I’ve been trying to quantify what it means to be older, to understand the process by which one adapts the tropes of the aged. I wonder if an elder conscience is one that no longer adjudicates between what is right and what is wrong but between what can be forgiven and what can not be forgiven, if wisdom is the knowledge of how much injustice one can inflict and withstand and experience the consequence of inflicting and withstanding injustice. It is a fact of our physiology that we become more attuned to bitterness and less attracted to sweetness as we age, but in what science is the bond forged between idealism (or wonderment or creativity or innocence) and saccharinity? Is cynicism the olive of attitude, that briny defense mechanism we only grow to appreciate once we can suck it out of the bottom of a cocktail glass emptied of gin?
“History is only bitter to those who expected it to be sweet” is a quote from Sans Soleil, which I watched again on Saturday night, alone in my apartment as I ate my dinner. It is the kind of cheerful pleasantry that defines this latest compilation of songs and chapter of my pop-music autobiography: We may be tiny, but we’re two of a kind. There’s nearly eighty minutes of 128 kbps mp3 in that one 73 MB file—the plastic manifest will be distributed when I return from Europe, Brussels and Paris, specifically.
In a thick of professional malaise and prolonged existential crisis, optimism takes the form of an affirmative answer to questions like: “Is my culpability for immoral acts offset by my insignificance in the grand design of the universe?” So much for wisdom and experience.
Paper cranes by Shing, made from a piece of paper taken from the end of a plastic-straw wrapper.
And although I have been unable to mitigate my existential crisis for several months now, one way to mitigate its effects is to realize that I am not alone in my cosmic tininess. The title was inspired by a pair of paper cranes that Shing folded after we shared a plate of tacos, folded from squares of paper torn from the end of a wrapper for a plastic straw—the picture of it will be the cover for this album. Last August, I visited her in Vermont on the weekend of her birthday. Across the Atlantic, I will be staying with Ky Vinh for a week.
I have been thinking about the nature of presence and absence in relationships, how friendships are often defined by the mutual intermittent presence of an other—I realized the strange role of intermittence in that definition when Josh visited me the week before last. We joined Cheryl for lunch in Bartholdi Park on the Thursday of his stay, and she asked if he had flown here primarily to visit me—he had. I realized in that exchange that mutual presence now requires a greater sacrifice of time and transportation—in closer proximity to my friends, the beginning and end of our mutual presence was defined by a clock, not a calendar; following the intervention of transcontinental distance, these rendezvous have taken on the necessity of flight, of clean bed linens and a well-stocked refrigerator. Our mutual presence now requires a greater sacrifice, and to those who have visited, I am humbled and grateful.
Over the last week, friends have been sending cards, books, and films (and I thank you)—Saturday, those were followed by phone calls from their celebrations in my honor, despite my absence in Los Angeles and New York. From both gatherings, the first greeting was imbued with the polite enthusiasm that accompanied the initial toast, followed hours later by a satellite link of lesser comprehensibility. Nevertheless, I paused my film to listen, amused and a little saddened; I let my dinner go cold. When I finished my gin, there was no olive at the bottom of the glass. And while I’d like to think that this is a metaphor for my personality, it isn’t. And I like olives.