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The Morning Wiz

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 19 February 2000

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DREAMS AND FALSE ALARMS

About this time each year -- usually sometime between Groundhog Day and my birthday in early March -- when the winds are unexpectedly warm, even though the sky is as grey as an adman's definition of Truth, a Joni Mitchell song, Amelia, starts running-'round inside my head.  I've pondered one verse from it, over and over, for many years now:

People won't tell you where they've gone; They'll tell you where to go. But till you get there yourself, You never really know. Where some have found their paradise, Others just come to harm Oh, Amelia, It was just a false alarm. Amelia by Joni Mitchell ©1976 & 1977 CRAZY CROW MUSIC

(I love the song so much I even named my old Martin D-28 guitar Amelia and I sing Amelia to Amelia everytime something, usually related to matters of the heart, goes wrong ... but I digress.)

While I can definitely relate to what Joni is saying; having spent a considerable chunk of my years seeking my paradise in the fame and fortune associated with the entertainment industry, I'm becoming convinced that, somewhere, there really is a non-relative form of paradise -- one that we can all agree upon, someday, because it is greater than we are and it incorporates and enfolds each and every one of us.  I'll leave it to the artists and prophets to give us the details, but it is out there -- or in here -- and consciously or unconsciously we each spend an entire lifetime seeking it.

I'd also submit that, often as not, the paradise on which we set our sights isn't really paradise at all.  Joni's song goes-on to lament poor, mythological "...Icarus ascending on beautiful, foolish arms."  You remember Icarus.  He flew too close to the sun.  The binding wax which held his wings together melted and he plunged to his death in the ocean while his father, horrified, watched helplessly.  Had Icarus, in fact, reached the sun, I'm afraid he wouldn't have fared any better -- much worse, actually, if you subscribe to the 'drowning is better than burning' philosophy, as I do.

Icarus and I have a lot in common.  All my life, the lure of the Hollywood lifestyle drew me like a moth to an engraved silver cigarette lighter.  I finally got my shot at it two years ago: got myself a house in Woodland Hills; later, a condo on the beach in Malibu.  I started living large, going to parties and events where I'd get myself seen, soaring ever-closer to what I was certain had to be paradise.

Fortunately, I never made it -- not sour grapes, just an admission that I would have been one of those who in that particular "paradise" would ultimately have come to harm.  As it was, I did get singed, more than a bit.

If there is one thing that has kept me from the same fate as Icarus, it's probably that every time I've  started flying too high, a storm comes up and forces me to set my feet back on solid ground.  Most recently, it was the collapse of my employer's entertainment division.  I survived.  Now, that's not nearly as romantic a concept as dying in pursuit of my dreams, as did Icarus and lots of other celebrities, but it does mean that I've been able to stick around and tinker with my dreams a bit more; to see if I can eliminate some design flaw (or twelve) in my "wings" that I may have overlooked along the way.

So, when the sky is a darkening, dismal grey; when Amelia is crooning to me that it's all just a false alarm; when I awake and (like Bill Murray) have to face yet another Groundhog Day in an eternity of Groundhog Days: something else whispers, "Thank God for the storms of life!"

And so I do just that.

-wiz
19 February 2000

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