From the Archives…

Read/view while listening to Blind Pilot.

Yesterday was one of those travel days where everything goes wrong. I should have been westbound on a plane from MKE to LGB that would have had me in before noon with a rental car awaiting me on my arrival. But because I missed my flight it ended up looking a lot more like this: Bus from MKE to ORD, 3 hours of waiting, flight to Charlotte, North Caroline, more waiting, long, boring, endless flight to LAX. No rental car. Metro trip from LAX to Long Beach. All told, it was a 15 hours travel day.

This morning is a lot more peaceful. I’m using the time difference to my advantage and I’m sitting at my usual Long Beach spot – Portfolio coffeehouse. It’s 7 am and it is COLD! I’m wearing a sweater and denim shirt and still the cool air catches me off guard when the door next to me pops open. It’s making me so excited for New York fall weather.

Yesterday my sole entertainment on my cross-country flight was the latest issue of DETAILS magazine. Let me just say that I read every piece of text there was to read in that thing purely out of boredom. One of the articles was a one-page interview with Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy. Now don’t get me wrong, Seth is a comic genius (maybe just purely a genius) but we do not share the same worldview. One of his comments caught me off-guard: “Carl Sagan said that we are ‘significance junkies.’ We love to attach patterns to everything we see. Not everything has meaning to it. I can’t afford to let it turn me into somebody who suddenly believes that he’s being watched over by a higher power. It’s kind of arrogant; that’s a lot of bandwidth for whoever is up there to have to maintain at any given time—Andy Dick alone would take up so much time and energy.”

It’s within my personality to make connections. In my mind – probably to a fault – everything has meaning. Everything is connected. Even my long day of travel was filled with meaning: creative ideas I wouldn’t have otherwise had, personal thoughts I wouldn’t have realized, people I wouldn’t have met. For instance, I met a woman sitting next to me who was en route to visit her estranged daughter and son. She had a fascinating and heartbreaking story. I couldn’t help but think, as I usually do, what if I hadn’t been on this flight? I would never have had this interaction.

Sitting twenty feet from me right now is a man named Fred. Fred is my personal prophet. I’m kind of kidding, but kind of serious. He’s an older man that reads the paper at Portfolio nearly every morning. And sometimes he ropes me into conversation and usually tells me incredibly profound things about my life. And then I won’t see him for a year and then we’ll pick up where we left off the last time.

Today I’m too tired for prophecy so I’m avoiding eye contact. But Fred is one of those people that, had I not had the first interaction, I wouldn’t probably not have continued to have this bizarre, fascinating relationship with the man of the years. A string of interactions linked back to one latte and bagel and Thomas Merton reading session where it all started.

I guess despite Seth’s words, and despite my (possibly) over-imaginative propensity to find meaning in everything, I can’t help it. Because I believe in God, and believe he has a purpose for us, the meaning is there. I don’t have to pull it out or connect links… it just rises to the surface.

The photos in the post were from a year ago in August. My screen on my camera was broken at the time and I accidentally overexposed all of the pictures so I pretty much discarded them… However, I revisited them yesterday and found new hope in them. They’re more contrasty (woah, blacks) then usual, but I kinda like how they’re sort of a mixture of moody/dark and light/ethereal.