Monday 16 November 1998

The future is now and now is breakfast at where else, The Hurst. My favorite waitresses are here, they are all, every single one of them likely to make me fall in love with them with the slightest provocation. I was reading over what I wrote yesterday over breakfast, and I'm kind of horrified, really, but fortunately this is just a pen on paper and not going directly to the world wide web or anything crazy like that. I imagine that anyone might think I've gone pretty far around the bend, and I'm not so sure myself. I just have to straighten out my brain here a little—it's getting pretty mixed up. As much as people are really the most important thing in your life, and your friends are the most important people, the exception to that is that the cinema is the most important thing to me, and my love for the cinema is really bigger than my love for all humanity and even any individual. That's really a position contradictory to what I really feel, but any conviction without a contradiction probably is a piece of crap anyway. The truth is in the contradictions, and it's all crap, including this, but out of that is what's real and what I really care about. Someone put on Leonard Cohen, and that reminds me that music is also my biggest love of my life, even above the cinema. Well maybe not above the cinema. And then there's—well, just art in general. It's really art that is what is able to make you love people to the highest intensity possible. And I don't believe that all love is the same, or that all people are equal in that love. All people are definitely not the same in their capacity to hate, so why would they be with love? It's not a universal thing, and it's not anything to take for granted. It takes constant work, really hard work, because all the good stuff goes away without work and everything becomes dull, slightly dirty, blunt, and slow. I really want to keep everything at a sharp edge, hot and sharp and intense, and if I can do that maybe I can go on.

Sunday 15 November 1998 – Later at The Hurst

The Belmont Street Octet are playing and I actually am in the bar in the evening—actually I came here last Sunday night—they play every Sunday. I've heard them from the porch, but in the bar they're really excellent—and the most motley bunch you'll ever see. Actually, if you were to see a more motley bunch anywhere, it would be here. You could call this place the Motley Hurst, or something. Maybe I will. It just struck me, it's kind of like what Black Sparrow is to book publishing. They seem like a real good comparison in some weird way. (Though I can't really say what Black Sparrow is up to these days.)

In John Cassavetes' movie Love Streams, Gena Rowlands says something about love, that she thinks love is in a continuous stream. I don't remember it exactly, but I'm kind of interested in thinking about that concept, so I should go and re-watch the movie and try to make something out of it. Anyway, until I do, I'll have to take the risk of muddling it all up and just say that comes close to how I've been feeling lately. I mean, just the expression itself—“Love is one continuous stream”—even if I'm misquoting, is fairly intriguing as a concept. And it comes close to how I've been feeling lately. It's a similar concept as in my song, “Open Your Heart”—and now I'm quoting myself, so I'm much more comfortable about it. The basic idea is, open your heart and people come right in—everyone comes right in. So it's a bit of a warning—that you have to be careful when you open your heart to anyone, because then it becomes vulnerable to everyone and everything. That can be, and hopefully is, a good thing, but it's also dangerous. It's living dangerously, on an emotionally heightened level, and that's what Cassavetes is all about. It's also to some extent what Heather's movie is about. It's called “What You Wish For,” and it's interesting, when I wrote an intro to “Open Your Heart” it had the line, “Be careful what you wish for,” which I wrote before she named the movie, but was not aware of it. It's an old saying, and old concept, but the most notable use of it as a quote I can recall is in Willy Wonka—memorable because it's said by Gene Wilder, but hell, now I can't remember the context!

Moving along, this brings me to the very subject of being in love with two people at the same time, which seems to have been a theme in my life up to this point; every time I've fallen in love with someone, there's been another kind of mirror-image falling in love. No, that's not it. There's another “crush” to deal with, even though I don't use that word anymore. I mean, it's just probably a neurotic thing—kind of about the fear of really falling in love with someone. It's kind of really not fair to the people who I'm seemingly just using—though, you know, they don't know I'm in love with them. Well, they might. But anyway, it's neurotic, sure, but also, it's maybe a product of opening my heart to someone else, and it's inevitable, unavoidable, at least with me.

Right now I'm sitting at the bar almost right next to the girl at the bar, who I will soon think of a name for, and I am close enough to reach over and touch her. It's between sets, and they're playing recorded music. It's Elton John singing “Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting,” one of the really sexy songs from my childhood, a song that really makes me feel like I could just spontaneously kiss someone. It's really an intense moment right here as I listen to this. What the hell am I doing? Just a few hours earlier, I was laying on a prop bed with a lot of prop clothes and mess, a few inches from Jordy, close enough that I could roll over and put my arm around her. Of course I never would, never could, never will, but just laying there, in maybe what there is no more of an intense and romantic setting, well, it's just the best really good I've felt in about the last few months at least. All this love and film and art makes me feel all the more still in love with Heather, which is my way of having a broken heart, which I do, but that's not the reason my heart is open. It's open because I let it be, but it helps that it is helped open by Heather's friendship and love, and Jordy's intense luminosity, and the smile of this girl at the bar, who sits like a... I don't know what... _______ (fill in later)—night after night, over here at the bar, making my life rich and warm in the present, with no future. But what the hell.