The Dharma Bum

"There will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet" - T.S. Eliot

I'll be honest with you. Right now I'm having the time of my life. And I think it's only just the beginning.

In the past two months I've gotten to review bands like Lords of Acid, Ulali, Moby, Bree Sharp, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Sister 7. I've sat down with Bree Sharp and sang Journey songs, I've waxed philosophic with Moby, and I've spent hours drowning in a sea of music by some of my favourite artists. Just as importantly, I've cultivated the most treasured, dearest, and genuine circle of friends a gent could ever ask for. I love my job, I adore my classes, and I feel better than I have in years. I tell you all of this dear readers, because I started off having the worst millennium I could've ever undreamt possible. Since then I've spent time contemplating relationships, people's behaviours, and just simply human interaction. In case you were wondering, I still haven't come up with any answers, but I do have an idea or two.

Beverly Hills 90210...meet Cape Girardeau 63701.

God bless Aaron Spelling and his multi-decade spanning litany of docudramatic soap operas and television shows. While many of us see more cinematic worth in late night infomercials, you can't deny at least having sat down and watched part of an episode of 90210, or perhaps its more sultry spin-off, Melrose Place. The beauty of the intellectually devoid episodic adventures into the lives of the aesthetically pleasing, and often financially well endowed, gen x-ers, is that while we can mock the melodramatic nonsense of the situations or rhetoric - we can also identify with it most times as well. Friendship, love, beauty, truth, lies, deceit, infidelity, superficial enmity - all alive and well and running amok both in Beverly Hills, and Cape Girardeau. For instance...

Boy A meets Girl A

Boy A falls in love with Girl A

Boy A becomes engaged to Girl A

Girl A starts seeing Boy B, possibly Boy C...breaks up with Boy A

Shortly thereafter....

Boy A meets Girl B

Girl B makes Boy A feel complete again

Boy A falls in love with Girl B

Girl B has great libido that doesn't involve Boy A

Girl B breaks up with Boy A

Cape Girardeau or Beverly Hills? I'll leave that up to you to decide for yourselves, but it's not really the point. What is more important is why we as people, feel the need to wear so many different masks. Granted, it's inevitable that certain societal roles dictate different behaviours (masks) - you act different as a daughter/son, as a student, as a worker, as a lover, etc... The masks that puzzle me the most are the ones we wear to tell the truth, and those we wear to avoid it. Some go to great lengths to avoid verity, choosing instead to weave their tangled web, regarding honesty as an infinite grey area they can run back and forth across the gamut of. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not exonerating myself of these human fallacies, I'm just as guilty as well, (looking around - not from my pedestal, but rather my soapbox, and sheepishly stepping down.)

A dear, fair-haired artist friend of mine made the observation that Cape Girardeau is a case of "too few people in too large of a space" - everybody knows everybody else's business, and any kind of news/gossip/or the beloved "rumour" travels at light speed. This is unavoidable no matter where you go though. Personally, I think Cape Girardeau is a swell place to be, especially if you don't mind running into the same six people over and over again. Even so, with all the overlapping concentric circles of relationships, in this 21st century age of Internet sex cadets, hypnogogic heroes, and all the drama of every day life - perhaps it'd be easier if we all lived in an Aaron Spelling show. I mean we all have our "Dylans" and our "Kellys", our "Brendas" and our "Donnas", our "Brandons" and our "Steves". What frightens me more than anything else is that I know all the characters names.....SIGH.

So in an effort to come full circle - love is good, lies are bad, drama is everywhere, and someone is always watching you to see what you're doing. Tangentially, "Random Acts of Kindness" week is soon approaching, and if you don't want to participate in the conviviality, feel free to join me in one of the following weeks - "Random Acts of Defiance", "Random Acts of Science", "Random Acts of Violins", and "Random Acts of Mayans". Better yet, wait and we'll all have a huge Cinco de Mayo party. You bring the victuals, I'll bring the drama, and we can barbeque our problems away (or veggie-barbeque them away, if you're so inclined). So as the sun sets in the West, I bid you a fond farewell, in my state of surrealistic bliss, from the city of existential tranquility (next to the derailed train of thought tracks), and with a zip code that's always changing.