The deconstructionist

sleepless, early morning, a rented room in Silverlake. Sun passes through curtains making orange jelly fish on a bathroom door. Somehow it's ending like it began. Los Angeles, songs buzzing in the fibers, hopeful new beginnings gather in the valley smog and hills just beyond. I am a deconstructionist; Perhaps not in the classic sense, but in some sense if ever there was any. I dream of the architecture, but my capacity to maintain it is fatal. I see my life inside the rooms I've lived. My years as a mannequin found me in many. It started in a flop house condo purchased with the first dollars my songs ever made me. I lived there with my best friends from high school and we drank and smoked and slept until noon. There was the swanky one bedroom in Beverly Hills I saw only in the dark of early morning and then again when the light filtered in reminding me it was time to drive to the studio again. My friend Bobby shared that room with me for a few weeks one December. He took the bedroom and I took the couch in favor of a siren song from the apartment's only television. Then there was the mannequin pad on sunset. The band would go out late and wake up with the mattress's on the walls and the lamps all broken. There was the hotel room in seattle, the van that crossed the country, a red roof inn in Secaucus, New Jersey and eventually a pair of matching hospital rooms on both coasts. In the mess of it all I returned to my parents home and the bedroom where I spent my last two years of high school. Climbing the stairs was hard then and my days were pills and short walks in warm clothes in the middle of the summer. When it was over I returned to the flop house briefly but soon after escaped to Los Angeles and the road to hide.There was the tour bus, the Linden Row inn and a hotel with a fire escape leading to a roof and a water tower I climbed.There was the tree house on Mulholland where we threw parties every weekend, partly to forget the preceding year and partly to avoid winding through the hills late at night knowing how drunk I planned on getting. It was the halo year and I loved staring out onto LA, pretending the sky had collapsed leaving the stars mapped on the ground below. In some way I think it actually had. Then there was the house with the green roof, so brand new and full of rooms I rarely sat in. There was coffee in the morning and writers block at night. There was something real and heavy always knocking at the door, so I built a fence and when it started knocking on the fence we moved. The first move was temporary, it was to a little guest studio behind the home of a potter named Paulette. I showed up there ill and coughing and she took my wife and i to the beach and said "stay here until you're well again" and we did. Then there was the desert house. There were only three original mannequins left and we played music in the living room, climbed the hill every day and stared out at a past which seemed more like a movie than a life. We drank absinthe and hunted tarantulas at night and then returned home to make our final record. Eventually my wife and I sold the green roof house and found a little cottage of our own, back where we started drawing this circle so many years ago. Paulette came and helped us hang our pictures and put furniture in the right places. I don't live on a hill anymore, and I don't dream of life on the ground. These years and these rooms and houses have been filled with so much living, so much joy and complex emotion. When I think of them, I don't see the walls and the windows, I hear the music they reflected; nor do I see the tables or the chairs, but rather the people who filled them.