My Place

The way I see it, there has to be a certain place out there that is perfect for me. A place where I don't have to run around trying to find life, it just comes to me. A place where my chances are high for success and it is difficult to not be happy.

Why can't I find it? I've been all over the world, and I've been to places that ranged from gorgeous to incredible.

But I don't know if any of them are really my home.

Don't get me wrong people, I'm by no stretch of the imagination complaining about where I am now. Unlike most people, I actually like Utah quite a bit. People say the culture is judge mental but so am I. And why care what other people think? If I'm in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem people don't agree with a lot of what I believe, but I still got on with them just fine. I also love the mountains. To some degree I don't even need access to them, I just like knowing they're there. The are solid, sure, reliable, and they totally make the skyline rock. Cooler even than a New York skyline in my personal opinion. There is something powerful about a mountain that sky scrapers can't match.

But it still isn't my place.

Part of the problem is that I don't know what my place would be like. I'm sure it would involve beautiful architecture, a vibrant culture, and access to a large body of water. I'm sure the people there are helpful and interested. I'm sure that at sunset you can just breathe in pure contentment and at night the city comes alive.

But beyond that...

I've always dreamed of far away places. In the case of Florence, literally. Maybe that is part of the problem.

See, the ideal is always just around the corner, just on the other side of the hill, just out of reach. Same with the places I imagine as my home. They are always perfect utopias, meeting all my needs and satisfying all my desires. And they are never where I am.

I'm starting to think that that is the most important part of my place. What makes it a dream worth having is that I will never really have it. Anything you have, no matter how wonderful, becomes a prison with time. After a while, even Eden wasn't good enough.

The only exceptions to this rule are memories. A sunset on a great day may make you grin, but years later the memory of that sunset and the people you were with will bring a smile to your face and peace to your heart.

So to some degree, life becomes a medium for creating new dreams. In the future, things are muddy. In the present, nothing is perfect. In the past, there are memories, and when a memory becomes a dream, the ideal becomes reality.

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Nothing major to report in the critical artistic area of my life. This week I've re-watched both Bourne and V for Vendetta. I didn't much care for Bourne the second time to be honest, although the action is still great. V is still one of my heroes.

I apologize if my last couple posts have been a bit philosophical for your tastes. Upon reflection, I realized just how dull it would be to read my lists of stuff I had done. If you weren't there it wouldn't mean anything to you, and even though I can unleash some pent up sarcasm in those sort of posts I'm planning on scaling them back to avoid stifling the microscopic audience that I have, an audience that features one real person, a person who thinks that she follows me, but doesn't really, and a website critiques movies, probably jacking some of my input to do so.

In the words of a hero of mine, "Stay thirsty my friends."