What the Hell is This?

I mentioned in my last comment thread that I feel as if I’ve stepped out of my capsule like Bowie’s Major Tom, and am free-floating, weightlessly, in space — having left behind nearly every context of my former known world, and every wish I had in that world. Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles, I’m feeling very still. Disconnected from most of what has tied me to my present circumstances and my adopted city, I feel supremely lonely, and terrifyingly, supremely free…to drift away.

**

Even though I’ve lived here for almost nineteen years, I never exactly put down roots or committed to one narrow career path. Nor did I make it my goal to marry and have children simply for the sake of marrying and having children. But in my little teapot rebellion against middle-class expectations, I also never dared to do much of anything that involved serious risk, the way some of my backpacking, globe-trotting, adventurous, entrepreneurial contemporaries did in their twenties and thirties.

Now here I am, at 41, every day reading the jaded, overeducated souls on Salon.com letter threads expounding upon what a tremendous disappointment life is, and how rarely dreams come true…and I wonder if it’s truly harder for very smart people to be happy. They think of absolutely everything, after all, that can go wrong, and then use those worst-case scenarios as an excuse to stay in their safe or uninvolved zones (and convince you to do the same).

I think of Great Dead White Dudes like Pascal and Nietzsche, among the most brilliant men who ever lived, who seem to me at least to have also been rather miserable up-their-hole sonsabitches. (To be fair, they were both ill for much of their adult lives, and died quite wretchedly…though advocates of mind-body medicine might have an opinion about that.) Their contempt, including for the female sex and for anything they considered “soft,” knew no bounds, and they were forever deriding everyone and everything around them from their lofty perches like doctoral-level Holden Caulfields. (As you might imagine, I greatly admired them in college.) What a burden it is, to be smarter and better than everyone else!! Anyway, those rejecting attitudes that may have once been a daring assault on a complacent bourgeoisie are now more of just a yawn to postmodern millennial intellectuals who can tell you the price of everything and the value of nothing, and why it’s stupid to care.

Given the choice, I’d rather be relatively square and make a fool of myself once in a while. One nice thing about being out of certain circles now is that I no longer have to worry about being “cool,” about whether my views or my tastes are hip enough among the liberal intelligentsia, or the college-radio crowd, or the technologically savvy. I can go back to being a classicist dork, listening to my bleeding-heart Irish homeboy on a ten-year-old boom box and reading Rilke from an actual book.

**

Ever since I left the evangelical church (and had one wonderful English teacher who exposed us to the beautiful exhortations of writers like Saint-Exupéry and Thomas Merton to remain genuine into numbing adulthood), “keeping it real” has been a top priority and a core value for me. The commitment to be authentic in all areas of life has trumped things like money or success (at the price of conscience), acceptance by various groups or people, and superficial if convenient relationships. (If I hadn’t kept this commitment to myself, I’d probably still be at my old job.)

At the risk of sounding like a tweener who can’t stop gushing about Zac Efron…this is yet another reason why I’m so grateful to my latest inspiration, that folky Celt whose full-throated call jerked me back from the brink of self-abandonment. He’s one unapologetic poster child for emotional frankness and what I referred to before as “ragged authenticity.” I must mention that the cynical hipsters at pitchfork.com (who apparently have no appreciation for traditional Irish music either) naturally ripped him a new one for being such an sincere, touchy-feely girly-man. He dared, after all, to write lines like the ticking of the Western man’s need to cry. Which I found fucking brilliant, and which is what I’m talking about when I say that the so-called “patriarchy” harms men as well as women.

But my admiration goes far beyond that, now that I’m floating in space. I was thinking about how he broke with his early band, Juniper, just as they were picked up by a major label. The record company started pressuring them, as record companies are wont to do, to compromise their artistic integrity for a more “radio-friendly” sound. Disillusioned with the music business, Damien turned his back on possible fame and fortune and escaped to rural Tuscany to try his hand at growing tomatoes (which sounds like heaven on earth to me)…and then, when the money ran out, went busking around Europe like some traveling minstrel. Now, of course, years later and on his own terms, he’s an internationally renowned musician who gets to perform coveted gigs like the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony and Leonard Cohen’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

What I find most inspirational here is that “lilies of the field” attitude, that optimistic willingness to throw oneself upon the mercy of the world and make choices that sound insane to more “sensible” people. My friend Talia Rosenberg landed in Paris after college with a few words of French in her mouth and a few dollars in her pocket, and went on to get her doctorate there and have a love child with an acclaimed Hungarian novelist. I love stories like that. That’s what I call balls. That’s what I call courage. That’s what I call living the dream. And I want to be more like that. Before it’s too late.

**

In his book The Bridge Across Forever, New Age guru Richard Bach astutely wrote “Anyone desperate enough for suicide…should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.” Floating ‘round my tin can, far above the world, I’m just about that desperate.

I’m almost out of money, with no promising prospects, no home community. I had been clinging, fiercely and for dear life, to a dream I dreamed up years ago, to which I was attached on an almost cellular level — there was such beauty and such depth of passion in it, and moments touching on agape — but my grip has finally loosened. For months, I quietly if irrationally hoped I’d somehow be restored to my former “household” like the Bible’s biggest loser, Job…or that my avoidant friend might call me and confess how confused and upset he is, and that he isn’t sure what he wants, but that he still cares about me, and wants to see me.

No, I’ve done enough fruitless, fruitless pursuing in this lifetime. For the first time, I accept, however intolerably, that it’s all gone…the way one accepts with that awful bottomless hole in the heart that someone has really died. I let go of it all, and at times it feels like the vise grip, the iron claws of agony clenched like a fist in my chest, will kill me, and maybe they will, mercifully — but I accept that I’ve lost.

In that acceptance, I feel like I’ve died, too, or that at least some version of me has…and what’s left is practically screaming at me about wasted time. What the hell is this, AlienBaby? You don’t have that many more years to be readily employable, or fuckable, or to start over. As Dylan sang, it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

**

Most of the people I know around here talk conservativism and scarcity without even considering a different paradigm. I have an unemployed friend with a debilitating autoimmune disease who calls me up regularly to chew over alarmist economic scenarios and fret about her diminishing funds. She lives on a cocktail of pharmaceuticals, along with Coca-Cola and crackers, and laughs at the idea of alternative medicine and nutrition therapy — which have, in some cases, restored other people with her condition. A septagenarian friend of mine shot down my tentative musings about a radical geographical move the other day by saying “The ‘geographic cure’ doesn’t work: wherever you go, you’re still there”…as if adventure played no role in making such a change, as if we don’t alter ourselves at all by altering our habitual and safe modus operandi.

But chatting with some Dutch students at the coffeehouse last weekend reminded me of the personal expansion a person can experience upon discovering other landscapes, other systems, and other customs in the world, as well as untapped capacities in oneself. I know for sure that while I was in Italy, my perspective was enlarged by the multiplicity of cultures I encountered among my fellow travelers, and my self-confidence grew exponentially with each successful navigation of foreign trains and towns and streets. Frankly, I kind of miss the feeling of being a global (not just an American) citizen.

Pessimism is, of course, the path of least resistance when risk appears stupid (which it probably does for most Americans right now), when the assumption is that we’re completely on our own and that it’s all too easy to fall through the cracks of society and perish (which it probably is for most Americans right now).

Scarcity and peril as the paradigm: this is so familiar. This is how I was raised, to fear the world like a minefield, and to pinch whatever limited pennies might come my way. I felt the fear even more keenly when I lost my home church and my interventionist Daddy-God. It was all on me, suddenly…I felt the terrifying burden of sole and solitary responsibility for my life, responsibility for struggling to eke out a survival in a random, indifferent, perhaps even cruel universe, and I wasn’t at all sure I was up to the task.

If every last one of the dreary assumptions above is inarguably true, then it’s no wonder. I’m not sure I’m up to it today.

**

Cold, cold water surrounds me now…and all I’ve got is your hand.

I was walking down the street toward downtown the other day, feeling nothing but the ache of the blasted-out cavern in my ribs where my heart used to be, when those lines popped into my head. Hot tears blurred my eyes as I realized what the song means to me now. Namely, that I’m going through this lonely, painful, scary ordeal I’m not even sure I can survive, and I’m grasping like a life preserver the hand extended to me from another creator’s body — of work. Yea, I could say, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for Damo art with me.

I may sound like I’ve gone off the superfan deep end, but I’m talking about an intensely personal experience even hyper-rationalist David Foster Wallace discussed in the context of how an author can affect a reader. In my case, I have been, in a sense, “rescued” by another artist’s emotional courage, sensitivity, and uncompromising integrity — as well as encouraged by his example to take more chances, perhaps even to trust more in the ultimate benevolence of the universe.

What some snarky (dare I say cowardly?) critics have called self-indulgent and embarrassing earnestness, I currently call my lifeline. Maybe one day I’ll be that “hand,” that lifeline, for someone else in crisis, because of what I’ve been through and choose to write about. Maybe I, like some gifted songwriters, can also help someone feel a little less alone, and a little better understood.

**

When I got downtown that same day, I went to check out the vegetarian expo at the Marriott, and promptly ran into Annemarie.

Annemarie is a ceramics artist and yoga instructor who worked with me many years ago at the bookstore, and who was once seriously involved with Tony the Surly Music Critic (from my Valentine’s Day post). She greeted me with great warmth and kindness, which nearly made me, in my shaky condition, crumble as I divulged my general state of fear and heartbreak. Hugging me impulsively, she proceeded to tell me — a trace of her own pain knitting her brows — about how she had just kicked her out-of-control teenage son out of the house. (Talk about tough love…and I had said nothing!) Tolerating disrespect benefits no one, I think she said. She encouraged me to stay in uncertainty, reminding me that life is more open when we sit patiently with our unknowing. We embraced tightly as I choked back tears of gratitude. I felt heartened by this exchange — shown another unbidden example of hardass caring, and recognizing the gentle wisdom of Annemarie’s advice. It’s not hard to grow, when you know that you just don’t know.

One of the speakers I went to hear there was a former gangbanger who founded a conservation nonprofit in Texas that teaches inner-city kids about taking care of animals and the environment. He was a beautiful, inspirational man (if a rambling and somewhat incoherent speaker), and I talked with him afterwards, trying to pry from him the secret of how his thug-life despair morphed into creative empowerment. If sheltered middle-class white people are too scared to try to substantially change their lives (and change the world), how is it possible that an impoverished Latino surrounded by scarcity and hopelessness could become a visionary leader?

He merely repeated his presentation point that in rejecting the culture of violence by feeding only plant-based foods to his body (restoring his “bodily integrity”), he got healthy, got clarity about refusing to perpetuate suffering, and became empowered to change the way he lived.

I quit eating animals thirteen years ago, but I’m still a chicken. I guess there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for busting out of your own cage.

**

I dream of closing up my old bookstore with Samira. We straighten furniture and sweep the floors. I think about how she and Ken prepared for their departure by getting rid of most of their belongings, and wonder if my psyche is telling me to close up shop myself. (The night before, in a sort of trance, I dreamt I was listening to a long voice message from Sonny. He wasn’t angry, defensive, or accusing…he was simply telling me where he was in his life, with a trace of regret. It made me sad; it made me miss him.)

Over and over again I’ve heard stories about how doors magically open for people once they decide to make a major change, but that generally hasn’t been my experience. Against my own experience and common sense, then, I’m hoping for some serendipitous opportunities now. I’m practically praying for a miracle.

Because I don’t know what to do. All I know is that I want to start living, at my advanced age, instead of just barely existing — more like dying — in this sunbaked little desert town where I can’t hear the sea, and no one can hear me. I want to eat tomatoes off the vine in Tuscany. I want to drink a toast to Damo in Dublin. I want to live in a place where they actually consider it necessary, not “cosmetic,” to treat your lady problems and your painful leg veins in their socialist medicine clinics. I want to hang out with people who know how to live like lilies of the field, and I want to write like a fiend and get paid for it. I want to make excessive orgasmic love with men I find irresistible without the use of topical analgesics.

Am I dreaming too big? Can you hear me, universe? Do you take special orders, like those Secret people say you do? Because I don’t know the first thing about how to make any of it happen.

Surprise me. Prove the naysaying bastards wrong.