I tried to be everything to everyone but it was always a struggle to contain my crazy creativity, my endless ideas of things. I was seeing things they didn't see and going places they didn't go and daydreaming and looking at life from other angles, staring at paintings and getting up at daybreak for runs and walks and sunrises. I wanted to be Bruce Weber, Dali, some unknown auteur filmmaker struggling in France. I wanted to be that guy steering the gondola in Venice. A spy. A hero. A recluse. An artist.
So, after running everywhere and chasing everything I decided that there was no other person who thinks like me, looks like me, dreams like me, snores and eats and stomps when mad like me.
I listened and talked and built my house and met as many people as I could and collected the things that fascinated me and took my mind.
I knew and ate and enjoyed these things with so much laughter and fun and ideas.
All of the people, all of the photographs, all of the fashion and and excitement, all of that glorious food.
In my retro dreams I was imagining something. Boxes of cuff links set with stones. More formality than this world can understand.
Then, I decided that I did not care that no one else is as crazy or wise or unique as me. And I stopped trying or searching because I found something.
I was not Dali. I was not Picasso. I was McAdoo.
So, I did what was the only thing to do: I became McAdoo.
I became a writer of ideas, a photographer of dreams and a boy inside a man who still carries a knapsack filled with notebooks and pens and who runs in the rain and eats everything.
I became McAdoo. That's all I could be.