Wasted Days

 

                        Hemingway wrote about the death loneliness that comes with every day wasted. I never really understood the extent of this truth, until the wasted days string together, one after the other, and all you can see in either direction are these empty days you threw away like loose change, never suspecting there’d come a time you’d want them back; never acknowledging your mortality, or the very basic human instincts you cannot escape, despite all the clothes, and the culture, and the exaggerated intelligence we use to separate ourselves from our boorish beginnings; refusing to accept that the core of us all remains primitive and unchanged, and all that’s left when everything else has been stripped away to prepare for evaporated endings.

             But in any predictable timelines, I’m far from this weightless conclusion. And with all my wasted days, the death loneliness is smothering and stifling, and all of my intelligence, and culture, and clothing is shabby, and in desperate need of discarding. And so not only is my loneliness slowly expediting a death who has introduced himself far too soon, but the embarrassment inherent in such public failings is only exasperated by my nakedness. Everything I had to shield myself from these painful truths has withered away from overuse, and if I’m to fight my way out of this one, I’ll have to do so with nothing but my own two hands; nothing but a thickening skin to deflect the criticisms and the piercing gazes who thrive on any comparisons that validate themselves, regardless of their merit, and in all the winning excitement and personal celebrations, brush their own wasted days under the carpet, to be uncovered at a later date.

            Perhaps Hemingway hated his wasted days more than I hate my own. It doesn’t seem like he ever allowed his to spiral out of control. I probably should be comforted by the sunlight and the endless blue skies, and my proximity to all the good things that could succeed in making wasted days fun days, in the very least. But they are like pretty pictures you hang on your wall but didn’t paint, of beautiful places you’ve never bothered to go, like celebrating someone else’s success makes you successful, and acknowledging that things exist outside of yourself makes you worldly.

            I see these things and retreat, wanting no part of the spoils I am inexcusably undeserving of, like the only thing that could compound the torture of all this death loneliness would be to shamelessly pretend it didn’t exist, and ride to happiness on the coattails of the sturdy souls who bothered to get it right.

The Bridge

Every night’s another story.

The hot June air, ripe on my face as it breezes through the passenger side window, hits my skin at such a pace that it’s only natural to infer it offers relief, but it’s hard to be certain. Even though it is the middle of another summer night, the sun has no bearing on the heat, nor the heat on the sun, and it resonates from everywhere, reborn again on every surface in this city’s annual defiance of the laws of all that is natural.

The lights from the bridge, as always, are dazzling and deceiving. While they’ve never ushered any promises my way, their very presence make my fingertips tingle with energy and hope on every ride home, and they know. They know, and they shine unfailingly, night after night just the same. It’s as good as an assurance to me.

It’s Thursday night, but the streets are alive. Every turn, every bump of the car upon this weathered and well-traveled road, there are new voices, and new bodies, pouring on the sidewalks, sitting on the curbs. Days of the week mean absolutely nothing in this place to these spirited faces. For me, the days and their names are a gravity I can’t overcome, and I resent the weightlessness of the strangers on their streets.

They own them, after all. They lay their claim with their bodies and patio furniture and bar tabs, and every time I pass by, trudging home and weighed down by the physical evidence of my limitations, I swear I can see them wink. Like it’s cute I could even think that after seven short years, I could call them mine as well.

I watch. As always. It’s my most practiced pastime these past few years. I study the intricacies – the idiosyncrasies. I try to imagine what it’d be like. I try to predict if they were me, and I them, whether my mind would still be paralyzed from waging a civil war upon itself every time anything resembling New York nostalgia enters its sensory spectrum. If I were sipping wine on the sidewalk of a quaint city street at the stroke of midnight, with my loudest friends, and no regard for the new day, would I want to stay forever?

It’s impossible to tell. Just fuel to this tireless fire.

All this second-guessing is getting old. Each night, each new crossing of that fucking bridge, with those fucking lights, and the fucking air on my skin – the air I can’t decide whether I’m better or worse off with – I am newly resolved, overturning the pledges of the previous night, and certain this petulant issue has finally been laid to rest.

I will stay, for no other reason other than it is out of the question to leave.

But in another twenty-four hours, I will cross that bridge, and see those lights, and I will decide that I hate them. They’re vapid, false, and issuing checks they never intended to cash. They only stand to reveal every body upon body of frustrated bones, stacked up and bled dry, gullible donors to an unworthy cause, and I resent everything about them. With my forefinger and my thumb, I snuff them out.

And these vibrant kids on the streets – the one’s forgetting the time for rest is now – they are liars too. It’s all for show. They’re here to be seen. Not by the people sitting next to and across from them, or the ones like me, peering in from tinted windows, but from the people hundreds and thousands of miles away. The people who think they are something. The people who think we are something. Their distance blurs and glorifies our lives, like our very presence in this place is the only evidence needed to prove we’re a resounding success. They think we’ve made it. And if they think so, then haven’t we?

Self-evaluation is nothing but self-indulgence anyway.

the stranger.

            As much as I love New York in the fall, there is something irrevocably sad about the death of summer. And this isn’t a hyperbole for the end of summer, for temporary endings are tolerable things, even if they are unappealing. It is the death I mean, and the death I loathe.

Like a best friend, or a beloved dog, it was a salvation you thought you’d always have to comfort you – the soft mattress at the end of the longest of days — but somewhere along the way, understood it couldn’t be yours forever. And so it is not mine. And perhaps with twenty-three summers, I was blessed to have more than most, but I could have used this one. If not just to rest and recharge, at least just to be. To remember all the reasons it is good to be anything, even if you can’t be everything. To remember what the sun feels like upon your skin, at least long enough to be reminded that it is worth the wait and the effort it takes to wade through all the days and months you’ll be without it. To live in the light, and remember what it’s like to know promise, and to wake up each day with something to look forward to, even if that something is still a stranger in the morning.

But these things weren’t mine. Even with the elongated days, I found myself chasing the sun – watching it rise and set from an air conditioned room, and wondering if it felt as good as it looked, or if it was as deceiving as the blue winter skies of this city. And I tried to cling to the seconds and minutes I could pass through the bits of summer that belonged to someone else, but it was futile. Maybe I should have just let it go. Say an honest goodbye and preserve what was once happily mine, instead of grow to resent everything that never shall again be.

I guess I don’t know this for sure. Perhaps this was just a vacant year – an anomaly that is not my fate. Or perhaps I will learn to fill the gaps with little things, and bring a balance to these lopsided years I’ve grown so accustomed to, but whose delicate architecture is a bit too volatile for temperamental minds like my own. The trick is probably to find friends and festivities whose energies masquerade as the sun, and then your summers are never more than an arms length away. 

I’ll try not to let my period of mourning over this untimely death overrun all that’s good with the fall. I suppose we all have to grow up sometime, and forgo the carefree enjoyment of being for the responsible burdens of living for something more than ourselves. But I never quite feel ready, and with each new year, I’m beginning to doubt that I ever will be. 

truth & lies.

            I only took one psychology class in all of my educated life, and while the science and unpronounceable names for the many facets of the brain have long since abandoned me, the general concepts won’t let go.

            An emotionally stunted young adult, I’ve taken solace in these oft frustrating abnormalities of mine by knowing that I’ve been gifted a good head on my shoulders. And in that head lies a brain that, while maybe not so well connected to my heart, is flawlessly dependable, rational, and vast. Perhaps even impenetrable, I always felt pretty invulnerable to the blind spots and scar tissue in trauma that seemed to make so many others flirt with the deep end.

            But then, psychology. The knowledge of all the ways your brain can lie to you to protect you from a truth too strong for the paper-thin walls that serve as a foundation for the mind. If it weren’t for these walls, and these lies, it would all come crumbling down, and we’d be back at square one: helpless, and crying out for protection. And so, humble enough at least to accept that my brain probably wasn’t inexplicably superior to this core foundation of human self-preservation, I tried to trace the trails of my own few traumas to seek a truth. And the truth was, it sure seemed like my brain was good at lying too.

The details of these low-points were blurry and intangible. Even with recent events, I could sense that the harder I tried to remember, the harder my brain hid the details so I could do nothing but forget, or simply hold onto a vagueness too indistinct to be of any use. It was like chasing a ghost around my head that wasn’t limited by the walls and barriers and folds that I was impotent against, and forced to abide by. I felt like Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, trying desperately to hold onto my memories, even though they were bad ones, but ultimately succumbing to the superiority of a human brain that has been perfecting its methods of self-defense for thousands of years, and making a mockery of my mere two decades.

And so I’ve been faced with the notion that I, too, have been brainwashed by my own brain, and the dependable truth of all that resides in its gray folds isn’t, in fact, as dependable as I once believed. Perhaps, every now and again, I am wrong where I am certain that I am right. Perhaps, given a bigger trauma to shake the foundation of my being, I too will be on the brink of the deep end, where even the strength of all my ration and reason won’t be able to help me swim.

I suppose if and when this time ever comes, I’ll be thankful for the lies. Sometimes, I’m thankful for them already. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, but I can’t help but believe it is fabricated. I seem to live my life in a constant state of being underwhelmed and underachieving. And it usually isn’t a morose truth, just a bland one that I accept and deal with in stride. But for some reason, show me a photo or video clip of the past – any past – and I’ll remember fondly and proudly. It’s always a sense of achievement in actually living, like it’s something I used to do, but don’t anymore. And my rational brain understands this discrepancy and what it means, but the other part – the part I can’t control – lets me revel in this temporary pride and happiness without heeding to a nagging truth.

Yesterday I watched dusty footage of a Missouri dusk that I’d forgotten by the following dawn. It showed a small group of us young adults soaking in the comforts of the impending absence of a brutal sun. My brother and his wife, and a few of their friends, sipping on beer and living simply. My sister and I, old enough to join them, but instead chasing fireflies with a curious two year old, with equal excitement and pleasure as her, my brother’s grown puppy nipping at our heels. As I watched my handheld footage, squirming at the embarrassment that is hearing my own voice as others hear it, I smiled with a pride I don’t often attain. Constantly chasing a life of fulfillment I convince myself can only be achieved through endless activity and grandiose glories, in this moment, I know that I am wrong. This life I seek now seems clearly and blatantly catered to an audience – one who can see my success and assume my contentment. But like my brain, I will have manipulated them into seeing what I want them to see, and it’s only a short matter of time before their approval will give way to a gaping truth of lies, and I will know that my calculated efforts have resulted in nothing.

I watch this video, the one of the night I barely remember on my own, and it embodies to me every happiness I’ve ever sought out. The simplicity is pure and clean, and its bareness cannot serve to mask any lies, so they do not attempt to hide here. This is peace. This is life. In an open backyard on an Army base in a poor Southern state, I have lived, and I am proud of this moment.

But like anything – like everything – this moment has passed, and is so far behind me that if it weren’t for this video, there isn’t much about it that I’d remember. This house, and all of the ones beside it and around it, have since been obliterated by a tornado, and this setting no longer even exists for me to revisit and recreate this scene if ever I’m feeling empty.

So I’ll have to make new scenes, and new memories, and new photographs and footage that I can revisit with more pleasure than I know I probably enjoyed in that original moment. But my brain will lie to me, and make me content with the things I’ve done, even if I can’t. And I will be content, and thankful for the lies that mask an often disappointing truth.

Maybe, if I’m as smart and rational as I think I am, I will consolidate my empty ambitions of glory into a simpler life, where there is no room for lies, but no need for them either.

            As I search for a pristine place, dry and comfortable, to sit myself down and feel the creative inspiration flow through my rested bones – as if the answers to my current drought lay in the soil and the grass and the bark of the tree I lean my body against, and the contact upon my thirsty skin is sponge-like, so that it doesn’t take long before I am satiated and teeming again with promise – I realize that each tree, up close, is a disappointment, and my eyes hunt for something more. This park is planned and premeditated to be like a forest, so the next trunk isn’t far, and from here, is unmistakably better.

            So I tread the trodden ground toward the promise land, but as its proximity nears, the mirage of blended perfection dissipates and clears into singular details, and this grass, which looked so lusciously green from afar, is sparse and patched at best, just like the rest. And just as life imitates art imitating life, or whatever it is those clever people say, life imitates life imitating life, one of which is mine.

            Just as this damp and damaged lawn alludes to the deception dormant in the most unsuspecting places, each detail of my day uncovers a truth that I’ve been consistently masking with my own lies for the greater part of my freethinking existence: a better life isn’t’ waiting for me. Not beyond this tree trunk. Not beyond this relationship. Not beyond these city walls. Not anywhere.  This grass literally isn’t any greener, it is just farther away, and in this distance, the details are elusive and unknown, and my imagination is good and pure and as unrealistic as ever.

            It isn’t time or distance that is going to rectify my disappointment, it is a little TLC.  Maybe if I water it, and feed it, and tend to its needs, the grass will grow stronger and greener where I am, and it will be mine to cultivate and keep and reap the rewards so long as I desire to do so, and I will stay. I won’t have to keep packing up my things and hitchhiking to foreign lands to escape my fruitless life like the cadger I fear that I am. For once, I will be self-reliant, and I will find contentment in all that it entails.

            And just as there are disappointments latent in everything, so too are there possibilities, but they are buried by the hands of a universe that revels in your suffering, knowing that your ensuing perseverance will be cathartic and contagious and validating. All you have to do is dig, and understand the depths it sometimes takes to reach the heavens.

            And so as life imitates life, and life, and life — and although I’m unsure to which rung applies to me – the trampled land underneath my feet serves to emphasize a lucid path. A better life isn’t waiting to be discovered, it is waiting to be built.

the lighthouse

It is not my intention, nor do I take pleasure, in being pessimistic. In fact, I ceaselessly admire those with untainted attitudes. I find their positivity contagious and invigorating. Probably, unfortunately, because I don’t possess any of it by natural way, and I often find that my transfiguring efforts ring contrived, false, and in the end, unsuccessful. So no, it is not my mission or my desire to be a pessimist, or to spread the plaguing poison it entails, but at times, some of which I find disturbingly too frequent, it seems unavoidable. True nature cannot be disguised forever.

I often reconsider, and suspect that it is only natural to get discouraged when you can’t find the rewards in all of your efforts, but that this doesn’t make me a downer, just someone who is down, for now. In fact, usually I am confident that my light is not, in fact, darkness, but rather a steady glow of reason. It might not illuminate the path to the promise land, but it can be a lighthouse – a constant by which you can find your way home if you discover yourself lost and unsure of which of the other blazing lights are real and trustworthy and will lead you out of the void.

I think we call ourselves realists. It isn’t to suggest that I am more in tune with reality. Just my reality. And I know the power of positive thinking does not unlock all doors, so I approach things with an understanding of what is achievable and a confidence in my ability to obtain this success. The pessimism only creeps in when I am forced to reconsider my idealistic rationale, and mull over the notion that I am wrong in at least one of two ways:

1.     My estimation of what is achievable is high and unrealistic.

2.     My confidence in achieving this calculated success is simply arrogance, and I neither possess the tools for accomplishment nor the work ethic to improve my chances.

Regardless of whether the problem lies in either or both of these miscalculations, the end result is the same, so identifying the specifics seems much like beating a dead horse. I have failed, and the discouragement makes it all too easy to make a lapse into negativity.

And I find myself often, if only momentarily, standing on the brink of a black hole, understanding that to let myself be sucked in would be all-encompassing, debilitating, and endless, but simultaneously wondering if the juice is worth the squeeze. It is a monumentally exhausting fight to escape the clutches of this dark abyss, and each time I do I am glad and better off, but it doesn’t prevent my reoccurring predicament. And my aging bones and tired mind are less adept for battle, and I wonder how many more escapes I have left in me. I am no quitter, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t learn when to quit, and concede to an inevitability.

But I know this is just the disappointment talking, which I take hard and always have, but am becoming more equipped at dealing with in stride. My life is not an inevitability. My downfall is not an inevitability. I would be wise to take a cue from my best of friends, whose light I’ve always been drawn to because of its ability to offset my dark, and consider my temporary failings as weapons for my ultimate success.

And so that’s what I’ll do. I will once again swim through the vast space, propelling myself away from the incessant pull of the black hole, and back to the stars and the sun and the light that help me once again feel the possibility of my life and illuminate the dead end maze that I mistook for my rightful path.

But I won’t forget my reason, and I remember to know that there is no such thing as ultimate success because it requires an end that one can never truly be aware of until it is over, at which point there is no time to reflect. Only nothingness or forward motion. So I won’t strive for ultimate success, just temporary successes, which, when strung together, can make up a good life. 

Écrire

            The most daunting facet of writing, and trying to be a writer, and trying to convince not only yourself but the people around you who keep tabs on your life that this is more than a hobby, or a fantasy, or an excuse for wanting to do nothing at all, is the days when you wake up and you have nothing to say.

            And in the name of discipline, you pick up your pen and you put it to paper, but you can’t find the words, and they don’t find you. Sometimes you put it down again, and look for distractions or inspiration, which are more or less the same things anyway, or sometimes you just start moving your fingers, and the words trickle out slowly and solitarily, but their lack of authenticity makes you cringe and fight the urge to destroy all evidence of your fruitless efforts.

            Just like with everything I suppose, these days leave you desperate and doubting, and unable to push the notion of succumbing to a real and natural life out of your head, and just thankful for the time being that it hasn’t made its way down to your heart, which is all encompassing and unforgiving.

            And you go back to sleep again, and when you wake, you find your predicament unchanged, and you go through the motions as you feel the weight of your worries slipping down your spine, or sometimes your throat, as if your heart was a magnet of all things, good or bad. And you hope you find the strength to switch the polarity today, or maybe tomorrow, but know that the following day isn’t looking so good, or the rest of the week for that matter, because it might already be too late.

            But then one day, the morning sun lifts your eyelids, and the world comes rushing in. Or late night fatigue is adrenalized by an active mind, and you crawl back out of your sheets not because you want to, but because you must. The words repeat themselves, cyclically traversing your mind and antagonizing you endlessly, daring you to ignore them lest you forget. And so you write them down, less for the pleasure of performance, and more for relief.

            But they are out, and active, and alive, and they make you alive because you know that the only evidence of your living is inspiration, and it’s beating down your door. The personal validation is enough to push the weight and the baggage back to your brain, where it can be properly managed and monitored. But occasionally, or rarely – which is closer the truth – your words, the ones that are unlabored and unstoppable, extend this validation beyond their origins and original creator to unsuspecting lives of others, and the weight doesn’t just ascend back to your mind, but is pushed straight out of your head and is released to the world, where the fresh air dissipates it into impotent nothingness.

            And you know it will find its way back, or a new weight will eventually succumb to the pull of your magnetic heart, but for one moment on the rarest of days it is gone and you are free. These are the days when the daunting facet shows its true face, and you realize it masquerades itself as your nemesis to call forth the latent hero inside of you. 

coffee & cigarettes

          

            My transition into coffee drinker has been quick and painless and almost unnaturally easy. Part of me hoped that it wouldn’t hold, and that I could always claim that I made a valiant effort to no avail, but that I really just stand alone on the outside. In an industry dominated by coffee and cigarettes, I simply cannot conform. And I know nobody’s asking me to, but it was always something I could keep for myself. One less thing to be dependent on, one more way my life was my own.

            But my life isn’t my own. Not entirely. Coffee and nicotine addictions aside, all you can do is make your decisions and try desperately to hold onto the things that are most important, and hope that those are the last things people try to take away from you, but they’re usually the first. People are helplessly attracted to talent and passion, and any small bits of it you’re lucky enough to own hardly belongs to just you long enough for you to make out its face and figure, and once it’s been thrust into the public domain, it begins to take on a foreign shape under foreign persuasion, and no matter how desperately you try to get it back, you can’t quite remember its details and intricacies, probably because you never got the chance to learn them in the first place, and so it is lost to you. And you can quit and embrace that your life belongs not just to you, but to everyone who wants a piece of it, or you can begin again.

            And so I’ll drink coffee and tally one to the universe, but I’ll use it to mask something better, and hope by now I’ve learned how to hide pieces away more successfully, but I know it’s a gamble. And it doesn’t matter so much that the thing I want to keep most for myself is myself, and just the satisfaction knowing I always did my best to be a solid human being, even if it came at the expense of being an awesome one, because in the end people are people and they are rash and they will make up their minds before they have all the facts. And they will take that one last thing from you if you let them, not knowing just what they are doing, or the bigger things at stake.

            Or you can hold on for dear life, and that last thing will get stretched and weary in a game of tug-of-war, but if you hold tight long enough, they will get bored and move on to something or someone bigger and better, and you will be left picking up the pieces, but thankful that at least this time there are pieces left to pick up.

            And you can put them back together and hope they heal stronger than before, having learned from this experience, but it’s more likely that the only hope for salvation will be if you learned from this experience, and acknowledge that the seams of your former self are weaker, but they can be built upon and added to, and there will be strength in numbers.

            Maybe the solution is to not spend all of your energy trying to hide it all away, but to share what you can, and save the fight for the big things that you can’t afford to lose. I haven’t figured out the balance of it all quite yet, but I’m sure it’s there, and I hope to get a little wiser and a little closer every day. And so I do a little spring cleaning, and throw more and more pieces into the universal pot of fair game, hoping that with each bit lost, the whole becomes simple and clear and mine long enough to memorize in case I ever need to get it back again.

Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway told me to start out each day by writing the truest statement that I know. 

Ok, he didn’t tell me specifically, but he told me that that’s what he told himself. So I figure, he was a smart guy, I’ll do what he did, and see if anything sticks.

Today, the truest thing that I know is this:

New York city is hot in August. It’s not the kind of hot you dream of in February. It’s the kind you dread in May, or sometimes even June, when the weather is just right, but fleeting.

As long as you know it’s coming, however, it isn’t so bad. It can even be pleasant if you don’t think too hard about it. These days it’s only the weather that takes me by surprise that I find intolerable. After my years here, to let this heat take me by surprise would just be inexcusable and, frankly, preposterous. So I don’t.

And so it is. August is hot, but it’s nothing worth complaining about. So I don’t do that either. I sit in my fifth floor apartment with my oscillating fan and nearly naked privacy, and when that’s not enough, I sit on a giant gray slab of rock in the early fringes of Central Park, with speckled protection from the leaves above to take the brunt of the sun, and I watch others do the same.

A group of three women lay on the rock as if it has been eroded over hundreds of years into the finest sand, and the ocean waves are lapping at their feet. I too enjoy the rock, but to lay my body on its surface and act as if it is relaxing seems like a lie even I couldn’t pull off. Not that I’m any good at deception, but you know what I mean. It’s a lie I couldn’t even convince myself of, which is something they’ve seemed to succeed in doing.

I wonder if they’re tourists, as most people in this park give themselves away to be. Maybe they are toursits, and literally have no place else to rest their weary feet, so they pick the flattest surface they can find, which just so happens to be this rock, and take a load off. Or maybe they’re locals, like me, who can’t quite afford air conditioning, so come to this place and its speckled salvation and cool breeze for relief. It’s not really cool, because it’s August, but there is a breeze, and if you close your eyes and let it softly grace your skin, you feel pleasant, so assume that it is cool, which is more or less the same thing anyway.

It isn’t so much reality that is important, just what you think is real. At least in the small things — the things that don’t effect anybody but yourself. When you start shouting about how we never really put a man on the moon, you start stepping on some toes. But if I tell you I’m happy, even though all signs might suggest the opposite, who are you to argue with me? Who am I hurting?

I try not to give it much thought, but when you ask and I tell you I am, I can’t help but think that I really could be.