Mortality, The Value of Being Human, and Unconditional Love

Meandering the chilly halls of a hospital can leave one with a smattering of memories, thoughts, and inklings that can somehow simultaneously illuminate lost ideas and dreams and make absolutely no sense whatsoever. What do you suppose that's about? Until last week, I've had extremely limited experience with hospitals, which is a testament to the good health I have been blessed with in my 23 years of life, both personally and among those I hold dear to me. Until Wednesday April 11th, the only lasting hospital memory catalogued in my brain was September 8th, 2011, the birth of my daughter. Now I have a subdural hematoma, a flurry of MRIs, and a wheelchair-bound date with an oxen's dose of morphine under my belt.

The fluorescent lights dotting the halls of St. Vincent's Medical Center sapped me of coherence and filter, sprouting in my head three flawed, yet bold ideas for a play. My brain, at that point in time painted with an overcoat of blood, released weird line after puzzling character description. Of course, remembering said ideas becomes the true testament of a creator's strength as I struggle to recount exactly what the Herculean keeper of the knight's academy's creature realm refuted the headmaster about...

"Raph, you've stopped making sense again..."

It's around this point of 'literary' confusion every day since my release that my head wanders to my battle with the Morphine. It tickled me, truly. I remember feeling hot and cold and itchy and somehow free of the skull crushing pain I had endured the three previous days. Is it odd that the very first thing that happened to me upon admittance was being tossed into a wheelchair and plugged up to an IV of that stuff? I laugh at this craziness and then I float to when I told the doctor that I felt like Ray Charles because somehow, my mind's only connection to morphine was a flawed and most likely mis-remembered account from the movie 'Ray'. I think I asked somebody to change the name on my wristband from R. Krasnow to R. Charles.

Then I giggle myself to the other side of things and think how lucky I was when the resident neurosurgeon told me that I did not need any surgery. My stay in the hospital was relaxed remarkably by the presence of first, a woman and friend I hold closer to my heart than many, and secondly upon his arrival, my ever loving and ever helpful Dad. My understanding of my mortality now is outweighed only by my newfound understanding for the joys of being human and being loved by other humans.

We humans are lucky creatures that can behave poorly, selfishly, recklessly, and inanely and still somehow garner love, affection, tenderness, and help from the select few who do so unconditionally. Why is that? How is the human heart capable of this? After my release from the hospital with a nearly clean bill of health, my first desire was to see my daughter. My little bear that I hadn't seen in over a week was on the tip of my tongue, the top of my brain, and the center of my heart and that inexplicable feeling made me so happy and brought relief to my woozy mind.

I've talked about loving women and loving love and all sorts of things of that ilk, but in so far as those things are within my grasp, they do not humble me and bring me near tears the way that this mystifying concept of unconditional love does. The love that someone or some people feel for me and the love that I feel for someone or some people that goes beyond any rationalizing or poetic substance and just exists is the love that strikes me tonight. This is my roundabout way of expressing it, traveling through close calls, hospitals, and pain killers to get there. What a journey it's been. And a few of you will get this, but after all, it's my journey.

Go hug somebody.

Time Flies, Always

I woke up this morning next to my daughter. This little bundle of mushy cuteness, exuding her 6-month sounds and movements and smiles, was just laying there staring into my crusted eyes. I smiled with pride and joy, knowing that she was a part of me. How crazy of a feeling is that? It's a simple case of human genetics, but to me, it's a marvel and a wonder that the universe gave me this creature that is me, but isn't. I think about all of this when she wails inconsolably for 40 minutes straight and no amount of farting noises or cross eyed grins or 'I Love You's' please her like they normally do. This was how it went last night, hence her sleeping in my bed.

It's already March and I still am clueless in this world. I remember New Years Eve like it was yesterday and now, the maple sugaring is starting in my home state. I've been on a few adventures since moving to Los Angeles, bouncing from this bar to that bar, this girl to that girl.
              "Yes, I have a 6 month old daughter. Can I buy you a drink?"

I haven't yet found my place in this town, not like the way I nestled in perfectly to my favorite haunts in New York. I've grown weary from trying to compare the two towns, as they are completely different beasts with completely different tendencies and desires. So now I let myself drift through this vast expanse of a city, a mental image of its map and my lonely bus routes projected against the inside of my forehead.

As I wrap my head around my lot in life, I'm struck with a thought of this little girl, my little girl, growing up and asking me why I moved from New York. Because surely, I will speak wistfully of it to her and she will see the twinkle in my eye and hear the weight of my sigh.
                "Because of you, little one. People come from all over the world to New York because it represents something bigger, more beautiful than their current life. Once upon a time, that's how it was for me, craning my neck at the skyscrapers, simply aghast at the City's magnificence. But then a little gorgeous angel sauntered into my world, eyes shut from months of darkness, vocal cords bellowing a Whitman "Yawp" and my siren became not the steel jungle with its yellow cars and pounding trains, but you. In an unknown world on the other side of the country laid a part of me, calling me and drawing me from what I once knew because now, she was all I knew. The rest, of course, is history and though New York sits squarely at the head of the table of my memories, I don't regret this for one milli-second."

Then of course she'll say "You could have just said because of me" and I'll go on some pretentious rant about the power of words and how sometimes poetry is the only means to blah blah blah. With the way time moves now, it seems I may wake up tomorrow morning and this day will come, her feet jumping up and down on my bed telling me it's time for cartoons. But for now, it's March(!) and she is curled up a few feet from me unaware of how crazy everything is. So until I find a clue in this world, I know I have that to look forward to, which is really all I want from Los Angeles, anyway.

Fate and The Kindness of Strangers

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”

                                                               -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

          On the final weekend I lived in New York, I had the pleasure of interacting with two women, two complete strangers, that have impacted me in ways I never thought possible. Both of them are beautiful women. They intersected with me at an emotionally bizarre time, in light of my move to L.A., my recovering heart, and my eyes being lost to future's uncertainty. I didn't think for one second that in the last 72 hours of my watershed life experience (living in New York), two of the three people I spent true to life time with would be complete and total strangers.

But they were. 

And now my head can't seem to stop orbiting around them or this concept of 'the stranger'.

Our lives depend on the kindness of strangers without us even realizing it on a day to day, moment to moment basis. My life, in particular, seems to have been wrought with oddly intense interactions with people that I meet and either never see again, or see them again, but that spark, that ignition has flitted away into the ether. Most of these people are women, as I have a fascination and inclination towards them that I have learned goes far beyond the physical, though that tends to play a role in these interactions. Something about a woman, about eye contact with them, smelling them, touching them... makes me a better man. A better human. 

The boundless joy and crackle of heat in my body that I felt with one was mirrored by a subdued force of expression and questions with the other. And then they switched and my brain went "what? I've been here before". Questioning the basis for these experiences became something that careened to the front of my thoughts for the last 5 days. What about one woman made me stay in bed with her for an entire 10 hours, spending half the time just talking, our clothes and cares strewn about like a child's room, on my very last Sunday in the city? What about the other made me sit in a deserted McDonald's waxing poetic about all things fears and desires and idiosyncrasies, staring at this untouchable beauty as if it were our last night on earth? 

The funny thing about all of this, is that both experiences involved conversations on serendipity, synchronicity, and the F word:

Fate.

Never before have I given real credence to this word as being anything other than a word. But these women, an Aquarius and a Pisces, much like the only two women I have ever loved (thanks, Universe!), brought fate into my head and it's stuck. There has to be a reason I met both of these women in the same weekend right before I started the biggest chapter in my life, and no matter how hard I try, I can't bring myself to think otherwise.

I have kept in contact with both and I will continue to until they don't want to anymore. They are too important to me and my journey not to. Someday I may find them both to be just my friends, or one lover and one friend, or two lovers. I don't know. What I do know is that I am going to find out.

This fate stuff gives me an unlikely and unnerving feeling in the pit of my stomach. But sometimes, in one's life, there's a shift. And these two spectacular, flawed, gorgeous, and giving women may have been a part of mine. For two strangers, that is pretty god damn impressive. 

Daydreaming at Night

There's always something sappily cinematic, however fleeting, about standing on your apartment rooftop at 2 A.M. I don't know if this is a phenomenon owned by New York and its steel canvas of man-made mountains, but when I'm up there with my bouncing iPod buds in my ears, staring at everybody else's lives, I feel bold. I feel important and invincible and hopeful. I feel a torrent of unwavering ownership of my city, smugly looking down at the peons walking their dogs in my kingdom. I imagine a breathtaking damsel, taken straight out of Cary Grant's clutches, nestled between my body and arm telling me she's never seen something so romantic. 

'That's right, baby, I painted the moon just for you. Now come here, doll....and kiss me.'

And then I come crashing back to reality, jarred to see the contents had shifted during flight. I look out again and it's just a vampiric city, bleeding and dead, but never asleep. 

But because of those moments, those 'I can't believe I actually live in New York' moments, I am going to miss New York. It may be a heartless bitch of a city, where millions of people are rude and self righteous and moronic, but I can't help loving it. I've formed so much of my 'adult' self in this city. I've killed countless brain cells in its bars and rooftops. I've ebulliently made love in its bedrooms and bathrooms. I've cried and cried and cried in its streets.

In a few years, I could see myself looking at New York the way I look at my first love: with appreciation, love, respect, and regret. We've shared so many unfathomably amazing and terrible moments and she helped shape me into the person I am today, more so than any person outside of my family. Coincidentally, in a roundabout cosmic joke sort of way, I wouldn't have my gorgeous daughter in my life, steering me away from destruction, if it weren't for New York City. 

Now my mind jets past itself: In two weeks, I fly for Los Angeles. I have two weeks to say goodbye to frustrating, yet incomparable, public transportation. Two weeks to close a chapter of love that was dead on arrival. Two weeks to thank a friend that gave me unending joy and support. Only two weeks to remember two and a half(!) years of life. How can I possibly do that?! Panic! Panic! Panic! 

Then I breathe. And remember however magical or impacting this period of my life has been, there will be another, different period. And another. And another, and so on and so forth. The beauty of living is that when one experience ends, there is always another around the corner. I'm not losing anything. The people and things and memories I love about my time in New York, I'll keep with me in various ways. Someday, I can pass them on to my daughter and she'll know of this insane time in my life and why New York is so important to her father. Why he associates Morningside Park with his broken heart and gaining empathy for her mother. Why a basement of a broadway theater gave him some of the greatest laughs of his lifetime. Why a Manhattan rooftop was an ideal place to socialize and an even better place to dream.

And for a reason that is just barely out of my reach, flies just over my intellectual fingers... that settles me.

Loving Love

A very strange thing happened to me tonight. I say 'strange' because I'm not really sure how else to describe it. The four horsemen of the apocalypse could come steaming their way through humanity, barreling into townships and houses mercilessly cutting down any, and every, thing in their path and ask me to describe what happened tonight in any word other than 'strange' in order to save myself from their despotic rampage and invariably, 'strange' would be the best I could come up with.

I ran into somebody. Somebody that haunts me in a way that I don't understand. I used to be angry about it, this occupation this person had in my brain and heart, and after tonight, I don't know what to feel. Anger started giving way to recovery recently and confusion and resolution now seem intertwined, swirling  drunkenly forever. What do I do?

I didn't yell or fight or get defensive and it was cold out, the air shaking me. When our eyes connected I saw question marks, mocking my previously indignant resolve. What was I thinking at this very moment, I can't quite recall. All i know is I was unsure of myself and I felt weak. Needless to say, I didn't take kindly to this and I broke our line of vision. I started talking about my writing and about my daughter to combat my wavering sense of self and the world around us became stiff and dangerous. Silence. Then I felt better. I had regained control over the situation, we smiled and talked a bit more about this and that and dogs and movies. Then we hugged.

My sense of smell has always been keen, the strength closer to my Mom's supernatural smell than my Dad's muffled olfactory ability, and well below my brother's godly powers. The hug triggered something and we stayed like that for minutes, maybe. We both smelled familiarity and distance and apologies and pain and something else: Love.

I've been in love with two women in my short time on this earth and I'm sure I will love again as many times, but I'll never really understand why. My friends have noted that I fall quickly for girls and I can't deny it, but the question always becomes 'what is it that makes me love'. I loved this person to a point where I was willing to risk things that were well beyond my power or right to risk. Any sane person would say it's understandable I ended up broken because of this love. I always come back to the thought that maybe....maybe I love love. Maybe I've become such a cliche, such a monster of romantic sentiment that I genuinely ache for the idea of love. Romantic comedies always pull me in even though I always, always, know how they will end and unrequited love is actually admirable in my book. What a loon I am.

This, of course, does not invalidate the times I have been in love. One of the rude and inane things people say is that 'you don't know what love is until you've been in love'. People are rude and inane, in general, but I don't know if the former is true. What I do know is that if you have been in love, you know. I guess by talking about loving love, I think I want to propose that maybe I look for it before it's there or after it has gone.

The love I had with the person I encountered tonight is gone, but god damn it if there wasn't a tiny bit of me that wanted that to be false tonight. I miss being in love and I'm not ashamed to say it, but I am proud of myself for not giving into the warm, begging hands of a former life. So I guess that's one small step for me.

Isn't that nice.

When I Was Afraid of the Dark

This morning I woke up with a raging monsoon in my head. My brain was refried mush trampled upon by hundreds of angry goats and I only had myself and the beauty of alcohol to blame. I had fun last night. I ventured to a couple of bars, enjoyed the company of close friends and stayed out nearly late enough to view the sunrise. But at what cost? I began my day grumpy, dehydrated, and in pain and I had one question on my mind: am I getting too old for this?

Youth is fleeting. We move energetically from childhood to pubescence to adolescence and then something stops. The engine starts sputtering, the hinges creak and our smiles dim a bit. That spark that flew swiftly towards dreams and goals and future falls dully. We start to have regrets, real regrets. Why didn't I get my degree when it made sense? Why did I set fire to so many brain cells before my mind had completely formed? Why didn't I try? And then, looming behind every true regret: fear.

When I was a kid, I was afraid of the dark. I remember having to be in one lit room while I wrapped my stumpy little arm around the corner into the adjacent room to turn off that room's light. I physically couldn't be in a room at night with the lights off unless I was tucked neatly into my bed, with all corners of my room in vision. I remember a sense of pride when I didn't have to use a night light. It was embarrassing, really. To be nine or ten years old and still be deathly afraid of something so commonplace. Growing up in Vermont, especially during the winter, I couldn't escape the dark. It was an omnipresent specter waiting to steal any dignity I had. Afraid of the dark....what a cliche. I thought about that fear this morning and how real it seemed and how trivial it seems now.

Today, my greatest fear is being a waste. A waste of an artist. A waste of a father. A waste of a son. A waste of space. It's such a complex fear that when I begin to think of it, begin to seriously wrap my thick head around it, the fear springs out into infinite branches going in impossibly morose directions. Just an endless maelstrom of prongs, each one turning 'future me' into more and more of a sad sack. I end up feeling sorry for 'future me'. What did he do to deserve it? But the question is what am I doing now to fuck over 'future me'. He didn't do anything wrong. I have to do something NOW so that poor guy doesn't get the shaft!

It's thinking like this that inspired me to get my head out of my ass and move to Los Angeles to be near my daughter. At least I know that whatever else happens with my music or writing or acting, I'll have given 150% at being a dad. I can automatically cross off one of my fears. I won't be a waste of a father. I'm committing fully to something and that's kind of exciting. Am I afraid of this move? Oohhhh you betcha! I'm still afraid of being a waste in every other aspect, but I'm not letting this fear debilitate me the way it has in the past. I got over my fear of the dark and became a generally well adjusted adult(!). This is the same fear in a different cloak and maybe I can conquer that too.

I started writing this several hours ago and at that point in time, the thought of alcohol was cringeworthy. By this hour? I sure could go for a beer. Guess some habits are harder to kill than others.
Oh well. Here's to growing up!

Why, hello.

I'm 23 years old. Some days I feel 33 and others I feel 13. Of course most days I feel 23, otherwise things would be weird. Or rather, even weirder than they are. I have a daughter now and it's a strange thing to say. I try to write as much as my other distractions will allow. I live for singing and my former roommates will tell you that the shower is my Carnegie Hall. I drink much more than I should and fall way, WAY too hard for members of the female gender. I have always had an issue with blogging, as I never much cared for it or understood why it happened. Now look at me! Mommy, mommy; look no hands!

I guess my issue with blogging is that I don't really know why anyone would care to read it. Then I think, what does it say about me that I want people to read what I have to say. Then I think, what is it that I have to say. Then I think, why I am I still thinking this. I suppose it comes down to the dual fact that I like writing and I like attention. It took my a while to come to terms with the latter, not so much the former. I always thought I was a humble and modest person and maybe that's because everyone in my life has always told me that. But boy, do I have a narcissistic streak.

If you make it past this first post with me, you'll start to see a theme. I live in a world where up routinely trades places with down, where thoughts are pooped out in fragments onto a page and then reworked and reworked and reworked until normal people can read them, where decisions get made that, well, just shouldn't be made. I like my life. I really do, but sometimes I fall flat. Very flat.

I mentioned I have a daughter. She is 4 months old (wow!) and more beautiful than I could ever hope. Clearly this is an important aspect of my life, especially since I'm just now trying to reconcile my two lives: that of the patient, responsible, loving father and that of the destructive, but amiable drunken wanderer. Which, FINALLY, brings us to the name of the blog. Growing up isn't easy and I've never really done it. Now I have to.

Yay.

I've always been one to need a swift kick in the pants to do anything and boy, if this isn't one I may as well pack it in. My daughter is the reason I'm moving from the greatest city in the country (New York City) to...Los Angeles. My daughter is the reason I no longer have the ill-advised and, you guessed it, narcissistic dream of joining the 27 Club (members include Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison). My daughter is the reason I'm attempting to refrain from that extra whiskey and that extra phone number. She's even the reason behind me blogging, though this is NOT going to be one of those blogs about my kid. Just to warn you.

I'm on a train from Vermont to New York City right now as I write this and I'm starting to get excited about my future. If you want to know my follies and exploits and triumphs and pain and joy and behavioral issues, come along for the ride with me. Your driver is blind, but this car sure has a ton of fun.

'Til next time.