Its already begun before you

May 20, 2002

Its already begun before you know its beginning and its already ended long before you call it quits. All the time you try to be in the moment. The creative arc begins by taking you away to somewhere. The ramp up to your departure is paved with all the things that add to your creative fuel supply. A cathartic event galvanizes the images of your past and off you go. You think that the cathartic event is the beginning but the beginning was a long time ago. You repeat the idea of the created entity until you feel it lose its impact. In music this means you perform the song until you can’t feel what made it good in the first place. You think it ends there but it really ended a week before. Performance always goes “long” because people don’t want to let go of all the energy and love they put into making it work in the first place. Long before I ended up doing this tour there were tiny animals scurrying around making it all happen. I said something to someone that they repeated to someone else. Someone listened to a song and imagined the future. I slept on a couch in a far away place after talking 'til the wee hours about what was good in the world. These were the beginnings of the tour. The end of this phase probably came somewhere back when I realized those forces were at work all over again. Staring down into the truthful black mirror of my first coffee I felt that something was about to begin. This is probably the signal that something is ending because without death there is no birth. Yes...life is an additive and accumulative process but it is the opinion of many cultures I trust that no real change happens without the bad stuff. Bad stuff brings revelation and the catalysts of cataclysm. My friend George had the urge to downsize and put things in order the other day. While rifling through drawers (in an attempt to change his head space) he found a lost thousand dollars. Before you ask where he lives, and crews of spelunkers show up at his door, its best to note that this won’t happen for you. You can set out to do this but a lost thousand dollars finds its way home. It doesn’t want to be found by a stranger. I don’t think he realized it was lost. Not trying to find it was the only way he was going to get it back. In this way it was never lost. It was just waiting. The focus had shifted away from the money and then the little animals at work realized that George would need the money soon and the focus shifted back to that drawer in the study.
White, yellow, baby blue, green, pink, red, royal blue. Left to right. Test pattern. I’ve nodded off to it hundreds of times. Never realized that it was imprinted on my brain. Each time I see it I am a depleted man. 4:00am. I’ve either just finished a raft of hard work or I’ve tested my immune system against another long day and drowned it with liquid joy. Maybe the test pattern is to readjust your perception. If it can be used to recalibrate the colour balance of your TV then I’m sure it is recalibrating something inside the person who has to perceive what is happening on the TV. It presents the basic physical elements and your brain has a chance to refresh itself at the end of a stretch of getting lost in the long day’s journey into night. Those are the colours. I will use them when I wake up. The little animals scurry away knowing they have prepared my senses for all tomorrow’s parties.
The death of today’s programming signals the birth of something. Here is the bleak and stark disappointment you feel staring at a test pattern. You’ve run into the cul de sac. There are no houses to go into. There is no more of the street to walk down. Your energy has dissipated to the point where you can’t back out and move to a new place. Make the decision. Go to sleep? For those of us who are 8 years old inside... going to sleep still feels like defeat. A victory is coming. Not to be too mushy about it but. .. waking up the next day is a victory. Its already begun before you know its beginning and its already ended long before you end it.

sidebar:
Urban wildlife celebrities. Pier 39 in San Francisco is home to one of the greatest displays of urban wildlife. After the earthquake of ‘89 a group of 350 to 600 California sea lions decided to camp out on the floating docks of Pier 39 on San Francisco's Embarcadero. To the onlooker it looks like a sea lion reenactment of the movie Caligula. A Roman orgy of sea lions rolling on top of each other, biting, playing, humping and basking with full stomachs in the sun. All this is surrounded theatre style by human onlookers with Tilley hats and various types of cameras. They are there because by fluke. When they got there the people didn’t kill them or drive them away like our predecessors might have. It became comfortable. Raccoons or coyotes struggle in their relatively new urban environment but these sea lions are pampered celebrities. It cheapens their reality. You want to see them on majestic outcroppings of rock beside the foaming deep blue sea. When the sea lions realize this is a bad career move they will pack up and go back to a place more dignified.

diary notes: The two shows last night at the Warfield were among the loosest yet. Lossey goosey is juicy to me. The crowd was a lot of fun. Tres San Fransiscan. I played “Satisified” in the first show because it was big here and it has the Bay Area reference. I made a mistake in it and laughed. I always screw up that song.