The Breathtaking Impermanence Of Things

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

On Pragmatism, Lullabies, And Angsty Manchildren

I thought I was going to end 2013 surprised to have made it, a bewildered survivor counting dubious blessings, limbs numb from treading water, year defined by a near-death experience in the back room of an office supplies store that felt at once reason and epitaph.

Here lies Michael, killed by a wisdom tooth while working at a retail store in the suburbs. Dead because switching jobs all the time means gaps in medical coverage, means finding yourself stuck in mediocre, uninspiring places surrounded by mediocre, uninspiring people, your range of options narrowing with each passing year until all you can do is the same thing over and over until something stops you.

An allergy to penicillin, for example.

That image of myself should have inspired me to pick myself up, to do something different. I've always been a man of passionate vows and lofty goals, and those dreams and promises are most of the reason the idea of expiring as a fat thirty-something at the Wilsonville Office Depot was so darkly amusing and desperately sad. This time, though, it was a brief epiphany in a dark time of my life, a flash of headlights on the face of a man walking through what was starting to feel like a very long tunnel.

At the start of 2013, I was sleeping on an air mattress in an unfurnished room in a house with two guys I found on Craigslist. My marriage was over, my job was coming to an end, and I had no idea what I was going to do. I'm not and never have been able to talk to other people about my feelings - a factor in the reality of no longer being married, yes - and I struggle to process and define my own emotions sometimes, but I was very depressed, and I'd be lying if I said some very stupid thoughts didn't slide through my mind a time or two.

My marriage had been ending for a while. It was a shock to people on the outside, but that's what happens when one half of a partnership is a very private person and the other half vents repressed feelings as tattoos and confusing essays years after the fact. The truth of it is that we grew apart. We were kids when we met. My grown-up wife is sensible and logical, concerned with the future and with building stable structures to house it in. Her grown-up husband is a slightly more coherent teenager, happiest in transience and always at uncomfortable angles to things like mortgages and 401ks. Over time, our pieces stopped fitting together quite the way they had. It happens.

We decided, initially, on a trial separation, which was how I ended up in the Craigslist House (which sounds like the worst of all possible ideas for a reality show). It was supposed to be a temporary thing, some time apart to figure our own shit out and then maybe, hopefully our marriage. It became a permanent thing the night I discovered my wife had been spending time with a man I didn't know behind my back.

The last few months we were in California, I worked a bar job evenings and weekends and looked after Ryan during the day. He was at that difficult age where he was mobile and active but not yet aware and smart enough to be left to his own devices, even for a minute or two. It was in that space of time that I discovered how exhausting parenting can be, and how rewarding. There were a hundred different bonding moments, but the one that ended up mattering most happened entirely by accident. I'd put a movie on the TV as background while we played in the living room. I don't remember what it was, but it gave way to the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line without me really noticing. The only reason I became aware of it at all was because Ryan was suddenly and completely captivated by the music, laughing and clapping his hands. It was the first time I'd seen him really engage with something like that.

So I sang him Johnny Cash songs. He'd sit in his chair while I took a shower in the morning and laugh at my renditions of Walk The Line and Ring Of Fire; when I lulled him for his afternoon nap, I'd sing Cash melodies with my own made-up lyrics about little boys needing to go to sleep. I mentioned the way he'd reacted to the movie to my wife, of course, but I never talked about the singing. It was ours.

By the time November 5^th of 2012 – a night I'd remember forever even if there wasn't a rhyme entirely dedicated to not forgetting the fucking date associated with it – rolled around, my Johnny Cash lullabies were at their peak. I don't have his range, so I'd take the pitch up a little, and on a song like Folsom Prison Blues, this lent itself rather naturally to a slower, bluesy sort of thing I was secretly quite proud of, and which I sang to Ryan that night because my wife wanted to go and see a movie and asked if I minded watching him for a few hours. The Craigslist House didn't lend itself well to the presence of an infant, so my time with Ryan was spent at the Beaverton home I was temporarily estranged from.

It's a good memory, the last of that part of my life, sitting in a rocking chair with my son in my lap, watching him smile at my soft voice, watching his eyes fall half-lidded and then closed, gently laying him down in his crib. I carry it with me in a way I carry few others.

My wife came home not long afterward, complaining that she felt sick and just wanted to go to bed. I walked down to my car, drove around the corner, and waited.

It gets a little blurred around the edges after that, but I remember very clearly how I felt sitting in the car. My stomach hurt and I could taste bile in my throat. My hands were shaking. The signs had gotten too obvious to ignore, and you don't spend seven years with someone without learning their tells.

After a few minutes, a car I'd never seen before pulled into our cul-de-sac. I got out of my own car, pulled my hood up over my head, and walked to the corner, where I watched the driver being welcomed into my house.

My house. By my wife. While my kid slept upstairs.

There are two sides to every story. A year on, I can see that. I can look back and I can see that I wasn't entirely the victim. I am a flawed man. I have behaved in ways I'm not proud of, I have let down my loved ones, and I have sometimes failed as husband and father and son and friend. But I have never done to another person what was done to me that night.

I'm partial to the idea that we each carry in our wake a comet trail of the things that make us who we are, memories and events, thoughts and feelings, flotsam and jetsam. It's about as close as I get to the idea of a soul, because not all of these are things we're consciously aware of. Walking towards my house that night, my mind a white-hot and mostly incoherent blank of anger and hate and betrayal, intending nothing but violence, fingers already closing around the key in my pocket, shaking uncontrollably, those things were what saved me. Saved us.

Folsom Prison Blues, this particular chapter of my biography is titled, Or How Much I Love That Fucking Kid.

This is a lot more than I intended to share, but I hope that it illustrates and perhaps excuses the head-down pragmatism with which I approached much of 2013. I got a new job and I got the bills paid on time. I got out of the Craigslist House and out of the suburbs and found a wonderful little apartment in the city, a space of my own for the first time in a long time and a place where my little boy can hang out with me. I dated – too soon, probably, but I was lonely – a variety of strange and beautiful women, and somewhere along the line I realized that those women wanted to date me, that I wasn't the angsty manchild I'd seen through another person's eyes for far too long. With that realization came fresh perspective on the last months of my dumb, dying marriage. I can't and won't forgive, but I hope I can understand enough to take us down the road of co-parenting and eventually some kind of friendship we're currently walking.

In November, a year after the fact, I externalized all that with fresh ink and a commitment to myself to put it in the rearview and move on. It's time.

A lot of what I wrote last year, both publicly and privately, was about growing up and – slightly perversely – about finding a context for failure. To take it all the way back to the first essay I wrote here, I lived in a world of princesses and dragons for far too long. I had hoped, in my newfound pragmatism, to find a place in my head where I could deal with just being myself, with having my son and my job and my friends and a roof over my head. With that being enough. My entire adult life, I've put tremendous, unending pressure on myself to be A Writer, whatever that means, and these last several years, caught between that pressure and the reality of growing older, of increasing responsibility, the procession of soul-destroying retail jobs that gnawed incessantly at the corners of my motivation and my health, I'd begun to feel that something had to give. I'm a talented writer, sure, passionate about it to the point of idiocy, and if I could make a living from it I would want for nothing more. But I've done nothing of note for seven years – seven years – and even then it was never more than a collection of above-par erotica, some promising shorts, a single print credit, and a hard drive so full of aborted stories and stillborn ideas it'd break your heart. My day job was eventually going to grind me into powder, but everything I built in 2013, that relentless drive to push back the walls and make some space for myself, was funded by it. If one of them had to go, it was never going to be Office Depot.

Only it was.

2013 was, for me, a year filled with small victories achieved through sheer bloody-mindedness and largely uncelebrated. When my boss invited me into his office and read to me from a pre-prepared script an explanation of the elimination of my position, I wasn't angry. I'd known it was coming. I wasn't even angry when he explained that my new position wasn't a demotion but would nonetheless cost me roughly fifteen grand a year. I was, after all, a pragmatist, cool-headed and logical. The math no longer added up, so I'd simply have to find something else to do.

I applied for only one job that afternoon. My resume has always been solid, but when I read over the cover letter I'd written to accompany it, I felt a little tweak of excitement. I was a good candidate for this job, maybe a great one, and I'd composed a wonderfully concise explanation of who I was and what I brought to the table. In my experience, good feelings are all too often followed by crappy realities, but I couldn't shake this one.

They got back to me that same afternoon. Within a few days, I'd given a decent account of myself over the phone and then an in-person interview that was as confident, charming, and professional as I have ever been in my life. I walked out of that office knowing I'd done it. I walked straight past the elevators and ran down the stairs like a kid on Christmas morning. That weight on my shoulders, fifteen years of it, was shifting.

One more interview, not quite as good the first but with an air of informality about it, of necessary crossing and dotting. Then more running, this time off the sales floor at Office Depot a few days later to answer my phone, to be offered the job. I accepted immediately, then walked very calmly back to my boss's office, the same room I'd almost died in seven months earlier, and gave my notice.

No more evenings, no more weekends, no more late nights and early mornings, no more holidays. In a final Fuck You to the industry that had dominated my entire adult life, my last day was November 27^th, the day before Thanksgiving.

If I could have one memory of 2013, it would be sliding behind the wheel of my car at the end of my shift on the day I gave my notice. I sat there for a while, looking out through the windshield at nothing in particular, just breathing, aware of the tears in my eyes, of this huge and stupid feeling of joy way down in my guts I had only one real way of dealing with.

I had to write about it.

posted at 5:43 PM

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