-It’s a funny idea, marriage. It’s all based on this idea that god loves us unconditionally. Marriage is based on the purity of god’s love. It seems to me that the disappointment that accompanies being in a relationship is loosely godlike as well. How must God have felt when the things he spent so much time creating and nurturing decided they wanted something different? That’s not to say I feel godlike, (though I guess through antithesis I’m creating a subtextual thesis), but really…what makes us as a species feel like we can stay together through anything, even when every external circumstance screams at us that we can’t and shouldn’t? Why don’t we just stay around until one or both of us are bored, then move on to other people? In principle, spending your entire life with someone you regarded as a close friend when you were young sounds like a great idea.
I’m not saying anything coherent. I’m just realizing through subtext that I’m not as “over” ******* as I thought or would like. That, in turn, is probably just excusing myself for being fucked up all the time and sleeping later than any self-respecting young (?) adult male should. The more I think about being single, the more I’m certain there’s nothing really special about me. I’ve got a receding hairline, I’m not in especially good shape. I have a few interesting ideas, but only a few people are drawn to interesting ideas—because either A) people or B) my ideas aren’t as interesting as I’d like, I suppose. I’m reasonably confident. I’m gracious and accommodating, if occasionally gullible/arrogant. When you perceive the world as a series of disembodied systems, it’s difficult not to (even subconsciously) repackage yourself into something palatable, something desirable. We might not all of us want to be palatable, per se, but we all want to be desired. I do. Shit, I just want to be with someone as badly as (she) wants to be with me. I was telling CB the other day that it’s very difficult to imagine circumstances under which I would attempt to keep another long-distance relationship alive. That could have been phrased much more tidily, I guess. Who cares.
` When I think of all the time and emotional energy I misspent on her…
For me, women are, most of them, some combination of A) gorgeous, B) intelligent, C) petty/neurotic, and D) interesting, which is usually some intangible confluence of A) B) and C). Can I get an ABD without the C, please? I wonder if the inverse is true? I’m sure it is. Men are, to some degree, A) handsome, B) intelligent (don’t really know how important this is to women), C) perfidious/self-absorbed/insensitive and D) manly, which is as context-sensitive and elusive as “interesting,” its female counterpart.
I guess I’m making this more difficult than it should be. I find myself staring at the ceiling in my bedroom at strange hours of the night/morning, discerning patterns in the shadows and wondering precisely why it is that I feel so alone in this world. I feel like everything would be magically ameliorated if I had something warmer and more animate than a down pillow to cleave to myself…but I think about that outcome, too, that happiest of ostensible outcomes. This person I’d hold close…well, we’d eventually end up sleeping in our own postures, on opposite “sides” of the bed, regardless of the bed’s size. I hope at the end of the “day” that it’s enough just to have someone comfortably sharing the bed with you.
Maybe I have high expectations of and strange ideas about marriage. So many people are so unhappy in their marriages. I’m watching some of my friends get married around me; even more of my acquaintances are doing so. One part of my mind that’s only about three months old wants to know “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU PEOPLE DOING?”…other parts just want to know what these people have in their relationships that I didn’t have in mine. I know it’s not that simple. It’s not like the breakup was my decision, much less my idea. It’s not like I’d been apprised of my inadequacies, although the “whatwentwrongohmygodImsosorry” part of my brain feels like there were a thousand unspoken warning signs, registered things I ignored, willfully or otherwise. In any case, it’s over…
To get academic on this sum’bitch…I’m just having trouble reinserting myself into the “discourse”…or the economy of bodies, if you want to be crude about it. I want companionship without cheapening human emotion, without marginalizing myself or someone else. I want to experience intimacy without tawdry side effects.
…also, I want a pony.
Basically, I’m a reasonably intelligent, not-bad-looking graduate student. Just like everyone else here. I and someone else of the opposite sex will probably, someday, decide mutually to lower our expectations, not just for each other, but for ourselves out of loneliness and an inexorable fear of dying alone. The transition to low expectations will probably be seamless, since chances are we both will have made some humiliating sacrifices/compromises by that point, and all subsequent sacrifices/compromises will seem petty by comparison.
Adulthood is institutionalized, perpetual forgetfulness intertwined with inaccurate, indelible memory. The way we all experience things has absolutely nothing to do with life-as-lived. Milosz said “the only memory is the memory of wounds,” and that’s neat. It’s not accurate, but it’s neat. The only memory that matters is the one you carry with you on a given day. Maybe even that one doesn’t matter. Like any sentient animal, negative stimuli condition humans more quickly and effectively than anything else.
I was going somewhere with the above. Maybe later.
We all of us live in natural systems. We don’t precisely know how we fit, but on an intuitive level, we understand that the greatest of human achievements are somehow just crude geometric approximations of natural structures. We and our geometric approximations of nature wage perpetual war against dissolution, chaos, entropy (as we understand it). But no matter how we strive to keep everything (EVERYTHING—structures, machines, flowerbeds, relationships) in order, our temporality, ephemerality, relationships to/with our surroundings all wear us down to nubs, as they must. Governing law of the universe: flesh yields to patience.
I might slur a little, but it would be a pleasure to hear your voice.
Consciousness/identity appears/resolves from a thousand thousand choices. As easy as it is to say “I am not the things I own,” it is easier to say “the things I own exist as a function of my identity.” I imagine my mortal remains scattered, buried, disidentified…but if you assembled my things, the things with which I had chosen to surround myself…you would have a puzzle. But you would have a puzzle with decisive clues. What an idea for a board/computer game. You’re given a shoebox. You have no way of knowing what will be in the shoebox. It could be a box of pictures without dates or notations. It could be five years of a family’s itemized bank statements. It could be correspondence. It could be a box of maps, maps of places you don’t immediately recognize, with a few documents written in a mysterious language, or better, in cipher.
There would be no guarantees.
But the game’s guarantee is this: each box contains at least one life, and the life(ves) open to you are yours to explore. This would be a very detailed game. You would even receive access to the shoebox-story-person’s medical records. You would have full access to libraries, the internet, and government documents pertaining to the shoebox…because all the data in any given shoebox would have to be “true,” right? Because otherwise, what would the point be? Why trace the life conduct, origins, habits, and foibles of a person who never existed? You want to learn something tangible, someone’s microhistory, right? What’s the point if there’s no authenticity? No history behind the gambit, the search? It would be archaeology for dummies, in reverse: We give you the artifacts, you supply the facts and deduce the history. Mad Libs with the lives of others.
Or worse: the shoebox contains a certain data set. The data set could belong to anyone. You could pay a premium to get a shoebox associated with someone alive. (Basically identity would become a commodity. Not only can it be stolen, it can be sold and adapted. You can be twelve different people at once, depending on what everyone else is doing with/to “you”. Truth becomes irrelevant, and you (victim) become subject to the New Criticism. The officers look so good in brown, their red armbands so gay in the spring sunlight!
All it takes to convince someone he/she is crazy is a widespread social conviction.
I think it’s to my great demerit, discredit and shame that I’ve never had any kind of spiritual experience worth half a shit when sober. Not since I was old enough to know better, anyway. I have a memory so mystical and sfumatoed it might as well be a dream by now. I just remember colors, and impersonal smells. Being in some kind of gallery in a dark church, seeing the plain ROYGBIV colors of the inarticulate vitrazh. Amazed at how different that space was from my own. Licking the screen doors, the taste of nicotine and aluminum. Walking in on my mother, vomiting. She pretended it was some kind of game. I might have been seven. Dad was at rehearsal. She explained that she was playing hide and seek.
Childhood is a strange thing—I’ve been musing on this a lot since I started reading Schulz…the disorientation that accompanies childhood is untempered by paranoia, clean of conscience and worry. Images, or at least the way you remember them, are so different. Things are bright and focused. Unnaturally so. The grisly JC-Penney peach ruffle curtains in my parents’ bedroom windows…the unchanging indian face. Years passed and mom dusted, but I always saw the outline of a suffering indian in the curtain’s lace outline, the way most children see animals in cumulus clouds on spring days.
When I was seven or eight, I decorated my first refrigerator box. I colored in different control panels that could propel us out of the garage and into the mysterious blue. I had no heroes to speak of. I changed my name to “Steva” because no one was named “Steva,” and I wanted to do something exciting, something original. I tried writing a play about the stock market when I was six. I gave up because it sucked. And now I’m twenty-five. In most developed countries, I’m a third of the way done. And where am I? God knows I’m not the first whiny twentysomething to kvetch about his lot, but I really still feel like I have promise. Like every time I stay up until 8 am writing about my problems isn’t an abject fucking waste of my precious time on earth. God knows I couldn’t’ve (the compound contraction should be totally legal. We’re in agreement here, right?) written
Through my lens right now, childhood seems garish, imprisoning. I miss Clarksville most of all.
The clubhouse. The sandbox beneath it, and the larvae I found there. They disgusted me, their overlapping carapaces, the moving lusty energy of the earth in my fingers…I usually threw them into the yard. The way it would rain for days, the drainage ditch in the back yard running fast, brown and deep…the only connection with the outside world: the bridge my father built. Beyond: who knew? I found a squirrel’s tail. I’m certain locust trees must be rare in the southeast united states, but I swear there was one on our little quarter-acre. I remember the tall grass field Caleb and I only dared to venture toward once or twice.
I imagined a tall structure, made of cement gutterpipes and leading up to a clubhouse. In the clubhouse there were chairs, wood floors, a soft drink machine in excruciating detail, down to the C02 cylinders. I had different versions of this dream until I was about fifteen-sixteen. I remember on some stupid kids’ menu survey or activity book, an exercise posed the question “what is the ideal age to be?” it seemed stupid at the time, and it seems stupid now. At the time (I was 8), however, I answered “eleven”. I’m still convinced I was right. Eleven is the last year you’re really a kid. By eleven, you’re fucking GOOD at being a kid. At eleven, you know how to get along with your parents, there’s no peer pressure, and hormones haven’t kicked in. Puberty sucks. This is a universally acknowledged fact. You go to college. You meet people you think will remain important to you, close to you forever. Then you realize that there are too many people, and that forever, even in human terms, is a very, very long time.
But what happens after college? You’re thrust 2/3 against your will into unfamiliar social situations. Adapt or die. College is microsocial Darwinism. You meet more kinds of proto-people in one place than you ever could elsewhere. At a certain point in the cell division process, we (all entities) branch out. Life springs from the same source, we’re all just predisposed to have codes, things built into us that enable us to read, write, communicate…have skeletons, much less be bipedal. In college, you see things budding. Asexual organisms like wealth and nepotism perpetuate themselves, an evolutionarily conditioned coping mechanism. This coping mechanism helps families and fortunes survive despite being surrounded by more intelligent entities. In college, you learn to understand people within thirty, no, five, seconds of meeting them. The greek letters College gives you to pigeonhole people are more useful than you could ever imagine as a naïve 18-year-old. Long after you’ve been in college, you’ll sort people by letters. “Well, in College terms, he’s basically a Fiji.” “You know, she’s a KD type.” These are not just College greek types. These are KINDS OF PEOPLE YOU WILL ENCOUNTER FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. They exist at College in their most stereotypical, essentialized forms. Everything else is an allegory of the cave.
It’s as though life were a series of sieves. Something pure and thick, rich, vibrant and unified undulates from an amphora, and the stream’s vitality knows neither beginning nor end. It flows from mesh to mesh, losing bits of itself along the way, finally unburdened and without memory, worn down as though held beneath the river Lethe…into the hospital, oblivion, and death.
Conversation excerpt:
VT shit, I'll be closer to Australia/New Zealand than america by the time I'm 45, if I play my cards right
8:31am
MP what card game is that?
8:31am
VT the metaphorical "adulthood" card game
you win when you get to do everything you want to do, and life still has wonder and mystery.
8:32am
MP I hope to never play it
Lethe et cetera, above. The image is one of emerging from a life of boredom and forgetfulness only to realize it’s too late, that the opportunities are gone, it’s too late to enjoy your life; your health is limited and your days are numb(ered). You buy a nice car because you’re losing your hair and your children are ungrateful and your wife doesn’t love you anymore and what the fuck what the fuck else are you going to do? Your self-esteem is all vicarious and dependent upon your kids’ soccer teams and your W-2 every year. Six figures? Six figures. Because you deserve it. Because you deserve a vehicle that can take you quickly, wastefully away from the problems you’ve created for yourself. Yes, no, All of them…because that’s what freedom is about, isn’t it? Absolution? Absolution is all any of us want anymore. Absolution for ourselves, for our grandparents, for our parents, who knew not what they did, for our sinful selves and natures. All the accrued guilt of the Modern Experiment heaped in an apotheosis of cruelty, a mountain of mutilated flesh, man and animal. In the background, smokestacks belch acid into the atmosphere.
I’m calling it a morning. It’s ante meridian nine thirty-seven, Eastern Standard Time on the third of February, anno domini two-thousand and eleven. I wrote close to three-thousand words tonight. Some of it wasn’t terrible. I deem it a success. As for my upcoming test…god, I have half a mind to say “who cares”.
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