Under my thumb
Touch touch get in touch!
I was in bed most of last week. I traveled back to Berlin, for good, after 4 months away (with a short 3 week interlude back in Berlin in early March, because I missed my stepdaughter.) I crashed hard and made bed my place for a week.
I’ve just completed a cycle. I finished the enormous photoshoot I had been creative directing for months, which was the main reason I was in the US. It took a lot out of me, but I feel pretty good about it.
Geographically, I’ve been filled with good fortune and mobility. I got to spend a few weeks in a cute apartment in the basement of a 1910 Craftsman in the Hollywood Hills. I made trips up to San Francisco, where on Easter Sunday I attended the Hunky Jesus contest with my Berlin friend Tonia. I even got to visit my brother in the hippie foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains 3 hours east of San Francisco.
I toured all of the important sites of my childhood and young adulthood and familial line, revisiting psychic scars that needed to be rubbed gently with my thumb: San Diego (twice!), New York (twice!), western Massachusetts, Hawaii.
My ideas have never been quite so in congruence with the speed of the life I live, and it feels quite good. I have an idea, I make it happen, I pitch the client, I buy the candle and the notebook, I tell the person how I feel. The yeses and the nos feel very clear and sharp.
This congruence is erotic. But I’m also quite far away from the things I care about most, which are to be present and of service and loving to the people around me. And to create art, write, dance, and cook, in a way that provides the kind of internal peace and stability required to be a resource for community and to generate ideas that then compel others to generate their own.
I’m back here now, and walking into a summer in Berlin. I’m hoping for it, and wanting it, and looking at the people in the eye on the sidewalk and under the bridge, and they’re touching my arm and saying that we’re friends, saying that I don’t need to show my wrist stamp on re-entry to the venue because they remember me. I’ve missed you.