Last night's dream: a music conservatory, walking between buildings in rainy autumn weather – I am a student working on my technique, talking with others – serious, committed and reasonable, as I never actually was in school... a surprisingly detailed, and strange, setting. Like another life, one that might have happened.
Today I was working, yet again, on the film scores chapter of my book on music and AIDS. The Velocity of Gary, a surprisingly inept but colorful translation of a play to the screen, which involved a number of fairly famous actors – a fragmented (and sometimes quite striking) view of a scruffy street life in downtown New York, chaotically strewn with hustlers and drag queens. Another possible life, filled with passion and despair.
Although I frequently (and while, unfortunately, whining too much) imagine various aspects of my life having gone differently, it is strange to imagine really huge dislocations: what if everything were different – what if I'd gone off on a sharp angle at some early stage, such that not a soul I've known would be a part of my life, not a cityscape I've loved would have been a setting for me, nor any of my smaller goals or experiences or homes... what then? What if I were entirely unrecognizable to myself?
It is amazing to think of – and not entirely improbable: more than most, I have blundered through my life, through many places and situations, without a clear sense of where I was going or how to get there. A few sharp turns, no sharper than the turns that I have actually made, could have landed me in vastly different settings, in worlds that would be utterly other.
I can't help wondering: and – would that have been better?....
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