Sinister: life is beautiful

[Scott Neiss]

As if from a lucid dream, I’m emerging from a weekend
of perfection with renewed hope and gratitude.

When my brother lost his corporate job a few weeks
ago, I offered to fly him out to Seattle from rural
Wisconsin (of all places). Separated by geography,
tastes, lifestyle, education…he and I have mostly
neglected our relationship since we were young
children. As a teenager, I suppose I was guilty of all
the nasty things so typical of older
brothers…ridicule, teasing, and competition. He lived
his life and I mine. Sure, we’d exchange a few emails
and see each other a few days a year…and everything
was fine, but we were simply too caught up in our
separate realities and the gap was too great.

This has all changed. We should have been twins. From
the moment he arrived, we could so effortlessly and
freely speak about anything. His perception of the
world is, at its core, the same as mine. He lives from
the heart. He’s an idealist. A romantic. An artist. A
bohemian who has been deeply scarred by a reality that
does not align with his soul. His emotional,
spiritual, and intellectual intelligence far exceeds
his experience and position in life. Imagine, my bro,
an evening-and-weekend techno artist (DJ Fuse) from
small-town Wisconsin, opening himself up to all that
Seattle has to offer. Like a sponge, he spent the
entire past several days absorbing
everything…listening, observing, but more importantly
sharing. 

We so easily judge each other…we condemn friends,
strangers, and family. Yet when we become mature and
open enough, we understand that everything is okay. We
are all connected and everyone is truly okay. How
deeply saddening it is that ideas, values, morals,
positions, whatever…should get in the way of human
relationships. This is especially true with family.
Nothing is so important that it should come between
family.

So after a night out with my wife and brother in Queen
Anne…followed by a walk on a misty Saturday night by
the Space Needle, we cranked Rufus Wainwright (I'd
already listened to too much B&S during the weekend)
while driving home to our apartment. When we had
finally arrived at 1:30, none of us had intentions of
going to bed. Several hours later, we found ourselves
listening to The Beattles, burning incense, and
savoring a 1968 Tokaj Konac that we picked up in
Slovakia and had been saving for the perfect moment.
1968 was a significant year in Czechoslovak history.
It was the year of Prague Spring…during which
revolution was ended with tanks sent from Russia. How
perfect, we thought, that farmers in Czechoslovakia in
1968 may have been listening to Strawberry Fields on a
summer evening during harvest…and now, there we were,
in Seattle 34 years later…still hoping and burning for
a social and political revolution just as they had.
Well, maybe we couldn’t change the world that night,
but by 5:00 AM we had changed our lives. We laughed,
we loved, we celebrated life…and we woke up at noon,
watched a French movie, and felt absolutely no
regrets, no awkwardness, and not even a headache.

So, as I write this today, my wife is on a plane
halfway to Detroit for a business trip, my brother
will be returning to a rather miserable reality
tomorrow, and I’m finding it impossible to transition
into yet another boring, common day at a job that
slowly kills me. We will all pay a price for this
weekend, but for a few days we were truly alive. 

Sorry this message is kind of...heavy.  I just felt
like sharing...

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