The goal in life is to discover you’ve always been where you were supposed to be. I believe that. Especially now. This is where I’m supposed to be. This is the right place to start writing again. Or blogging. I guess I’ll discover the difference soon enough. I open the Borges I bought at City Lights last night and read: A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. Seriously, didn’t I just say the same? These things happen all the time and the more they happen, the more likely they are to happen. Serendipity. Synchronicity. 

I’m sitting at an outdoor table at The Blue Danube coffee house. Clement Street, San Francisco. I’m reading a Film Comment interview with Jarmusch about The Limits of Control and have just picked up a copy of After Dark by Haruki Murakami at the Green Apple bookstore down the block. Jarmusch is talking about The Limits of Control being influenced by the poetry of Neruda and I’m reminded of Pablo writing, “I’m tired of being a man.” This reminds me of Bill Murray for some reason, Broken Flowers and Lost in Translation perhaps. I read further that Jarmusch’s latest story is centered around movies, music, science, Bohemians, drugs, and Bill Murray. This reminds me of where I am. Vertigo, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Stanford, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Kesey, Haight Ashbury. You can’t be in San Francisco and not be reminded of all of that. I look over to a Thai restaurant called the Burma Superstar, an apparently infamous culinary vortex, the lineups will start later that afternoon, and a girl sits down beside me. She stirs her coffee as her companion, the Japanese guy from Mystery Train, I swear that’s true!, smokes a cigarette and paces in front of her. Their dialogue goes something like this:

How long?
What? How long is what?
You and me, this.
This? Meeting for coffee, you and me?
6 years?
At least 7.
No way. 7?
I’m 35.
I’m 36.
We’re old.
You’re old.

He smokes and poses. She plays with her hair. Blonde. A California blonde via Detroit we find out. No one is from here. No one has parents here. No one has children. They couldn’t possibly talk this way without an audience. They’ve scanned my props and have generated their own Murakami Jarmuschian postures. I’m cast as their writer/director and the film will change when I leave. Laundry, finances, something less stylized, less written, less rehearsed. I pack up my sources and moving on can feel their postures sag. But none of this is likely true, they are as real as they’ve ever been. This is how they really talk. Did they become this way through films and books? Or did Jarmusch and Murakami create their cinematic poems from sitting at coffee shops not unlike this one? Or is it both? And does it matter? I think this blog might be pointed in the direction of deciphering that equation. My quest is to explore the question of, Are You Experienced, and decide who is and who isn’t. I was 12 when the album came out and there was no question of my namesake being experienced. And interesting that there was no question mark on the album cover. I wonder that if you could say, Are you experienced, and not think of it as a question, then maybe you are. So to the present where I recognize Jarmusch and Murakami as being experienced and wonder about their coffee shop offspring. Who is closest to the source?