Gabe's

Archive for March, 2010

Have you ever flown on a plane and totally lost your bearings? Completely adrift, at sea without an oar. Waves of air carrying you places you’ve been or new one’s you forgotten you wanted to visit. Airports are like great time machines…if planes were fast enough, they really could travel through time I think. But anyway, they are amazing places. So many options, so much choice as to the next step…where you take this body you’ve been given. I can’t help but think of those less fortunate, those who can’t take the plunge and go somewhere new and unfamiliar. Either due to money or time or whatever, fear. Or due to other less obvious reasons. Like those who, how can I put this, are unlucky in their name? If that doesn’t make sense, how about this. Tom Hanks was in a movie called the Terminal. He plays an Uzbekian (i think) who is unable to leave the airport because of citizenship problems. He makes the best of the situation and fights back with love, and the ending is happy, and there’s jazz too. Anyway, It works because it’s a movie and I think the message is about borders.

I don’t mean the book store, I mean you and me and everybody in a place called something and that is a country. As a child, I used to really wonder about what my life would be like if I wasn’t born in the states. How would man’s inhumanity to each other affect me more because I wasn’t born in this place, where there is freedom. Freedom and all that goes along with it, like responsibility to always be kind to your neighbor, even when they are obnoxious and have maybe had too many drinks for you stand. Say like Canada had too much MooseF*** Ale and was trying to pass silly laws that would mess with the economy, our duty would be to be polite and try to convince them that it was in our best interest, and maybe theirs’ too-if they stopped. But the point is there is a border that says, they can do what they want, ‘up-there’ in Canada. That is unless they mess with the fragile economy. Not sure what I mean by that, but the message of the film Terminal and my reason for writing to you is the same reason that a poem, heard or read at the right time and by a certain someone, can bring you to the brink…of your life or emotion or reason. A few words, well chosen, are timeless and without a doubt, right on time.

Okay. Here’s another example. Say YOU are at a festival. Celebrating something or someone’s thing or lots of something done by lot’s of diverse someones. Say there are vendors selling refreshing items, food and drink, whatever. Say though that there are also at this little party, artificial boarders, or I mean like fences or ropes, to contain you in certain areas. Now there are some, let’s call them ‘little walls’ that are necessary for everyone. Like to keep out people who aren’t able to pay to be at this party I guess. But say there are some little walls that are placed at the festival which do nothing at all except exist for their own sake. They have been placed there by people trying to create a little secret special place in which only certain special, um, very important people may enter. Now I’m sure that these special people have been given their due in their lives, and might deserve preferential treatment, but it’s a party right. We are all here together at this celebration of life-or this festival. And I suppose if you asked the special people, how they got so special, they probably wouldn’t know and they probably wouldn’t mind hanging out with everybody else at the party, it’s just that, for them, you have to arrive somehow in the special place. And if you don’t, or say you do, but you leave, and go to the wrong place, you can’t stay or you don’t belong or you are banned from being back there. So to make a long idea longer…

You’re at the local jazz festival. Great music fly’s all around you. Everyone is feeling fine, like wine. YOU go up to a vendor and get some water. A few hours later you try to go back, but there is a rope in front of the vendor with the red letters VIP ONLY. So, YOU being thirsty, think this means you. But you are stopped by a person who is being paid to stop YOU from getting the water…because you are not a VIP. So if this story is about anything, it needs to be about the people who erect these boarders in order to create a special place that only certain someones can enjoy. Seems like it is a ‘necessary evil,’ no? If you are lucky lucky, you have arrived at the place and can get some water with the cool kids, ah but if your timing is off, even a little, you are stuck with the hoards of masses of seas of fields of other humans, all trying to get that sweet sweet water **. Those people who erect these boarders, are they seeking this special place themselves, or are they ‘just working here,’ I wonder? It shouldn’t matter right? Because whether you stand here or there on the other side, the music sounds the same. Ah, but the water might be better over there right? It’s been blessed with VIP money or something. But water’s water and it’s everywhere unless it isn’t. Say it’s only deep in the ground in a special place and YOU and those you come from have been getting at this water for many many years, and say a giant, wonderful, terrific, fantastic, red and white creature comes to this place and drills into the ground and taps all the water for itself. But it is reasonable, and offers some back at a rate of exchange that’s a little off kilter from the past. Whereas it was free for century’s, now it has a cost in monetary terms. Okay, I’m getting a little too ‘real *****’ here baby. PLUMBING is a necessary thing, I think. So are caffeinated drinks. Well, not necessary, but nice to have I suppose. I hear the Rome used to REALLY stink too.

So where are we? You and me and those that erect boarders and ‘protect’ them are to be commended. They do us all a great service, and the service industry needs more talent. Have you ever tried to by a something from some one that didn’t like you, or their own job of selling you a something. It’s no fun for anyone. We should all feel blessed that there are people out there who give and give and give for like 32 hours a week. Making the world a better place, one latte at a time…

That would be a good ending point, but I feel like I’m off – MY point of sending you this. Garrison Keillor reads poems. He does it a lot I think, every morning, just about, you can turn on the radio in Indiana and hear him read a poem. Now he’s probably a really nice guy, unless you are someone he likes or finds interesting, then he would probably tease you a little bit. Like-you know, in a fun way. Not really a sting, but just a little poke. Say you were at a party, he might comment on how much you seem to be enjoying your asparagus. Some one might not think much of this, some might chuckle, ‘Jeeze, that guy really likes asparagus,’ hehe. But you might never forget that moment when GK told you that you are getting down on some asparagus. In the interest of reaching a wider audience, by gettin’ down, I mean, eating asparagus. ANYway, I consider GK a VIP in this FUP place we all live. An I know he could get down on some ‘sparagus wit’ anybody, especially those who love Hiphop. Or Bebop, or Blues, or maybe especially Ballads. But, there might be one annoying person at the party that even GK wouldn’t want to chat with, in that case, I guess we need the VIP tent because, he wouldn’t be allowed. Unless he or she was born there.

**(I don’t really think there is a population problem)