Straight Edge Life

Went north to P-town this weekend. Holy crap it was hot. It was in the 105-110 degree range in the sun. Hotter inside. Oregon, if you don’t know this already, isn’t a place where you buy an air conditioner. We get about 5 days a year where it’s unbearably hot and that’s about it. Nobody has air conditioning in their home. You would likely be considered a sissy if you did. Many places of business don’t have it in their buildings. So on those few days when it is hot, people get the hell out of town and get out to the coast where an erupting volcano could coat the earth with searing hot pyroclastic ash and it would not get above 54 degrees. It’s never warm on the Oregon coast.

We, of course, headed straight up to a bigger, hotter town to hang out with Ann’s brother, Mike and his girlfriend, Dorothy. I was also heading up to catch up with an old friend from College, Donia. And, of course, to stop in and see Steve, who’s been glued to the TV for the last 23 days watching the Tour De France with his biker roomates. We all got together for dinner at Abou Karim, so tasty.

Whew. Anyway. Here’s the deal. I hung out with Donia on Friday night. Donia’s an artist. A painter for the most part, but she works with a lot of different stuff. As unpretentious and honest as they get, her work has come a long way from shared days in our school’s art studio in Illinois. It was really good to see her again but it was strangely disappointing. When you meet up with someone you haven’t seen in some time, someone you have respect for especially, it’s a mirror onto your own soul. You see, you compare, you toss and turn in the differences.

And I am here at 3:25 in the morning looking at these differences and reflecting on how many decisions I could have made differently in my life. To be more like Donia? No. To be more like the man I used to be. It’s sent me into a tailspin that I can hardly bring into words fit for you to read.

I looked into her deep blue eyes, faded and rich from struggle and passion, and mused upon a beautiful world that I coldly turned my back on years ago. I don’t draw any more. I don’t paint. I don’t set up a sketchbook in my room and dirty my floors with graphite, pastel, and oils. I don’t sketch in an 8 by 8 inch book.

Today, I manipulate data. Not data in the pixels of a digital image kind of way; but data as in a huge set of records in a database, data. Tomorrow I may shoot a photo or two. Perhaps even today. But gone is the world of art that once surrounded me. One language replaced for another. And I miss it, because Donia and I barely had a thing to say to each other on Friday night. I just listened. Shocked by the acuity of the moment. I feel longing for that language lost. To once again speak in those words and connect in so many irrational ways to an irrational world of beauty and imagination.

Tonight is an extraordinarily sad night. At the exact moment where much of my hard work and sacrifice is coming together to better my life, I’m realizing how many things I’ve lost along the way. Wondering if all of it, any of it, was worth it. I could go back. I could go back to who I was and what I did. I could do it in an instant.