The Butterfly Part.

 

Let us recap: Previously on this blog …

Since about February I have been trying to figure out how to construct a life. I’ve been trying things out. I’ve been looking for ways to protect my personal life and time from my job which is constantly trying to expand beyond its box. I’ve been testing out better sleep schedules. I’ve been testing out different diets, different foods, different ways to spend an evening. 

Because I moved here shortly before Quarantine dropped on all of us, I didn’t really much of a life to speak of when we went into lock down and I have realized — much to my horror — that as life begins to start up again, it means that I have to begin anew the work of building a life for myself. 

I’ve done this sort of work before, but usually it was because I was in grad school a couple of times and, say what you will about grad school, it comes with a built in cohort of people. This life doesn’t, not exactly. I’m blessed with a handful of great coworkers who are fun people to grab dinner and a drink with occasionally, but because they’re my coworkers I can’t just call them up and be like, “I’m lonely!”

I have a couple of friends in the Bay Area, but more than a hour away, so that limits our interactions.

So in the weird period where the world is open, but not fully up to speed yet, I’m concentrating on myself and what I can do to build up a life that I like, so that when I eventually have to go meet people and try to make friends and — god forbid — try to date, I will at least be a person who has his shit together and has something to offer.

With all of that in mind, I’ve been doing the basics: getting enough sleep, drinking enough water (never once paid any attention to this before like a month ago), I am more consistently doing yoga in the mornings, I’ve been scouting out new running trails, I’ve been trying to both clean up my diet and remove most meat from it (two things I have needed to do for awhile), I’m also going to cut back on the booze and try to dry out for a month or two. Red wine got me through Quarantine, and I will always appreciate that, but Quarantine has ended here in California and now I can’t justify the extra 600-800 calories in a bottle of Malbec. I’ll still grab drinks with people out in the world, but both meat and booze I’m just not going to bring into the apartment anymore (with the possible exception of tune, I’ve been eating a lot of tuna and rice lately).

I also purchased a scale recently because I was convinced I’d put on 20 pounds during the big Q. The reality is that I weigh about what I did when I moved here. I know I have lost muscle mass and put on flab, but my weight has about netted out, so that’s something. I figure that just by losing the wine, the pizza, and the potato chips I’m off to a good start. Add to that a cleaner diet that involves actually eating the fruit I buy, and now we are off to the races. On a day when my job does not eat my life, I can get in about half an hour of yoga in the mornings and I have scheduled time to run for about an hour in the early evening. In the latest interaction of my daily schedule I have built in time specific to writing, which I hadn’t really done before. If you add up all of these small changes I’ve been working on, you start to see how full on habits could emerge. That is the idea. I always get ambushed by life and work, so each time I try to make improvements, only a few end up sticking, but that’s why I keep trying; some of them do stick, it just takes time and effort.

Such is life.

One thing I have learned from earlier attempts is that if I can actually have one of these good days (yoga, clean food, a reasonable work day, running, writing, reading) I actually sleep better (I toss and turn a lot lately) and when I sleep better, I wake up feeling better, which makes it easier to have a good day, and a good day means I sleep better, which means it is easier to have another good day, and on and on and on … but that cycle is somewhat difficult to get into to, but I’m trying to get back into it.

When I feel bad about my failures in these efforts, I find some grace in reminding myself that everyone in the world has endured a terrible trauma over the last year and a half (and in some places that trauma still endures) and so we can’t really judge this new life we’re entering into the same way we might have judged our previous lives. In some ways the fact that I have to build a new life from scratch here in this place is actually kind of thematically fitting. I did the chrysalis of Quarantine here, I just need to now figure out how to do the butterfly part.

.

.

.

Boating with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Aaaaaaand I’m back!

I took a little vacation. I went up to Washington state with some people and spent a few days staying in a beautiful house on a lake. I had a wonderful time, thank you for asking. I got to ride on a boat. I got to run in the forest. I went to new places and met new people and I only embarrassed myself a little more than the normal amount.

The pandemic is not over, I know, but the scientific miracle that is these vaccines has given us back a version of life that I am incredibly grateful for.

It wasn’t until I arrived back in my empty little apartment on Tuesday night that I realized how debilitatingly lonely I have been. My situation is not unique. Lots of people went through quarantine alone. I was lucky to have family zoom calls and a supportive group of coworkers and friends to talk to, but nothing is quite as life affirming as being in the same room with other people. It is with good reason that some countries consider solitary confinement to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment. 

I’m not going to lie, I cried a little when I got back here. Not because it is terrible here — I’ve made the best of quarantine, I suppose — but because of how much simply being around other people felt like such a warm blanket. It was like walking in out of a bone chilly cold into a room warmed by a fireplace and with chocolate chip cookies baking nearby. I had to go back out into the cold eventually, but the experience of the cold is different after you’ve known warmth.

There is a scene I always think about from the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is a book about prisoners in a Stalinist gulag. Each morning they have to pile out of the bunkhouse into the Russian winter and the guards inspect each prisoner to make sure they’re not taking anything illicit out on their work day. Solzhenitsyn goes on for like two pages about Ivan’s strategy for standing in front of the fire in the bunkhouse absorbing as much warmth as he can before he has to step out for inspection. About the way he’s learned to buckle his coat over his body to make sure he takes as much heat with him as possible. The thing that sticks in my mind about it is that Ivan knows that the guards are going to make him open his coat once he lines up outside. He’s not trying to take the warmth with him all day, he knows he’s only going to get to enjoy it for a few brief moments. But he has a whole strategy for it, because he knows that at the very least, those are moments that he can enjoy. Ivan has learned to appreciate things as brief as that.

Now, I am not in a gulag. I did think of Ivan though while I was gone. I so enjoyed being able to be a person in the world again, to talk to people, to drink with people, to play cards with people, to enjoy people again, to laugh until I cried. There is so much life out there still and bit by bit by ever-too-slow bit, it is coming back. And I am eager for its return.

.

.

.

Blame an Architect.

 

I’ve been reading a book called Brave New Home by Diana Lind. It is about housing in America … no, wait, come back! I promise, it isn’t as boring as you think! It’s more a work of Sociology than anything else. Yes, it is about housing, but really it is a history of the way modes of housing interact with our lives in a society. It is about how our spaces shape the lives we live inside of them.

For instance, for most of human history, some kind of multi-generational home was the norm. This made a lot of sense because people didn’t usually move around that much and it actually made living easier because the work of the home was distributed among many people. Grandparents watched the kinds while the parents were out hunting and gathering, etc. This persisted (with exceptions, of course) for most of our time on this planet.

Let’s fast forward to the post-World War II housing boom in America: this is when things really start to change. The Industrial Revolution produced pretty squalid and terrible housing because that’s when people became commoditized as simply “labor” and the living conditions were terrible and over-packed and this is where much of our housing code started, which was a good thing at the time. In the era after World War II, there was a pretty dramatic shift toward the single family detached home. Culturally this had to do with a movement away from the cramped industrial housing of the urban tenement house, but also was a result of the fact that farm boys who’d been drafted and survived the war didn’t want to go back to the farm. Not when the GI Bill would send them to college and government-backed loans allowed them to own their own homes. It is really this period from the late 40s onward that shaped the American idea of what a “home” should be, because that idea had not really existed in this form before that.

Now fast forward to now. Now we know that a whole bunch of single family homes, private, accessible only via car, closed off from the world with big backyards and useless front yards have altered our sense of the individual’s (or the individual family’s) place in society. You can’t sit on the stoop with your neighbors when you have no stoop and have never met your neighbors.

In James Howard Kunstler’s fantastically bitchy book The Geography of Nowhere, he really goes in on the idea that mandatory housing setbacks (how close the house can be to the curb) caused the flourishing of the green front yard with its picket fence, but that they destroyed the community life of the neighborhood.

Lind makes the argument that the idealized “privacy” of the single family home created a mindset that bled over into down market housing like apartment buildings, basically our entire society became about minding one’s own business in the residential sphere and that is reflected in the design of apartments now as well as housing.

The book makes a lot of really good arguments about how ecologically disastrous our current forms of housing are, but this thread about how they have had deleterious effects on the social and community lives is the one that is really connecting with me at the moment. She connects the inbuilt privacy of our housing designs with the increasing epidemic of isolation and loneliness, which we know now translates to actual erosion of health and which (apparently) has been linked to earlier deaths. She even says that smokers with a lot of friends live longer than smokers with no friends, which I thought was interesting.  

I think about this a lot because the walls of my apartment are so thin and poorly insulated that everyone in the building can hear what everybody else is up to. I can hear not just when my downstairs neighbors are having a party, but when they sitting down to dinner. It is always odd to be able to hear so much of these other lives so near my own, but to not be a part of them. There is a line in a poem I have always liked that goes, “almost being there/is a kind of punishment” and that is a little bit of what I am describing here.

In the Robert Putnam book Bowling Alone, he talks about the collapse of American social communities (like churches, bowling leagues, service organizations like the Rotary Club, etc.) have contributed to the splintering of our society into ever smaller and more isolated groups and that idea basically wrote the check for Putnam’s whole career. While I think he was correct, Lind’s idea about the design of our housing working like castle gates to keep us apart from others, seems like a far more practical explanation for some of the ills in our culture.

I think that Roman Mars and 99% Invisible have taught us all about the importance of the design we never think about. I’m writing this the same day I have a physical therapy appointment to work on the pinched nerve in my neck caused by spending 14 months hunched over an impromptu work desk in what is now my office and used to be a guest bedroom. Design and intention matter.

I could go on and on on this topic, but mostly this morning I just wanted to tell you that if you ever feel lonely, you can probably blame an architect, as this is obviously all their fault.

.

.

.

BC and AC.

 

Today is my Two Doses + Two Weeks Day!

I am now fully vaccinated! I would like to thank my family, my friends, the staff at the weird grocery store pharmacy where I got my shots …

Sooooooooo … now what?

I’ve expressed a little anxiety here before about what this next part is going to be like. I’ve moved around enough that I know it takes me about six months to settle into a new place and I had lived here almost exactly five months when Quarantine started 13 months ago. I guess this means that my counter restarts? Does it reset to zero? Or does it reset to five months? Does it actually reset at all? Or do I have to wait until the rest of society comes back online?

The thing is, aside from some work people and a few friends 90 minutes away in the Bay Area, I don’t really know anyone here. I live in basically a company town suburb that isn’t walking distance to anything really. The town I “live in” is actually a short drive away and doesn’t have a lot to recommend it in terms of nightlife or meeting people opportunities. Monterey proper is about a twenty minute drive and while there are some bars there that I like, they’re less fun to go to alone. 

I’m not trying to complain. The area is beautiful and I am lucky to be here, but I’m trying to adjust to the reality that from here on out, when I feel lonely, I’m not going to be able to blame that on the pandemic. I now have to blame it on me.

As much as i have enjoyed living a varied life that has taken me to live in lots of different places, each time I’ve moved it has felt like I lost people along the way and as if my circle of people has gotten smaller and small until this past year when it was reduced to just me and the cat. Which is too small. But what do I do about that now? I worry a lot that I will just never be able to add to it again and that it will simply remain this small until I end up dying alone one night and then my cat eats my face off.

It happens. In fact we know it happens a lot.

This is what I do though; the stoic in my goes immediately to the worst stuff, that way I can be ready for it, but it is also probably some kind of anxiety doom-loop that is about more than the fact I’ve read some Marcus Aurelius, but we don’t have time to get into all of that right now.

Even though I am working today and have a lot to do, I am going to try to shift into a lower gear than normal and I am going to try and spend some time thinking about what a good day this is. Two doses + two weeks! That is a big big deal. Today, for just this one day, I am going to just live in this one day and try to feel good. For all of us life is going to be broken into Before Covid (BC) and After Covid (AC) and I might reasonably be able to think of today as my first After Covid day. That is a cause for hope.

.

.

.

April 5th, 2019.

 

Every morning I make a silly little drawing and post it to my Instagram. I’m terrible at it (Can’t draw), but I like doing it. After I post them, I write the date in the bottom corner of the drawing in my sketchbook and today for some reason I wrote: 4-5-2019, which is not the correct date.

I have no idea why my brain did that.

4-5-2019 is of no particular significance (I don’t think), so I guess my internal clock is just a little off today.

But it did get me to thinking: Holy shit, it is 2021!

How the hell did that happen???

Just a minute ago it was 2016 and I’d just moved to Portland. And then the Former Guy got elected that November and we all fell into some sort of Darkest Timeline wormhole and then Covid hit and then a year somehow simultaneously disappeared while also aging all of us ten years.

And now it is 2021. 

We live in the future, I guess???

When I was growing up, I  used to read science fiction that was set in like 2015. They had lasers and stuff. We don’t even have jet packs.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that time is kind of merciless in it’s brutal and inevitable march forward. In a way, I guess that’s good. It means that 2020 is in our rear-view now. It means that a summer of vaccinations and hugs is on the horizon.

But it also means we completely lost an entire year. You know, I moved here to Monterey in October of 2019 and I’d only been here about 5 months when quarantine came down. It usually takes me about six months to settle into a new place, and I never really got to do that here. As Vaccine Summer approaches, I’ve started feeling this odd anxiety about life getting “back to normal” because in this case “back to normal” is going to mean “having only lived here 5 months” and so I will still have to do all the work of building a new life. So the relief of surviving Covid is going to immediately turn into the existential dread of having to build yet another new life from scratch. There is a part of my that likes that I’ve gotten to move around a lot, but the part of me that keeps getting older has come to the realization that every time I move, my life seems to get a little smaller and my circle of people is reduced. I really am worried that one day I’m going to look around and realize I don’t even have anyone to get a beer with. There is a part of me that is a little worried that when it is time to start doing hugs again, I simply won’t have anyone to hug.

This is not the future I used to read about and it certainly isn’t the one I imagined for myself. Though I guess I have to admit, at least we have reached the point in the pandemic where it is even reasonable to begin to really think about having a future that’s bigger than just our dumb little quarantine lives. That counts for something.

.

.

.

Not Going to Miss My Shot.

This will likely be a short post today. I’m feeling some anxiety. See, today I have an appointment to get my first Covid vaccine shot. I am SOOOOOOOO happy about that. Yesterday I did a dry run and drove out to the pharmacy (because it is in a place I had never been before) and it seemed easy enough.

So why the anxiety?

I’m not sure.

I want so badly to see people and hug people and be in the same room with other people (I have been quarantined alone for 12 months), but I think I have a little fear about what the return to life will be like. This past year has been terrible and so incredibly lonely, but I had only lived here about 5 months when quarantine started and I had just barely started to settle into a life. I don’t really know anyone nearby and I didn’t have the chance to — you know --- make friends or do anything more than think about dating. So I think the anxiety is maybe tied up with the fact that when quarantine ends I will have to do the soul numbing work of trying to build a life.

Maybe that will be easy (I think people will want so much to be out in the world, meeting new people, and going to parties, etc.), but maybe it won’t be.

Obviously I will have some time to work all of this out, so I know in my brain there is no point in worrying about it right now, but I’m still feeling the anxiety in my body. 

Obviously I’m over-thinking.

Obviously.

I’m so happy to have gotten an appointment and I’m so happy to be one small part of getting our entire society safe and back to normal, but what is normal going to be next? I think I am a little afraid that I have gotten used to how lonely this past year has been and so maybe I’ll just continue to carry that loneliness around. The thing is, that right before quarantine, my “normal” was pretty lonely. I don’t want to go back to that normal. I want a better one. I have no idea how to do that.

Ironically, I kind of had the proper skill set for staying home, I’m not sure if I still possess the skill set to go out in the world and meet people and make small talk and even god-forbid, try to date.

So yeah, I think that is why I am feeling this way this morning.

That being said, I imagine I will feel much much happier five hours from now when they are injecting me with that sweet, sweet mRNA vaccine! I will get this done today. I will make Dr. Fauci happy. I will do my part today. I’ll worry about the next part after this part.

Wish me luck!

.

.

.

In Need of a Patron Saint.

I have been having a few difficult days.

Only in my head though.

It is a kind of vicious irony. For so long one of the only things I knew I really wanted was to get into an MFA program. AND I DID IT! I am in one and it is a good one and it is in Portland and that is awesome and - therefore - I am awesome.

But being here has been hard. It is hard to move very far away to a very different place and to do it alone. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that I am someone who has had to restart his life more than once. Turn-it-off-and-turn-it-back-on. For some strange reason, I feel like that is what I am doing here right now.

I heard a TED Talk the other day with a writer named Lidia Yuknavitch and she was reflecting on her success - or lack thereof - over the course of her life and she said something like, “How many times I have had to reinvent myself from the ruins on my choices …” and because I was in a sour and blue Hamlet sort of mood I thought to myself, “You tell ‘em sister. I know what you mean.”

It occurred to me almost right away though how much of a self-involved idiot I am. From the back of my brain came the voice of that part of me that actually has goals and stuff and it said, “You are not here all sad and lonely because of the ruin of your choices, you dumb shit. You are here because you are one of the relatively small percentage of people who got accepted to one of these things. Of course you are feel isolated, you don’t know anyone in this state and you have been here less than a month. Stop being such a self-pitying jag-off.”

I had to concede that all of those were good points.

Now, that does not mean that the clouds parted and the shown down upon my face and I smiled. Let’s be clear, much of my difficulty is external. To make a long story short - and say it with me if you have heard this one before - : there is never enough money.

I am not starving (yet), but I’ve had constant struggles with the admissions, housing, and financial aid offices, I have not yet been able to find a job, I feel like the other people in my program have figured all this stuff out already (although objectively most of them clearly have not), I’m kind of pissed that this program has not (thus far) given me the support (financial, emotional, or professional) that I was expecting, and - because I am given to flights of geopolitical grandeur - I look at these problems and at most of the chapters of my life and see that the source of most of my life stress has been money - just normal fucking money - and how the hell does it make any sense to build a society where such a thing could be true?

A couple of years ago, when I was in a similar predicament while getting my MA, I tweeted, “This starving artist thing looked a lot better on paper.”

On top of everything else, I had a terrible and nasty cold about two weeks ago (it knocked me on my ass for several days) and I just have not been able to kick the sniffles and the cough. So it has been two weeks now that I have been some amount of sick.

There should be a patron saint I can pray to about these things.

I walk around downtown Portland when I need to clear my head and downtown Portland is full of homeless people. They are just all over the place. Recently I had a conversation with a native Portlander who was complaining about the population boom of homeless people and he said, “I hate them. I just hate the homeless everywhere.” And he explained why and I guess I could understand where he was coming from, but I do not hate them, in fact when I wander around, they make me bashful and a little afraid because I think about how easily I could become one f them. There is some hyperbole to this, but not much. I may not be living on the knife edge of poverty, but I live close enough to it that I can peer over the edge.

So like I said, this starving artist thing looked better on paper.

I know that this raincloud I feel like I’m living under is a combination of being alone in a distant place, being somewhat disappointed by the reality of my program (as opposed to the fantasy land I’d imagined it to be), worrying about money every third thought, and then feeling generally as though my life has been a series of violent, disaster-averting hairpin turns rather than a steady and progressive movement forward.    

Maybe it is all of us, or maybe it is just me, but I have this thorough feeling of un-accomplishment. Of disappointment in myself for all of the things I have wanted to do but been unable to do, so far. This is different than imposter syndrome (which everyone loves to talk about now). It is just run-of-the-mill disappointment. So common it is barely even worth commenting upon, which is kind of heartbreaking in its own way.

Now all that being said, there are cures for all of these ailments. Obviously perspective is one (I’ve been here only about a month and I should chill the fuck out about rainclouds and disappointment). Another is exertion (a week from now I should be able to start running again and until then I should knuckle down and do all this schoolwork instead of feeling sorry for myself). Attitude is probably the final cure for what ails me (Yes life can be difficult sometimes, but feeling sorry for yourself just makes it harder. So turn that frown upside down, asshole).

Anyway, I am going to go do stuff now while attempting to maintain a positive attitude.

.

.

.

Living Alone.

Heading into this summer I was lucky enough to pick up a full-time job as a staff member at the college library where I had been working as an assistant. In about two weeks I’ll transition back from grown-up-town to student-assistant-ville again because I’m not allowed to be a student teacher and a state of California CSU staff member at the same time. Lame.

That’s fine, whatever. I entered freely into a system that is designed for 22-year-olds who still live at home.

The summer has been pleasant so far. It is probably the easiest job I have ever had. It is big on monotony and I have a superhuman capacity to tolerate such things at work. You - for instance - would have self-immolated a month ago just so that you could feel alive again, but I don’t freak out that way. It is boring work, but I work to find the interesting in it.

The larger point though is that it is the kind of work that I can do while listening to stuff and one of my projects this summer (in addition to writing a collection of poetry, doing Project 333, and generally being awesome) has been to listen to This American Life. All of it. 

I have been working my way backward from 2015 and right now I am knee deep in 2009. Ira and his team have been on the air since 1995 so obviously I am not going to get through it all. That is just math and would have been obvious if I had thought to do the math when the summer started. But this is one of those things that makes me better for having attempted it.

Today though I felt a little bit assailed. Not intentionally, but assailed nonetheless. If you were interested in thematically titling the This American Life Episodes 391 through 402, you might want to call them, “Even this guy has a girlfriend!”

This blog post is going to be all sour grapes from here on.

That’s not really true though.

I’ve been living - for some time now - a quite contented bachelor life. I really do like my life. I like my mattress on the floor, I like my futon/couch, I like my cat, and my ability to do whatever I want at any given moment. Occasionally I go get the mail without bothering to put pants on and no one yells at me about it. It's kinda great.

Also, I’m not someone who tends to get terribly lonely. I find my own company rather entertaining and I have a lot of easy friends (by which I mean: people I like who I can go get a drink with but whose lives I don’t have to be involved in). There are moments though when I do miss having that someone in my life. I’ve come to discover that “significant other” is one of those politically correct terms which has proved to have some useful existential value.  Just say it a couple of times: significant other, significant other.

It is that other person in your life who is significant. I’m willing to admit that I miss that. I miss being someone’s person. Their go-to. And I miss having a go-to.

That being said, I’m just whining. It’s not like I’m on match.com or speed-dating or anything, so how much do I really miss it? I mean really?

There is a fantastic song by the otherwise forgettable Mr. T Experience called “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend” and that is how This American Life made me feel today because one of the dudes in one of the stories was a landlord-murdering meth addict and you know what? He had a girlfriend.

One guy went to Baja California for no good goddamn reason to hunt down the landlord-murdering meth addict and you know what? That guy had a wife.

One guy hated everyone and was bemoaning how long his social circle had to mourn the death of a friend with cancer and that guy was married.

One guy moved home to sate his childhood daddy issues by rebuilding his father’s rundown house over the course of A YEAR and THAT GUY had a wife.

One guy was on death row for having MURDERED a dude, and THAT GUY had a girlfriend.

One guy experienced amnesia while in India, flew back to the United States, and had a girlfriend when he landed who still loved him and whom he did not remember AT ALL.

AND there was a whole story (from The Moth) about one woman in an abusive relationship who met another woman in an abusive relationship and how they bonded over how fucked up their abusive relationships were and then they both WENT BACK TO THOSE GUYS.

Just kick me in the teeth why don’t you Ira Glass?

Anyway, like I said, this is not a bitchfest, rather it is just a nominal and pragmatic WHAT THE FUCK?! to the universe. An open letter, if you will.

There are things about my life that I treasure, but - at the same time -  I am bothered by the fact that other people seem to be making connections better than I am or more frequently that I do. And to dispel your questions: I’m not bad looking or smelly or naive or particular demanding. But then I guess, neither is that dude on death row who’s just waiting to get executed, while holding hands with his girlfriend.

Oh! And just because it seems thematically contiguous, below is a brilliant song by The Helio Sequence called “Lately”, which I always think is sung by Ryan Adams but which actually is not:

.

.

.

 

Some Virtue.

One of the difficult things about being single and basically a monk - which I basically am - is that there is no one to talk to about the small things like what I should read over the summer, or whether or not I should test out the shaved-head-and-beard look, or is this Bukowski poem good or have I just had too much wine?

I’ve long been saying that the little things in life are the most important and the most odd and also the most interesting. I do - if I’m being honest - miss being able to share the little things with someone. I lived with a girl once who let me read to her in bed at night until she fell asleep and I miss that sort of thing. I remember the books I read to her and all of those books are special to me and I can’t imagine that it is simply because for two years I was on a hot streak of good-book-picking.

There is - I’ve realized - some virtue in going through this whole being-alive-thing alone. My life is busy and I crowbar freedom into it as I can and that would be impossible if I had to account for the minutia of someone else’s life. Also, I’m not certain that I would be a very good partner right now and so I’m not anyone’s partner. This is just me being honest because this is a blog that no one reads.

Two things, I guess, are certain though: this is a good Bukowski poem and I have had too much wine.

.

.

.

Rules for Marbles.

Rules for Marbles

By james bezerra

          

When playing marbles, it is best to know the rules as well as to have a basic understanding of physics. 

When I say “playing marbles”, what I really mean is “when existing in the world” and when I say that what I really mean, of course, is “When attempting to navigate this too-brief lifespan of ours and accomplish all of the things you will ever accomplish all in the blink of cosmic time between when you are birthed and when your body ceases its standard biological functioning; all the wandering, the learning, the falling in love, the working, the moving from one empty place to another, the packing up over and over of all your vinyl records that you keep promising yourself that you will one day buy a player for, the surviving of illnesses, the making of soup for yourself those times when you have the flu and no one in your life who loves you enough to even heat up canned soup for you, the buying of rugs so large that you have to carry them rolled up over your shoulder like someone carrying a heavy burden or a rescued princess, the having your heart broken again and then mended again and then inevitably broken again, the sitting in a sun beam in a summer park and closing your eyes and seeing that the blackness that usually covers the back of your eyelids has been replaced by a faint but warm yellow, the paying of taxes, the writing of your will, the watching of fireworks from the last hospital window you will ever look out of, it is best to know the rules and to have a basic understanding of physics, or, at the very least, gravity.”

.
.
.

DRD4-7r.

About a year ago I settled on the word restless. This is the word I am okay with when I have to explain to people what the hell the deal has been with my life. Most people are far too polite to ask specific things like, “What happened with that marriage you were in?” or “So I hear that you don’t sleep in a bed because your ex-girlfriend broke your heart so bad that you’re essentially the emotional equivalent of Jason Bourne”, but even though they don’t specifically ask those things, those are usually the things they’re asking, though usually for sport and not out of a sense of concern.

So “restless” is the word I have found which feels both honest and yet somehow still obtuse enough that it allows me to not have to talk about those things … you know those things … they happen inside your body and make you feel the … what do you call them? The feels. No one likes those.

“Restless” gets me off the hook without my having to be dishonest.

And it is such a dynamic word. I’m surprised presidential campaign propaganda is not all over this word yet: Vote for So-and-So, the Restless Patriot: Spreading Justice and Freedom and Truth Sunlight to All the Corners of the World Not Yet Reachable by Disney Cruise Lines.

Obviously that is a hyperbolic example.

A few months ago, right around Christmas, I had drinks with a friend of mine in the East Village of Manhattan. It was a fancy as fuck little tiny bar that made its own bitters. He’s a student at Columbia Law and also one of the finest readers of poetry I have ever met and we talked about life and such and he asked why I’m doing this teacher-training thing that I am doing as part of my MA and I was more honest than I usually am and I said that I simply enjoyed the teaching thing in a way I never expected to, but also, that that wasn’t it all on its own. I'm not one of those selfless adjunct professor types who is simply drawn like sailors to the rocks by the Sirens of TEACHING. I told him that I find something appealing about the idea of having 100% portable credentials; I can get a job down the street or in Arizona or Portland or Texas or West Virginia. I told him that I liked the idea that I could go teach in Colorado for a couple of years and then decide not to anymore. I told him that the restless part of me likes the idea of living a semester at a time.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t have big-picture goals and don’t want commitment, that I don’t want kids and a home that isn’t floating a foot off the ground, but I was being oddly honest that day (it was kind of drizzly and wet weather always makes me feel closer to myself) and so I think I used this word “restless” numerous times.

It is one of those words that is both solid and simultaneously empty. It is a great container. If I tell you that I am restless then you are immediately willing to pack up the Subaru Outback of my soul with your own problems/desires/fantasies/fears/wants/hopes and then you give me a pass because the thing I just said ceases to be about me and becomes about you. This is why women in relationships find me, on average, 7,000% more attractive than women who are single (which is half the reason I don’t date.); I am, and can be, whatever.

That isn’t me being coy, BTW, I really am frequently what-the-fuck-ever.

For years now I have felt like that one montage scene in Legends of the Fall when Brad Pitt is wondering lovelornly around the globe doing things that don't even make sense (I think he kills a rhinoceros at one point), though I promise you this is the only time I will ever compare myself to Brad Pitt.

“Restless” buys me all of the things I have said so far. It is a word that most people will let slide by. Ironically it is a word like “love” or “sad” or “hungry” in that people acknowledge it on the level of a base emotion which does not require additional explanation.

This is not to say that my restlessness is a manipulation, because I assure you that it is not. You’re frankly lucky that I’m not one of those people with a world map tacked onto a bulletin board with color-coded thumb tacks indicating which continent I went to on which trip, or even one of those people with a globe tattooed on their back (though I have seen some of those skinny lithe backs and they aren't always bad, with that ink circle up between the shoulder blades and its circumference altered by the tensing of shoulder blades), I would enjoy being one of those people very much, but I am already halfway through my thirties and I am also ambivalent about patchouli. So permanent-globe-trotting-backpacker is probably not in my future. However, I AM going to hike the Camino de Santiago in France/Spain, that is just a thing that will happen, be assured of that. I may even wear the patchouli for that one.

This whole thinking on the word restless is because I read this article: The Wanderlust Gene: Why Some People Are Born To Travel, which seems to posit that there is a “wanderlust gene” called DRD4-7r, which I do not believe for one single second, but that word “wanderlust” is pretty good too, isn’t it? And it — like “restless” — can be used to explain away all manner of sins. I am always inclined to think that I have this Wanderlust Virus everyone Pintersts about, but I don’t travel widely enough to get it tattooed between the sharp edges of my shoulder blades. That’s just a function of money though. If you would like to loan me your Black Amex card, I will be in Morocco tomorrow with the Mercator Map inked into my very own flesh.

A few months ago one of the “travel” blogs I read (i.e. : written by an attractive young person with the money to pay for plane tickets) linked to the video below. I am posting it not because I think that it is good or bad, but simply because I am both the girl described in the video and also, somehow, the guy who the video is waving off. Also, please note how great the song is (Seriously, watch the video and then watch it again just to listen to the remix).

(Hey, isn’t it funny how this post about restlessness didn’t answer any of the questions it raised and then ultimately misdirected you toward a video with a great song and cool girls in small black bikinis?)

.

.

.