So, I’m listening to this interview, and Rick Rubin says “I believe in everything.” You can hear it in his voice, like leaves moving in the air. All that time spent sitting, quiet, letting his hair grow. He wants to disappear, for his work to be invisible. I’m a crypt too. It’s an elegant teacher. Just don’t try to convince me that every thing works for everyone—you’ll only white-wig me that you’re a scepter. That’s exactly why there are so many things—because there are so many of us.
I can tell you one thing—I’m in love with everything. That’s every thing, not every one. I’m no fool—I’m in love with my fuckin’ running shoes. You already know I’m in love with coffee. I’m in love with the paper bag full of dates and cashews in my orange running pack. I’m in love with my van. I’m in love with the sun coming in the window this morning, and the trees and light outside the window, and how I fixed the oven in that old stove. I scrubbed the white enamel with steel wool, and then I re-lit the pilot light. The stove sat there in the kitchen for three days, and the oven still refused to fire, and then
(<eye>) four-hundred
o pen ed
teh [oven] and re mov ed / door /
hte plate & tu r n ed
eht to & (knob)
it
LIT
bottom You think I fixed it, right? I did, I fixed the oven. You think I fixed that thing with love? You think I fixed it by turning it on? I fixed it by waiting. You want to talk about twelve steps? I’ll give you the first test, but you’re not ready for the other nine. That man’s hat, it’s on my side, it wants to work. Give it an exit sign and it knows what to do—it burns. It’s not made of anything that can break—not like my so-called resolve, my resistance—or my heart. After all this time, and the evidence, it’d be easy to conclude that I’d been trying to break it—although that’s not what I was aiming for. And maybe that’s just it—that in my sick-smelling and half-willed unconsciousness, that in my not giving it my eye-to-eye, that I tread upon and forever damaged that dense, double-thumping, blood-purple fist of flesh. We speak as if that organ were the source—but to me it seems that it’s what runs between the seams, and what’s eighty-five percent of dreams—that it’s the weight of what still can’t be seen—that seems likely to be love.
Let’s say we’ve just arrived amongst the rings of Saturn. Cold blocks of asteroids and ice, drifted up and assembled by gravity itself, and lit by the distant glow of Earth’s same sun. Even here, lonely space is
FULL
STORIES of
forget that we
never can
me STORIES that showed
EVERYTHING was when I
young
empty
SPACE
is FULL
even
of STORIES and those stories, love—those are love, the stories of our youth, spread out to the stars, together or apart, each one part of everything. Each some thing and each something to believe in. Every thing. Everything. Everything.