Here it comes, People-
Another year. If you make it through, you get to start another. So, congrats to us all for getting here. It’s not always easy.
I spent some time in New Mexico over the holidays. I was fantasizing about perhaps moving off the grid into the hills somewhere outside of Santa Fe. The difference between fantasizing and actually doing can be immense. I was in Santa Fe for four days and as beautiful as it is, I would really need to make some personal changes to live there, even part time. Like, I would need a new brain entirely. I’m already lost in my head a good part of the time. If I went somewhere with few-to-zero distractions I would fall down into myself and maybe never get out. Or I would wander around the town just stopping in places with the desperate need to talk—to anyone. I’d like to think that I would write a book or come up with some new creative direction and do something amazing but I should know by now that inspiration seizes me in crisis, never in peace. Maybe that will change but I don’t think I can force it by running away.
I took a tour of some of the places that defined my childhood but I've rarely returned to them. I went by the first house my family lived in when we moved to NM in ’72. I lived in the basement with my brother. It had its own bathroom and shag carpeting. I went by my elementary schools, the synagogue I was bar mitzvahed in, the place I worked in high school, my high school, the house I actually grew up in and The Frontier Restaurant on Central Ave, where I learned to think.
I had some odd realization based on some of the memories that would flash by me when I was around these places. I think there is a lot to be learned from what memories surface and what memories you hang on to. How many memories are hard and painful verses the ones that are fun and feel-good. I like the feel-good kind but I tend towards the painful ones. Though a lot of who I am came out of mistakes and missteps and feeling embarrassed and awkward. Some of the trauma leads to me being who I am and I am honestly not sure I could identify a good time during my adolescence. There were some parties and near death calls in cars and some small victories. Great times don’t have the bittersweet resonance of heartache until they get so far away that even remembering them is a little painful. This is what happens when the years fly by. It gets a bit more challenging to feel alive like you did when you were young and stupid. Thankfully, new experiences can be deeper because of those years, that slow emergence out of who you were as kid. The crawl through the sludge of experience to maturity where you walk with a little more difficulty but each step carries the weight of everything that you are. Happy New Year!
Today I have a deep talk about love and relationships from someone who earned his wisdom the hard way, Neil Strauss. Heavy stuff. On Thursday, New Years Eve, I have a lighter, shorter chat with the hilarious Bill Buur and then we are going to run highlights of some big happenings from 2015. We can do that. We have them.
Enjoy!
Boomer lives!
Love,
Maron
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