Yesterday I saw who I wanted to be.  It was an art-as-found-object puppet in a Brothers Quay film – it doesn’t matter which one, because they all seep into the pores of your soul and just sit there, smoking and staring at you.  It had butterfly wings, a Georgia O’Keefe-like ram’s skull, feathered legs.

On the train I kept thinking about it – the puppet – the way it staggered about in stop-motion sternness, doing the same task repeatedly, reassuring everyone that it had purpose.  I listened to something by someone on the iPod, hands in pockets, eyes on floor, anonymity in place.  I have this embarrassment lately – a white noise that builds to a deafening level and then I have to look at the floor.  Michelle Pfeiffer said once she was terrified that everyone would find out she was a fake.  Me too.  Or maybe that they just won’t find out anything.  That I’ll die in the last row of the Film Forum at a retrospective and no one will know that I wanted to learn sign language and make out with someone while listening to a Bobby Goldsboro record and ride/operate one of those seesaw things on railroad tracks and lead worship with nothing but Nichole Nordeman songs (from her first two albums only) and play a part in a TV show written by Amy Sherman-Palladino or Aaron Sorkin and…

But even if there was some pre-death countdown of every incomplete pipe dream, unfulfilled ambition – it wouldn’t say anything.  We are not our wants.  We are not even our thoughts.  We are our actions.