Post-script

04/29/04

I know I promised to post this a couple of days after I arrived in New York and I know it's now a week later, but as those of you who have been here before know, there are times that I just can't do things I should do, even when they are important and easy at the same time. Somebody asked me recently why I didn't go to college and, looking back, I realized the main reason was that you had to fill out a thing and send it in somewhere and I just couldn't get around to it. The way my brain works, I knew it would be easier to fight an uphill battle for the rest of my life than it would be to do that one thing. Just the stamps and the filling out and the sending... impossible.

So sorry, once again, for abandoning you all for so many days. And now that it's been a week since the tirp ended, it's pretty fuzzy in my mind. Some people would say that this distance in time from the event would give me some useful perspective and allow me to write about it more honestly and with keener vision... Nope. I just don't really remember much.

As soon as I hit New York City, actually by the time I was 400 miles outside of the City, reality came roaring back and has since been erasing the Nowhere Man haze I was living on the road from my memory. 400 Miles outside the City was somewhere in Pennsilvania. Every single time I drive across the country it either starts or finishes exactly the same way (depending on which direction I'm crossing), with a full day of pissing down gray gray rain across all of Pennsilvania that feels like it will never end. I resent Pensilvania for this and it's one of the main reasons I refuse to spell it correctly. I know there's a Y in there somewhere but I refuse to do the research to get it right.

This time, as I crashed through sheets of rain being thrown at me by a gusty wind, my mind started to look ahead to my imminent night in New York. I thought about how I'd get there at night and how it'd be raining and what a pain in the ass it was going to be to unload the dog and all my shit into our tiny apartment and then try in vain to park the massive navigator in the village streets, only to park it in an expensive and far away parking lot. But then I started to look farther ahead than that and the picture got brighter. I would go to visit my friend. I'm not going to say who my friend is for his own privacy all I will say is that I was looking forward to seeing him and that, when I called him from the car, he met me with the news that he is dying, as in really really soon. I am not going to go into details about this but suffice it to say this news was... stunning and upsetting. This guy is easily closer to me than anyone in my life who has died. I visited him that night and another time since. It's something I've been dealing with.

Okay, that's all I want to say about that because... it is what it is.

To continue with this comparitively pointless weblog....

My wife and daughter arrived the next day at the airport. Loona and I went to pick them up. I was so happy to see them. It's hard to describe the feeling you get when you spend time away from your wife and baby and then get to see them again. Every single time I see my wife after a long or even short absence, I am stunned by how beautiful she is and how she makes me vibrate with happiness. It's not that I forget it in every day life, but with just a few days distance from her, when she comes back.... wow. The best thing about seeing the baby is really her reaction rather than mine. Reuniting with someone you've missed is still something new to her so the rawness of her feelings, of her smile always just knocks me out.

We all piled into the Navigator and began driving straight to our house in Upstate New York. The drive is normally two hours but, it being rush hour on a Friday in New York City, it took us two hours just to get over the Whitestone bridge and another two to get home. We didn't care, though, because we were all together and had a lot to talk about. When I think of it, it seems funny that we were bursting so much with conversation, considering that we talk on the phone and email several times a day. But that's always the way it is. "Oh, I forgot to tell you!" and "Guess who I saw!" for hours. I remember when I was younger and single, I would go to parties and when I saw married couples at a party sitting together and talking just to each other, I would be amazed. "What could they possibly have to say to each other?" I'd wonder. "They're together all day, every day, for years."

Now that I'm married, I understand. I will try to explain it. Talking to your spouse never never never gets old. I think it's because when you are really sharing your life with someone, when you are living with them, part of everything that happens to you or them is talking about it with them after. Nothing that happens to you really feels like it's done happening till you talk to them about it. Like when you experience something, you don't really experience it completely till you think about it. But when you're married, you now think in a dialogue instead of an interior monologue.

I guess that, to me, asking "What could a married couple have left to talk about" Would be like looking at any solitary person and asking "What could he possibly have left to think about?" As if, at some point, you will have had all the thoughts you're going to have and that your inner voice would start to just say "So ah.... I don't know.... What's up with you?" and then eventually fall silent. I suppose maybe that does happen to some people. You might realize one day that the thoughts that are running through your head on that day are old or rehashed. That you have nothing left to say to yourself. Jesus, that's pretty grim...

A comparison of the solitary mind and the dialogue of a marriage is in my mind because a large part of this trip for me was the rare experience I had, as a father and husband, of sitting by myself for miles and miles, for hours and hours, just alone with my thoughts. Spacing out and wandering in my mind all over the place. It was very euphoric. yet every night I craved this weblog, the ability to connect with someone. And I called my wife every time my phone had a signal and now that I have her and the baby back, I wouldn't dream of missing my time on the road alone.

So now we're all back home, back in the country. There is grass and trees everywhere, lots of spring mud. You can hear cows moo from our bed at night. The frogs are CRAZILY loud. Loona is running all around the yard, digging up last year's bones. Alix is back in her garden. The baby and I play in the back yard and I'm amazed at how she's grown up, how we play the same games as last year but she really engages, she really plays WITH me. I throw a ball up in the air and hit it with the bat and instead of looking at her own shoes she watches me and says, in a voice incredibly crisp for a two year old "Wow, papa. That was a pretty good hit." then we go get the ball together as I hold her and "Gallop her like a pony".

I would love to show you pictures of all of us but I just don't feel right about putting my wife and kids up here. The internet is just such a swamp. Not even just in a bad way. It's just too weird, thinking of everyone all over the world, in different places and states of mind, in prison, in New Zealand, in a Cyber Cafe in Brockton Massachusettes, looking at pictures of my baby. The fact is I can't even explain it to her well enough to properly ask her for permission. So I can only offer these abstract images of her. This one being the most vivid...

So that has been me for the last week. The crazy part of it is that, as I write this, I am on a plane back to Los Angeles. It feels so silly, after my Loona and Clark expidition across the plains, deserts, pastures, mountains and lakes of America, to just hop on a 767 to come right back to the west coast in five hours. But that's the way it is. I'm having a couple of meetings about the pilot tomorrow at Warner Brothers and then I go on to San Francisco, where I'm playing the Punchline for two nights. It should be good. It's a great club. Come by if you're in the bay area.

Once again, i will close this entry by promising emptily to keep up the weblogging. Actually, I think there is hope that I will do it for at least the next month. I find out if my pilot is a series on May 19th. Until that day, I am living in total limbo. I can't take any other jobs, I have no idea what the future will be and I can do absolutely nothing, beyond the work I've already done, to influence the outcome. So it's a perfect time to sit around and type words to strangers. Thank you all, sincerely, for coming by and reading this.

That's all for now, my friends...

Thanks for reading,