A Cultural Exchange

Waking up this morning on the foggy beach just outside the city. I wondered if Dunedin was the affordable Santa Cruz and definitely part of me is sad to leave.

I watched a lone surfer in waves bigger than I would dare to attempt. The constant struggle between being one with nature, fighting against nature, harnessing the power of nature, and being totally annihilated by a wave twice your height. It does seem things tend towards both chaos and equilibrium. Enjoy being alive for this beautiful moment in time.

It’s my last morning camping and I just had a really amazing cultural exchange with a local. For the sake of this blog, I’ll call her Sophie.

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The night before,

we drove up to the top of a hill, sat beneath a radio tower, and listened to Johnny Blue Skies (aka Sturgill Simpson) sing about wanting to “Make America Fuk Again”. We chastely held hands and watched the sun set.

She said it was funny to her that I traveled from far away to visit here as an exotic vacation and it was just where she lived. The clouds turned orange purple and merged into the ocean. You could see the city near the bay as the distant mountains were layered shadows and fog.

We say good bye really expecting to never see each other again this time.

Right as I’m queuing up some music to drive to the beach campsite, she says “hey I think I’ve got a flat battery”. Luckily, I’m carrying jumper cables in my van and it’s not a big deal. We take the time to once more chastely hold hands, then her car engine starts and we go our separate ways into the night.

I hadn’t quite spent all the money that I don’t have, and decide to spring for some Thai food instead of cooking dinner. I contemplate the beautiful, yet fleeting, nature of it all and other platitudes.

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She had liked my Hinge profile when I was working in Cromwell, and said to let her know when I was actually in Dunedin. Here I was in Dunedin, during the Architecture and Design film festival.

We drank gin and tonics, ate popcorn, and watched a documentary about a hippie commune started around a music festival successfully build a community housing project in Denmark. Truly inspiring. Because the festival was sponsored by a paint company, we also got tickets to get free paint samples, so we could perhaps choose the color of our own hippy commune housing project one day.

We stayed up most of that night chastely holding hands, which naturally brought up the topic of tattoos. She had one poetically inspired by her grandmas pottery, and correctly noticed that I had none.

I do have several ideas for tattoos but have yet to pull the trigger.

I even had the idea of getting a line art drawing of mountains to symbolize my time spent in New Zealand, but then walked past the window of a tattoo shop in Queenstown that had 6 different designs for line art drawings of mountains. Naturally I hated them all, realized I wasn’t that original, and remained a tattoo virgin.

I really think if I was to get it done my first tattoo would be a jewish star with a Music note inside on my back. Being half Jewish on my dad’s side, with it being a religion that strictly follows the maternal line, I would have been killed by the Nazis (who tattooed numbers on all jews in contraction camps) but not accepted into the most religious sects of judiusm (where tattoos are forbidden). That along with the music note are core identities of mine that I wrestle with, but placing it over my heart on my back would symbolize where I come from while recognizing that the future is in front of me and I can forge new identities on any given day.

I would also love to get a tattoo of a leaf on my arm for photosynthesis.

What do I see on Sophie’s bedside table but a copy of The Alchemist. I was literally just 2 days into my own reread of the book.

Freshman year of highschool, I was assigned the alchemist as mandatory reading for honors English. I had recently been bar mitzvahed semi against my will, and was probably in the most atheist period of my life. I would soon discover that all the cool kids were agnostic and would arrive at the pearly gates of purgatory saying “I don’t care if you let me in”. I think was a little put off by the godly nature of The Alchemist.

I do remember being pretty down with the overall story as the main character goes on his great adventure, but definitely thinking the ending was bullshit. I don’t recall the details, but have a feeling, that I’ll like the ending now, as I’m winding down my own traveling in this period of my life. for whatever reason felt called to reread it. I tell her she should call me when she finishes it.

In the morning, she dropped me at a coffee shop on her way to work, and I accidentally, maybe on purpose, left the Johnny Blue Skies (aka Sturgill Simpson) CD I had just bought in her car. She had a CD player, and I didn’t, so I was fine with the idea of never getting it back.

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After watching the surfer a few minutes, I notice some slightly less intimidating waves breaking a little closer to shore. I feel a gentle insanity take over, decide I better wetsuit up, and paddle out myself.

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PS I’ve been working on several demos and definitely have a record coming this fall, but I don’t feel compelled to share any more of them just yet. In the meantime, I’ll link one from my last record that feels somewhat fitting to the content above.