After a recent introduction to a new clique (or maybe just a roughshod gathering of friends and friends of friends), i had a feeling, a slight tugging, that this was part of something bigger, that this Brooklyn night will end up years later across ruled parchment.
Possibly the names will be changed, or, remaining intact, will only exist in a systrophic litany without fat, no delicacies for the reader to nosh upon, compelled to research each entry themselves; either way, my existence present at and involvement in said night of board games shared with a gaggle of artists, creatives, musicians, lawyers, sandmen—all of us world travelers—might be documented.
This night produced a decision, a new modus operandi: i will treat every encounter as if it is memoir material—whether that be mine or the other person’s, doesn’t matter; i see that distinction as a trivial matter, something along the lines of: the center mass of the universe actually being what all planets and objects revolve around (yes, the sun included).
With my unparalleled love and awe (?) for memoirs, auto- and self-scribed biographies, i should be obsessed with them, one would think, but I’m not. I save my frenetic indulgences for other things—or, really, i have an interest in too many things to dedicate energy to a sole purpose, unless, of course, it isn’t for a prolonged duration.
Anyway, what’s important is life stories fascinate and interest me (yes, there’s a difference! One I constantly quibble over with my father who loves the former word, while i have historically hated it, swearing by the latter lol).
With each reading of a new journey, be it Nikki Giovanni’s autobiographical essays (Gemini and Sacred Cows) or Andy Warhol’s Diaries or Henry Miller’s Black Spring or Herbert Gold’s Bohemia or Kwame Ture’s Ready for Revolution or Bro. James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man or Walter White’s Walter White and The Harlem Renaissance or Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and On the Road, i marvel and take notes from each, looking at their encounters and meetings as markers that great and creative minds will always find a way to intermingle, to cross, to double-cross, to copulate, to share, to head nod at reflected spirits all on their own journeys, understanding but not looking too deeply into the magnitude of their existences.
The prospect that my legacy will have footnotes and cross-sectioned entries with and within others’ books or pamphlets, poems or essays, plays or blog posts, fiction or non-fiction, excites me, makes the existential parts of my psyché giddy.
There’s a hope that my legacy, the platform for my haranguing fear of not leaving indelible marks upon this world, will have some fodder, some aliment to sustain itself.
Am i looking unnecessarily deep into this? Sure; i’m open to consider that. But what else is there to do when one has no children?
Create future manifestations, future triumphs, and future failures all in the hopes i’ll see them come to fruition, even if they’re distorted—of course.
Now, here’s to the next social event or cosmic encounter, the extemporaneous conversation, the random show of goodwill, of good faith, to future spillages of drinks, holding of doors, to lingering eye contact; never know what words will be written because of ’em. All is possible memoir material.