“Seasons of Love”
In what has to have been the most jam-packed weekend of attractions we’ve heretofore experienced in our adult lives, I began last Saturday morning hellaciously early by my standards, after having gotten home around midnight the night before, and headed out to the “No Kings” march with friends.
Getting on the Red Line North afterwards I caught this awesome duo singing at the State Street Red Line stop:
Heading back to our neighborhood, I met S. and we took a walk around the neighborhood, ending up at the annual Chicago Thai Fest for a fashion show, three masterful, soul-string-tugging Northern Thai traditional dance performances by Professor Waewdao Sirisook (@waewdaosirisook on Instagram):
and then an incredible vocal performance by Bobby Bank (@BankBobby on YouTube):
And on Sunday we went to Midsommarfest in Andersonville. Anthony Rapp lives in the neighborhood, and he put on an awesome show with just a pianist:
And immediately after that, we headed to the South Stage for Sixteen Candles!
2.
Music and dance have so much emotional resonance, especially as markers of time; I believe we’ve gone to see sixteen candles almost every Summer for about two decades.
As Anthony Rapp was singing “Losing my Religion” (his Rent audition song), and then “The Origin of Love” from Hedwig, “Falling Slowly” from the musical version of the movie “Once” and then “Seasons of Love” to close his show, he was singing the soundtrack of my late Gen X queer life, and songs that have inflected and defined the eighteen years S. and I have been together.
As I mentioned in the last essay, I lost another essential person in my life well before her time last week, and have been since ruminating on Toni Morrison’s conception of actual adulthood as a hard-won state of being, and understanding “Seasons of Love” as our inescapable reality seems helpful.
2.
We were recently ghosted by a friend of three or so years. It is a pattern with her, but I have a scrappy or perhaps just plain entitled tendency to think I, or we, can be exceptions to certain rules, because that is actually sometimes the case.
A close friend fell out of touch last Summer too, and has since happily returned to our lives, but this end of “season” feels more final.
3.
To quote Dubbing Wikia “Big Boobs Buster (巨乳ハンター Kyounyū Hantā) is a Japanese direct to video film based on the manga of the same name by Kōichirō Yasunaga.” I watched this camp masterpiece about a decade after its release, and when its heroine decides to halt her one woman war against her bustier classmates, her mother approvingly says: “Another season in her life has passed.”
Attachment as an impediment to happiness is a thorny concept for the Western mind to parse. Charlie Stewart-Brown wrote in 2023: “We can love people and things, but we should not allow them to define us, or pin all of our happiness, peace, strength or sense of self on that love. We can have people we love in our lives and have possessions, but not attach ourselves so tightly to them as if we own them.”
What this means in the scheme of our ever-evolving development and devolution throughout our life’s journey, is that impermanence is our only permanence.
In Abbey Lincoln’s vocal jazz masterpiece “Throw it Away,” when she sings about “the things I lost / the things I gave away.”
she expresses the same sentiment, in her own hard-won lyrics, of adulthood attained.
4.
I had a dream in which I was explaining my philosophy of “keep things moving” to the singer Madonna in the private dining room at one of the restaurants where I work.
And “keeping it moving” like trying to practice universal compassion, tikkun olam, or even just getting out of bed, is a day to day type of often enervating but also needed work.
When we lose someone who is very important to us not to death but to what feels more like entropy, the question of “what did I do?” is generally the first asked, and if someone stops reaching out in love and concern, it is inevitable and even necessary to look for possible reasons, but this work is only useful insofar as it points the way towards “how might I do better?” in future if a sundered bond might once again converge.
We all think we are operating in good faith. It’s kind of necessary to function, unless you are a sociopath, but every small choice we make in relation either binds or repulses. When making toast, no one sets out to burn the bread, but burnt toast is still a thing.
5.
Ideally, figuring out what specific behavior, on our own part, precipitated an unbearable tension between ourselves and a suddenly absent or aggrieved loved one, and actually cutting that shit out before asking for grace, is always the best and only course of action.
And sometimes a “Season of Love” is just at its end. S’s guitar teacher when he was young would use the phrase “Reason, Season, Purpose” to describe the essential impermanence of relationships.
If there is no graspable reason for an “uncoupling” you certainly don’t have to just “let it go,” when it comes to losing a connection that was important to you, but you do need to let it be, if any repair seems futile. The Buddhist teacher Kate Spina taught me that useful distinction.
All relationships change over time, and sometimes change right out of existence.
My favorite moment from the many seasons of Seinfeld is the episode where Elaine very seriously asks Jerry:
”Is it possible I'm not as attractive as I think I am?”
How we perceive ourselves is always predicated, to some degree, on how we want to perceive ourselves. The degree to which I think I’m very organized at work was put into doubt by my friend and colleague last week after I missed stocking a few things we needed for the weekend on delivery day. Does my having missed a few details make me a monster? No, but it sure shook my sense of self.
It’s easy to let the ego spiral when our foundational beliefs about how we exist in the world brushes up against our actual actions in real time, but information is information, and when someone tells you that your self-conception may not currently, particularly, align with your real life actions, it’s best to just listen, and make use of that information. I love the African-American axiom: “Know better, do better.”
That being said, sometimes lives just diverge. I saw a good friend from College a few years ago, and while all the warmth of our connection was still there, the degree to which we’ve chosen radically different adult existences made that time together feel like a loving, warm, but definitive goodbye.
6.
In the Stars song “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” there are these brilliant lines at the end: “There's one thing I want to say / so I'll be brave: / You were what I wanted / I gave what I gave / I'm not sorry I met you / I'm not sorry it's over / I'm not sorry there's nothing to save.”
Everything has its end, one way or another. So “how do you measure a life?”
In “Seasons of Love.”