but I have only hinted at one of the larger ones, which is Youth.  Tolstoy wrote three entire novels called Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth in an attempt to fully render the subject and perhaps wasn’t able to do the theme justice. Youth is certainly a separate entity from Childhood and Boyhood.  Childhood and Boyhood suggest the factors of your early years: the years before age 10 or 12.  These two words or phases bring to mind the toddler Stephen Dedalus learning about a “nicens moocow” or listening to his “Dante” speak about Parnell at the table on Christmas.  Childhood and Boyhood suggest those early impressions of objects and relatives, family holidays, the way your grandparents speak, smell, and give you presents. “Youth” is something completely different.  Youth is figuring out what loyalty is; how easily you can be deceived by what you think love can be; understanding the extreme differences of the feel of the opposite sex’s body from your own: like that softness only girls’ thighs seem to have.  Youth is finding the extremes of your athletic ability; beginning to realize what music can waken within the depths of your soul. And, of course, Youth is all of those hours passed with friends in the heat of summer or huddled in the freezing cold of a car during winter trying to stay warm and just stay out as long as possible – even if there isn’t any beer or smoke left for anyone.  These are the things that we write about when we write about Youth.  These moments and images are so powerful that we constantly try to write and rewrite “coming of age stories” or “bildungsromans.” Perhaps one day when I have the faculties to correctly create me own tome to Youth I will do it just as Tolstoy did.  But, for now, I only have images and occurrences that I can thread together.

The night before Thanksgiving is one of the more wondrous nights of the year.  However, there is no enchantment to it like Christmas Eve or even a feeling of simple exuberance like the humid nights of our Fourth of Julys.  It even lacks the sheer uncertainty, the bleary-eyed bliss and shoulder shrugging that New Year’s Eve brings with it year after ominous year.  Thanksgiving Eve is something different.  It is not enchanted, but merely real - mundanely poignant.  It is colored in sepia from the moment the sun sets and all the oranges, browns, dark yellows and grays of the world drain and are replaced by the deep blacks, navies and periwinkles.  And in those colors of November nights there are endless postures: college freshman returning home with gelled haircuts and fresh eyeliner, the prodigal son stepping through the garage with a beat-up green canvas backpack, old fishing buddies sneaking out from their wives to have one quick drink at the Corner while the bartender lets Knicks highlights flash on the TV and countless twentysomethings in sweatshirts or fleeces, wool sweaters and pea coats with gin and tonics or clean, very cold brown bottles of Budweiser look around either for someone to love or skyward for some kind of distraction.  In either case, someone is looking for an answer.

This past Thanksgiving Eve, I watched people I knew and still know spill out of an old colonial home that also serves as a bar.  The jukebox was playing, but I always imagined that at one point it could have been a piano.  I saw and exchanged countless customized handshakes; draped my arm around Carhart jackets, fuzzy wool pea coats and thin-shouldered black sweaters.  I drank long cold beers and huddled on benches with beautiful girls I was once very close with and we felt the bushes on our back and looked closely to try and articulate “What if?.” It was at this scene that I stood on green, frosted grass and looked at the white, wood shingles of the bar.  I stood next to one of the most stand-up old friends I’ve ever known.  We drank our beers.

“I read your blog,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Mr. Puddles of Yourself.”

We both laughed.

“Anything you like in there?” I asked. “What do you want to see?”

“This,” he said, stretching his hand out toward the smoking cigarette cherries and the bodies spilling along the wooden plank walkway into the front door of the bar.

I drank my beer and surveyed the scene.  I thought about the old girl I had just sat with and how she was still quite beautiful.

“I might just do that.”

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Caraway (Fitzgerald) describes Long Island as a great many things.  He describes the Sound as a “great, wet barnyard” at one time and that is a phrase I have certainly absconded into my own little catalogue.  He also manages to do justice to the exhilarating feelings of darting back and forth from Long Island to Manhattan, which is unlike any other commute.  New Jersey is too clunky and filled with impossible bluffs and the historical wickedness of the Hudson River breaks it apart from the island nature of Manhattan and Long Island; Westchester is lush and promising, but it shares some of its sentiment and identity with New England and Buffalo, which are entirely separate entities.  Long Island is like a funnel, which one travels along, the seagulls and piping plovers skirting along overhead, while you leave a trail of sand in your wake along the parkways that inevitably lead into the heart of New York.  Always there is the smell of salt water and promise in either direction.  Caraway/Fitzgerald does this justice.  I also admire the small parts in the novel where Nick steps out of his house and onto his lawn; you feel the heaviness of Long Island leaves and the constant knowledge of water out in the dark just beyond the reach of your arm.  The water makes the stars shine brighter as the pools perfectly mirror the darkness of the sky.  In the summer there is always the mist and the allure of some light glowing in a bramble or thresh of forest.  In the winter everything is barren and your breath streams out, the wind is persistent, but at times everything falls dead and quiet and you see how bright the moonlight is on the frosted grass and the near frozen saltwater.  In the distance is the call of a gull or an ill-informed duck and a car drives on some stretch of road across the harbor under tall streetlights and you realize what is so close in hand.  Perhaps, what I like most about Great Gatsby or Fitzgerald is this quote from the very end of the book:

"Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

This quote seems to set the scene of Long Island, with its great history, its natural beauty and slow decay, in the most accurate and concise nature – with a bit of romantic prose to curve the edges.

It was in this sort of place that I had my Youth.  What people sometimes fail to realize is that there is an honor to growing up.  Much of it is pain and boredom, but there is an honor to being young and that should never be forgotten or overlooked.  The part that should never be overlooked is the part that has to do with the impossibility of friendship and how we are forever trying to make friends or understand what that vague word means.  I mentioned earlier that Youth is made up of all the time spent sitting around with friends in the summer or in a dark car or in the hallways between classes at school, which is a fundamental truth that almost any person growing up in America can relate to.  Yet, what many people in America fail to understand is how there is an actual virtue laying in all of that sitting around.  Sure, we’ve had people like Bruce Springsteen, the Ramones, the Replacements, Nirvana or Wilco try to explain it to us in song, but it always comes off as the commodity of rock n’ roll, of what your youth is supposed to be like if you want to end up this way – if you want to be as messed up and depraved as the rest of us.  Those are obviously terrific sentiments, but what Youth is to me, is something more than that.  Youth teaches us to enjoy sitting on a curb in the darkness of the night and watching a sprinkler shoot out into the street while your friends circle aimlessly on bikes; to appreciate for all its worth those hottest days of the year climbing the brambles of the dunes in order to look out across the harbor at the sailboats that stood so prominent and white with their masts ringing back and forth against the water that was at times green and navy blue.  Or even those evenings walking along Main Street and just listening to the hum of the back of the deli or the wine store and looking at the shadows of the automotive shop.  And further still those stinging fall afternoons playing football in the park while cars whizzed past and your friends’ older brothers hurled curses at you and then tried to take you down to the stiff brown grass.  And that one time when your friend jumped on your back and tried to strangle you while everybody piled on top.  What I am saying is that there is a distinct honor in all of these activities and it is the honor of growing up and you will recognize it immediately in anyone that you meet as you move forward in life, and will notice those who lack this honor even sooner.

Youth is an honor and a virtue to be gained.  And as I said, the main aspect of it is the search for friendship.  Great Gatsby is in many ways about that search for friendship. It is certainly a story about one man trying to gain a handle on another’s man’s personality, trying to size him up and figure out what draws him to his personality.  And, to be frank, that is what much of adult male friendship is made up of.  Take this quote from Nick:

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”

If you read that sentence ten times, eight of those ten times you will agree that, deep down, that is what friendship is completely about.  Friendship for the most part is about loyalty and most of our notions of loyalty are formed in this period of Youth – when we fight for each other, back up the jokes in the back of the class, perpetuate the lies to keep everyone out of trouble and stay out as late as possible so that we are all in trouble if the ship really is going to sink. Nick’s outlook on Gatsby is always left unclear.  He is glad that he compliments him at one point towards the end of the novel; at one point he says that Gatsby was alright, but at another says that he disapproved of him from the beginning to the end.  Yet, he was drawn to him, drawn to him because of that ability Gatsby had to fully concentrate on one person with a smile full of understanding.  And perhaps it is like Nick says, that he had some “deficiency” that made him ill suited to the East.  For his Youth was made up of the West, of the long train rides home in the snow from prep school, passing Chicago and going further to Minnesota and watching the flakes fall at the stations in the winter dark.

Another novel that shares some of the themes of the Great Gatsby and what I am trying to say here is The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon.  It is ultimately a novel about summer, about friendship and its difference and confusion with love.  It is about a narrator who seemingly has no friends and who gets mixed up in a world of friends who look like celebrities and who have sex and drink and some of who are homosexual.  It is in many ways a weak and frivolous book, but it always calls me back – it has its hooks in.  It is because the book does justice to the complexity of friendship with quotes such as this:

“If any of the attempts I made that day to telephone Arthur had succeeded, I would have asked him nothing.  I would only have listened to the way in which he spoke to me, listened for accents of friendship: the banality, relaxation, and lack of style that characterize a conversation between two friends.”

Or, when the narrator, Art, is feeling overwhelmed at the long-standing friendship that his new friend Arthur and his other new friend Cleveland share, ruminates:

I envied their history, the plain and frantic days, the simple length of years behind them.

“No matter how long I know you guys, I’ll never be able to catch up.”

The cigarette hung from Arthur’s peeling lower lip, and I saw that he’d had his own reasons for suddenly growing quiet.

“Catch up on what?” His Kool jiggled as he spoke.

“The time. All the days and evening like this one.”

Chabon does his work very simply and elegantly in his first novel.  He is able to capture countless scenes of silence between two characters that are friends as they smoke cigarettes and sit somewhere high up above Pittsburgh and look at the streets and the faraway small forms of cars and mothers with children standing on the streets in summer.  However, these two quotes epitomize what exactly that period of Youth is about and what it instills in us if we achieve its honor.  First, is that distinct ability to talk with a friend, moments of urgency punctuated by prolonged silences, fiddling with bottle labels or worn in boots.  There is no pointed questioning, only idle questions. And at the end of it all, if you are on the outside, there is always that envy for those who have that camaraderie – those who share the years that you so desperately lack.  It is more than just knowing someone for a long period of time: it is a shared experience, it is a virtue that was borne through passing time, through fighting, through forging loyalty on the doorstep of growing older.

Why this past weekend made me think of all these things I can’t say.  I have had Great Gatsby and Mysteries of Pittsburgh on my mind for quite awhile.  And perhaps it is because I am always thinking about friendship and the Youth that sometimes might keep me separate from the youths of others. I think mostly of friendship, because as Chabon says in his novel, “In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.”  What that actually means can only apply to each individual person and how hard they want to be on themselves.  However, my friend’s prompt certainly pushed the issue.  That and perhaps two other scenes.  The first was at the same bar I described at the beginning of this post.  I was leaving the bar with one of my best friends who I had not seen in about a year and we passed a kid that we had known in our Youth.  This guy had once choked me during an afternoon football game that got out of hand, but it had stood out as some kind of instance against other instances of the years so that always bonded us in some way.  Regardless of that, we had all known each other.  So, we passed this guy and his girlfriend standing on the dark, quiet neighborhood street, lined with cars.

“Domino! Morgenstern! Where are you going?”

“Sawicki! We’re going home!”

“Going home?”

“My sister is in Busko’s car. I gotta go.”

“Look at you two. You look the same.”

“So do you.”

“We’ll always all look the same.”

My friend turned to me then.

“You go on. I’m gonna stay.”

“You got it, Danny.”

And then I turned to my friend’s car where my sister was waiting to ride home too.  The stars were beginning to become patchy as it was getting nearer to four o’clock. And I knew we all didn’t look the same, but in his eyes we did and for some reason on that night, at that moment, that seemed profound.  Perhaps it was because of the tone of happiness in Sawicki’s voice.  I felt more so, that it was because we shared a time together, and it was really all the people that crossed my path in my Youth – they all became some kind of character in my mind, passing from place to place, all sharing some secret more than the fact that we grew up in the same place, but some distinct honor that would seem opaque and impalpable to those who didn’t see or value it. In any case, I went home that night.

Second, the night after Thanksgiving all of my best friends piled into the Corner bar.  My best friend, his girlfriend and his brother piled into a booth drinking pitchers of beer.  Acquaintances came by and told us about the army.  My friend’s pastor came by and introduced himself and I told him I was a Catholic. Then, all of my friends were pushed into the booth and we were drinking beers and the laughs were coming as easily as anything I’d ever done.  It was warm and light and there was terrible music and a worn wood floor and before we knew it we had to get outside and have a bonfire at my friend’s farm – so we did.  We drank freezing beers and got smoke in our eyes and threw a liquor bottle in the fire trough and molded it into a sculpture for a friend who was far away and who was coming back home.  It was a freezing night if you were away from the fire, but my breath was strong even though I had a cold and the beer tasted good and I could fit my arm around my friends’ shoulders. And I realized that even if you get annoyed at a friend you haven’t talked to in a long time and are wary of the next time you see them – its never bad, because your Youth precedes you and will always win.  We are creatures of the past borne by habit, and all of the virtues that ride along on the trail of our missteps will forever dictate our future triumphs.

After each of these instances, I was infinitely hopeful of some great future. I was hopeful because next fall my other best friend is getting married on a farm and its what he’s wanted to do for his entire life.  And amidst all the pain and loneliness and confusion of the world, the criticism of the arts, of what is maudlin and what is genuine emotion, there are moments of clarity and happiness, moments that we can look forward to when we are all together in some kind of pristine moment that is indestructible.

In the end, you may be saying that this was a complete waste of time.  It is completely obvious that everyone has a Youth.  Everyone has some dinky and limiting suburb that they grew up in, that can also double as the universe and eternity and the soul of man if you look at it hard enough.  That opinion is absolutely valid.  For I know there are cities on the West Coast and in the South and even further up North along the Northern Atlantic seaboard that can brag all of the same things I have expounded upon and provide their own nuances. However, my Youth came from Long Island, a deeply terrible place that is capable of the most breathtaking moments and places nature can provide; a place where you can only bow your head at all of its history. And only I have that conflict with it, only I have that knowledge of the honor of Youth and the virtue I have achieved through it.  I only hope that you too can dangle the same intangible object, in your own way, over the world’s quivering head.

Friends 2

I’m going to write about Rafael Nadal winning Wimbledon another evening during this brutally hot week.  For now, there are other things I need to address, but there is something elemental about his struggles and achievement in all of this – at least I suppose so.

As someone who has spent the majority of his youth trying to understand the  impossibility of friendship rather than comprehend the fathoms of love, I again found myself, the day after the Fourth of July, staring into the azure blue of the deep end of my childhood pool and cleaning dirt and mulch from the shimmering bottom.  This isn’t to say that I never enjoyed cleaning my pool – in fact I always have loved it in some strange way.  I’ve loved it because you can stand outside in the heat, away from your neighbors and listen to the radio in private.  You can become the shrieking heretic in “Sympathy for the Devil,” or the snide hipster of “Like a Rolling Stone,” and then when you’re done, you can jump in the pool, submerge the heat and the sounds of the radio, only to emerge once more, pleasantly surprised by the heat of the air and the slick feeling of your hair as you push it or flick it back on your head.  Then, if you choose to, you can get out and touch the soles of your feet to the bricks that your parents paid for to surround the pool.  Or, if you choose to, you can simply float.

Jay Gatsby was shot in a pool, but I was never anything like him, though I did think I could’ve made an admirable Nick Carraway.  What I always admired about the whole mess that led to Gatsby’s demise, besides the idea of creating an image of yourself and building an identity in America, was the illusive notion of friendship that Nick Carraway seemed to identify with the Gatsby.  This idea was recently resuscitated with an almost equal level of eloquence by Joseph O’Neill in his novel Netherland.  These are both novels about men who are lost and who are able to find out truths about themselves by making acquaintances with two different criminals.  Gatsby is by all means a high level bootlegger and gambler as we are led to believe, while Chuck Ramkissoon runs an intricate but low-level Caribbean “lottery” throughout New York City. These narrators, Nick Carraway and Hans, are both looking to make an identity for themselves in New York, and have lost touch or have chosen to the lose touch with the places they came from. For Nick, that is the Midwest, for Hans it is London and his native Netherlands. Hans actually has a wife that he is estranged from, where Nick Carraway looks for love with the distant, independent, and modern female tennis player (see, I told you Nadal was in here!) Jordan Baker.  Because their love lives are unreliable, they look to notions of friendship they find in unreliable males.  Both Hans and Nick are able to find the sensations of masculinity in male friendship in both Gatsby and Chuck Ramkissoon: feeling privileged to be in the other’s company, the sense of adventure of moving about in the world with the other, the sense of sharing a similar desolation, the ability to drink a beer in the sun and share a private moment.  However, each one is left grasping at what their friendship meant or could have done after their “friend” has been murdered in each story.  Nick Carraway tells us in the beginning of The Great Gatsby that he wants no more “privileged glimpses into the hearts of other men.”  That, in essence, is what male friendship boils down to.

These similar tropes have been seen in the work of Jack Kerouac, whom I think in the 21st century should be madatory reading for elementary school boys instead of Treasure Island and that kind of book.  The Duluoz Legend of Keroauc’s mind’s eye represents the what should be the new “adventure book.”  Kids know about all the dirty things earlier now anyway, why should they not read about unbridled enthusiasm and driving across the country, climbing mountains, driving in cars, when they are young and are forced to be driven around by their parents.  No one wrote better about a fall day coming home from school and eating peanut butter crackers with milk than Kerouac anyway.  He was a maudlin and unapologetic nostaligist.  And, he often depicted the search for friendship in the cast of characters in one’s life better than most writers in any medium.  You may find him amateurish and by all means he certainly is, but even in the most amateur of technique, or brutish sensibilities, we can find the truths of the world.  The friendship between Kerouac and Neal Cassidy as it was fictionalized or marginalized by Kerouac’s work is something that should be admired as the representation of a relationship between two people in this world, two friends, two men trying to make sense of the years and whims that rose up within them and without them.

So, because of novels like these, I spent much of my youth looking for that kernel of truth in friendship, in male friendship that would answer me some kind of question.  What does it truly mean to be a friend to someone?  How does one get by when those friends have to travel and move on to do the different things with their lives?  What happens when our adventures end? Do our adventures ever end? Is it even possible to love somebody else?  These are the questions that the illusive search for friendship can raise up in your mind.  And I spent much time cleaning my pool and thinking about these types of things.  I found myself doing the same thing the day after this past Fourth of July because I had a variety of friends staying at my home from different levels of life: elementary school, junior high and high school, college, and post college.  Some of them knew each other very well, some of them knew me very well, some didn’t and vice versa.  Yet, we all got along and had a memorable time.  The kind of time that sticks to your memory and leaves the details there, so, that even if you are one who loses tracks of the details to distinct places and “times” easily, you would be able to recall the year, the light and perhaps who was even there.  And of course, when it was all over, when the beer and other litter had been dragged to the curb, I was there cleaning the pool, thinking about all that had happened and all of the fun that had ended.  The radio played and the mercury in the temperature inched closer and closer to 100 degrees – ambition echoed hollow In my gut and I just wanted to be finished with it all and be able to swim.  I wanted to run out into the shade and the swaying of the trees and the heat.  After that, I didn’t know what I wanted to happen – I just wanted that.

Then, a song I had been longing to hear came on the radio.  It was “Mother” by John Lennon, from Plastic Ono Band.  I, thinking of friends, of course thought of The Beatles and about how stories end and how we move on as I have written about before.  If you have listened to Plastic Ono Band it is all about moving on and how we do it in the different areas and through the different traumas of our lives.  I grew up loving the album, because when I was younger, I related to John Lennon more than any of The Beatles just like most kids do.  You gravitate towards John Lennon because he was the “smart one.”  All the Beatles were funny, but he had the quickest and most biting wit.  He made the bold statements.  He was the leader.  You don’t think about the finer shades that you do the longer you spend with the Beatles: “Paul was the most melodic,” “Paul was the most natural musician,” “George’s songwriting was held back just look at All Things Must Pass,” “I agree with George’s pragmaticism and spirituality more than with anything harsh that John had to say, or simple that Paul had to say.” When you are young, you love John Lennon, because that is what time has taught us about the Beatles.

And I loved John Lennon on Plastic Ono Band because he said all the bold things, because he screamed in his John Lennon way and because he made hooks out of the syllables in his verses in that singular John Lennon/Beatles/mostly John Lennon way (just listen to “Mother” when he says “Sooo, ayyyyyeee”).  However, I loved it the most because no matter what I was going through, I could listen to it and feel clean again.  It was like getting a haircut for your soul.  That image seems demeaning, but the sentiment is true.  Whenever you go for a haircut, you go for that feeling of newness, of freshness. “With this haircut, I’m going to do something. I’m going to impress someone. Something’s gonna be different.”  Whenever I put on Plastic Ono Band that is the intent that I have. From the refrain of “Mother” when Lennon says “So, I/I just have to tell you/Goodbye, goodbye” to the thrilling coda when he screams “Momma don’t go/Daddy come home” you know that he is losing the demons and  whatever yours may be, you can lose them to with his screams and with the hypnotic piano and drums. Then we get to “I Found Out” where John tells whoever is listening that “I’ve seen the junkets/I’ve been through it all/I’ve seen religion from Jesus to Paul/Don’t let them fool you with dope and cocaine/No one can harm you/Feel your own pain.” And of course he throws the double entendre in there with the loaded word “Paul,” making you think just a little bit harder about what he means because he is saying it with such conviction.  As the album veers from harsher commentary to the brooding slower numbers such as “Love,” “Working Class Hero,” and “Look At Me,” you get the ultimate sense of someone stripping themselves to the essentials.  There are no comments on what friendship is or what love is, besides to say that “Love is real/Real is love.”  This effect is refreshing since there is no overarching statement leading you in a direction.  Love is real, is merely an indicator of a feeling.  Because even John probably didn’t even know what it was that he was calling his love with Yoko Ono at that time.

Then, of course we get to “God,” which has always been one of my favorite songs of all time because it doesn’t let you get away with anything.  Now, many people may call this song merely self-important sermonizing, but I can’t stress how powerful I used to find this song and how necessary I still find it.  How often to you address a statement to God that could be addressed to the earth or to something more definite, when all you are doing is trying to measure out the amount of pain or confusion you are feeling?  How often to you place meaning on a false idol of any kind, God or anything else?  When John lists through the names of all the things he doesn’t believe in anymore, all the icons that he is tearing down, it is timeless in a careening way of never letting yourself get consumed in the things that you have consumed your time with.  It is an exercise in separation, in distance and in seeing something from a new perspective.  When punk music came around, they did the same thing, in a less eloquent and less conscious way.  They wanted to tear down icons because it looked cool, not because it trapped them.  This is all the stuff of James Joyce.  There should be no nets that trap you.  All our Elvis’, our Zimmermans, our Kennedys, and our Beatles need to be overthrown at every turn because they are wait rein is in to saying “we can’t.” Those images and icons, while showing us what is possible, also indicate to us that there is something that we can’t or shouldn’t do or that we aren’t capable of doing, but we are always more than capable.  So we have to get rid of what we’ve already known from time to time, we need to start over again to remember that there is only us in the end and that’s all that there ever was to begin with.  That is the haircut that allows us to see what we’ve been consumed with better than we’ve ever been able to see it before.  That allows us to understand what our love is; what the feelings of friendship we are longing to define are.

This was supposed to be a manual on cleaning pools, but now its about cleaning something else.  I guess what it’s all about is realizing that the Midwest of your youth never really existed, that no matter how many books you read, how many words you learn, you’ll never come upon that word known to all men, you’ll never truly understand how to describe the impossibility of friendship or the fathoms and blue shades of love.  All you can do is remember all of the things that brought you to a certain point and then try to forget them all, try to forget the way you saw them so that you can see them in the way that they really are.  Because in the end, its all about what you can accomplish and very often you can’t accomplish much without other people, but with them you can often lose yourself by forgetting what’s important or forgetting how you see them. So, you have to get a haircut from time to time – alter that identity and those identifications, if ever so slighlty, in order to keep chasing what you’ll never be able to fully capture.

Actually, this was a pitch for a new TV show called Friends 2.