Dave Raphael

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Often, if you are the lucky type, you might find yourself walking the streets, lost in your own little universe, tapping out a drum beat on the wallet in one pocket and the keys in the other, congratulating yourself on collecting the coolest friends ever, fantasizing about the critical details of the next adventure; salivating at the thought of the next time you can fuck off and run to an airport with a giggle.  Bounding in time to the breaks of How Many More Times with a leading left foot and pausing with a dot to wonder, how DID I get so lucky?  Eventually you might come back down to earth, either in some kind of graceful glide back to the ground, or the more exciting, standard issue, reckless crash landing and then doubt everything your gleaming self confidence brought.  But every so often, one of the original members of the circus will ring you with a reminder that yeah, you really do have the coolest people ever.

Dave!  what are you doing on Thursday night?

Im flying back from Prague, why?

It’s my birthday, everyone’s coming over and we are going to draw.

Who, in adulthood, would ever expect to hear something so full on righteous as that come out of the ear piece of a mobile phone?  Draw.  Ok, Im there, direct from Schipol, save me a spot at the table.

Look, when I was a kid, this was normal.  Me and my friends, we all sat around and drew on everything.  When we got tired of that, we built universes out of legos, you know, the toy building brick.  But drawing.  That was huge.  Drawing was in the top five with bicycle, swimming, playing in dirt and lego.

And now decades have come and gone AND WHO THE FUCK HAS DRAWING BIRTHDAY PARTIES?  I know the coolest people in the whole galaxy.  I am, in fact, the luckiest motherfucker and need to remind myself of this on a more regular basis.

Unfortunately, by the time I got back from the airport, I missed out on a good portion of the crayon battle that apparently ensued before I showed up, but did get there just in time to see everyone show off their masterpieces.  I swear, sitting here looking at these pictures now, all of us adults, who does shit this cool?

Apparently it is customary for everyone at a Dutch birthday party to bring a cake.

Or its not customary at all and everyone just brought a cake anyway.

Regardless, there were many cakes, which followed the usual awesomeness that comes out of the kitchen at Tos and Eef’s.

At one point a long discussion was had about De Korenwolf and how if a little rodent was good enough to halt real estate development, it was certainly good enough to be Gulpener’s furry mascot.

This evening was also the origin for a later discussion on the duality of the word box and things you can do to drumsticks when your friend sends some: zal ik je hele doos schuren?

All the funnier when the drummer is a girl.  And it’s her birthday.  Yes, we have some laughs…  

This table has been the scene of countless hours of etymology, which really doesnt seem like it would be any fun in any way, but somehow our discussions always boil down to some talk of words and its kinda the greatest thing ever.

Earlier that day, there was a colossal Taschen score which everyone had to get their eyeballs on.

I was also not the only one who had gifted Eef a photograph for her birthday.

I was super lucky to be in Amsterdam for Eef’s birthday, first time I got to celebrate with her and of course, really glad I decided to hang around another week or so for this gathering.

The usual gang was present, replete with my favorite Dutch dog, Nibler, Koning van de Bakfiets.

My favorite part of Nibler is that he has this absurdly large head, even for a french bulldog, and it could possibly be the most satisfying thing in dog world.  His little dog head is like, lusciously large.  It truly is immensely satisfying to look at and flat out exhilarating to pet.  Prominent brows, big bulging eyes, tiny muscle dog body but enormous head.  Nibler rules.

He really is pretty much all muscle, skull and full of love.  Some dogs are fun, others are friendly and then there’s the ones where you are just glad that you got to meet them because they make your life better.  Nibler is one of those dogs.  Unique, completely awesome, proud and full of love.

Makes sense he runs with this crowd, they are all like that…

There’s always that odd anxiety at the end of the summer, when you are from a place where the summers end.  Often, its not particularly tangible, it mostly just sort of creeps in until you are wearing a heavy jacket wondering where the summer went.

Not this year.  A week of fog made the intangible unavoidable.  Things were getting heavy and the people I was with unmasked themselves to be predictably what I hoped they would never show me.

All of that at once left no alternative beyond a frantic fling of clothes and cameras through an open rental car window and willing a piece of shit automatic with all the force of my right foot to peel out (which was impossible) against the pacific ocean in search of higher altitude, dry air and a last, bite off more than you can chew helping of the sunshine in solitude before the bitterness of the winter would set in.

This normally would never lead to Las Vegas, but after a day spinning around Mojave the influence of Billy and Ethel was curiously absorbed.  The spine of the Sierras would have to wait,  before I knew it, I was back in Nevada, the Silver State I had just left a few weeks before and I was returning, assuredly, a changed man.

So, Vegas.  When I met up with Stephanie she made a comment about how much cooler her bike was than her car.

Your bike?

In that I’ll ponder the remarkably consistent part of my personality which makes all of the most fun roads lead to girls and their motorcycles.

I always discover this (the bike) after the fact, which of course makes it all the more salacious.  There are few things in my history that are as consistent as this.

I need a new helmet, follow me to the bike shop, you can check out my ride.

Deal.

Ok, so, raise your hand if you’ve kicked up into first wearing heels.

And, raise your hand if you wear a kid size helmet.

The combination of these two elements can bring a smile unlike many others.

So much so, in fact, that it’s this afternoon that stands out in the time line among the memorable moments from that trip.

The search continues to understand where I come from, or as a compromise, to discover who dropped me on my head as a toddler to get me on this track as an adult.

Either way, the one conclusion that can absolutely be drawn from this day’s fun is that a bike can accelerate way the fuck faster than the fastest car.

Precisely the reason why I dont have one.

When you can have anything,

anything at all that you desire,

with the explicit exception of the one thing that you critically need,

does the concept of Choice retain any relevance?

Everest.  Ironically, the camera I took this photo with had been to the top of everest. There was probably more snow there though…

what comes down, must pile up.

this is what ineptitude looks like.  If I was a politician, I would probably do whatever the fuck I wanted, whenever I wanted, however I wanted too.

bad day for a bike ride.

worse day for bike parking.

I had originally gone out to find a bank that was open, but they all took snow days.  Next order of business was to find a lock smith to make some keys for a buddy staying at my flat, no such luck.  Snow Day.

I then met this totally fun girl, three thousand miles away from the warmth of the central valley where she was from, buttoning up her soy ice cream business for, a snow day.

Armed with only a broom to clear her entrance way, I stopped for a bit for a bit of the old good samaritanism and a friendly chat about california, japan,

and how much ice cream you can sell in the winter, especially days after a blizzard.

In the end, I went home with my checks and without keys or, not surprisingly, ice cream.  It was this guy who had the best idea in ages, doing something that you just can not ever do in new york city,

let alone in the middle of the street, in new york city.

kudos to always being prepared…

blurry vision of

eyes burned from a terrible snow,

wind and lighting,

striking by surprise.

finding a love,

who can bring you in,

hopeful thougths

of never straying again.

(well I) just came back today.

some parts of my personality are just relentless.

Blech, the wretched holidays.  Surviving that horseshit as a single person is on par with the solitary dude hanging in a sleeping bag swinging in the freezing wind via a carabiner bolted to a vertical cliff face, some thousands of feet above where yaks dont bother to climb.  After all these years, I spent my first Christmas, well sort of, in NYC, alone.  Odd to say the least, all in all not so bad, delighted not to be a suicide statistic, thankful its fucking over.

My shitty Christmas Eve started out in the vestibule of my apartment building.  My neighborhood is one of the only in the world that I have traveled where a company can spend tens of thousands of dollars renovating a building and have it turn out looking worse than what it did with 35 years of wear on it prior to restoration.  White marble and shitty gold colored plated fixtures spells LES Chic.  And you can blame the Chinese, these are the materials that are often on sale cheap in Chinatown.  Underbidding, bottom feeding contractors, lower manhattan residents all salute you and your fabulously american business practices, for if it wasnt for your high code of ethics we actually might feel like we are getting something for the absurd amount of money we pay to live here every month.  Alas, gold colored plated shit metal and the quarry’s reject blem shit rock cut with out of square miters will have to do for our top dollar payment this month.  When people dig up the bones of this place a thousand years after I am Legend, they’ll never figure out the true miserly origins for the worst interior design the wold has ever known.

My neighborhood on a Friday or Saturday night is packed to the brim: bumper to bumper traffic, not an available parking spot in sight, double parked cars battling it out with cabs collecting fares and a constant flow of bicycles, both the usual onslaught of delivery bikes and then the weekend influx of fixed, skinny jean, not ironic just old at this point facial hair twenty somethings, and thats just the street.  Sidewalks filled to the brim with perfectly backlit homeless scamming kids, the clack of cheap high heels, catalog shoes and trash and vaudville boots all worn by the drunk, the young and the impressionable.  Yes, thats my hood, still one of the few consistent destinations for bridge and tunnel idiots, both from the east and west.  Its also the location of a University that, like all evil plans disguised as good, has been buying up every single piece of real estate it can with mom and dad’s hard earned tuition money.

And all of the fuckers who contribute to this scene, every one of them, were home with their family, away on vacation, hanging from a rope after carving brooks was here in a rafter somewhere, anywhere but on this block where they usually are on a Friday night.

So, with Christmas Eve on a Friday, it was nothing short of surreal to see empty lanes of traffic at midnight, where there is always gridlock and wide open sidewalks with not even the occasional drunk to be spotted.  Surreal.

Our priority quickly shifted from finding some place cool to go to simply finding some place open to go…

My only hope was to find a spot that had something absurd on a television.  Because God forbid you have a bar in this no attention span, entertainment obsessed culture without a fucking worthless television on.

Dreams of the usually scheduled Nakatomi Plaza adventure (how did that become my generation’s Its a Wonderful Life?) gave way when I saw whatever this horseshit is through the window and knew we had found the right place.

The kitchen was closed, but we settled in, beneath a proper old school NYC fixture

for at least one drink in this cozy little bar.

When the bar had emptied out after about ten minutes and we were the last customers, after midnight on a shitty Christmas eve, the bar tender brought us popcorn.  Things were looking up.  It was Christmas, I was out with an old friend I hadnt seen in seven or eight months, a terrible movie was on a television that has no off switch and Bowie was playing on the stereo.  Until.

Some sick fuck cleaning dishes in the kitchen made the executive decision that it wouldnt be Christmas without that joyless Christmas music, turned off our Hunky Dory Christmas in exchange for that knife turning last dose of holiday cheer and they didnt even have the conceptual continuity to seg with that terrible bing and bowie little drummer boy.  No.  Straight to carols.  Heartless motherfuckers.

Head hung low in desperation, I rallied to think of some way to take over this bar.  I was not about to have my shitty Christmas sabotaged by oh the weather outside is frightful.

Without pause, I announced to the bar, which was now us, the question of the evening:  In 40 years, how many women has Bowie bedded.  Tour bus bunks, backstage tile locker room shower stalls, airplane lavatories, Chateau Marmont garden walkways and Max’s Kansas City coat check rooms all count.  So do boys.  I put in my first bid at 10,000 people.

Annnnnnnd, we’re back.  In the past many months, having found something better to do, I havent been drinking much at all.  There are far more constructive paths to self destruction and Ive lately chosen working myself to death over alcohol.  I havent seen Ash in a million years, but as is usually the case, old drinking buddies can pick up where they left off and so we were, in the Next Position, face down on the bar, fully amused with our obnoxious opulence.

Almost on cue, this guy got involved.

Probably 30 minutes into the discussion it was determined that we both had a good amount of time on the road and our Bowie conversation went from the absurd to the realistic.  Let it Snow was now playing for a second time and I readjusted my estimate to a much more reasonable 8,000 people figuring averaging 200 people a year was far more doable for Bowie, especially when you offset for the Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke years.  Yeah, Im sticking with eight thousand.  And it still feels low.   Thoughts on Bowie vs. Jagger vs. Hetfield lingered, Tom Jones not even in the race for Bwana Dick with that kind of competition.

Soon enough, even or especially so for a Shitty Christmas, we wore out our welcome, and with conquest inconclusive,

In a blur,

were back on the street again, in search of the next place.

Infected by the wretchedness of two rounds of Let it Snow, priorities shifted from shitty television to a fireplace, which we were lucky to find.  If you are going to spend Christmas self destructing in a bar, might as well do it by a fireplace.  Leaves you the option, when you dont need the pain, to be properly shot down in flames.

A Bon Scott Shitty Christmas did not last long beyond singing one chorus next to a fire as I took my coat off when somehow the bartender announced that she was knitting something for her boyfriend.

I suppose the only word for it, all things being equal, is obsession.  A healthy fixation, certainly not the first or last person to fall victim to it, but powerless to resist the guitar tone that Jimmy Page was slinging around in 1969 and 1970 both on both European and American Led Zeppelin tours.  Its probably the original impetus for what caused me to plug in my first soldering iron when I was in college, foolishly thinking it was two transistors making that sound.

Built just about every fuzz box design commercially distributed in the late 60’s for years searching for it, until coming across the schematic for the completely one off (well, they made two) Hiwatt Amplifier that Page played on that tour, all the way through to 1971 actually, when he switched to a Marshall and everything went down hill.   After building that amp, quest for the ultimate tone satisfied, a literally life long quest finally put to bed, I had to find something else to focus on.

I had been trying to find a white shirt that would properly blouse at the sleeves for years, but thats too easy.  That cardigan he wore on that 1969 tour, most notably photographed at the rock argument ender of all time: Royal Albert Hall, 9 January 1970.  Where to get such an absurd article of clothing.  Anyone with the balls to play what was performed that night wearing what he wore while doing it would forever be, in the oddest form of salacious mystery, my hero.

I had built the amp, piece by piece, by hand.  I now needed the wool, and Im not learning how to knit.  My phone hit the bar with a slap, check this out, can you knit one of these?  Some day, I will have one.  Then and only then, will I be the most absurd geek out there.  For now, I’ll be happy with the fact that a photo I took is currently the number one (and twenty ninth) hit in google pictures for “Jimmy Page Cardigan”.  Don’t say I never accomplished anything with my life.

This was the jist of our delightful, fireside, shitty christmas eve conversation, and it lasted until they put the fire out, we closed the bar and headed home for the evening wondering how many men and women bowie actually did manage to fuck in a lifetime of consistent celebrity, a bulk of it through an American sexual revolution and where Im ever going to get a proper cardigan ’cause you cant play that ascending part to how many more times without one, which is actually the core explanation to why that ascending part of the riff was only ever played live: the wool.

Christmas eve down, 22 hours of Shitty Christmas, Im single and hate the world torture left to go.

Somewhere in the middle of rock and roll wool and where have you been for eight months things got a tinge ugly, as they sometimes do with enough alcohol after youve already been face down on the bar and that’s probably when we made plans to have christmas dinner together.  Cajun anti christmas dinner was out of the cards, because like all respectable business owners, the spot we wanted to go was closed because I dont know, someone is happily married and just wanted to spend the holiday holding someone’s hand and feeling loved for a day.  Pssh.  Not us.

We decided the next best anti christmas dinner would be Indian and a brisk walk through the ghost town of my Saturday night neighborhood brought us to little india and the scene of such desperate begging for customers we almost ditched the whole idea.  Rabid, starving fucking dogs, foaming over a bone except they were people and well, so we were.  Take the wrong culture, put it in the hearltess competition of NYC and sometimes what is bred is not the ugliness itself, but the drool that the ugly salivates.  This city can rip your soul out if you arent careful.  It can also motivate you to do the most ludicrous things to make your rabid dog meaner than all the others and as such, a thing of beauty was born onto the streets of manhattan: Psychedelic Indian Restaurant.

Yeah, well, the food’s not the best, the management are a bunch of fucking animals, having *harassed* the bulk of customers into their business, but they DO have exactly one trillion lights inside the place which predictably makes it a hundred degrees, but it was cold out and shitty christmas demanded the rude absurdity of chicken tikka masala served under the illumination of a thousand christmas trees.

The best part is that it’s like this all year round.  Certainly nothing festive for christmas, shitty or otherwise.

BYOB.  Woops.  8 degrees outside.  Fuck.  Pack of rabid, foaming, questionably tempered dogs at the door.  Double fuck.  We’ll drink after dinner tonight…

After some ado, some distraction, and commenting that every single person that got suckered into the restaurant came through the door with the same look of fear and excitement on their face, having survived a pack of rabid dogs only to be led into the psychedelic indian food den, we ordered.

If you are gonna fall off, might as well hit the ground hard…  Dont wake up for a 15 mile ride, definitely dont lift anything heavy for lunch and whatever you do, dont run nine miles before dinner, just take the day off and dont do anything on Shitty Christmas except hate the world and eat this mess of fried goodness:

yum.  It’s ok to cheat one day a year.

On the walk over, we simultaneously commented on how cozy this one empty (among all the empty) spots looked, and after dinner rolled around the corner to what would be the most unsuspecting surprise of the year.

Walking into this empty bar, I was amazed to find a french bar tender serving only czech beer and maybe 12 taps worth.  This is not normal or usual by any stretch of the imagination for NYC, or America for that matter.  The best we can normally do are underpowered co2 taps serving flat, thick, hoppy beers or flat, thin, watery beers.  A bar chock full o’ real pils was a delight.

Thrown in there, would be the biggest surprise and absolutely the most out of place tap in the universe.  The whole universe to be exact.  Among a bar of czech pils was my favorite ale of all time, Australian Coopers.   Up until that moment I had just assumed that kegs werent even imported into the US.  Amazing.

I had found my christmas miracle.  For the first time in maybe ten years I sat back behind an american bar with the same enthusiasm that I do sitting behind a Dutch bar, excited to enjoy a beer I really love, instead of just drinking whatever some bar is serving because often self destruction wins over good taste in too many instances.

Sadly for Ash, her phone blew up right as we sat down,

Her shitty christmas miracle would not involve finding her favorite, never to be seen in America beer, but instead getting called into work.  On christmas.  Shitty Christmas.

And just as she left, I ran out of film.

I can not recall the last time that has happened to me.  In a way, its kinda freeing, as this camera is as much compulsion as it is fun.

Stories about a Parisian bartender in NYC, a long and uninteresting tirade about European Beer and the lack of it in the United States and my pure snobbery about it, the two Canadian girls who showed up later and an equally uninteresting lament over the interstate highway system in Colorado and why its unique in the US will have to wait for some other time, when I fall off the wagon again and bring enough film for the journey straight to the ground.

So concludes my shitty christmas.  Like I said, thankful its over.  Could have been so much worse and was real special to spend it with an old friend, rowing the same boat upstream, just like we always used to do.  Perhaps next year, this hopeless romantic won’t be so hopeless.  If someone with a life so full of luck is allowed one wish, that would be mine.  Only eleven months to go.  blech.

when presented with it, sometimes ya just need the proper motivation…

Counting down to a fully, fully righteous start to 2011, I spent the day recalling some of my favorite moments of the winter of 2010, a justly earned adventure on the heels of recovering from a broken bone, broken brain and my erstwhile holiday companion: ye good olde broken heart.

Too many proper adventures start in airport bars (however the truly righteous have origins in gas stations), $8.67 bottles of heineken are a must (when flying, pray for sleep), and serve the right match for excited departures, belabored returns and, in this case, the 2010 Winter Olympics.

There’s nothing quite comparable to the silence found in the din of shuffling footsteps, grinding conveyor gears, whirring golf cart transmissions, dragging skateboard wheels bearing carry-on weight, poorly amplified public address systems and the excited chatter, witless banter and single serving friend drivel that are all standard issue for the solo traveler in American Airports.

Trying to live a full life off the hinges, airports serve as the lines of demarcation between the incessant passion-suck of the monotony of dayjob life and the moment before that all shrieks to a halt and something vastly different happens.  There’s an absolute reflection that comes attached to that, an immediate reminder of the last time you sat in your local airport bar before a flight, a reminiscene of the last adventure, a challenge to make the one you are about to start just that much more intense and a distinct measuring stick of all the things that have occurred since the last time you sat here: all the nonsense you had to tolerate between passport stamps and all the good born of it, all under a spotlight.

The mirror-hard, unforgivingly focused light of a spot often bears no mercy as it illuminates all the fickle lies you’ve suffered, all the people that disappointed you, the handful that impressed and the rare dependable that delivered.  Thoughts of the amazing old friends you have, old friends you wish you still had, gracious thoughts on how lucky you are to have met the new friends you have now.  All the achievements you’ve conquered, weight lifted, miles run, vices shed, goals improved, songs written, stories crafted.  All the surprises that made you smile, people you’ve made smile with surprises, the handful of moments so real you still haven’t figured out if they really happened like that or if you just imagined them that way, and then the few things that might have effortlessly held you to your knees forcing the tears whose absolution was likely part of the equation that brought you back to this airport, once again.  Possibly.

A straight shot to the heart of darkness, center of passion and id of happiness can pass through your head in the hours counted down between a security checkpoint and walking into a big metal tube weighing tons, designed to travel twenty thousand feet above safety, hopefully touching down, delivering you through the fog and into to the next chapter.

Yeah, there is no other silence like what you find in an airport, none.  Its berth is wide and if you are lucky, it can stay with you in waves, through the entire flight.  It can stay pressed against your shirt, forcing your pulse to beat in your fingertips, right up to the point to where you see the ground rushing up at you towards the fuselage faster than it ever should as you are halfway into the second verse of that song you always sing to yourself on these routine descents as the gear forces another set of black marks into the blur of a runway.  Again.

And it’s on.  mind your step.  welcome back.  watch out for firecrackers to the head, happy new year.

To suggest that the last few months, two or twenty or forty eight (depending how ya want to count them) have been uber intense would be an easy underestimation all day long.  Perhaps Im dipping into the unrelatable, but there’s this thing about mines.

Gold, silver, copper: drift mines.

To get up in the morning, unwrinkle a topo map, lace up your boots, pack an extra bulb, two sets of batteries and actually seek one out.   Adventure, risk, adrenaline, you know the routine.

When you find the tailings crumbling down the side of the mountain beneath the pines, the heart rate gets elevated, you can climb faster even though you are exhausted and the true path to wonder gets illuminated.

Standing at the mouth of a drift, that could be a minor form of sheer terror.

You don’t know whats in there or how many different ways you could meet a death that will most certainly be served alone, in total darkness, with no quarter.  Crushed by a cave in, asphyxiated by invisible poison gas, impaled on 100 year old blunt, rusted iron, slip helpless down a might as well be bottomless shaft, make enough wrong turns to be lost under ground for all of your last days alive, eaten by zombies, or shot by a land owner.  This all flashes as you take that first step into the darkness.

You search for the 24 guage rail or a fragment of steam pipe to hopefully guide you into the belly of the beast.  After the first 100 meters, when the graffiti peters out, the daylight outside grows dim behind you and the ringing in your ears rises to make you aware of the silence, a certain comfort sets in.

You can walk in there for miles sometimes, and if you are lucky, the fear subsides and perhaps foolishly, the constant danger just becomes comfortable.  When you are lucky, survival flows eminently.  There is this odd thing however, about the light at the end of the tunnel.  Most people view that light at the end of the tunnel as a positive thing.  Most people arent stupid enough to go wandering around abandoned gold mines.  Because, well, they are fucking dangerous places.  So dangerous, in fact, that most of the entrances are sealed, in one way or another.

Dynamited for the permanent cave in, boarded up to impede the casual explorer or in many cases, barred with lengths of ancient steel.  Cages at drift entrances that don’t look much different than the average prison cell.  These are exceptionally effective at keeping people out, but they are absolutely expert at keeping people in.

So its always with great anxiety, after a few hours in a mine, that Ive learned to greet the light at the end of the tunnel.  Will I be able to stroll out?  Will I be met with bars drilled several feet into concreted walls?  I just survived all this danger, will I have to turn around and repeat it all just to get back out the way I came in, will I get back out at all, I was after all, pretty lucky to have made it this far.

And so, thats my experience with the light at the end of the tunnel.  Much of the time, its the brewer of an anxiety that has no measure, the light at the end of the tunnel can go fuck itself in the ear with the tortuous optimism it can recklessly dangle in front of dilated pupils, especially when your calves are burning from climbing, your nose is burning from that sulfur smell, your shoulders are burning under the weight of your pack, your hands are burning from the fresh cuts in them, your eyes are burning from trying to see through the darkness, you’ve creeped yourself out to the core deep inside a steam-age hole in a mountain and you just want to go home.

Gold mines were my adventure in the 90’s, I still cling to the lessons in fear I hauled out of all the holes I was lucky enough to walk out of.  So the last few months.  Yes.  They have been a grand adventure, measuring high on my list of all the grand adventures I have been on, climbing into the stupid risks of abandoned gold mines included.  Up until recently its been a big party in the blackness of the new exploration, an unfurling of the wonder of discovery, each step more exciting than the last, each decision more filled with risk than the sum of everything that preceded it.  But then, there’s the light at the end of the tunnel, and my learned reflex to it.

A few nights earlier, I had seen a drawing of what the light at the end of the tunnel might look like.  I knew what it represented.  It got me excited, made me levitate off the fifth floor for just a second, but it was just a hint.  And that was good.

I was not prepared for the email couple days later that I opened to discover the light at the end of the tunnel, full on.  It brought with it lots of emotion, as these things tend to do, but I was not prepared for the beauty: of the thing itself, of the possibility of change it represented, of my reaction to it.

So I sat, lost in the idea of the most beautiful thing in the world and in some moment of clarity slowly became aware of the fact that the fear was gone.  Monumental, yeah.  Definitely.  Overwhelming, yeah.  Certainly.  Awesome?  Absolutely.

The next question quickly became, what do you do when you conceptually have the most beautiful thing in the world sitting in front of you, but its top secret and you cant show anybody?  Or its too specific and nobody would understand?  Or that its just so far on the other side of the edge that it defies explanation?

Ive asserted for a long time that the loneliest people on earth (who are all about to die) are the few Apollo astronauts who stood on the moon and looked at the Earth.

There is nobody that has seen such beauty and nobody who took such risks to see it.  The End.  The most hardcore of the hardcore.  The hardcore-est.  The small few that make you realize the word elite has lost all its meaning and impact.  Their entire lives must sound like the charlie brown teacher as the rest of us bland earthlings drone on about our concerns, failures, achievements and accomplishments while silently in their head the universal retort for everything, every fucking utterance that another living being can provide them is “well, I stood on the moon, motherfucker, whatever”.  Apollo: the most elite fraternity and the loneliest men alive, nobody will ever relate to their perspective, not even the shuttle pilots who would walk in their wake.

I dare not compare myself to these men, but considering their plight, knowing they carry the ache of unimaginable beauty gained by conquering nothing short of the most grotesque quotient of danger, considering the burden they awake with every day makes the task of yielding to the most beautiful thing in MY life certainly some kind of cake walk in comparison.

But I had to show someone.  Someone else had to know.

I explained to my brother that at long last, I had the most beautiful thing.  I suggested, with a certain urgency, that he drop what he was doing and come bear witness to the magic I had going on.  He explained he had some work to do for his day job and I insisted that Joe Kittinger had to break the speed of sound without an aircraft testing a parachute deployment system so that Neil Armstrong could take one small step for man, see the most amount of beauty that man would ever know and then make it back to Earth alive, to be tortured by the isolation of that knowledge for the rest of his days.  The conversation went in this circle for some time before he agreed provide some critical companionship and would do the interview from my house.

Tonight’s interview was Mr. Toast for the NPR radio show that he produces.

ISDN brought worlds together, Mr. Toast extolled the virtue of collecting cereal boxes and I scrolled compulsively through the folder of scans that I had trying to come up with a strategy of how to show them to my bro without exploding his head.

We made it to the usual sushi spot with his interest now off the chart.

He had been hearing me talk about this for a long time.  The only person who has been in the loop longer has been the guy Ive been working on this project with.  I figured it was time to provide him with a proper security clearance and laid my phone down on the bar.

Talk of Kittinger, Glenn, Aldrin and the hardcore elite spun into a conversation about the arctic circle and the people that go there, what they are made out of and why.  Things got really interesting when we shifted from the north to the south pole and after my usual stream of frustration about access to Antarctica as a civilian and he recounted a story about a researcher who spent winters there.

For many scientists who are lucky enough to spend time in Antarctica, there are no weekends.  No days off.  No convenience of emergency medial treatment and sporadic resupply which is entirely ruled by the weather changing on the thin side of a dime.  Time there is always limited and always bracketed by some outside force.

So there was a guy, doing weather research at an Antarctic station.  His shift was a twelve hour day, seven days a week.  During the winter you have what basically is perpetual darkness.  The arms on a clock spin around, the work is endless, you can spiral into the abyss without a marker or two.

Well, at this weather station, Saturdays were celebrated.  Celebrated as a reminder of life back in the world, celebrated as a marker to reset the cycle, celebrated as a stake on a reality that may or may not apply.  And such it was that every saturday, Looking For The Heart of Saturday Night was blasted beneath the satellite dishes, radio antennas and over the horizon arrays throughout the hallways of a weather lab on the bottom of the earth.  Every Saturday.  Impetus for fun, Essential for sanity, Critical for survival.  This went on for years until, back in the world, this scientist suffered his first seizure which immediately disqualified him from ever going back to the south pole ever again.  He could have attempted to pull a Kittinger and not tell anyone that the pressure fitting in the right glove of his flight suit was malfunctioning, avoiding having the mission cancelled, but he didn’t, the burden on his colleagues would have been too great if he needed urgent care which circumstances as simple and common as a white out would prevent.  So he never went back.  Fantasy passion boarding pass: revoked.

The story really made me sad because I know that guy is lost.  And I suspect I know exactly how that guy is lost and there’s probably nothing worse.  When you live for the lust that fuels a passion and it gets ripped out of your hands like that…  Nothing worse.  So he had this song, which was his light at the end of the tunnel, a fantastical marker of another week down in the life of the hardcore of isolation and now in the mundane daily life of tying shoe laces and filling a car with groceries playing that song can only stand for the obscene paradigm of the magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.  Trust that this can only be the case.

Lucky for him, he did have the memory of the most beautiful thing.  In his world.  Perhaps not so different from Kittinger’s memory of that eternal lean forward in the open door of a hundred thousand foot gondola, or Armstrong’s memory of that first puff of dust swirling up and around the stitching covering the lead weight in his boots.  I pondered this for some time.

Our conversation continued on this track through dinner, which in our usual fashion, went on for two or three orders too many of the best fish in NYC.

The same fish, maybe not so ironically, that served as a small part of foundation fuel for what I was about to show him.

The Spacelord himself made mention of two concepts, two ideas which find their way into my daily life more and more and more these days.  One: you get what you give.  Two: there it is.  Having been the lucky recipient of point one, with a Voila, I passed my phone to my bro with the instruction to scroll right.

It was confirming to watch him react the way I had been bouncing off the walls all day.  I opened an email.  I paced my house.  I tried to sit still.  I tried to focus.  Just. Too. Excited.  Set a new personal time record at the gym that night.  Motivation is everything.

This is insane.

Yes, its going to be.

No, really.

I know.

Texts were sent, invitations declined, more drinks were ordered, a proper celebration would have to wait for another day.  It might have been premature anyway.  And really, this was no celebration.  It was all just offset.

A shift in energy having the knowledge.  A deep plunge into the ether of amazing combined with the shrill shock of being in it virtually all alone.

It was nothing new, if anything its been the foot note for everything Ive cared about in my adult life.  The loneliness of all the good things, some days, I don’t know, its just a big bite to chew on.  Way out there beyond the edge, it can make you think.

You dont have to leave the atmosphere to have an earth shattering memory (although it must help).  You dont have to free fall for four minutes.  You dont have to climb half a mile down into a hole.  We all have an edge.  Those of us with this disease keep pushing past it and the line of demarcation is constantly getting adjusted further and further away from convention as you venture farther and farther past where it once was.  Some people probably call it desensitization.  But it’s really not.  It’s just a redefining of maximum capacity for the extreme passion.  The problem is, the further you go beyond that line, the lonelier it gets, way out there.  The longer you have to walk back, the emptier you feel when you return.  And sometimes, in the numbing emptiness, you never know what will flash you right back to inception, on the far side of The Edge. 

Just like that: Poof.

The light shining through the end of the tunnel this time, perhaps, is different.  Its real, its beautiful, its awesome.

The two people along with me on this one, in every way, have been epic.  Change, sometimes, somehow, its not so scary.