When Frank Lloyd Wright Designs Your Life
It’s 1:30 in the afternoon, and I’m sitting next to Lake Austin. The skies are azure and melodious, the emerald waters are inviting, and an unfamiliar mesquite breeze, not born of Dixie, occasionally makes its presence known.
A singer-songwriter in blue jeans and a white T-shirt just grinned after a request for Freebird. He politely reminded the interloper with a SXSW badge that it’s an impossible task on an acoustic guitar.
I’ve been reading Robert Caro’s The Path to Power—volume one of three (hopefully four) on Lyndon Johnson. It’s marvelous. I’ve been transported, coincidentally, into Texas Hill Country—but two hundred years ago, when a full moon didn’t mean a sublime evening in Austin but rather a barbaric Comanche attack.
It occurred to me that I’m not in an office. Nor do I have a boss. Or a quota. And I sure as hell didn’t suffer through a torturous Monday morning meeting.
The fact is, I’m a drifter, which doesn’t earn a 45-year-old man a merit badge. I live an unorthodox life, though I rarely see it that way.
As I write this, Brokedown Palace by the Grateful Dead is playing in the background:
Momma, momma, many worlds I've come
Since I first left home
I melt when art and life hold hands. No truer words have ever been sung when it comes to my life.
I’m living in a mobile home in Austin, reading Robert Frost when I wake up, and bouncing between coffee shops when I’m not intentionally getting lost in Hill Country.
I’m building a business too, but in my own bohemian way. It’s a lonely life. My friends are dead poets, beatniks, and musicians.
I’ve long bought into the romance of being alone on the road, but it’s a tempestuous existence.
When I’m not floating in a pool of self-pity, I acknowledge that this life of mine was intentionally designed, like an architect’s blueprint. But my architect was an iconoclast.
Some guys hire the equivalent of McKim, Mead & White to build their symmetrical lives—lives where Princeton and Wharton degrees hang on wood-paneled walls, where kids play tons of sports, and wedding anniversaries are spent in expensive restaurants with sommeliers.
My architect was more Frank Lloyd Wright: indifferent to authority, a malcontent with a high IQ, a nonconformist in a cape.
But if you saw me, I look the part—usually in a tie, always in loafers. If anyone looks like Charles McKim designed their life, it’s me—at least aesthetically.
Though, as I’ve gotten older, I’m prone to growing Faulkner-esque mustaches and getting quarterly haircuts. I even don a fedora now. But to a trained eye, it’s an obvious display of sprezzatura.
Anyway, one of my favorite poets is singing one of my favorite songs:
All things must pass
None of life's strings can last
So I must be on my way
And face another day
—George Harrison, All Things Must Pass
