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.