My busser shift ends when the glasses are cleared off the tables, the empty wine bottles are in the big blue recycling bin, and the Edison bulbs are clear and polished at the end of their dangling wires.

The restaurant is finally quiet, barring the tired laughter of its familiar, final occupants…some nights I join chef, GM, and bartender at the bar for final drinks and closing ceremonies, but not tonight. Tonight the only small talk I can muster is a single word: “Bye.”

The double doors swing wide and, just like that, I’m walking in the cool desert night. Graffitied stores and crumpled cigarette boxes guide me home. It’s not the best neighborhood, but for now Highland Park’s odd blend of rusty metal fences and stretching jacaranda trees are the closest I have to a home.

There was a shooting down the street a day or two back. Bullets zipped right through the bar door. I don’t know if anyone was hurt, but I do know that there were no deaths. Probably it’s naivety on my part, possibly it’s overconfidence, but I can never seem to worry about stuff like that happening to me. A shooter on a dark night just doesn’t seem like a fear worth swimming in. Possible enough, sure, but not imaginative enough to really paralyze the mind with fear. Maybe it’d be different if the gunman had a scarecrow mask…but then again it’s October already and Halloween is right around the bend. I spin the idea around a finger for a few seconds, then decide to let it go before I have to convince myself my attacker will have more tact.

The cool breeze is a gift that washes the restaurant kitchen heat from my skin. It’s one of those rare nights in Los Angeles where the lights in Hollywood are somehow burning low and you can see the stars. Ursa Major (a.k.a. the Big Dipper) is right in the middle of the sky. The two stars that make the front lip and chin of the ladle form a line to Polaris, the North Star, part of Ursa Minor (a.k.a. the Little Dipper). Finding Polaris isn’t a much sought-after skill in a world of automated barges on trans-ocean voyages, google self-driving cars, and GPS. But knowing that I can impress a girl on a late-night walk someday is enough.

It’s also humbling to see some divine fire so far away burning so fiercely that it cuts right through the manmade lights in the windows of a million homes…there wouldn’t be much to see of Earth, if you were to look at us from that distance. We’ve still got far to go before figuring out how to burn bright as that.

True to the heart of Los Angeles, the sound of movies spill from most of the houses I pass. Action, thriller, drama, soap op…just the sounds are enough to pin them all. It’s tempting to explain, with a sentence, why the baristas and gardeners and record store owners and mechanics end their days with an indulgence of fantasy…but that is naive of me. Every single one of these people have their own reasons. Still, I hope, and will always hope, that more people discover reality for the fantasy it can be.

I saw a rocket today as I cleared a table on the patio. A goddamn rocket. A huge, ascending star thrusting through the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere. Phew. A couple people look up. One woman continues to shovel a load of salad into her mouth. Neither the major nor minor event could possibly be made up and my attention flips between the two. A rocket has to travel between eighteen and twenty five thousand mph to clear escape Earth’s orbit. A fork has to travel considerable slower to keep control of its payload from tabletop to mouth. Eventually, the rocket wins out for control of my attention. I find out later it launched from Argentina something like 1000 miles away. It looked close enough to touch. It makes me think of a blonde joke I heard once: A brunette asks a blonde, “What’s closer Africa or the moon?” The blonde replies, after a second of thought, “The moon! You can see the moon.”

Alright, that’s my one joke for the night.

I think.

Later that night I find out my friend, a redhead, is in a movie premiering in theaters. Also exciting, also humbling. I share a house with her. I feel like I know her.

After the movie I realize the her I think I know is one point of a pixellated mosaic. An incomplete fragment. A trick of the light. There’s so much more. I leave the theatre wondering how to see deeper, past the mirage of the surface, and into the possibility of who a person can be…

And the streetlights glow steady overhead. And the streets themselves are quiet. And there are other people sharing the late night with me. Walkers lost in thought. Bar goers lost in booze. Couples lost in each other. And I think that if all the manmade lights and the jet burn of rocket fuel suddenly vanished there wouldn’t be dark. Instead there’d be other lights – lost now in the haze of a city that never sleeps – but there nonetheless beneath the surface of every stranger’s skin.

Not the red, green, yellow of stoplights. Not the dull orange of wired Edison bulbs. Not the exploding illumination of propulsive fuel. A different kind of light.

The other kind.

————————————

ALIVE

How am I still alive? Why?

What reason is there other than the prolonging of sensation?

What do you believe, in the dark? What do you draw from to generate light?

You mind and body are machine. What does your machine produce? And is it of worth?

If not there’s no choice but to change. Because negative creation is a knife at a child’s throat, an evil to be born by the as-of-yet ungrown, a shadow that doesn’t walk behind but stretches ahead, a darkness cast into the future.

Ask yourself this: what has worth? What can I offer?

Discover an answer in action. Action that leads to growth in heart and growth in mind. Action that counters weakness by perpetuating in spite of it. Action that defies the stagnancy of unchallenged fear.

Breathe.

Inhale. Exhale.

Feel the body absorb, transform, and release. It consumes with the higher purpose of creating. Imprints each exhale with fragments of itself. Pulls and pushes still air into motion.

We six billion circulate the air of the world like so many bellows, you know.

Air fuels us.

Innervates our blood.

Ignites neural pathways in our minds.

Grants us the flicker-pulse of consciousness, that great, constant interplay of certainty and uncertainty, knowing and not knowing. Dendrites in our minds branch treelike into black space with each inhale, only to recoil back into the seed with each little death we call so lightly “exhale.”

Breathe. Expand. See and know.

Exhale. Shrivel. Lose sight and forget.

You have it, you hold it, then you must let it go.

The invisible world pulses and you must pulse with it.

You can’t hold your breathe and you can’t refuse to breathe.

But as you catch, make sure you it taste it.

And as you release it, make certain you shape it.

Remember these things.

Reality can become fantasy.

Any person can surprise you, anytime.

When the streetlights go out, make your own light or find it in others.

And breathe. In and out.

Oh, and learn how to find the North Star. Because you never know when you might be lost at sea…maybe with somebody you want to love.

— Nomad