Author: amyliming

When I stop at a Swap Meet, I feel like I can hear a thousand voices talking at once, telling the stories of the energy imposed on the items for sale.  All of these things were left behind or unwanted by the previous owner, by death or choice, or force.

Rarely does a window open so clearly into a basic piece of the past as it did for me this past Sunday at the Long Beach Flea Market.  Drawn to a vendor selling pictures—which is almost always a bad idea—I picked for an hour through some of the most evocative pictures from the 40s and 50s I have ever seen, especially considering there were pictures of strangers.

Next, at the bottom of the last box I picked through was an envelope addressed to one C.M. Burnett of San Diego, CA, sent from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.  Inside was Chamber of Commerce tourism information from 1959, and before I ever knew how much I would be charged, I knew I had to have it.

Once home, I carefully pulled the information out and found:

• Helpful Driving Tips: a brochure alerting visitors to One Way streets, parking on hills, jaywalking, and tow away zones.
• Gray Line San Francisco Tours Advertisement: Choices for which tour.  The Burnetts have put a checkmark next to Tour 1.
• Calendar of Events for all of 1959: The Burnetts have a checkmark next to July 7, 11, 18, 21, 25, and 28 for the Municipal Pop Concerts
• San Francisco Hotels and Restaurants List: The Cliff House Restaurant is checked, but nothing else
• Your Guide to San Francisco and its Nearby Vacationlands: The Burnetts have checked off Bus Tours, Bay Cruise, Cable Car Rides, The Embarcadero, Golden Gate Park, Presidio, Seal Rocks Playland, and Zoo, Nob Hill, Maritime Museum, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill, Chinatown, and then further out Yosemite National Park and Sequoia as well as Monterey Bay Country.
• Avis Rental Car Ad

San Francisco Chamber of Commerce ad, plus other incredible photos I couldn’t leave behind.

I love the little pen marks.

They had a lot planned for their trip, certainly, and I don’t know how much they actually saw or if they even made it, but affording a glimpse into a regular family planning a vacation in 1959 feels like I opened a private window.  I know that the little envelope from the Chamber of Commerce wasn’t meant to sit around until 2014 and be purchased by a stranger, but in the end, we are just stories, and we never know what part of our stories will live on…and which ones will be boxed and carted around swap meet to swap meet, anonymously.

Skeptically Yours,
Bigskeptic

The law of diminishing returns seems to be a plausible reason for things dwindling as we age as well; at least, it makes sense to me because trading my heroes for ghosts happened over time, such a subtle, incremental change that I hardly noticed it.  I’m not just talking about actual heroes, people—I mean, that’s changed a little bit as well, but largely the idea of things that were once important drifting into the ether of time and being replaced by less substantial elements.

When I get into these modes—this existential “life is empty-ism”—my natural response is to seek something visceral and terrifying that will call back into existence the pertinent and meaningful guardians of my moral compass.  When these key directives dwindle, it’s an almost innate draw to danger.

I have less clarity these days than I did when I was in my teen years, and to show how old I’ve grown, I’ll quote Don Henley in a blog intended to quote Pink Floyd:  “the more I know, the less I understand.”  Part of growing older means getting answers for questions best left unanswered.  My life’s path has been a lot different than most of my peers; and part of it was choice, part of it was by the universe’s design and not my own.  I look back at things that I thought were my own decisions, and it’s almost laughable.  As much as I hate the idea of predestination, some things do seem like they weren’t up to me.

Without the typical elements that usually keep people grounded—kids, marriage—I have to create my own center.  And those “life is empty” moments are frightening without the bigger picture to create focus.  No matter how much meaning the other things have—job, friendships, passions, it all leads back to a paragraph that sent shivers down my spine when I was 16 and reading Kerouac for the first time around:  “My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”

So MUCH of modern life seems like a giant goddamned waste of time.  When I think back to the most wonderful moments of my life, they were spent twisting along Beach Rd, speeding on I-10, resting with sand etched into my elbows as my best friend and hero, the long-gone Rottie Circe, played at the beach.  Perhaps in the trading of my heroes for the ghosts of things that once mattered, there has been an ensuing madness.  The madness lands me here, over 30, unmarried but also never divorced, finally finished with my first book, the clear reality of “who my friends are…” and although I understand less, in general, and have to watch my demons at times…I do realize one important factor:

Some of the heroes were simply false idols and worth the trade to ghosts, who do me no harm.

Skeptically Yours,
Bigskeptic.

I’ve been a Bowie fan for a long time (Labyrinth, anyone?). I’d be the type of parent that completely Zappa’d out and named her kid “Bowie.”  That’s probably why the universe has kept me from procreating, but that’s neither here nor there…

I’m the type of music dork that gets hooked on a song for a few hours, clicking the “repeat” sign and just absorbing the song until, somewhere in the fourth hour, I never want to hear that damned song ever, ever again. I do that with TV shows, food, etc.  Maybe it’s the part of obsessive behavior I let roam free.  In any case, today it’s Bowie, and I can’t stop listening to “Changes.”  It’s this line that nailed me to the floor: “I watch the ripples change their size but never leave the stream of warm impermanence, so the days float through my eyes.”

The idea of impermanence has been something that seriously resonated with me for a while. Nothing is permanent, and as the song implies, everything changes.  We change.  I use science often as a major defense mechanism against long-term relationships, so the idea of change is just…biology and, thus, not scary at all.  Our hormones change.  Our bodies change. We are essentially becoming different people all of the time. 

 So, in the ongoing relentless change that my body and my mind undergo–in my thirties, everything seems different. I feel different. I react differently. I want completely different things. I was lying on the couch the other day with my dog, Joplin, who gazes up at me with deep brown eyes filled with both love and mischief. I felt completely happy and content.  Part of me, at some point in my youth, would have been itching to DO something and not “waste time.”  John Lennon once said that “Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.”  I fully agree and understand that now. I also cry easier, tell people “I love you” often, and find myself wishing to be a part of my nieces’ and nephews’ lives. Changes—you know—oftentimes for the better.

All it takes, really.

I also stopped buying into the excuse that because we change as part of our biological destiny, we can’t maintain good relationships long-term. Obviously, there are plenty of people that have already proved this theory wrong.  I’ve not been one of them. Or have I?

When I talk about people I know and love, most of them I have known for a decade or so (give or take—28 years with my oldest, dearest friend). Somehow I have maintained those friendships that long (patient friends is my theory). I guess I have always believed in and been a part of long-term relationships, just…the platonic ones. 

Proven then: the acceptance and belief that impermanence is life and vice versa, and change is our only constant, is not mutually exclusive to healthy relationships. The patterns I have created for myself, now that they have been proven illogical, are likely to fade…just like “Changes.”  43 times…it’s enough already.

Okay, maybe just a few more listens… 

Skeptically Yours. 

It’s my Birthday!!

Last year at this time (almost exactly), I stood at Rockefeller Center and felt the pulse of New York City under my feet.  My mother and I were being tourists on a double-purpose trip to visit John Lennon’s memorial at Strawberry Fields on the 8th and to celebrate my birthday on the 10th. It was late day, and as the sun was reclining into the horizon, and the lights of Christmas decorations seemed to glitter everywhere, I looked at Prometheus bedecked in gold by the ice, and I almost fainted.

It seemed like the weight of the entire city was dropped squarely on my shoulders, and I absolutely reeled, everything a swirl of chaos and Christmas. As soon as the lightheadedness left me, I changed my entire life.

Rockefeller Center and the tortured Prometheus have appeared in my life twice, both during strangely revealing moments. Once, as the background while being proposed to, and the second, the background to breaking it off and leaving all of it behind.

It was sort of an epic birthday for a skeptic like me to trust some sort of Universal message that led me to make gargantuan decisions and just blindly run for them.  It’s one of very few moments that led me so clearly.

This year, exactly 365 days of, as I’ve said to many people this year, “trying to figure my shit out,” and I still have a lot of chaos swirling around me; I have a few more things figured out, but I am nowhere near a point where I feel like this year and this universal guidance has come to a close.

What I know is that one year ago, I started in the right direction. I am on some sort of path now, still kicking stones along the way but gradually making progress.  My travels this year have allowed me to reconnect and fall in love all over again with my friends, stay up too late and be too social, go to bed too early and just sleeeeeep, burn the candle at both ends, rescue a dog, enjoy time with my mother, start restoring my Buick, put my Nova back together, take better care of myself, relax and enjoy a few incredible moments, screw up a lot, wake my passions for writing and acting, and move past bitterness that clouded my judgment.

To my friends and family that allowed this year to be all kinds of chaos and comfort, thank you. I have a weird, special thank you for Prometheus also. I often say “there’s a reason for everything” is a bullshit statement said by people searching for meaning in a universe that functions mainly on energy and coincidence without any greater guiding purpose. If I pass on the life-is-meaningless-existentialism for a minute and just look at the symbolism here, it’s clear that this statue meant something; that’s its somehow not a coincidence that it existed during these moments of both entering into something torturous to me, and the ensuing escape. For the unlikely task of making me think twice about the meaning of it all, thank you, Prometheus.