If this mind is all you have, fuck rational, forget the boarder between the societal drag telling you the way be, and your own perception.

MIA

A year ago i was in New York. I spent a lot of  my time wondering the city alone, I loved every minute of it. I loved being unrecognizable and minuscule. Just a rat in a subway system.

It was late one night, on the L train back to Bushwick, when I met a life changing character. Looking back on the interaction, I wonder if it was all a figment, born from my lonely mind. How do people really judge the boundaries of their imagination, where memories meet perception? How can I speculate reality, when every second I live is processed and pasturized in my head?

He was standing outside a Pizza shop. His grown out bleach job exposed his gray roots, and his brown leather jacket was beaten baring creases of experience. He was old and dirty, and reeked of a crazed wisdom. Hippie Loo. I thought he was a bum.

I don’t know why, but I offered to buy him Pizza. He got plain cheese, and walked me to the station.

Long story short, Hippie Loo was no bum, he had a masters degree in economics and was living off the proceeds of a book he’d written years ago. For buying him his dinner, he insisted on taking me out the next night.

We hit every restaurant and lounge, bar and club in a six block radius in the Lower East Side. We ate dinner with practicing lawyer from the U.N. at Balthazar, where we were treated to dessert and introduced to the head chef. The night was unexpectedly perfect, layered with surprises.

Beyond the obvious lesson, never judge a book by its cover, Hippie Loo indirectly taught me to sacrifice the comforts of society’s plan for me, for a greater understanding.  Never stop learning, and never settle in a life that anchors you.  If this mind is all you have, fuck rational, forget the boarder between the societal drag telling you the way be, and your own perception. Live for yourself.

The last contact I had with Hippie Lou, he send me this story, I don’t know if he wrote it, but it reads the way he speaks.

“I’m in the Upper Bay swimming away from Manhattan I’m in my alpine star motorcycle suit and have four floats with me the kind we used to use to keep our sailboat from scraping against the dock. All of sudden I realize I’m down by the Narrows and it hits me. I got down here pretty quickly. I must have floated with the current.

I look back at Manhattan, and it just looks like a low ridge on the horizon. Then somehow I zoom in on it and I see the familiar shapes. I look out past the Narrows and I see, at first glance,what appears to be a similar construct. I think wow, this is a mirror image but on closer inspection, I realize it is not. There is a big white building in the middle. Then I say, my conscious mind says, there cannot be a city south of the Narrows. It’s the ocean out there. And if I don’t start swimming back towards Manhattan I’m going to be swept out to sea. The current that got me down here is strong. I might swim hard for an hour and not move. Maybe I can move toward the shore, where the current is weak.

Just then a nice looking sailboat cuts through the waterclose by. It has a strap hanging off the stern and it is heading for Manhattan. I grab it, and start being towed I am calling up to the sailor, trying to ask permission to be towed back, but he can’t hear me, or if he can hear me, he doesn’t answer. And he immediately changes his tack so he’s not heading to Manhattan anymore. There is a couple in the water, and the guy sees what happens to me and says he is going to Manhattan and offers to help. So, I hold the pontoons and start kicking. I look up and suddenly a big Chris Craft boat appears out of nowhere, diving towards the water, bow first it plunges into the water.

I say to the guy, I hope it doesn’t come up under us. I keep looking around, down, waiting for it to come up, but it never does. Then I think I’ve lost my floatsbut the guy shows me where they are. Next thing I know we’re close to Manhattan.

We seem to be out of the water, under some bleachers I’m asking the guy if I can walk out of the water on the southern tip, down near Battery Park. He is telling me some place on the island where I can walk out and he may be giving me directions to get there, but I’m not listening to him. I know I can handle it from here.”

Posted on December 30, 2010 by carmentalawton