MOONSCAPES AND MINDSCAPES
The darkness of the room mingled with the glow of the streetlight. After what could’ve been two hours or two thousand years, Marie appeared in the room and switched on the lamp next to the bed. I sat up and took in unfamiliar surroundings. A common experience during those years. Everyone’s place was indistinguishable from everyone else’s place. Black light posters. Lava lamps. The scent of bongwater lingering in the air. Hearing the murmuring and laughter, I thought about going into the living room to rejoin the small gathering. But they wouldn’t see me. They would’ve seen a stand-in, a stuntman, a cardboard apparition strung up by wires inserted randomly into cracks in the ceiling. She said she’d be back in a while. I got up and slid along the scribbled and scrawled-on art project hallway wall. Made it all the way to the kitchen screen door, where the night called out to me. Outside, insects were playing intricate orchestral arrangements. In the backyard, I looked up at the full moon. Less than a decade earlier, astronauts had first walked, jumped, and had a hopped up on gravity or the lack thereof party on the moon. People had to have events, music, and things to fill up the space of living a life. Everyone’s existing within the confines and confusions of history. Pinwheeling from the moonscape to an internal mindscape again. How are some of us lucky enough to make friends with our minds, while still not ready enough to wander into the dangerous neighborhoods hidden within. Time would tell. As it does. I was a bird molting, a dog scratching its back against a couch corner, a snake shedding its skin. There was much pontificating about the universe back then. At someone’s house, I’d found a halfway read Krishnamurti book sitting on the coffee table. One of those books of interviews or dialogues concerning life, death, the cosmos, as well as turning around to face yourself kind of books. Creating ourselves was the name of the game. Sometimes making something out of nothing. In the movies, they say an idea or event came out of nowhere. For some reason, I thought of this night. A night like so many other nights in the mid-70s. I sat staring out the train window in the early afternoon. After a long train ride of seeing the landscapes rolling by, reading, drifting and dozing, never quite fulling sleeping through the Eastern Seaboard nighttime lights and monuments of Washington, D.C., and rural backyards of North Carolina, lit up by back porch lights. I got up from my seat and stepped into the small Amtrak bathroom, locked it behind me. I splashed cool water on my face. Looking at my reflection in the water-stained mirror. It was the end of May, in 1978. The train had taken me from St. Petersburg up through Georgia and the Carolinas. We’d just pulled out of Philadelphia, and we’re less than three hours from New York City.