Live a Life

I notice that I hate nostalgia, and love history. It's not in my nature to look back at my life wistfully or longingly for times long past. My life has been filled with good moments and not so good moments and moments that now seem neither good nor not so good.

I'm usually just in the moment. And that's good enough.

On the other hand I do like reading history, or especially biographies or autobiographies of people from other times and places. I have found it's a great way to ground events, and draw the crazy strands of our world into some kind of focus. You have to kind of trust that the author isn't completely fabricating shit, some are better than others, but in the right hands it's not that great of a leap of faith.

I realize that I live in a world where our Pop Culture has leached into everything, so for me these characters that I have delved into are all of equal weight, I mean, each a human life: Crazy Horse, Bing Crosby, Jean Genet, Dean Martin, William Blake, Bill Graham, Josef Stalin, Anthony Keidis, Christopher Marlowe, Bono, Arthur Miller, Bertolt Brecht, Elvis Presley, Marcel Duchamp, Jimi Hendrix, Samuel Beckett, George Amstrong Custer, Che Guevara, Richard Sheridan, Morrissey, Francis Bacon, Phil Lesh, Jasper Johns, Richard Nixon, Andy Warhol, Errol & Sean Flynn, Sonny Liston, Jerry Lee Lewis, Andre Breton, William Shakespeare, Charles Darwin, Led Zeppelin, Robert Oppenheimer, Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Yukio Mishima, The Flaming Lips, The Futurists, Emmet Miller, The Beatles, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Vince Lombardi, Black Elk, John Peel, Jean Paul Satre, Johnny Rotten, Sonic Youth, The Dadaists, Pink Floyd, Yoko Ono, Joseph Cornell, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Aleister Crowley, Dante, Terry Southern, Philip K. Dick, Rolling Stones, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Charles Laughton, Billy Strayhorn, Thomas Merton, Syd Barret, Machiavelli, Daniel Pearl, George Orwell and a bunch more that I can't recall at the moment.

Which is weird. How come we don't remember everything? And why do we remember the things we remember? And where do the things we forget go?

And what have I learned from all this reading?

There are billions of ways to live a life. Each unique. Like another world. None like any other.