Welcome to DarinLand

by Darin Lowery

My high school English teacher was a pleasant man by the name of Mr. Beatty. He was slim and wore tweeds and had an amiable, professorial air. He put up with a lot from me, as most of my papers dealt with hookers, cheap drunks and nightclub singers- unusual material for a sixteen year old boy.

I’ll never forget his puzzling words after reading my first essay. “Darin,” he said, “almost every one of your sentences begins with an ‘I’. ‘I saw’, ‘I did’, ‘I went’- it just goes on and on. Perhaps you can use a different perspective.” Seeing as how ‘me saw’ sounds very much like a Vietnamese curry dish, I promptly forgot his suggestion. It just didn’t work for me. Besides- his class was the only one I excelled in. I flunked every other subject except Art.

And I loved the demimonde.

Welcome to DarinLand- the first in a series in weekly columns by yours truly. While I tend to be egocentric and self involved (but I really am trying to work through this, Oprah) there are times that my eyes do rise above my navel. On those days, moments in Life (mine, yours and ours), suspended like bits of reality in amber, seem so vivid they must be addressed.

DarinLand, if you will, is a collage, a mosaic, an amalgam of ideas and images and sometimes, a play of Dark against Light. It’s more a state of mind than a place; more a place than a fantasy. Sometimes it’s a prison; other times a church. It can be ‘sophisticated’ in its true sense, meaning ‘artificial’ (look it up) but it can also be as down and dirty as a bar brawl.

DarinLand is my life and all those who enter it. Welcome to my perfect world. Welcome to my nightmare.Living in the Globe-Miami area for five years now has definitely made me a sunnier, more affable guy. Perhaps it’s the light- that clear, swirling watercolor wash we call our sunsets. It reads a salmon pink and blood orange, and the trace of lemon yellow in the sky means that when a GlobeMiamiTimes article calls for a photo shoot, my editor Linda and I always opt for an after-seven snap session during the summer.

The photographer Annie Leibovitz, who shoots for Vanity Fair magazine, adores this type of light but I’ve never seen her or her camera on Broad Street.

The wind, too, has had an effect. Oh, you’ve seen movies where some wizened old duffer crawls off a porch, hair on fire, screeching, ‘The wind is a demon, the wind is ALIVE! I’ve gone mad in the last hour from this howling devil’.

Um, yeah.

The night air which rolls over my hill is actually a strong breeze, and with it comes coolness and the scent of pines and sweet four o’clocks. At times it also amplifies my neighbor’s musical choices, but we have similar tastes. When my pal Molly lived here, she always said she loved the way the loose shade on the old light post in back would rattle at night. For me, however, it only means the Earth is still spinning, and we each have a new opportunity to rise in the morning and begin again, fresh and clean and hopeful.