There’s always beer
Sometimes it seems like words have a shape, a form that just rotates in my head. I struggle to find those words among the pages scattered round my room, but the books don’t cooperate. Just write something yourself, damn it, I hear myself say.
But it’s never that easy. It’s as if there are ghosts in the room, beckoning echoes of people, almost like heat signatures of feelings that won’t fade. When you burn yourself, it heals. If you’re frozen, you always thaw. Common feelings always reset, return to normal, level out. When you miss people, they’re just ghosts. When there are holes in your life, they don’t naturally seal over.
But what if what you really miss, is someone you’ve never met? There’s a song by Thin White Rope called “Dead Grammas on a Train” that tells the poignant story of a train wreck that killed the grandma of “his perfect one.” When the present isn’t what you want it to be, there are two fundamental choices. You can look back to the past, in idealized admiration, or forward to the future in anxious anticipation. That is, unless the grandma of your perfect one was killed in a train wreck.
Then everything collapses. “Some are born to sweet delight / Some are born to endless night” (Blake, not Morrison). I think about what to do from here. Do I teach community college, teach myself Latin and Greek and get another cat? It isn’t a pretty picture, at least to me. The spirit of the flaneur doesn’t want to leave. Okay, so if you can’t be happy you can at least watch other people be happy, right? For years, that was my home, inside my head as I watched it go by, never thinking much about the reality that I didn’t have much of a life myself. I tried to get one, but I ended up in Arkansas. And how do I go back, to being the watcher I was? Hey, I may not have been all that happy, but at least I got the endorphin rush of making things that made me think. Now, I rely on the words of others all too much, getting the same sort of rush from time to time when I figure out what they were really trying to say. Small thrills. Small moments. Small life.
Affirmation is the trickiest of things; it’s wrong to expect it from one person alone. It’s a group thing. That’s why fame intoxicates, and losing it causes a hangover. I remember standing on a street corner with 16×20 mounted prints hoping someone would be curious enough to look. There were few takers, and it felt demeaning. I can remember going into bars with a little box of 8x10s and having everyone gather around to look, and having people compete over who would see them next. I’d trade anything for some of those smiles right now. There is low, and then there is subterranean. And there is this place, filled with nothing but ghosts. Or the terror of entering a doctoral program and actually trying to be “original.”
Or there’s always beer. Maybe partying will help.
