Gatsby & Spontaneity

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

So reads the epitaph on the top slab of the grave of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a quote from his most wonderful and renowned work, The Great Gatsby. Most of the quote, however, presently rests obscured beneath a shard of frosted glass. There's nothing quite like a cemetery draped in a contiguous blanket of ice, each tombstone a pinnacle of stone piercing through the encompassing tundra. Nor is there anything quite like sitting beneath a winter pine, observing in quiet contemplation said gravestone, framed by a sunset pale orange.


I had only just settled into such a picturesque reverie as this, one Saturday evening recently past, when my phone rang. It was Justin in Philadelphia. Fast forward half an hour of conversation and find me on the interstate to Pennsylvania with naught but the camera in my hand and the clothes on my back. People do funny things when their nearest friend lives a measly two and a half hours away. Funny, yes. Spontaneous, yes. But you only live twice, and this life is far more fleeting than the next.

Philadelphia was good to me yet again. I had a wonderful weekend of movies, conversations born from and about movies, friends with which to partake in conversations, good food to eat with friends, and about twenty-four hours in which to do it all. And after the simultaneously most subdued and most exuberant Superbowl party I have ever attended, we smoked a few celebratory cigars and made plans late into the night. I arrived back in Maryland around 3 AM and woke up four hours later to prepare for the day ahead.