A Pirate Grows in Brooklyn

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Originally uploaded by the once and future dr.science.

Today I could be found, for a time, at a Mahayana Buddhist temple, the interior of which was decorated, in part, with neon lights and an enormous gold Buddha. This is not the point of the story for which I am posting, nor is it even really an important part of that story, but it's a detail I feel sets nicely the tone of a meditative, slightly bizarre, and decidedly american experience I had this warm Thursday.
A little backstory: The freedom that comes with warm weather exists as an almost tangible image in my mind. It is the beginning of warm weather in the year I worked for Matrix, and I'm racing down Fort Street in a rickety Ford Festiva with Adam T., fresh out of juvenile detention, riding in the passenger seat. He has insisted that the windows be rolled down, and is singing at the top of his lungs to the same one song we listen to whenever he is in my car. It is almost always "I wanna be a baller" by Little Troy (and about ten other guys are on that track, I think, and it's actually a very BAD song). We enjoy the ride at our own pace.
That song is about celebrating what you have but recognizing that "there's gotta be a better way." Adam and I were both at the same place in our lives, I think, as we were both trying to find a better way to do what we wanted to, whether it was transforming the world with theatre or just making it out of that neighborhood alive. We knew there had to be a better way than living in a post-industrial wasteland or banging your head against the same problems for months on end. I think we also tried to carve out some fun in the face of it all.
So today I had to try to pull myself out from under a huge pile of work, including listening to several hours' worth of oral histories collected for this group project I'm working on. I walk to relieve stress, and I walked as I listened to those histories, thanks to the iPod. By the time I got done with what I had to listen to, I had walked all over brooklyn and was halfway across the manhattan bridge.
I wasn't feeling any less stressed out, though, and lately I've been getting disheartened by finding more problems than solutions, more work than results. So I kept walking.
And I'm sure you can guess what happened. It's cliche, I'm know, but "I wanna be a baller" came on when I set the iPod to play randomly. And no, none of my problems went away and nothing actually got better, but at least I found myself having fun with that lamentable state of things and enjoying the warm weather, and checking out new parts of the city. If I had windows, I would have rolled them down.
So if you saw a pirate walking around brooklyn and manhattan today, belting out terrible lyrics like "i wanna be a baller, shot caller, twenty-inch blades, on the impala," yeah...that was me.