if dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts

Life does not imitate art.

I've decided, instead, that art imitates the life we wish we led. Think about it. All successful art is based on the premises of practice and planning. And how are those ever really relevant in life? It's not like you get a test run of this being alive thing. You've got one shot! Sure, there are sometimes second chances, but it's not like in, say, a sketch that you can work on it, draft after draft, before finally releasing it. We, as humans, are published from day one.

And planning. I could talk forever about this illusive "planning" some of us strive so hard to accomplish. But really? Other than a lunch date here, a college there... how much are we really in charge of? SO LITTLE. What's even more frustrating is that we can do all the planning we want, and life will still come in and serve us something totally different. Think about art. What art is possible without months, sometimes years of planning? Look at movies, albums and theater. All of these are only feasible with considerable planning, and the ones that go on without - take Pollock for instance - ...well, they speak for themselves.

So art and life. Close- but not the same. Instead, I think that art is reflecting the level of perfection we as humans cannot attain because of our inability to plan and practice the game of life. If we did have a do-over? That's art. Think about how movies are scripted, costumed and scouted. Everything is so close to naturalism, but in the act of sitting and deciding, "I'm going to write about this," we've immediately changed it from life to art (hello, Heisenberg principle). I can sit on a bench and read a magazine while waiting for the bus. That's life. In a movie, I'll sit on a bench, reading a magazine, and the bus will either never come and I decide to walk to my destination and then meet the love of my life, or I get on the bus and we realize we're the targets of a terrorist organization that has a bomb strapped to the bottom of the bus that requires us to go a certain speed or we all DIE.

That's not life, guys. It's life the way we'd like to imagine it. It's life if we could plan excitement, romance and success just the way we like it served. Unfortunately, that's not the way the chips fall.

Every now and then, you meet someone that makes all that lack of planning and practice totally worth it. You start to hope that maybe life is better experienced without a trial run. You couldn't have planned it any better, and all the practice in the world wouldn't have prepared you for how the shit is going down.

Or maybe that's just what I tell myself as consolation that I have no idea how I ended up here, and I have no idea what the hell I'm doing.