It's like climbing the Eiger Nord Wand. It's not for amatuers. You're a fool to try it, to put all your eggs in that basket.
Too many English classes, not enough Sociology, not enough Religion classes, not enough language classes, Greek, Latin, French... why not? How did you become so lazy? Why did your reading rate slow? Why did writing papers become so hard?
Writing, why? What's the point? Where's it going to get you? It's not within you that you will find wisdom, but without, in contact with your fellow beings...
Shyness.
Motivation? (The restaurant business provided you with outside motivation, the physical doing of things immediately, even with a sense of humor...)
Easier to go with the pack then on your own. On your own, you'll fail.
Act like who you are, an Amh'ust man.
Oh, what happened to that sweet kid with his pretty face.
And what does he do now?
And now my world could blow up at any second, any misstep.
I'd like to think of Lazarus, "leave your old life in the tomb," rise to a new life, but how do you do that?
I shake at night. It's so hard to deal with mom. If I take her for a drive, if we stay out too long, then have to grocery shop, then have to cook, then mom is getting all worked up about the cat, in, is he out, mom you just fed him...
None of this is productive.
I blew it then. I slipped through the cracks. I didn't ask anyone for help. I got hung up on a girl about as mean and narcissistic as my mother. Does my mother love me? Or is it an act... Well, you can't really say that. She supported you. Yes... but it's one of those unanswerable questions. Note you shrink from her touch, her I love you, feeling it an act, making you cringe, but you put that away. She's not well. And how many times do you have to hear the same thing over and over again. "I'm just trying to make converstation..." I think of the looming medicaid application form through the lawyer.
But you could have had more encouragement.
Why didn't you sing with Mrs. Endy when she asked if you'd like to be the lead of the high school play, Grease?
And then you're not even proud of your book anymore. You come to detest it. No way you can be proud of it. You come to hate yourself and everyone in it. You come to see how the book itself stands for immorality. The bum you became. The laziness. The Playing when you should have been Praying. (Though you were praying, in an odd way, a solo journey of questionable effect.)
Again mom gets up in the middle of the night and comes down to the kitchen just as I'm about to pick up my miserable writing tasks, thwarted as I was all day, and many bad thoughts backing up in the mind, no chance to meditate. Too many problems overwhelming me here.
To write a book in such a way, this is how you ruin your life, sabotage. And every author stands over his ruin, his own revealed Hemingway, his own Kerouac.
What drew you to them in the first place? A form of self-destruction... the genius's disgreement with the way the real world actually works. As James Dean put it, genius would have us be a fish leaving water, trying to live and swim in air...
It's nothing happy I have to write anyway.
Mom has a sip of Pepsi and the cat provides background yowl. He wants to go out. I get mom to take her pill, and take down a packet of saltines from the top of the refrigerator. One at a time. Otherwise she'd have four open. This I tried to do with the catfood cans. But when she started taking them up to her bed, to hoard them, even one open one, okay, I give up, I'll leave them all stacked on the counter next to the refrigerator.
She leaves from table, dissatisfied. Okay, I know I'm not wanted here. I'll just go back up to bed, she sighs. "Perchance to dream..." she says, wistfully, weighted down as she passes into the hallway. I don't say anything. She says something about my saying nothing, though I'm trying to keep my focus on the thoughts in my head. "Thanks, mom, we had a nice day..." Oh, she says, somewhat happier. Then further on, "I wish someone would play this guitar." Then she creaks up the stairs, pausing, as she does when walking, never a steady walk.
It's another relationship like the kind I tend to write about. Tedious. Low on energy and anything happening. Full of shallow exchanges, narcissism. Ending in dissatisfaction, like a Chekhov story but without his gift for the sublime.
The Black Holes of life, that leave you with nothing but nothingness and wasted time measured in years. The sick thing is that for a long time you sort of long for them, like you could go back and fix things, and then suddenly your life would change... well, it doesn't happen that way.
Mom and I drive in the car somewhere. Yes, I'm being brave for getting up out of bed to face her, all alone here. Take her for a ride. But she ends up noticing, I guess how could you not, because indeed I'm feeling it, the gloom over me. She senses the thoughts of me realizing and pondering all my failures, and how can you build a good life on top of failings, self-medication, self distraction... College didn't start out that way. I was a good boy. Anyway, what happened? Who cares... Crossing over the line of being too depressed with too many good reasons to be so, such that it's hard to do anything productive. Lucky if you can make a phone call regarding a charge from an ambulance company that maybe her insurance will cover. At least she wasn't so catotonically depressed that she could go on with holding a job.
Bourdain had the same tension in him, pondering later in life why had he been so rebellious, so intractibly ungrateful for all the opportunities allowed his way, Vassar... What a waste.
Clarity arrives for me in the night when I find it safer, alone, without being bothered. It's like a part in the night clouds, and one glass of wine doesn't seem to hurt. Father Merton liked a beer now and then.
You reach that point in your writing life. For Kerouac, it's in all of them, but most directly acknowledged in Big Sur. Climactic alcholism, climactic nervous breakdown. Sloppy drunk, from the biographical material, refusing to go into a restaurant with Neal and family, drinking and smoking cigarettes in the back of the brand new Jeep, setting it on fire. The sick D.T.s. Finally seeing The Cross.
Well, that's not how anyone intends to be. Not the student council president. Now haunted by his own bad memories, legion in nature.
Well, we drove out to Sterling Nature Center via the western route dipping along the dead tree swamp, then out by the churches near Ontario Orchards, north toward the lake. The slow route. Yes. Take it easy. 35 mph. The tractors are out. The fields have just been plowed. Blue birds dart along, skimming along the grassy ditch then wheeling playfully overhead again suddenly, then away, marvelous creatures, zooming over us in excited direction change. Two days ago a long turkey strutting along a bare field ran and took flight crossing the road ahead of us, a feat of grace, power and coordination, a living dinosaur as well.
We park and take our little walk, first toward the lake, then up around the old farm house, a red squirrel chirping from the side of the chimney as a buddy scoots low, tail out flat under the bushes.
By the time we get back, I of indecision, not feeling like cooking, okay, let's just go out for dinner. I'm reeling still from the last week or two, I don't know why exactly, but for legal paperwork.
We go the restaurant we've not been to for a bit. I get mom in through the door. We follow a group of four in, and they want to sit outside, so the hostess gathers them to go back out through the door and the foyer we just came through and mom is right in the way. Oh, you're fine, they say, mature people, well dressed, but exasperation flashes over my face. We get to a booth. To my low horror, the restaurant is busy, the servers not happy with being put in such a position. The hostess is now our server. They were dead earlier. Nobody. One of the servers probably got sent home. Not busy. But now, a lot of walk ins. We have to wait to get our wine order in. I see the stress on the bartender's face. I'm not sure he looks particularly competeent. He, like I, has been doing his job too long, a rut. They might be stressed, the bossomed waitress now with a dark navy blue tint to her dark hair who waits on people coldlly, no expression, and I think we should have gone to the old Italian regular place, so another bad decision, but the temperanillo is good, we share a caesar salad, and I find my burger very staisfying, eating it with the brioche greasy bun. The crew is tatooted. The proprietor recognizes us and comes over. She's had hormone therapy recently. Diagnosed with low testosterone. Energy and mood and memory impoved now.
Why aren't you happier? You're bringing everyone down.
No comments:
Post a Comment