The Village Part 3

When I think about all the places I've ever lived, I cannot think of a single place that was better and for that matter, worse, than any others. Sure, there are merits to every place you go, there are difficulties in every place too. For instance, I lived in Tucson, Arizona in the summer time once. It was a hot miserable place, dead and abandoned in every way. It was a particularly bad time of life for me. I loath the sun, I hate heat. It was the wrong place for a guy like me. However, I did not feel like that at all. Even though there were all sorts of problems for me both externally and internally, I really dug the place. I met wonderful people there. The experience as a whole was the precedent for everything that followed.

There are those times in life when we learn about ourselves. These times always seem to be times of adversity. The things that we learn about ourselves are generally not very good. This is the idea that what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. This was certainly the case with me in the days of Tucson, Arizona.

What I learned is this: no matter where you are or what you're doing, there is always someone to roll with. When you're at the bottom and even the puke filled gutter rejects you, there will be someone there to be with you. You are never truly alone. This may not be a good thing. After all, if you're at the bottom of your life, rock bottom and looking up, the people you are with are probably there too. This is what it means to live in a community, to live in a village.

I spent so much of my life writing, hours, weeks, years. I have labored over a pen and paper, in front of a computer screen and very occasionally due to lack of electricity, I have used a typewriter. It's a solitary act, the act of writing. Reading, not a dissimilar act, is also solitary. Any time I've spent taking photographs, I have also been solitary and hiding behind a camera. It's like I've always wanted to be a part of a community, and yet all the things that I've done have been specifically personal in nature without company. As a writer, how much do you really need other people? I mean, you can write all the people you want to write. You can populate your entire world with all sorts of characters who can be at once more real than anyone you may met, and yet you cannot touch them.

The community I had in Tucson was a very angelic crowd all of whom treated me very well, even if I was a scoundrel. They were mostly artists and musicians. There was one other writer, and meeting her was worth the price of admission. What I found was this, these were people who were all in the most dire, most derelict neighborhoods around central Tucson. They paid very little rent, and worked only enough to survive. They worked only enough to keep the art or music going. Everyone seemed like they were there to have more time to produce art. It was like they left the world behind. They left the world of bills and jobs and early death behind. They seemed like they all knew exactly what was important: sidewalk chalk festivals, reading prized books, cutting blues records.

If you have to live in a village, I'd hope it would be a village like that one, one populated with people who are like minded, or like hearted. A place filled with people who see the world in much the same way, a place of wonder that must be recorded in any number of ways. As I said, searching for art is searching for truth.

Likewise, I lived through the long rainy nights of Portland, Oregon on two different tours a decade apart. The first time there, I wanted nothing more than to be a writer, and yet I was busying my time trying to work for a living. Once I reached the breaking point, I quit. I did not quit writing, I quit life. That decision was many years ago and I never looked back. I never looked back because I always felt like the decision I made was the right decision.

In Portland, the northwest neighborhood specifically, I also found my circle. I found art students and animators and filmmakers. I found people who stayed up late in coffeehouses drinking strong coffee and chain smoking cigarettes. We had rowdy conversations listening to old jazz before the war on terror kept such behavior to older people in more sedate settings. It was time, in a small village in a greater place of wonder where we talked and talked and talked about all those things that really don't matter but have such great importance.

I have left pieces of myself all over the globe. I have been in countries where I would not even be able to decipher a sign anymore. I have lived in places where the people I knew there are no longer there. I have had communities of people who did not care about reading much less writing, and who would be shocked to have known I was a writer. I have loved these people even if their interests were nothing like mine. I have loved these places because of how I felt there, how others treated me. It may have been the particular color of the sky come daybreak after I'd been up all night engaged in dominoes or movies or beer.

When we think about the village, we have to think about the reasons why people settled in one place or refuse to settle at all. The places where I felt like I was a part of a specific geography are one thing. The places where I did not belong at all are just as rewarding as the places that took me in outright.