I wish that I could say that it feels like a whole lot of threads of my life are starting to converge on a point, a singularity in the not-so-distant future. That’s what I really want — for the past few years of my life to suddenly fall into place, to start making sense in a sudden explosion of knowledge and clarity. I want the desire to move and the band and the long stretch of bachelorhood and everything else to fall together where they belong in the jigsaw puzzle that has been taking up coffee table space for way too long.
But that’s not the way it works, unfortuantely. Some threads are starting to merge — Jonas emails me to say that he’s moving to Chicago at the end of May, for instance. But then other, newer threads seem to throw a wrench into everything.
My life has become a 24/7 version of LOST, without the hot actors and with not quite as much intrigue. Every week, another tantalizing hint, but then you realize that the hint is only a prelude to the introduction of a new mystery. And pretty soon, things are so tangled that you’re in Twin Peaks / X-Files territory. No matter what they do, they can’t possibly explain all that needs to be explained and keep it interesting at the same time.
So that’s life when you refuse to walk the path of the settled, the road into Suburbia. I can accept that and even deal with it. But here’s where my weakness for movies comes in, because it would be nice if everything in my life were cinematic. I could have entrance music that announced my coming everywhere I went. I would always get the girl, and put the bad guy down. And everything would make sense at the end, even if it took someone spouting off obviously constructed exposition to explain it to me.
It’s supposed to get really bad here in Birmingham shortly — thunder, lightning, and all the rest. I’m not worried though, because I’m choosing to see this as an opportunity for all the loose soil and flotsam to be washed away, and maybe after 24 hours of rough sailing and scared animals, everything will be clean and shiny, and it’ll be easier to put some of this together.