Over the weekend, we had another Beatnik night, the 20th Beatnik, actually. Way back in 2006, I and a few friends began holding events every 2-3 months during which we invited our friends and simply told them to bring something to share that recently inspired them. Could be poetry or literature or music, could be something they'd read somewhere or written themselves, could be just about anything. Over the years, we've had any number of amazing people sharing what it is that gets them excited about life - because the whole point is that anyone is welcome provided that they're willing to share. On Saturday we hosted the 20th Beatnik and it was nothing less than spectacular. If you're reading this and you were there, I thank you for showing up and for bringing da ruckus. Beatniks are my favorite thing about any given month or season.
For kicks, here's what I shared:
Let it be known straightaway that I'm attempting the impossible here. I'll pose this question to the general readership and let you tumble this around in your brains for a couple of cycles: Have you ever, in your own eruditely verbose or excruciatingly limited way, been able to tell someone you love not simply that you love him, her, or it - but precisely the ways in which you do? Have you been able to sit down, list it all out, deliver the amorous monologue, and fold your arms behind your head in the satisfaction that you'd completed the task with aplomb?
Such is the conundrum I face tonight.
But how do you, if you're not John Steinbeck, possessing his verve and verbal prowess, describe the very land you feel so attached to? How do you both love, loathe, and articulate your home, italicized and emphasized to communicate importance in some small way? How do you?
Los Angeles. A city I love, a city I've grown to love, a city I've grown to understand over time, as the Los Angeles River wears tired marks on its cement ballasts and as the Santa Anas eddie in the worn foothills of the San Gabriels, a city I know as intimately as I might know a friend or a family member. Here is a city whose thoroughfares I've traversed too many times to count, whose worn cement paths have equally worn into the grooves of my tires. Here is a city I've known.
Here is a city who wears her faults like a beauty mark.
Do you live here? Do you know what it means to really live?
Don't go quietly into this life, friends. There is so much about this world that is not right. There are deep and unending rivers whose depths hint at a despair that would level our best efforts and nullify our most optimistic thoughts. Fissures that roar across the surface of contentment. A rending that rips apart the very notion that things are simply all right.
Things are not all right.
I feel that Los Angeles represents this reality more plainly, more nakedly, more openly than most other places. There it eddies in piss-soaked bougainvillea, there it creeps along with the endless sludge of brakelights on the 405 Freeway. There it is, limpidly reflected along with the shifting sun in the paned windows of the tallest buildings in Downtown. There it slumps on 7th Street, amidst the swirl of detritus sloughed off from society. There it whips with the wind, tunneling down the arterial sprawl from east to west: Things are not all right.
The kids are not all right.
But don't, whatever you do, don't go so quietly into this life. If you can remember it, recall the last time you fought for something. Recall the last time you bitched and screamed and kicked and rebelled and shouted and reacted and threw your fists and howled and roared. Los Angeles would ask this much of us. She would ask us to fight like hell.
Go swinging into the night, my friends. Go fighting into this life. If you can sit where you're sitting right now, be it at desk or on the floor or in your car, and you can feel content, you can feel apathetic, you can feel safe or insulated, or in any way like Simon & Garfunkel's titular island, then I can guarantee you one thing:
You're not fighting hard enough.
And to you I pose a question, to all of you sitting here and listening, slack jawed and glassy eyed,
Brother, won't you hasten to love when the going gets rough?
