My Imagination

Do you ever feel this way?

"Bah, I am on a losing streak. I made a miscalculation somewhere along the line as far as my career as a writer. Maybe it was entering the restaurant business in the first place, which doomed me to a life where it is impossible not to drink, impossible not to have odd hours and so many things that make me undesirable as a mate. I'll never push a conversation with a woman, I'm too old for it.

"And yet the great Chekhov was a bachelor, and wanted the wife he finally took to be, like the moon, not in his sky all the time, as he put it.

"And if you don't settle down at a young age, well, past a certain point, it just seems strange and too much to deal with. Who in their right female mind would be interested in the quirks of a writer any way?

"And so I sink in the quicksand of bachelordom. Life becomes a routine. Groceries. Cooking at home, out of financial reasons."

Hmm.

A pretty young woman is in the line behind me, Friday at the Whole Foods. I've got my meats, my frozen breads, my greens, a bottle of wine, fruit/nut bars for work. I've had to go to the Bistrot for a meeting, which has thrown off my writing. My pile, spread out on the little conveyor belt, separated from the elder woman in front of me, the cold things grouped together, some apples for good measure, a tomato. Bachelor life, type O diet. Pretty gal has forgotten something, comes back a minute later with a pomegranate, which she places down on the belt after my stuff. "Don't forget your pomegranate," I say. "No, gotta have your pomegranate," she replies friendly. "It's not too much work, is it," I offer, after pondering it a moment, its pretty skin neatly coming to a top. "I enjoy it, actually. And anyway, I find it hard to distinguish between hunger and boredom." Now that's pretty funny. "Yeah, and it's not boozing either," I offer. Typical degenerate Irishman's line. Well, an honesty with respect to boredom, anyway. Then back to the mode of paying, taking my bags, then the business of arranging what I got into my bicycle courier bag to eventually hoist over my shoulder and ride home looking like a mushroom or some kind of bug riding a bike. I wish I saw her on my way out. Someone that bright shouldn't be bored, but, you know, it happens. It happens to me too, and that's why I like to cook and find it satisfying.

I ride home, back to my bachelor life, feeling as if I were some sort of immigrant, unable to grasp how the present culture socializes, grumpy enough so that I can tell I need to go for a bike ride. Before it gets dark.

I will be left with the unhappy mystery of encountering someone somehow desirable to me who I shall never see ever again, wondering about a chance meeting, over a few words, over missing words and where they would have gone. "It was the mood I was in," I'll attempt to excuse myself. "I am, like Johnny Carson off screen, a shy man." I am a sick man, an ill man... I am an artist. Until the memory of her wears off safely, the taste of the physical proximity of a grocery check out line, forgotten in the atoms. "I drink to forget," observes the drunkard in Petit Prince. Which starts him on a whole new path to repeat what just happened, perhaps.

It's a feeling brought across by the movie "Groundhog Day," the repetitions of life, part routine, work, of course, but also of the basic condition of life. Like for instance, the loneliness, and that vague sense that follows after it of being, well, maybe a little creepy. Hmm, maybe I do creepy things, maybe I truly am a creep, I really don't mean to be, I really try to behave and be polite, friendly but not step beyond the Heismann Trophy boundaries of polite and respectable society. Feeling chagrin, one has a Buddhist moment, which is perhaps somewhat logical (if you buy into it) but not so satisfying. Is it good health psychologically to say, 'oh well, that's life.'? Do you say the AA mantra to yourself, of changing what you can?

Ironic. I wanted to be a writer to be the best possible person I could be. As far back as I can remember, at least after I put drawing aside. I happened to write a book about a kid who, even though he's just trying to be benevolent, even though he tries absolutely to leave her alone when she expresses some coldness in his direction, enters that strange place where he can't redeem himself. Maybe it's a story like Chekhov's "Ward No. 6," where a doctor, exposed to a madman patient, begins his own slide into madness, thanks in part to accusations against him. And, well, if you have to deny that you are a creep or that you are crazy, well, it's like politics, trying to get the stain from your reputation, ("Jesus, Lyndon, we can't call him a pig fucker." LBJ: "Make him deny it!") or worse, you start to feel that maybe you really are that which you are charged with, which isn't good for your self-confidence.

As Chekhov says, a book should ask questions, not answer them. That's in its very nature. I don't have answers.

Be careful who you pick to be nice to. And maybe the greater part of socially acceptable nice is politely faked anyway. You want to be good, go join a church congregation. Volunteer at Boys and Girls Club.

What happens after the delivery of the self-fulfilling prophecy? Not completely, but your life takes a certain shape after something like that. You withdraw. Or, maybe, you know, you always wanted to be a writer, felt it a strong calling, shaped very much by meaningful events in your life, and maybe that alone is enough to make you a deviant.

It doesn't surprise me Stephen King, a real writer, writes the kind of crazy spooky stories he does, and I'm glad this sort of 'admission of weirdness' strikes a chord in people, as if to say, you know, I'm weird too, Mr. King. "Look around, and you will see," Lyle Lovett sings, "the world is full of creeps like me."

I can't help it. I wasn't raised a church-goer (maybe why I'm bad at fiction and a lousy storyteller), nor by members of the local Chamber of Commerce. No, I was raised by professors, exposed to literature and art, architecture and music and cultural events at a young age. A print-rich environment. And back then kids had really good toys, like the basic Lego building blocks (before they got so specific and fancy), didn't have to worry about computers and the only video game was Pong, a beeping dot that allowed you to play a back and forth game like ping pong. Life has led me, semi-professionally, to wine at least, and wine is civilized, a part of culture. I seem to have fallen down as far as making myself useful as any form of teacher beyond that.

Maybe the one thing attractive about writing is that it might serve as a free form of (self-)psychotherapy, I've often wondered. You get some painful issues out into the open, and at least you feel somewhat better for having done so.



Chekhov, you could say, began his serious career with "The Steppe," which is a story of a little boy traveling with a priest and a trader on a long journey to be dropped off at a distant relative's for his schooling. (My copy's out on loan at the moment.) From there, Chekhov takes us (amongst other places) to "Ward No. 6," as if to take that sensitive little boy and show him what life is like as a grown-up in society, in particular how a little charge, an insinuation, can grow from incipient form to something that ruins lives. His imagination is inherited, of course, by Kafka, and later to Kundera, take The Joke for example. And or course history, Hitler and the Nazi, Stalinist purges and the like, would prove the point, quite beyond anyone's wildest imagination. "The Lady with the Pet Dog," would make a similar point, here about the broader judgments of society against say, 'adultery.' It's interesting how a writer's stories develop.

One doesn't himself know what effect a charge will have upon him. He doesn't realize the effect it will have upon his attitude, the teacher who didn't say 'good paper, kid,' no reaction to it at all, just another bad grade on his record. He'll shrug it off at first, like any painful thing, an embarrassment he doesn't want to talk about. He'll be brave about it. "Oh, it was nothing." Little does he realize, at least in conscious thought, the deep effect a few words might have upon him, how such a thing will truly shape his life, leaving him, amongst other things, scared to say more than a few kindly intended words to a pretty girl in a grocery checkout line, unwilling to enter, fine and holy thing it should be, a classroom. Lord, how regrettable things snowball.

What did Tom Robinson in To Kill A Mockingbird say? "I felt sorry for her." For that act...

Anger, bitterness, they are not much my thing. I write. And I find myself comforted that it takes sometimes a writer's imagination to reveal such things, to flesh them out, to understand them. There is a purpose to it. Good luck to us all.