June 18, 2006
The Great Wide Open
Woody crunches numbers like i crunch wasabi peas at 4 am while writing emails that make me cringe when i send; to a beautiful girl on the other end, sleeping on the far side of the world.
"How many people do think are here?" I asked him.
We were at Germain Amphitheater in Columbus Ohio, standing in the lawn at a concert. It was a warm summer evening, and i was glad to be with a friend.
"15,000." Woody replied.
The girl to our right threw up on herself. Woody looked down at her as she knelt and wiped off her pants.
"Okay, so what is the average age of a person here?" I asked next.
Woody looked around the venue. It was a Tom Petty concert, and not withstanding the girl wiping off her pants beside us, the crowd was leaned a little north of your average Wednesday night rock n' roll concert.
"30." Woody replied.
"Okay, so how many cumulative man-years do we have here tonight?"
Woody looked up into the dark night for a half measure of "Into the Great Wide Open".
"450,000."
The man with the long white ponytail in front of us lit a joint.
"A half a million." he shrugged in resignation.
I looked around at the sea of swaying people. Mothers spinning in their dresses, eyes closed and smiling. Fathers singing along and getting stoned. I watched two teenagers made out on a blanket, beach balls bouncing like above the singing crowd like a karaoke ball bouncing over the lyrics scrolling across my summer evening. The stars sat high in the top edge of the sky, as if to keep their farthest distance from us; out of courtesy or offense, i could not tell.
According the american census bureau i was surrounded by 6,450 past or future divorces.
And yet everyone was dancing.
On an optimistic estimate, 7,500 past, current, or future broken hearts, perhaps another 7,500 sad stories. By some estimates, a total of $63,000 of credit card debt.
And yet everyone was clapping their hands.
I was among 262,974 hours of college education, hundreds of thousands of hours of shoveling dirt, taking orders, pushing papers and pulling files. Raising babies, teaching children, saying hello, crying goodbye, and the culmination of insight, experience and knowledge it brings.
But we were all separate. We were all inconsectutive. We were all self contained. We are alone. We only have 70 or 80 years on our own, to find our own peace, our own happiness, our own love.
There are schools of thought that approach life as one interconnected event. There are names for these ideas, names like "The theories of quantum consciousness", where one organism - a collective soul- shares all phenomenon; love, pain wisdom, misery, and Tom Petty concerts. I was sure the man with the long white hair in front of woody would have something to say to that. Woody was certainly hoping at least the smoke floating above the man's head would connect with him.
Perhaps, I thought, there is something. Something that - albeit temporary - can reveal the sameness of condition, of conscious, of emotion, which binds people together. Elusively, in-between our segregation, like Calder's mobiles swinging awkwardly, there are thin wires keeping some together, hanging precariously from a window pane in an attic above the street, a limb of a tree in summer breeze, or tears from a cheek, or swaying slowly to a concert on the green at Germain Amphitheater in Columbus Ohio.
Under the summer stars on the grass that night there was music. There can be a connection like a crown of daisies from a field, or string laid delicate across the green between the make-out blankets and the passed out girls, or around the world, made by the sharing the mind, sharing the burden of passion, the falling of tears, the revealing of heart. They can be made in a conversation while sitting on my professor's countertop in a kitchen at 3 a.m. They can be made in a ball point pen on a postcard from spokane washington. And they can be made in the middle of the night by thinking honestly, missing earnestly, eating wasabi peas, and staring out over rooftops and chimneys, trying to see into a bedroom window on the far side of the world.