That's How the Light Gets In

On South Beach, everything is beautiful and perfect all the time. 

The world's hippest lighthouse,
South Pointe Park @
Miami Beach

Because it seems that way. The weather's so good that when it dips below 70, the weathermen react the way they do in Detroit when it snows 14 inches. And I've never been in a town where there's such an attention to design in the DNA of the city itself. You couldn't possibly build your new office as a squatty little brick building, because you'd be laughed out of town. I can take pictures that make me look like a professional photographer with no effort at all because there are vistas to do it simply everywhere, literally all the time. The beauty per capita is through the roof, you should have bought a long time ago, got in on the ground floor. The shops are beautiful, the bars with their outdoor seating that consists of big loungy pillows and wicker swings are beautiful, the water, the breeze, the cruise ships leaving port at sunset Sunday, they're all just beautiful, the long-legged Colombian, Cuban, Italian and American women are beautiful, everything is just fucking beautiful. 

Which is why Cynical Joe just wants to distrust the crap out of it.

Because it's just not the nature of the world to be that way. Beauty exists because there is a thing that we can look at and say "That is not beautiful." Nothing is this good all the time.

But... what if it is...? For us, I mean.

We live close to the touristy part of town, so we're mistaken for tourists all the time. Which I've finally come to realize, we are. We are cherry-picking what we want from a city, staying in our ~$60/night "hotel," and getting exactly what we want from this town. And the next one. And the next one. Until we don't. 

Hipster Santa: Still an Epic Fail
(But a good cartoon: gricklethings.blogspot.com)

I am nostalgic for Portland, it's true. I worked a week there recently and the danger of just being in town for a while was apparent. It's Christmas, the big tree on Pioneer Courthouse Square was making me long for Hipster Santa, and all the stuff that annoyed me about P-town (The indifferent service that is somehow viewed as a Mark of Distinction by the servers who give it to you; The long slow Chinese water torture that is a Portland winter, etc etc blah blah blah) was somehow a distant memory. That's why they tell ya don't ever live somewhere when you've only been there on vacation. 

Knowing all that, the smell of the pine trees that just hangs in the air as a part of life there just overwhelmed me. I lived there 5+ years and it never got old, never ceased to be fascinating to me to step outside and realize how close to all this primal beauty you were all the damn time, to be able to go to Mount Tabor in the cold morning air and walk around realizing to yourself "I'm on top of a goddamn volcano." I was quite ready to just start campaigning with Monica for us to go back to Portland when our lease runs out here in May. But then over drinks, one of my friends said "Yeah, it's easy to come back here, you can come back anytime and it'll be pretty much the same," and in terms of the town itself, I bought in to that. I believe it enough that in an instant, it changed my thinking about coming back immediately. And it let me relax into Miami so far and see the fun in it, in this experience, without having to be afraid that I'd somehow be carried away into another place, into somewhere I didn't want to be. I can enjoy this, now. And whatever comes next, well, that's not today and the decision will happen when it needs to.

So when they ask me "What did you learn about yourself in Miami?", the thing I'll be adding to the list is that it's a necessary part of life-- my life, anyway-- to try new things, to keep expanding my mind, my world, and at the same time, to walk my own path on deciding an outcome.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in.
~Leonard Cohen