The period of time in which I so often
saw these falling stars, since it seems defined by their frequency, is maybe a
thing worth thinking about. If I’ve learned anything in the keeping of these
journals, and later on, these postings, it’s that of the majority of my
“encounters” – if even such a word is the word applicable here, which it isn’t –
the thing seen is important in the context into which it inserts itself; that
these intersections of the supranormal (even if it were often only the idea of
such) are like little color-flags stuck into the pages of my life’s book at
points of interest, moments in which the plot turns, the main character becomes
a little more seasoned, a little less bothersome, perhaps a bit more like
someone you’d want to talk to.
From 2006 until 2009, or thereabouts, it
was a time of redefinition and starting over, and starting over yet again. After
a disastrous marriage and failed business venture, I needed to find a new
career, or at least something with a living wage attached to it, and had no
idea where to go. I’d had a career in design before all of that, but it had run
out – just simply run out. Then I thought I’d found my stride afterwards in filmmaking, a childhood
dream, but that dead-ended also. I’d left Seattle and lived for a short while
on a sailboat in Redondo, CA, trying to think of how to start looking for a new
life, where it occurred to me – rocking back and forth on the waves in the
marina, waiting to hear back on the slew of resumés and demo reels that I’d driven
twelve hundred miles to hand-deliver, now watching some absolutely
uninteresting cooking show on a portable tv – that I could go back to school
(yet again) and learn to cook professionally. It was a stupid idea. I had no
background, demonstrable ability, not even any particular interest in cooking
at all, and what’s more, every single punter in America seemed to have come up
with exactly the same idea at the same time, although I didn’t understand that yet.
But a year and a half later I still had no better idea, in fact no other idea
at all, so I did it, and it was in the midst of this whole process of deciding
and taking action that the stars, I noticed, started falling out of the sky. I
moved to Rhinebeck, New York, where the stars also fell, usually as I drove
home at night after classes, and once even a fireball went shooting lazily over
the highway. While on my externship in Colorado, I saw a tongue of cartoon flame form and vanish in the air beside me, like Casper the Holy Ghost. This
decision, more or less an arbitrary one, but one undertaken with the inanely
maniacal, single-minded fervor of a robot, more for the sake of shaking things
up and making some kind of desperately-needed change than for the knowledge or
skill in itself (which I could almost not care about) seemed to fray the edges
of the real, to pull all this fizzy marginalia out of the sky and make me
think, and look, and think again, and look, if only to wonder what was going
on, or if anything truly was.
Eventually, all that stuff stopped falling. I think it stopped falling. The sky has stopped
falling; I’m only here now, and I have to ask, is this what happens when I
step to the side, lose the path, turn orthogonally out from the constraints of
a concessionary life and run counter to sense, even to my own nature? Could I
make it happen for real if I were to go truly mad, and stop only playing at it?
Would that help, and I am capable of such a step? Because it seems to me as if
I need other magic now; that an act of will, if absurd enough, can rewrite the
facts of the person, because it has to, just as it can shake out the more
arbitrary facts of the sky, as if the stars were only people once, or were
people now, or if they were only people.
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