A ROAD TO NOWHERE
The Talking Heads have influenced my life in multiple periods: from the cover band Houses In Motion that the coolest guys at my high school formed in the late 90s to the time my best friend screamed at me during an epic bar dance party "I WANT THIS SONG TO PLAY AT MY WEDDING!" (the song: "This Must Be The Place", the bar: Danny's, the dream: played at her wedding four years later) to recent weeks, when again, the synth-meets-afro-groove beats held my hand and reminded me that life is cool, no need to freak out.
The last couple of months have had my heart feeling like a volleyball- up and down and out of my control. Control falling in and out of my grasp from day to day. Little beknownst to many of even my closest friends, I spent the last two and a half months formulating a very real plan to buy a coffee shop here in Brooklyn. Assembling documents, dinero and a mindset that agreed: "Yeah! I will live in Brooklyn for the next seven years! And I will perform a stable and challenging role in the community in the form of running a small business!" It was not an easy task for this brain, which lives on an hourly paycheck working weird hours and spends days at a time engrossed in art projects in its living room. But we got there. And my boyfriend and I got there, on a different level that said, "We can do this together (apart on tour, together at home and then apart again)." Things were lining up and priorities were adjusting. In the final steps of this race with the bank, the owner and against another offer, I found out that the business had been sold to the other group. I found this out in a beautiful park on a beautiful day with beautiful hours to kill before heading to work.
At that moment I might have been crushed. Wouldn't you be? After spending all of your free hours for the last few months planning out the minutia of a business you wanted to call your baby and nurse back to radiancy and become a staple of a neighborhood? Uh, yeah, ya would. I would have, too, except one day, a couple of weeks back, I already thought I had lost out on this deal. When I heard there was another offer on the table, I felt a wrecking ball pulverize my dream. I fell apart. I grumped and cried. I proactively spent a day and a half figuring out what other direction I could set my career compass in. I made a list of thoughts that entered the void like, "I have to get insurance," "I hate Manhattan (crossed out), selfish people," and "Life is circumstantial." So on this day, when the Kiss of Death words came to my ear, "We signed with the other offer over the weekend," I felt... ok. I had shifted since the last time I thought it was all over. I had been continuing to work as hard as possible to make the dream come to fruition, but I had learned that the positive outcome of this would not make or break me. There would be other paths that would appear in front of me without this. It was not the end of opportunities.
This week, I have returned to less long-reaching goals. I spent five full days painting my Halloween costume. I have learned very basic Talking Heads songs on the bass. I took on a sewing project for a friend's new restaurant and visited Rough Trade as many times as I liked to listen to their albums of the month through very loud headphones. Things are okay. My friends and my partner are here, standing by me, still meeting up for coffee and entertaining my hairbrained fancies. The Heads say it best:
Well we know where we're going But we don't know where we've been And we know what we're knowing But we can't say what we've seen And we're not little children And we know what we want And the future is certain Give us time to work it out Yeah We're on a road to nowhere Come on inside Taking that ride to nowhere We'll take that ride I'm feeling okay this morning And you know We're on the road to paradise Here we go, here we go
