The Sudden Feeling

"I'm really intrigued: these disasters, these decisions that are wrong from the start, these dead ends that constitute the story of my life, are repeated over and over again. A passionate vocation for happiness, always betrayed and misdirected, ends in a need for total defeat, it is completely foreign to what, in my heart of hearts, I've always known could be mine if it weren't for this constant desire to fail. Who can understand it? We're about to reenter the green tunnel of the menacing, watchful jungle. The stink of wretchedness, of a miserable, indifferent grave, is already in my nostrils."*

             I'm almost twenty seven years old and I have to force myself to clean my room. My car sits dead in the drive way. My scooter has a flat tire. My space heater broke the week it finally got down into the 40s at night. Records are missing sleeves. Emails go unanswered. I made my bed today for the first time in weeks (it does look amazing, highly recommend, filed under simple steps to make you feel better about yourself). I don't know why it's so difficult for me to undergo these easy, little things that are a part of being an adult. That part of my life, the physical part, being a mess doesn't really make me lose sleep at night. It's the avoidance of everything else that's the problem. I've been afraid to make decisions, since I've lost faith in myself over the summer, and I haven't been writing, because I'm afraid to get too close to what's been just below the surface for awhile now. 

"I know where these tortured musings on the irremediable can lead. There's a dryness inside us we shouldn't get too close to. It's better not to know how much of our soul it occupies."*

             I've been looking back on the past few years and realized I waited much too long to do some things and rushed in or completely fucked up most of the others. Anyone that's ever swung out over a river on a rope swing knows that too much hesitation is never a good thing. I've always let go in the last second, before smashing into the black water of the Santa Fe river, but that seems to be the only time I have any guts. This past year I failed to get into grad school and I was too chicken shit to apply to any others. I took it way too personally and now I'm staring down another academic year without credentials. I'm not saying you have to be in school to be somebody, absolutely the fucking contrary. I work in a bar where MFA students repeatedly don't tip me, and personally I think they look way too clean to be actual poets. Most of them, I'm sure, have never seen a rope swing in real life.

            The other thing that deserves a lot of personal literary attention on my part is my total failure of having a healthy relationship. I don't mean that the relationship was a failure, but more to the point that I failed at it. I thought that by this point in my life I would have shut that door and been moving on to the next part of my life, but here I am, back at square one, and it's really no one's fault. I wanted to write an epic tale of woe, all about the miseries of summer and lost love and all of the stuff that's pretty easy to write about honestly, but I didn't. Looking back I'm glad I didn't. I've mostly just felt really confused, about everything. Drinking served its purpose of numbing out a lot of those feelings, and I've been on quite a roll of forgetting and evading, and might still be. I finally came to terms with the fact that it's hard to write when you're afraid of what you might unsettle in yourself. I've crossed that boundary at least. I'll still gladly check out mentally with my friends, because it's fun to be miserable together, even though we call it a party, even though it feels good, but I can wake up in the morning and sit down and deal with it finally. 

 

"I felt the gradual return of my old loyalties to life, to the world that holds endless surprises, to the three or four beings whose voices reach me despite time and my incurable wanderlust."*

           The weather changing has everything to do with everything. Summer's long misery is behind us! Everyone feels something new in the air, and it's both real and imagined. A lot of people, it seems, are ready to do something new. The next step. I feel comforted in the fact that by this time next year, I will be in a new place, doing something mostly different than what I'm doing now. Al Burian writes a lot about fall, and I've been flipping through a lot of Burn Collector lately. It's not a coincidence. Fall has a loneliness that summer doesn't, summer has a melancholy but fall is the time for remembering. The voices that reach me are the voices that I've always looked to my whole life, books I read before I had any friends, and books I bring with me when I travel, and books that will keep me company through our sunny, beautiful winter. 

        This book that I'm reading now (see below) has already effected me more than anything I've read this year. I did finish the Dark Tower series, and fell in love with the characters and story, but I consumed it, I devoured it so fast and just wanted to continue the story. In Mutis' book every sentence is a pleasure. The story is amusing and also at times strangely dark, and the main characters and the often doomed characters around him have insights into true melancholy. Reading it has reminded me of unidentifiable aches, weird pains, and the language of nostalgia. Travel, dreaming, and failure. The articulated, tangible feelings I've been searching for since summer ended. 

*The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis. 

Are there other world's than this?

"Now he could, and too often did, scan through the thousand pictures, a record of his life, in minutes. All he had to do was keep his finger on the leftward arrow. It was too easy. It was not good. It kept him in a dangerous stasis of nostalgia and regret and horror."*


             I've been in and out of the world lately. Two jobs and I went back to school and a stack of books that I'll never let get any smaller. I think more than any of my obligations or responsibilities the Dark Tower books have distracted me the most. I like Roland. He's my kind of guy. He describes himself in the first book as being, "the last of that green and warm-hued world" which has long since moved on. Yet he's still out there searching...hunting down his ghosts and (I haven't gotten to the end yet) the Dark Tower. Stephen King admits to modeling Roland's character off Clint Eastwood from The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and you get that wide-screen, dusty western feel from the books. The lonesome hero. The search. We all know the story, but The Dark Tower adds an element of nostalgia and also magic that those westerns  were missing. Roland talks about destiny and I listen, although I have no idea what mine is, or even if I believe in it. There's also the sense of decay in the books that I feel all around me, the sense of winding-down, that the world's moved on and moving away. 
              Dave Eggers just came out with a new book, A Hologram for the King, which struck me as uncannily similar in the sense that it is also about a world that moved on, and left a protagonist wandering around a different desert (in Saudi Arabia). The New York Times book review described it as kind of a "Death of an American Salesman" and it left me feeling like there isn't much to look forward to, as a country, because we've been totally sold out. Not just sold out by the government, but by each other, capitalism, a big bold ETC. We're just at the end now. A winding down. Watched in conjunction with the new HBO series Newsroom, you get the feeling that other people are picking up on it too. The lack of American imagination has become the lack of progress, which makes us a wasteland not just for artists but for everyone. In A Hologram for the King the main character describes watching the last NASA launch, it's heartbreaking, and its terribly similar to what Aaron Sorkin writes about America on Newsroom (bottom line, we're getting played, hard, by a lot of different people). 


                I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the national crisis of imagination or tolerance, passing moments of panic maybe, but instead spend my time reading and getting lost in fantasy novels where the great times have past, the heroes are already gone. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, the Dark Tower Series- all worlds where the heroes are long dead and the battles are over, until the next story starts anyway (and who among us doesn't secretly wish for their chance to be a hero, for Aragorn or Roland to ride up on their horse and say, time to fight? It's my favorite daydream) I only thought it was interesting, and worth writing down, that this similar feeling that "the world's moved on, and I with it" (courtesy of Roland) is seeping into other stories and coming from other writers. 
                 
                I've got looks of other books to write about. And soon.


*Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King