Till The Wheels Fall Off Quotes

Have I been a hostage to the impossibly happy ten-year-old boy I once was?

Whatever you do in life, do it to the best of your ability. That inner voice inside of you, trust it… it’s your intuition. It will guide you in the right direction. Try to be positive, ignore negativity, but if you see somethin’ ain’t right, that somethin’ is goin’ wrong, speak up. Live your life to the fullest! Cherish it… respect it. Live it till the wheels fall off! Write things down! Take pictures, pick roses with the thorns still attached so you can feel pain and see beauty all at one time… Eat chocolate cake ’till you’re sick, travel abroad, get to know folks who are totally different from you. Respect one another, too. Be the change you wanna see in others. Drink Gin Fizz and white wine with strawberries but most of all, the most important of all, ladies and gentlemen… don’t ever be afraid to fall in love…

But in the end, always, you become a hostage to who you are, to what you want or what you can’t say, to what fascinates you, what breaks you down and holds you under; the sense (or nonsense) you feel compelled to build, the truth or meaning you try so desperately to find.

that’s how you get caught up and swept away; you follow the forks and the tangents, scour the liner notes and credits like an atlas, and in this way every new record you discover and love can lead you in a host of new directions.

Maybe you look in the mirror first thing in the morning or when you're in the bathroom at a gas station, or maybe you're on a first date or at a business meeting that's going poorly, and you sort of squint at your reflection and turn your head back and forth, appraising, trying to look at yourself from some remove, as gauzy and filtered as possible, but you can't stand it, can't do it, don't have it in you to really see yourself, let alone to see the person the rest of the world sees when they look at you. At some point you maybe learn to recognize you're not that guy the world sees, that you're something less, or something more, or just something else. And maybe life is learning to make your peace with that.

That's the thing about photographs. If you really look at them hard enough and long enough, your imagnation or your memory starts to animate them. You hear voices, traffic, dogs barking, a door slam. The world of that moment was moving. Other things were going on outside the frame of each individual picture. An instant earlier or later, and you'd be looking at a different picture. Things were happening when the photographer froze these moments. They're a part of something, right? A life, an experience, a place in time. If a song is like a little stretch of a river, a photograph is more like a boat tied off at a dock, but your imagination and your memory can untie the boat and put it back in the river, make it move. You can take it down the river or back up the river.

There are, of course, a million tiny and ridiculous ways a person can get sidetracked and carried away off the main trail. But in the end, always, you become a hostage to who you are, to what you want or what you can't say, to what fascinates you, what breaks you down and holds you under; the sense (or nonsense) you feel compelled to build, the truth or meaning you try so desperately to find.

In my longest, darkest nights I like to think I know who I am, or at least that I know how much fractious company I keep, how crowded it is. I know I contain multitudes. I also know it would be the greatest and most crippling of misfortunes to have even the briefest, punishing glimpse into how I'm truly seen by other people- a cruel remark overheard from the next room, a retributive slip of brutal honesty, a vengeful snipe from a complete stranger on a crowded sidewalk. I don't believe I could bear that sort of knowledge, and I'm sure that has a lot to do with why I've always been so hesitant to allow other people to know me.

I'd sit beside him at the white table, and together we would stare into the photographs of Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus. "This is all America," Greenland would say, whispering excitedly in a rare display of respect for decorum. "We need a car, Corn Dog. We have to go out there and see some of this stuff and some of these people. This is where all your music comes from.

I started to associate my favorite albums and songs with particular photographers and images. In a weird way, spending so much time looking through those books- usually while listening to music on my Walkman- expanded my imagination in a way all the books I read growing up never did. I could study the people and places in the pictures and feel as if I'd been someplace else. Those books were also an education in looking, in how to really see the world around me. It seems obvious now, but I think I went through life looking straight ahead and trying to pay attention to what the world wanted me to pay attention to, and I noticed that most of the photos that really fascinated me were of things in the margins or peripheries, things you had to actually look around to see.