D.C. Pierson's Blog

One morning when I was fifteen, after I’d been up all night because it was summer vacation, I decided to experiment momentarily with what it might be like not to believe in God. I sat at the kitchen table and looked out the back window of our house, and the fleeting euphoria of staying up all night combined with our nice backyard bathed in nice sunrise-y light combined with the thought that all this might be possible without some omniscient universal consciousness who could loom up in my mind and judge me for watching scrambled porn channels to give me something like a religious experience, or the negative image of one, with all the colors reversed like the porn on the scrambled channels, but the same effect.

I felt emboldened by my newfound atheism so when my dad came out to get ready for work I told him about it.

“An atheist, huh?” he said. “I could understand being agnostic. But atheism… I dunno.” There was very little judgement in his voice. It was more like I had made a choice of car color he was pretty sure I’d come to regret later but hey, it felt flashy for now so more power to me and maybe I’d like it forever as much as I did the day I took it off the lot. 

Now it is a little more than seventeen years later and I want to say to him, Are you happy now, you bastard, you Joni Mitchell superfan, you endurer of tremendous loss who somehow kept us all more or less on the road, you early adopter, you excellent text messenger, you with the running joke of answering ‘older than dirt’ when asked how old you were turning on your birthday even though I think you might have been the age I am now when I was first old enough to voice the set-up to the joke, you gangly medium-long-haired teen in pictures we go through as we are cleaning out the garage, you quiet example, you reason I now resent every paunchy golf-shirted male baby boomer easing into retirement and reminiscing over rock’s lost ubiquity and undiminished superiority because you earned your place among their circle of folding chairs at the tailgate but you will not be joining, you easiest person for me to find a gift for, you pile of ashes in a box on my stepmom’s dresser, you battery of optimism that never dipped below ninety-eight percent, you who we still say goodnight to when the lights in what was your home go out cued by timers you set, you apparently actually good golfer? I’m pretty sure I’m an agnostic, and possibly more, and all for the corniest and least philosophical of reasons: the off-chance of seeing you again.

Last year my writing partners Dan Meggie and I started shadowing this high school robotics team as part of research for a movie. The project ultimately dissolved and we had a real “wait a minute… this was something we were doing for ourselves… now it’s something that we’re doing to help… the youth?” sort of Mighty Ducks moment. Anyway, it’s been insanely rewarding to help the kids make videos. They’re smart and earnest and make me less freaked out about the future.

Their league has a (wonderfully endearingly dorky) song parody competition and our team’s video “MY BOT” is in the semi-finals. Only three percent separate us and the next closest video so if you have a Twitter account, please vote for “MY BOT” and help ‘em out. Only 24 hours left and it’s gonna be a squeaker so your vote would help immensely.

Vote it up:

https://twitter.com/FIRSTweets/status/809760512430981120

Sure, it’s depressing to think of all the music you’d love if you heard but you’ll never hear, but on the other hand, think of all the music you’d hate that you’ll never hear!

The relief the terminal eavesdropper dining alone feels when the men who just got seated next to him at the sushi bar turn out not to speak English.

Apparently you can write NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS on mail addressed to people who used to live in your apartment unit but don’t anymore, and drop it back in a mailbox. I thought you were just supposed to hang onto it and let it weigh on you, like everything else.

This is a small David Bowie thing meant to be another David Bowie thing in the rapidly expanding star-cloud of David Bowie things.

Early on in college I babysat in Brooklyn. My first day babysitting a six-year-old named Gabe, we were sitting and coloring. I was probably thinking something about how pure and child-like coloring was, and how it was just a ton like improv, a thing I was learning and just as quickly becoming insufferable about at the time.

After a long time of us both being quiet, Gabe asked, “Who’s your favorite singer?”

“Elvis Costello,” I said, doing the most important thing you can do day one of a new babysitting job: establishing hipster cred. “Who’s yours?”

“DAVID BOWIE!” Gabe said.

Outcooled by a 6 year old. Truly this was Brooklyn.

Gabe hopped off the stool and returned to the kitchen counter seconds later where we were coloring with a big floppy black CD binder. In it were all the 70’s Bowie albums.

Gabe told me, “This is mine.”

I said, and meant, that this possession of his was awesome. We put on Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.

As it played and we kept coloring, I thought, Oh, of course a six year old would like David Bowie. It’s so theatrical and visual, even just on record. At a time in your life when your imagination is as overpowered as it’s ever going to be, Bowie’s music would be like this audio accelerant.

Sometimes when I’m listening to music and doing a certain kind of task, this space opens up in my brain between the two things. It feels like a physical space, a room or something. Sometimes it’s an imaginary place, sometimes it’s a hallway in my high school. It’s weird and I don’t know why it happens. It happened that day because of course it did. And listening through the ears of a six-year-old, that space seemed wider than it ever had before.

That’s where David Bowie lives. He lives in a space in your head that is sometimes memory and sometimes completely made-up, a space that opens up between his music and you drawing, between him expressing himself and you expressing yourself. He doesn’t stop inside your head. He continues directly through you.

My girlfriend was pushing this infant she babysits in a stroller in the park, and I met up with them so she could hand off our house keys. I walked with them for a little while along the lake.

We passed by a friend of mine, but I didn’t notice him until it was too late to do anything but wave.

That friend, who I don’t see very often, probably thinks we have a baby now.

Why hasn’t he sent us presents yet?

A few years ago, Dan Eckman and Meggie McFadden from DERRICK and I started developing my first book, THE BOY WHO COULDN’T SLEEP AND NEVER HAD TO, as a feature film. 

Today we’re debuting this proof-of-concept short to get people excited and attract financing, so if you like it, please share it all over the dang place.

I teach these writing classes and I always feel obnoxious promoting them but kids gotta eat, y’know? (Kids in this case equals cats.) Anyway, tomorrow night (Wednesday Jan. 21st) I start a solo-show class, so if you are looking to create a live show that’s all you, this class will help get you there. Check it out. Two slots left. Join us.

http://writingpad.com/one-person-show-workshop-in-los-ange…/

And here are the cats your participation in this class will help feed: 

I was walking last night and it was beautiful outside. The wind had kicked up some wonderful distillation of everything great about being outdoors at night.

When I lived in New York it was standard operating procedure for me to look up at nice apartments and think about how great the lives of the people living there must be (not necessarily more stable, but certainly sexier and more interesting), and I do a similar thing in LA, but now it has less to do with how much better their lives are per se, but more just how different they are. The way you step into someone’s house or apartment for the first time, and it smells very distinct, and there’s a design scheme working, and you think, they’ve really got a whole thing going, haven’t they?

I generate all that when I look over at a nice little house set back behind some hedges, architecturally specific windows glowing away in the middle of a rich and emotionally loaded darkness. 

My life, on the whole, is very good, and I realized at some point that the longing I have when I walk around and look at nice houses or apartments has less to do with status envy and more to do with mortality. I’m never going to be anybody who lives in that house or apartment, in the little world (that probably bears little to no resemblance to the actual one) I’ve auto-spawned in my brain in a millisecond. I would like to be. There’s that Ace Of Base song “Beautiful Life” where she said “I just want to be anybody,” and once in a grocery store I misheard it as “I just want to be everybody,” and I thought, that’s me.

I just want to be everybody.

And when I was walking last night, on a street that’s full of beautiful little houses and unique and wonderful-to-look-at apartment buildings (not too far from my house, because as I said, my life is very good) I thought, you know, once I would’ve looked at that house and thought, I wish I live there.

And my brain responded: You do live there.

It was a corny moment of (unearned) universal consciousness, but I was made very happy by it for minutes afterward, thinking, I live there! And there! And there! I drive that car and that car and that one! That’s my tree! That is MY outdoor cat! Look at all the wonderful places I live! I AM everybody! When I go to the grocery store later I will see a bunch of the other people I am, and it will be great!

And it was. It was a heady, silly couple of minutes, but it felt like a night and a place to let myself think heady silly things, things that I actually do kind of find emotionally resonant, but things you can also find yourself being self-deprecating about in the harsh, irony-drenched light of day. 

But there I was, walking up this nice street on a night that was the best kind of night, dark and cold and windy but friendly instead of scary, and I knew I was everybody.

Then I tripped.

It was the really dumb kind of tripping, where you land odd on an irregular piece of sidewalk, and you overcorrect to catch yourself, and you must look really idiotic from a passing car. 

And I felt extra-idiotic, and laughed at myself, because I thought, you can catch all these great big feelings from the evening air and the wind and the momentum that comes from walking fast, and you can feel at one with the universe, but you’re still you, and you still trip, honestly, like every tenth step.

And then I realized: I didn’t trip.

We all tripped.

You hear that? You tripped. You all tripped last night on the street.

You fucking klutzes.