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 5th
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 27th,
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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