Flow

[ Bentley at the Dirt Church. No particular reason, other than the plaque on the door behind him is Oh So Bentley.]

Feeling good today. Got a lot of little nagging things off my plate yesterday, but most importantly (1) got the form & photos I need to renew my passport, and (2) a script problem that I had cleared itself up, and I will soon be putting pen to paper.

The passport thing is pretty significant to me. I look at the one I am about to turn in, and I know there are novels crammed in those tiny, dog-eared pages. It was my first passport, issued July 9, 1999. The photo... I was blonde then, and - my friends will find this hard to believe, I know - it was a period in my life when I had absolutely no style whatsoever. My uniform was jeans, tennies, and polo shirts from the gap. Ew, I know.

Traveling, especially to Paris, now my second home, changed me for good. The things I have seen and the people I have met in my two dozen or so trips to Europe... I don't even recognize the person in that photo. It is hard to remember what was important to me back then. I thought I had it together, I thought I was confident. I didn't even know I was stepping off the precipice.

I feel that I am entering another ten-year cycle, and I am in some ways in that place again, but now I am aware. This time, I am leaping off that precipice, knowing that everything is going to change, again, and ten years from now I will look at the photo that today is new, and smile at how innocent I was. I think somehow that my progress in life is not in spite of my naivete, but because of it. Since I rarely think in terms of, "there's no way I could ever do that," it doesn't occur to me until I've finished whatever it was that I shouldn't have been able to do in the first place, that it doesn't make a lot of sense that I got it done, and most often someone else has to point this out to me.

I try very much to appreciate what I have while I have it, and I have these moments once in awhile, when things are going very well, that I soak it all in, recognize how lucky I am, and understand that this will not last. I don't mean that being happy won't last, for the most part it is unnatural for me to be any other way. I mean that this, this exact daily existence, in this town, with these people, in these circumstances, is fleeting.

I had one of those moments last night. I was out in Fells Point with Bentley, who is here for a few weeks from Toronto, again. I was just starting to get used to having him around and he'll be gone by the end of the month, probably until late fall. We got some sushi and then met up with my friend Christie for a drink on the open-air upper deck at Harry's. It was here that I had that moment. Here I was, looking out over a crowd of people on the wharf watching the free movie that had been set up there, a perfect night breeze blowing the fake tropical music through the bar, hanging out with my semi-unemployed artist friend and my self-employed yoga instructor friend. The bar was decently busy but we got a table right away, the waiter was friendly, everything was just so... relaxed. I took it all in, and I consciously said to myself, someday, sooner than I think, this, Baltimore, will just be a fond memory. I need to etch every detail of this into my brain.

I don't know what comes next, but I know I will be fine, I always am. I love Baltimore so much, more than anyplace I've ever lived, but I just have the feeling that by this time next year I will be elsewhere. That's a little scary, but in a good way, that keeps my blood pumping. Just as traveling changed the way I look at everything, the way I think of and carry myself, the way I interpret... everything... making this movie has reinvented me as well. I like it, and I can't wait to see what happens next.