Woke up with Shirley MacLaine on my mind. I was never particularly a fan, but I remember my mom didn't approve of me expressing interest in one of her books drifting toward new age spiritualism, as some called it back then. I barely kept track of who and what and why so long ago, but I'll never forget her boarding a plane at the Denver airport a few minutes behind me, and before she sat down at the front, she paused and slowly looked back at the rest of us, eyes gliding over each of us in quick seconds before she locked eyes with me, smiled slowly like she found something, and then turned back to face front and sat down. I didn't smile back. Aspienado didn't smile at people back then. Neither did I give it a second thought at the time. I was too disconnected to care.
Once in a blue moon I remember that moment, and I wonder why she smiled at me. It didn't seem like the usual smiling at a stranger looking at you kind of thing. Maybe she saw me glowing or something, I dunno. I've been told I glow. I've never felt like I could entirely fit into this body, and I can't hide it. Other people I didn't know have looked at me like that in passing, too, like they recognized something.
A number of years ago I wrote about how people I've never met and didn't know would walk up to me in public places and start pouring out their hearts or life stories and ask me what I thought. It happened so often that I took for granted that we must somehow know each other from beyond this life, and once I plugged into assessing life reviews on the fly like that, it became pretty obvious they automatically recognized somehow that I'm here as a sort of touch base. It's like 'how am I doing in this round' kind of thing. Some people feel emotionally overburdened and don't know what to think of that, and since I'm so disconnected from my own emotions most of the time, I seem able to objectively peer review and assure others that they're still on track and doing pretty well figuring their stuff out. Anyone who has gotten to know me better than a one day meetup knows I'm actually pretty angsty myself, sometimes to the point of people walking away again, so I feel like when "I" get in the way, I'm a disaster for us all, but when I'm NOT filtering through my super focused quantum me perspective, it's like I'm someone visiting earth in a people suit and my outsider perspective is invaluable.
I have a friend who has privately admitted struggling with how easily I can get along with another friend who is difficult, which I imagine might feel awkward since I'm not the original friend, but what this friend didn't seem to grasp, as far as I can tell, is that no one has ever had as much access to the real inside me as she has, which necessarily makes everything very awkward between us. I'm a terrible support system when "I" am in the way. I think sometimes I am Plato's rendition of the idea of a cat in human form. I have no transition field between logical support and full blown angst.
I have thought a lot over the years about people in entertainment as a living, a lifestyle, a mode of consciousness, a kaleidoscope perspective, as it were. Even with all the intertwined political pandering removed, with the critics out of the way, with judgment and accolades and self doubt filtered out, just thinking about entertainment as a hobby or career is notoriously difficult for me. I don't seem to have a personal awareness or gift for feeling an audience, for purposely playing out what doesn't come naturally to me to evoke a sympathetic reaction. More often that not, I irritate or disturb people when I step out beyond my tight little guarded behavior patterns to venture into thrill or speculation or rant, so when I try to think about another person's perspective playing multiple perspectives through their lives, I feel like I'm flipping through a comic book in my mind. Everything seems too exaggerated.
Everything we do all day long is guided by the entertainment industry. Entertainment is the middle man between product and consumer, the pencil sharpener for workplace training, the escalator launching mundane livelihoods into better ideas, the soothsayer calming or stirring the masses. Entertainers are cogs in the machine of entertainment. Entertainers are caught in a world of everyone seeing their faces, and those faces taking the brunt of whatever really happens in the entertainment industry.
We all know the entire thing is a facade. We all know it's not real. And yet... it is powerful. Oz behind the curtain.
One of the hardest things I've done is go public and then stay public. It's kind of like an ice dive, like stripping down and jumping through a hole in the ice with no team to pull me out and put a blanket back on me. I don't know how that relates at all, except to point out that's about the closest that I can relate, perhaps.
Entertainment is both raw and sheltered experience, from what I can tell. You let people tell you what to do, you do it, and then you sell it using your face (usually) as part of the branding. I've always thought of it as a form of whoring oneself out, actually. I don't mean that literally, of course. I'm sure some circumstances would support that literally, but I'm not talking about those.
Getting back to Shirley, out on a limb and stuff. I don't think she was being completely honest. I was intrigued back then, yes. I'm still interested in what lies beyond our immediate selves experiencing, yes. And yeah, she was very forthcoming. But true spiritual honesty? My perspective is that a lot was still left out, and that you can't reach the best conclusions without addressing the 'real'.
Shirley lived in the machine.
Shirley looked at me, and smiled.
I don't know what she saw, but I know what I see. And I'm not smiling, because I see the machine.
Time, times, and half a time have passed since then.
I don't know what to think of all this, except that moment was real. It wasn't entertainment.
Sting looked at me in Vail, but it wasn't life shaking. Little bit of context there. I didn't smile at him, either.
Some hours after Sting looked at me, a friend and I actually found the end of a rainbow high up in the Rockies. That was literal, not some kind of funky metaphor or allegory. We literally drove into the end of a rainbow touching the highway twisting through the mountains.
Ran into this vid this morning, well worth clicking over for the awesome comments. 😂
No comments:
Post a Comment