Not a concept we really question much, there are plenty of sayings that seem to capture the concept of ‘home’ and sum it all up neatly. ‘Home is where the heart is’ is a popular one, it makes a lot of sense because ‘home’ is a feeling AND a location, and that’s important, because if that above phrase is true than you could be at home wherever you were, as long as you travelled with your heart (proverbially speaking of course). But I think you can see or better yet, feel why it isn’t that simple, and why the words house and home seem so intertwined, even if they do denote different things. Someone made an interesting suggestion to me recently, he said that if you move away from ‘home’ and move anywhere else, just once even, suddenly you cease to be ‘at home’ anywhere ever again. Even, perhaps, if you were to return and try to make a home in the same place you started. Someone else said: home is where people understand you, someone else said: home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. And in so many ways it is possible to ‘go home again’ to the place where they have to take you in no matter what, but I question whether it can ever truly be completely ‘home’ again. The places you go, travel back with you, and you’re feeling about home is forever changed. Someone else said, home is where life’s undress rehearsal happens, where the conventions of the world are thrown off, and maybe that explains the locations of homes, and the possibility of having more than one home. But it still makes me wonder, if two homes, are the same as no home.
I was 8 years old when the Berlin wall came down. I remember sitting in my living room on Florence street glued to the TV, watching a crowd of people cheer for a man while he swung at the wall with a sledge hammer; I remember thinking in an 8 year old way ‘that’s pretty inefficient, they should use machines, it’ll be much quicker’. I did know what was going on and that this wall divided a city but I didn’t fully comprehend the significance of the event. I hadn’t lived through the heart of the cold war, I wasn’t alive during the Vietnam war, I couldn’t fully appreciate the historical importance, to me it was just a wall, a wall that was going to come down, and very slowly by the looks of it, I probably had to go to sleep soon, me and my G.I. Joe action figures had a big date planned for the next day.
There are other events I conjure up and marvel about what it must have been like to live through, the moon landing, MLK, JFK, etc etc. But now thanks to this year’s election, for the first time in my adult life I have something truly historic to tell my future children about. But when I think about the amazing progress America has made going from George Bush to Barack Obama, I have trouble thinking of it as simply historical because of his race; even if that is the reason he makes the history books. Because Barack Obama might be a whole lot more than just the best candidate this go round, he might go down as one of the great Presidents of all time. He may also turn out to be crap and end up doing fuck all but just by getting elected he’s already changed the game.
I’m sure you’ve all seen his election night speech so I thought I’d share his ‘More Perfect Union’ speech instead, which he gave in response to some negative press about his former pastor, for me this speech marked the first time I was moved by a politician:
I remember when I was in my senior year of high school and I went over to a friend’s place for the first time and found out he could play the guitar and pretty well; he was some somewhat of a hapless athlete and certainly ungifted in his studies so I was surprised to see his musical talent and if I’m honest, jealous because I wanted to have that skill. But alas it was too late, the time for learning musical instruments and languages had passed me by, if only I had picked it up earlier in life it would have been such a breeze.
Not long after that, while visiting my mother during a college holiday break I learned that she had taken up the violin. Here I was complaining to myself that it was too late to pick up the guitar and my mom was learning a new instrument without any care for that ‘I wish I had’ thinking. Someone once said, ‘It’s never too late to be what you were meant to be’ and it’s a lesson my mom taught me through example.
Now nearly ten years later and she’s taken up rowing, and I’m reminded again of how inspiring mom has been throughout the years. Perhaps I would never have learned to play the guitar, jumped out of a plane, never studied abroad or moved to California, never took a significant risk in my life if it wasn’t for her encouragement. I remember numerous times in my life when facing big decisions mom would tell me I could be and do anything I put my mind to, and when she said it I could see the belief in her eyes. And there formed the roots of my confidence, and I believe, the roots of my success, like they say: whether you believe to can do something or believe you can’t, you’re probably right. I hope this post doesn’t make dad jealous, he’ll get his own post, but this one is for mom, for being my constant example of bravery and optimism.
A lot of people ask me why I moved to London after I tell them I was previously living in Los Angeles, which to them sounds like a beachfront paradise. Well, an hour and a half by plane and I had my answer: for a chance to do things like spend a weekend in Munich for Oktoberfest, full of litres of beer, great Bavarian food and lots of really cool people, it’s up there amongst my fondest memories in recent history.
I read somewhere that the chemical reaction to doing/seeing something new and the chemical reaction to being in love are remarkably similar; perhaps it explains why so many people love to travel. For my part, pretty much all of my fondest memories relate to either love or travel, and some of the best of all, love while travelling.
With Rikin as my travel companion there wasn’t much love of the romantic sort this go round, but for the city of Munich, the people we met and the party they put on, I have lots of love for Oktoberfest.
Here’s a selection of pictures from the weekend, enjoy:
Here are some pictures from my Russian holiday at Aerograd Kolomna; it only took 3.5 hours to get from London to Moscow, and there I found a skydiving oasis… I ended up doing 34 jumps in 5 days, bringing my jump total to 141.
As a birthday present to myself I treated me to a weekend of all-expenses-paid skydiving at Empuriabrava, a large town on the Northeast coast of Spain. While there I hired a freefly coach to help teach me to fly on my head and transition between the 4 main body positions: belly-flying, back-flying, sit-flying and head down. He filmed me on jumps number 99 and 100 and now I present them to you:
Skydive #93 Hinton Airfield, Northamptonshire England May 11th 2008
I guess the funny thing about this video is that I’m both proud and embarrassed about it at the same time.
Proud because there are only a handful of people in the world who can do what I’m doing in this video. OK, maybe not a handful but a couple thousand people tops, in a world of 6.6 billion it seems like a handful. I’ll have you know that a lot of experienced skydivers never learn how to sitfly, it’s a pretty cool little skill I’m acquiring.
But embarrassed because I’m a joke compared to an experienced freeflyer, I drift here and there, slip in and out of the sitfly position, I move backwards when I mean to more forwards, I have all the skill of a first time skier navigating the bunny hill.
But pride wins out in the end, so I’m posting it. It wasn’t my best jump but someday I’ll be able to look back at myself ‘way back when’ and reminisce about how far I’ve come. Skydiving is nice like that, it’s always teaching you little lessons that apply to terra firma. This jump has reminded me that the journey really is everything, every time you jump out of a plane you invariably reach the ground; the destination is always the same, from novice to expert, from east to west, birth to death, but the journey, the journey makes all the difference.
By the way, I can do cool flips and stuff like that too…
