Dear Jeff,
I am deliriously tired – that sort of drugged tired one gets after a combination of jet-lag and what I refer to lately as a Going. This Going will continue for a bit yet; I’ve masterminded it myself and put its many pieces into place. It started a few weeks back and will continue at least until I get to the staring of Iceland, maybe even until practicing the piano in Libertyville.
Today I was in Oslo for a few hours. I nearly stayed in the airport, but was assured that the trip into the city center was a quick one and that hopping onto the westbound metro for three stops to find the Vigeland sculpture park would be easy. It proved to be true, and I was glad I stepped into the world a bit, that’s what traveling is for, right? The transit was exemplary; I was surrounded by aryan-featured folk like myself; and the sculpture park was a quiet and sunlit sight to behold – an unusual, kingly promenade of just over-sized, naked figures in various states of reflection, observation, intimacy and violence. There was something in their physicality that reminded me of Rodin (I’m sure the bronze helped that), but there was something less visceral about them, more plain, more Scandinavian? They definitely touched my museum-paced body with a texture and a smooth sort of warmth, even though there was a subtle removal about them. The park is spread out like an illustrious world’s fair pleasance but themed with this heightened, pedestrian sculptural portrait of man. It climbs to an obelisk in the center that is a stone roil of humanity of all ages climbing, scraping, building to the sky. I took time with many of the figures and steeped in the place. Mostly I was glad to be outside. I will admit my favorite part was taking a side path and being cut off from the other tourists and laying in the grass.
I was unexpectedly a bit bored by the northern, developed European cityscape otherwise. While I am simultaneously thrilled to be in a new place, at a certain point, the delirium has its pull. And it makes me wonder about travel – wonder about how one does it with purpose and that perhaps purpose is needed to entirely engage in travel – probably in anything. And I knew that it was time to get back toward Vienna, toward the identifiable goals of this trip. And I wondered if I was tired of seeing developed, familiar nations, but when I pictured visiting less developed nations (based only on my one experience in East Africa), I realized any element of industrialization, ragged or pristine, discarded or polished, sounded draining. And I thought, “I am thirsty for nature.”
Thanks for helping make all of this happen Jeff.
Deliriously and gratefully,
Tim
Dear Laura,
The first image is a trail of orange light on the vast blackness of the water suddenly ten thousand feet below in the night’s first real darkness and realizing it is from the pure, full moon. And for that moment those are the only two things that exist.
The trip turned mystical quickly,
Tim
Dear Mom,
It was heavy and sad to leave you today at the door of Tavern On Jane though we both knew that somewhere there was a lining of excitement. This week and weekend has been so full – full of anticipation of things to come, and full of the things themselves. There was a huge leaving, a couple if you include my apartment and some crucial souls in addition to that wonderful hotel and its most rigorous adventure of work. There were goodbyes to visiting family who I didn’t catch enough of. There was and is reeling gratitude toward people supporting particular dreams. Amazement. Utter exhaustion when I found the moments to realize it. I kept finding secret wells of energy that are apparently reserved for specific situations or types of company today. Then I would remember tired. Or loss. Or leaving.
I sang the Willie Nelson song I’ve had stuck in my head for several days while waiting on the above ground train station in the far reaches of Brooklyn. I cried while taking time on the lyric “they say that all good things must end”.
I think you’d like to know, though, that what it took was getting to the airport terminal and searching for my airline counter for the big smile to come. The one that comes out of a particular root screaming, “we’re doing that thing we love. Here we are crossing the threshold of adventure.”
The smile got bigger as I waited in security and looked at my flight info on the screen: to Oslo, and was shining that I’m going to places I’ve never been before. It reminded me of the unabashed radiance from love received that smattered across my body as I stared at my cast mates hurling applause my way in the elevator at the close of my final show. Just last night.
And now I’m moved out of Brooklyn, and my things are floating, and the next place I’ll actually live is Belgium. But thank god I’ll be back to New York for some minutes. And thank god I’m scheduled to sit on your couch with long, long coffees in September.
I love you. Thank you for teaching me that feeling big is the most rewarding way and that personal responsibility is a matter of respect and that living courageously is allowed.
See you on the other side of this one.
Timmy
On the late train home, a young man high on many things pounds, ranting, on the between car doors with laughter in his tone, then introduces the thunder of the tunnel and enters our car and doesn’t stop talking and screaming and laughing. He throws derogatory words in every direction including his own seeming impervious and causing the coping that everyone else in silent agreement buckles down to. He sounds lost. He yells out the door at each stop. He rails at someone for being a faggot. He squeals at a woman blaming her for not sleeping with him because he’s a young, black nigger. He prattles on about Chinese niggers slanting his eyes with his fingers and naming every Asian celebrity he can think of.
The quiet of my book that was going to take me home has to be abandoned and I watch all his moves in the reflection of the end-of-car windows. I consider doing the between car switch, figuring I’d have to go at least two cars in case he followed me, and if he followed me to the second, well, that’s all I had in me.
When he finally uses the doors to exit at 42nd Street, the first sign I see of his replacement is a warm-brown, thick wooden cane, and an older man in an arabic hat and full-brown pants and shirt sits down in the seat across from me. We exchange eye contact. Before long his eyes are closing. His cane is contoured and the swirling browns of a varnished branch. His skin is dark, but not deeply. His mustache has just enough grin at each end to make him look almost colonial and his eyebrows are expressive and watchful even as he gives into the day’s tired. He is every ethnicity and era together.
I get back to the quiet wonder of my reading. My book is called The Magicians.
Dear Dan,
What of the scenic corners of the earth? How is that we’re allowed to go there, and why such a draw, seated in glory, to attend them? To touch something and see something and breathe something with our bodies? How does this add to our lives?
It does add to our lives. This seems evident. We know this of ourselves and of each other. It does to the point that you and many other people are willing to donate some of their hard-earned money out of a glow of encouragement that someone else (me) do it. There’s a hopefulness, a promise, a fulfillment, and also a sirens’ call perhaps, exquisite and dangerous, to the pull of the world.
I cannot wait to share my photos of Iceland with yours of New Zealand from the same weeks this month. And I cannot wait to register the subtle, mystical, lifelong taste of seeing the sky from another corner of the earth, and to try unsuccessfully to put it into words and to share the deep, knowing smile from it with others.
Thanks for the support. Thanks for the encouragement to challenge and relish this life. Thanks for your traveling inspiration.
Photos soon,
Tim
David and Kathleen,
I grabbed a few bandmates in my two-door Toyota after work for the last of us to drive around the bottom of Lake Michigan. The Muccas, the marching band players, are the best people to group in any way. We drove over a few lawns once we were in the idyllic downtown trying to find the venue that turned out to be a warm, wide-open, guest-staying apartment as a green room, a community gathering theater and event space, and a fancy beer store. There was revelry from the small town ignited by some of our Chicago-community familiars. We ran along lofted catwalks, and that 80-year-old woman wearing a devil costume really hauled back to receive a full-force high five that I’d been doling out (I thought), and I gave her one and she looked at me in astonishment and said “OW!” I hope I did not break her. She was dancing with the best of them until the end. A few hours later, filled with encouragement and the cheer of peer-family we made it back to Chicago.
Moments later, I woke up with no clothes on in the moment I was to be at the airport. We texted our tour manager and sprinted the length of Chicago to Midway airport and found the same crew, all bleary, in the nick of time. And hours later we stepped out into the astonishingly refreshing Florida warm breezes. We got in the vans to another music festival campground for the Harvest of Hope punk rock festival. And then we were all day outside – parading in front of the stage, yelling and cheering, regrouping at the unpredictable food tent, raging a stage set, climbing light trusses like stars, and then not batting an eye asking if my favorite indie-rock band, Broken Social Scene, needed cheerleaders in addition to horn players. They said, after a horrible travel day, absolutely – and in the end I sparred with some of my rock heroes on stage and we confused them in delight and lingered too long, going from colleagues to fans back in the hotel parking lot. Then family again in the more welcoming rooms in the hotel.
The next day is on the list of most exquisite – that with nothing to do but a late flight to catch, we found a leisurely breakfast at the friendly, rock cafe then walked across the street to do handstands at the ocean. We took our passenger van to the main town and walked along the colonial stroll and sipped an old beer and scattered ourselves in smiling openness. And we walked to the fort and I snapped one of my favorite pictures of all time and we naturally gathered again for an elevated porch sip before finding our way to travel again. The best. There’s more words for that day, but these are some of them.
Such a grand, concise adventure that one.
Thanks for asking.
Love,
Tim
To Whom It May Concern:
New York is a place. It is a bustle. It is a constancy. It is a beast. It asks coping. It is a roiling swamp of concrete and activity and hustle and humanity. It is unending. It is a confined infinity of time and space and sights. It is loaded. It has necessary softness. And necessary meanness. The sun still shines here.
Though not in my work. In my work, imagination and the creative potential of hundreds of minds is fostered like a strange cave for dark and gorgeous creatures – bats with a love of noir and sweat and wonder and possession. We let the gathering group into the lair each night and we strive with body and might and conviction and abandon to give them story. We wear tuxedos. We wear dresses and bow ties, and cover ourselves in blood. We lurk around corners. We bury bones. We tell them secrets. We wrestle curses and each other. We command the world. Sometimes the visitors care; sometimes they do not. Sometimes they lose themselves and their desire lives in their chasing feet and their eager chests and voracious seeing. This is a kind of sharing. It is a most-distant cousin to other kinds of performance sharing and sometimes it works. Sometimes it only confuses. Sometimes it excludes. Sometimes it transforms.
And that happens in New York City. A bit like the city itself, and we at work are like the gnarly people on the subway, on the corner, trying to tell you a story. But the pedestrians with masks on in here have chosen to enter this forest; this micro city of fog and bird screeches and vintage crooners and dancing royalty. There is enough roiling and surprises and humanity and activity in this city to support our wood-paneled cave. There is enough in this city to support anything – to support the gnarly, to support the aristocracy, to support the striving and the surprises and the advertising and the every stream of intention that flows here every second of the day.
There is also stillness. But the city does not support stillness. It steals it most often; though occasionally you find a pocket it has overlooked.
And so New York is a place. Among many places.
There is much to see.
Sincerely,
Timothy
Dear Julie, Andy, Dad,
It was the first time I’d been back to the motherland in two decades. I met my friends at Rustler’s Roost, and the slide and the kitsch and the country music came flooding back in familiarity. I was a Stunt Pepper in the park that year, with our only real-life jalepeño-in-the-eye incident, and two kinds of horrid, slobbering monster. The grass was so cushy it felt fake and there was great love and Mexican food. I visited my childhood home and found our aged neighbor in her pajamas and got her take on Phoenix over the last forty years. We stayed in a house of musicians and family.
The next year I was also a little girl throwing herself a birthday party and a carnival barker. There were delicious breakfast sandwiches and a perfectly dry, bewitching hike in a place called Mesa, and a reunion with an innovating dancer and her friendly, Croatian husband. The host family was missing, but the house of musicians still slept us that year.
That’s probably all rather vague…
I miss the air and the rocks.
love,
Tim
Dear Aunt Pat, Hope, Erin, Myself, Phil, Mrs. Gibbs, Grace, The Owner of This Shop, and All the Other Best Souls Who Hold Fast To The Importance of Old World Habits of Time and Ink and Communicating and Coffee,
I’m sorry. I’m acutely aware that I’m not helping when I walk past the dozen purring laptops to open my own.
Today I’m using it to work on some writing. Does that make it any better?
Maybe everyone else is doing the same.
Stepping into the sunshine soon,
Tim
Laugh loudly.
Smile broadly.
Bear hugs only.
Then sit in quietly glimmering stillness and see the softness of the world.
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