Something Lost

Test Shot for the "Circus" Series

I've not had an adventure in a very long time.  I haven't listened to any music, either.  I wonder if those two things are connected in any way?  Music is the adventure of the heart, right?  I haven't read anything that makes an impact on my life, either.  Who is there?  Who does the Facebook generation read?  Who gives voice to their Zeitgeist?  Perhaps it is all on Twitter.  I'd not know.  Or Facebook either, for that matter.  It is not bragging.  There is something wrong with not knowing what everyone else knows, maybe not with intimacy but with a passing nod, anyway.

I was at a Cinquo de Mayo party for a while, a mandatory engagement, compulsory.  I sat in a lovely courtyard with many witty, more contemporary people than I.  Educated.  Sophisticated.  Funny.  Younger.  They laughed out loud, hard and strong.  Cackled, really.  They were drunk and irreverent.

At one point, there was a dissection of a T.V. commercial for Dos Equis beer, I believe, a goofball thing I have seen a few times in which a bearded older fellow is proclaimed to be "the most interesting person in the world."  I think.  I'm working on dim memory here.  In museums, they say, he is allowed to touch the art.  Something like that.  Now this was the conversation for quite a while, young professionals from "good families" and prep school backgrounds professing witty about the commercial.  I drank with a goofy grin on my face and took deep drafts whenever one of them would yell, "Stay thirsty, my friend."  And then the raucous laughter.

Stupid, right?  And yet I felt as if I had been left out of something, had been in a hermitage for a long, long time.  And it is true, in part.  My existence has become hermetic in many ways.  I've filtered and pared my existence down to a few essentials.

But something got lost along the way.  Adventure.  Music.  Laughter.  Maybe it has happened to you as well.

I am making a commitment to recapture some of those lost things. Music first, of course.  It is the easiest. But the others, too.  Adventure.  Really.  It is just a state of mind.