Nights At Home

"The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner...I almost believed him when he said such things. He said we do this all the time, all of us, we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we'll die. This is how we live and think whether we know it or not. These are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic."*
                   I did read the new Roberto Bolano book** like I said I would. I never got around to writing about it...maybe I couldn't make the time but also the story didn't leave me with much except the image of the German tourist walking down the beach during a cloudy day, lost within his own vacation. This summer has felt like that, a little at least, to me. Rain for weeks on end, waking up to darkness and going back to sleep until the afternoon, going to work with wet shoes, coming home with damp hair. I didn't leave town enough maybe. I visited my mom in NC and we kayaked around a lake, a mountain storm has just passed and the water split dark and glassy under us, and I felt happy, to be thinking about nothing in the middle of all those mountain colors. I came home and finished my summer class and kept working. I should have stayed up there longer.
                   A few of us went to the beach the other day and that might be the last time in the ocean until spring. The water will stay warm a little longer but I doubt I'll have the time. On our way home the rain was so bad Adrien couldn't see the road. Everything in front of us just looked white, and I worried that if we died on our way home, somewhere in between Gainesville and Palatka, that I had totally wasted not just my summer but the last four or so years of my life. I keep hearing all these internet-worthy catch phrases about "doing what you love before it's too late" but I think there's something to be said for doing what you need to do too. Also, even at 26, I'm still unsure of what I really love. I like that I'm unsure. As far as I'm concerned, I've got fucking options. I'm just going to keep walking the fence until then, a little bit of staring out into the ocean and a lot of working my ass off until four in the morning. I'm not sure I have or even deserve the luxury of doing exactly what I want, and I know for a fact that most people never even get a chance. 
                   Of a few things I am at least certain. Not the future, not my next step, but at least the little things that make me happy. Don DeLillo is right, staring out the windows of trains at passing landscapes is absolutely one of them. Punk music still makes me inexplicably happy; I can still walk into a room of people I don't know, in a terrible mood, drunk or getting there, hungover or totally sober, and suddenly there is music and I feel better. Sometimes better than better! Sometimes even excited, or I start thinking, "hey, the world isn't so bad, I should fall in love! I should write a book! I should write more songs, I could write NEW songs!" And along down that line of thinking until the spell wears off. I also like sitting in my room tonight, with the windows open, finally signaling that the long, terribly humid summer might finally be over, and I can put on a record and go through my books, and think about my life and it's not so bad.

*Don DeLillo, Point Omega
** the new Roberto Bolano book is Third Reich