It’s not easy getting into this place. There’s a back stair and that’s not always accessible. None of it really is. There are pathways and everything, but they get closed without warning.
I remember when I was young, maybe 16, and I was flying in my dreams. It was a marvel, and it happened repeatedly. And then I ruined it by thinking I’d just have to close my eyes and think, “I’m flying tonight.” It was like I thought I owned it, or I was a magician and this was my trick. And It wasn’t, and it was gone. I found it again, much later, when I didn’t think about it like that, and it appeared by the grace of some subconscious banshee.
This thing, this fairy entrance, this slant-lit magic hour is ruined by writing about it, of course. And I’m doing that now. It would be much better to be the well-coached hockey player and say I have no words. Because I don’t. And It’s not Christ. That I know, coach.
Sometimes I think – and maybe still do – I’ve found a short cut with the booze, but that’s a problematic, dull foppery angle. The truth, for what it’s worth, is in the in-between, the waking up, the forgotten, the tuning and staring off and remembering, the walking out back, nobody knowing where you’re off to.
Pit the most empathetic against the least empathetic and use the name Mercedes Verity. That’s where it all begins. She’s just up the back stairs. Right there.
At first, It’s just writing down words, getting from A to B, a clunky miserable slog that makes me feel miserable and worthless, like an unkempt bug-eyed man who scurries in the room, aimlessly moving around, making loud ignorant comments about whatever he notices.
Poop has few friends
It is minimally better the next go around. Still A to B, still clunky, miserable and worthless, but there with flashes, razor thin, something, an echo, a line across the dull grey sky.
Breathing and forgetting are next, lots of that, drinking too, reflecting and reconsidering. Even this, these words now, are feeling wrong, because I should be doing the sad reflecting. And I’m not. I’m rushing it. That’s the worst, making it the same awful thing at the outset.
Mountain goat skeleton in the Italian Alps
And then – good thing I got out of that – there is the crack, a way in, that meaty spark, a thing I was after, sharp and wonderful, until I reach for it and find it gone, never even there. I was drunk or wish I was.
The animal skulks about in the shadows, on the periphery, until it’s a mania of spinning my head, thinking I have something to say, knowing I’m a degenerate. The words are there but it’s still a morass – mole asses! – too much of that, and the drinking is my friend again, and I realize it’s time to give everything up. It never made sense. The drink was to blame. The repercussions are all there is, living the straight and narrow, facing judgement, crying for meaning, needing and almost finding that clear and consistent moral code, finally done with my childish nonsense.
I will wake up hurting
Gone and almost forgotten, I stupidly think it might be time to return, peak and see if that squirrely thing was ever there. And I do. And it was. It is. There are sparks and flames now, as shitty a metaphor as that might be, because I’ve got better things to do. I race after it and can’t stop until I do and realize I was wrong and that drink is to blame.
Time is the thing now, the breathing and forgetting, the drink, yes, too. Until it’s time again, or well past, and it opens just like that, the clunky thing still there, only needing a structural fix, deleting and editing, that on repeat, until there is something, a character more real than I know, a thing with meaning, not flailing and spouting, but sharp and clear, and not so much of that as to make it copy, but the sheen and wet of heavy footsteps bounding off to an end I know not of.
On the way to a Greenlandic summit
He doesn’t follow Emily up the stairs! He’s too chicken for that. He’s pretending that he will but stops and stares blankly as she vanishes and turns and makes a run for it. He’s free! No, he runs straight into his boss who he has to escort him into the party. He’s doomed and reaches for the first glass of champagne he can lay his hands on.
Anyway, I feel better about the book even if I know it won’t last.
The pink pickup truck was just ahead, a car and then the truck. I saw it when we turned, better to the left. It got further ahead, and I tried to keep up. What was that voice yelling in my head? Was it a workman on the street? A bad childhood memory?
The pickup glowed in the evening light, like an artificial starfish, the driver waving her arms back and forth in a steady beat. No, that was a dog’s tail. The dog jumped into the front seat. I picked out our family dog when I was a kid. “Not afraid of that one!” That’s what I said.
I needed to see the driver. I knew it was someone I should know. I changed lanes and then back again. I met a beautiful girl in my Feminist Film Theory class. She had heard stories about me and she still liked me. She said that laughing. I really thought it would work out.
The truck caught the light, and I couldn’t keep up. I remembered missing the bus. Shadows glided past as I navigated the curbs. I couldn’t find my phone and then couldn’t get it to work. I thought about that familiar frustration as I watched her go.
I’ve never understood how people know exactly who they are – not only the presentation of themselves but lying in bed with that awareness. I realize it is mostly a farce created to help us through birth to death, but I remain dumbfounded by their remarkable certainity in all of it.
My heads remains much the same as it was at Mia Frumhartz’s birthday party – I think it was her eighth – at the bowling alley where I decided to help her off with her coat. I didn’t know why I did that, aside from the fact that I like to be in the good graces of the fairer sex. I thought I would begin to know more about who I was as life went on. I was wrong.
My only consistent behavior has been to seek solitutude. The results are pending as is the impetus. In other words, I’m still just a kid trying to get away with stuff. My immediate desire when I have free time is to do things I’m not supposed to – smoke, drink, read trashy books – and get away with that as long as possible.
I do other things too, read stuff like Sartre, re-watch Tarkovsky films and have fine thoughts about important things. And I write too, my latest book focuses on an identity crisis, a person who revels in not only not knowing who he is but condemns those who pretend otherwise. And he blogs about that.
You go down the pipeline thinking you know something you don’t and it isn’t a bad thing but it’s an obvious thing and that’s still okay but then you remember it really isn’t because that’s sliding to nowhere, not knowing who you are and thinking that’s okay when it isn’t.
Then you’re left asking who are all these people are and how did they get into your living room.
Why are Andrei Tarkovsky’s films even a thing? They’re a meandering mess with endlessly long shot after long shot, slow tracks in and slow tracks sideways, sophomoric monologues about coping with existence dribbling on. Pretentious artsy crap. But I’m obsessed.
I was over tired when I went to see the recently restored version of Nostalgia. As much as I was enraptured by the opening shot, I was already falling asleep. It seemed a volatile thing because that’s where Tarkovsky lives, on that line between consciousness.
On the verge of madness? Was that it? Or clarity? A distant voice called out. A following tracking shot across a drained pond. I was almost scared. Or maybe I was and couldn’t admit that. I was understanding something, or forgetting what I thought I knew.
I try to think about who I am and what I know, but I don’t know what any of that means. It’s a thing off in the distance, someplace that I thought I might have been, even convinced myself of that, and have now lost.
I know what I want to be. No, that’s a lie too. Even if I said that I knew what I want, or that I thought that I knew that, I wouldn’t. The more I think that I know the who and what, the more I’m further from it because I think that. It’s a façade.
Confidence is the thing, believing in those lies is what makes you that you in you. The deeper you get, the further you are from the same. A gosh-darned paradox!
And so…something else. Drugs and whores! No confusion there. Or all confusion. Signs of it all gone awry. At least it’s not a façade. Or the façade of facades. Good copy anyway.
