Pretty Much Up For Anything
My best friend and I often talk about how amazing it would be to live other lifetimes. How—by means of some artificial intelligence matrix—we could dial up an existence in any time period and experience it like a dreamscape.
That technology doesn’t exist yet, but there’s something pretty close to it. And if you’re ever feeling like a rat in a cage and need an escape, an autobiography will do the trick.
But I recommend you pick a juicy one. Pick someone you love, or admire, or even someone you would want to be.
The effects are amazing.
This happened to me when I opened up Scar Tissue, by Red Hot Chili Peppers front man, Anthony Kiedis.
I’ve long been a super fan of RCHP, and Scar Tissue has been on my To Be Read pile for as long as I can remember.
Two pages in and I was immersed into the true story of a rock star, a rock star whose rhymes and rhythms have both stoked and soothed me for the better part of the last 30-odd years.
Not only is this autobiography juicy, it’s heartfelt, raw, masculine, and sensitive. It’s love, lust, energy, depression, addiction, loss, victory, heartbreak, redemption.
It’s all those things that men experience in our lifetimes, or sometimes in the course of one day. What I love best about this book is that Kiedis puts it all out there. From the moment he could remember, he has lived life with a “pretty much up for anything” attitude. That is a life lived.
What this book has taught me is to live every moment, even if it means I do it vicariously through someone else’s story. Fantasy is half the fun.
When you can’t be a rock star with a heroin addiction because you’re a breadwinning-husband/father-fulltime-corporate-American-still-yearning-for-some-moment-of-euphoric-shamanic-nirvana, inhabiting the life of one of your idols, if only a for a chapter at a time, is worth every word.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Unsplash
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