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Where do I plug in my ipod?

A Zulu hut was the last thing I expected to see behind an old Oxford country home.  Allegra led me round back passed the garden, and there it was staring back at me as if it belonged perfectly fine in jolly old Oxford.  And perhaps it did.

We returned to the table where Allegra’s aunt, 3 cousins, one of their boyfriends, and her uncle sat.  Her uncle Michael proceeded to tell us about another larger hut that he had built further up north.  Fashioned in the same manner as the hut in Oxford, he had fancied using it as a permanent residence of sorts, but his wife was not a fan of the idea at all.  

When he had brought his son’s friends to visit the large hut up north, they had all sorts of funny questions lined up for him, because who just ups and builds a hut like that?  Calling Michael an eccentric is a bit of an understatement and his building of these huts was seen as foreign locally as it was by me a foreigner.  When the boys arrived, one of them asked Michael, “Hey where do I plug in my iPod?”  The irony of course being that the hut had no electricity.

Michael chuckled while telling the story, and it dawned on me that being an eccentric artist was just who he was.  He just didn’t give a shit about what people thought.  Beneath his warm aloof persona was a solid sense of self.

I felt close to their family already; their space was largely cluttered with bits and pieces of creativity scattered about.  Their house, which I loved, felt much like my brain and my life.  There was a chicken coop in the front, Allegra’s aunt often reminded her that the front of the house was older than America, it had random doorways and windows hidden in odd places, an African hut and well, there were pictures filled with love pinned to boards, and random quotes of wisdom taped in no particular pattern all along the wall.  I found it particularly beautiful.  There was no color scheme, a student of order would’ve been lost there because it was non-stop random discovery.  The function and the form were one.

In a lot of ways, my life feels like a Zulu hut in a row of English houses, and it’s not until now riding back to London through the English countryside that I realize how deeply the day in Oxford affected me.  

The more I dwell on it, the more I realize that for the longest time I’ve felt like this lone Zulu hut.  When I was 13 I used to sleep with a hypercube above my bed because I had read that monks who meditated on it long enough would be able to see into the fourth dimension.  I started teaching myself Japanese and reading heavily about general and special relativity theories.  I adored physics, math, and language learning but I largely felt alone in a lot of my endeavors.  

And as is the case with many people, after years my interests sort of died off.  I mean who really wants to talk about tensor mechanics on a high school playground?  And by the time I reached college, I thought school such a waste of time, and I had so little discipline, I could do nothing else but almost flunk out.  Well almost flunk the hell out and also almost completely forget what I was interested in during the early part of my life.

The thing that I loved about Michael especially and his son Jethro was that they were unapologetically themselves.  If Jethro wanted a stranger to photograph him in a field of flowers acting like a daffodil, he did it.  I admired both his creativity and his courage.  

“Where do I plug in my iPod?” is a question that I have dealt with my entire life.  “Why the hell would you want to learn Japanese?  Physics?  Nah I don’t fuck with that shit.”  And now it’s  “What’s your 9-5?  Why would you just up and leave and move to a country that you’ve never been to?  You’re just going to Europe for 2 months?  Are you ever going back to America?  Are you really smart or are you really really dumb?”

I’m a Zulu hut.  I don’t have plugs, I don’t do 9-5’s anymore, I’m going to learn 10 languages before I die,  I’m a bit of a mess, and I have no interest in living in America.  I’m not exactly sure what my life has become or is becoming, but I have started to understand what it is not.  

This acceptance has proved to be most difficult.