Just staying alive seems so random. I remember at 16-years-old driving my parents van after drinking nearly a full bottle of Southern Comfort. Three or maybe four of my friends were in the car. Pretty scary stuff actually as I drove down a narrow street taking off side view mirrors on stationary cars. Finally, the police pulled me over and asked a friend, not as drunk but pretty toasty, to drive the gang home. Meanwhile they took me to a drying out cell in the small downtown Monterey jail. I remember placing my feet on the cold cement floor hoping they wouldn’t call my parents, which of course they did. Arrested that early was perhaps an early warning sign I suppose of troubled drinking to follow. Who knows what life turns I would have had if somebody had helped me. Nobody did and so today at 44-years-old and 28 years later, I’m simply grateful for healthy living, the random life given me.
So many are not so lucky. Sitting in an AA meeting the other night, I listened as a young woman teared up while telling the story of her San Francisco State friend who found six months of earnest sobriety at 19. Family and friends celebrated the change he was able to make. Then last weekend while driving to Chico, CA he died in a random car accident. Today in class a young student shared with the group that she knew this student too. Many say he had an amazing spirit. Another student in this class recounted a different anecdote about another 19-year-old who drank too much, passed out on railroad tracks in the East Bay, and met his fate there. Why is one person taken and not another? Simply eerie to ponder the random toss of the dice. My rolls have sure come up lucky so far.
Or consider how randomly forces of human nature take shape. With a friend tonight, I went to see “Coco Before Chanel,” a film with beautiful cinematography, telling the tale of a young girl orphaned at 10-years-old only to evolve into one of fashion’s revolutionary influences. She seemed to work her loss, her abandonment, into frenzied ambition. In the film’s narrative you watch and listen to her plaintive urgent whisper: Please see me now. No one left me, right? My work is me and so I’m visible, yes? Even in later life, Coco suffered the loss of her major adult love to a random fatal car accident. After his death, she had several affairs, but never married a person–instead forging a lifelong commitment to her career. Come to think of it, her signature fragrance Chanel No. 5 smells playfully sweet, yes, but also sad, a touch forlorn. Funny how loss can motivate the creative impulse, imploring the art medium–whether painting, fashion, cinema or many others–to represent tolerable presence while underneath so much absence is felt.
