Reflections on the eyes of the monkey and the ears of the hyper-bat on my 52nd birthday

I’m 52 today. I don’t feel old. And I don’t know why in all honesty. When I look back, it seems like I’ve been alive for a long, long ass time. I’ve seen some super gnarly shit. Long ago I learned the road through hard times is the hard road, and that might be why I keep entering wide pastures of life. I’m in one right now. Quarantine or no, the last few years have been increasingly better, and I’ve had a great deal of fun in life already. These are interesting times. 35 years or so ago, me and many of my chums set out down a mysterious highway with no rest stops and no speed limit, and while many of them died, the survivors became curiously good at being alive. Obvious. But interesting. After 50 is when we get to enjoy this.

Once, I looked into the eyes of a small monkey at the zoo. It’s hard to describe the haunting things I saw there, but I’ll try now to illustrate a point. His eyes were a shade of brown you don’t see in human eyes, a golden root beer, and there was somebody home in there. Placid, but just below the surface I could see the fat serpent swallowing the moon. I imagined I could see some hint of his behavioral coding, that he was connected to his history at every moment, that this monkey was in fact the tip of a temporal mountain that spread backward through time until at its ancestral base there was all of proto-monkeydom. Later, when I envisioned that money’s eyes in my mind, I saw other things. It was all my imagination, not in this monkey. What I saw, in truth, were facets of myself. That thought completed a metaphor that took two decades to construct. As I changed, I saw different things. I will interpret things differently in the future if I continue changing, as I will. I should be careful to study the right things because everything I internalize will be part of that change. I should also be careful not to ignore certain things, the other side of the same coin. In any case, I can still close my eyes and see the monkey’s eyes.

I think about bats now more than I should, but it passes the time. Imagine- a bat enters a cave. CLICK. He hears in the echo the contour of the walls. Imagine if the bat could hear twice as well. Then escalate from there. The grains of sand become evident. Then the topography of spores. Further. The molecules in a falling drop of water. Now imagine the hyper-bat left the cave and faced outward. CLICK. Escalate. That bat would soon be able to read the writing on the surface of a piece of paper on the far side of the world. This is my favorite metaphor for thought. I trade ideas for currency, and the inside of my head is a loud place. I have to listen closely, and the older I get, the better my hearing becomes.

The eyes of the monkey. The ears of the hyper-bat. We should all have thoughts like these. What is a life well lived? I can sometimes hear echoes of the answer, see reflections of it. It has to do with highs and lows, twists and turns, miles beyond measure, movement. I’ve met many guys and after a moment had the curious understanding that I was in the company of a mama’s boy who would go from birth to death without significant pain or turbulence, without ecstasy, without moments of earnest confusion that give rise to at least a measure of what comes from trying to understand anything vast, and so pass from this earth like a cow’s grassy burp gusted into a gentle breeze. As luck would have it, I am not that guy. I take no credit for this. The cosmos and entropy picked my starting point in life, as it did yours. It is better to be one who thinks of monkeys and bats. I have paid for the privilege.

There were good players on the field in my 52nd year. My sweetheart fiance Sylvia is the most positive, bubbly, incredibly kind woman. She likes everyone, but she loves me with all of her great big heart. She tells me so all the time, and I believe her. My Kill Bill agent Stuart Miller, at the very end of the year, in a final feat of sorcery, introduced me to a producer I can’t help but greatly admire. Stu also sent me a miniature Cadillac for my birthday. Thanks bro. My good friends, most of whom forgot my birthday again, are a fine pack of rascals. I feel… Lucky.

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