Rain & Pain

Trudging to the store each drop was thick and heavy, exploding onto my shoulders, hands, hair, and face. Halfway through the walk from El Supermercado to our apartment in Valencia, Spain, I took a break. I sat against a green wooden door, the doorframe offering refuge, and lit a smoke. Of course the quiet, as it always seems to be, was a miracle. The rain was waving like sheets in the wind, most visible in the tunnels of the car lights. Ancient towers from the Moorish days felt the rain of today as they have for many days before. The cobblestone roads in a neighborhood called Carmen, a statue of a man called The River in La Plaza de Virgen, Café Lavin, and the train station all felt the rain. Valencia’s streets are laid about like spaghetti noodles strewn on a plate, all small and winding with haphazard design. The buildings are faded pinks, yellows, and blues. The people are dressed in layered scarves and jackets colored black and brown and grey. Everything feels the rain.

The rain reminded me of the Camino de Santiago, which is a sort of walk/pilgrimage that thousands undertake each year to the town of Santiago in Northwest Spain. I left for a 10 day portion of this walk with a few acquaintances.

*

My back was already hurting, my shoe broken, and myself aware that I would be spending days in isolation with strangers and without distractions—all before we boarded a bus that would take us to Lugo. Lugo is where the walk would begin.  My mood remained similar through the first day of walking: It rained all day, as it would each of the next seven, unless of course it was hailing. My feet swelled into marshmallows, my ankles cracked, and I limped. I complained to myself. The oppression of knowing that the next day would be almost twice as long as the first was mentally crippling – I was limping in all senses.

The land was green and soft with small stone and wooden villages. The sky was always grey, which made the green even greener. Aside from the destination city of Santiago there were no built structures higher than one story and most homes have only one small door right in the center of the front wall. The path we follow was defined in some places and nonexistent in others, marked every few miles by a yellow shell and arrow. Sometimes there were piles of stones that have been left by pilgrims carrying rocks for sins and lost loved ones. There was a lady pilling hay into a wooden wheelbarrow, a man with a stick resting on the hind of the cow in front of him, and boys throwing small pebbles at a big stone.

We waited for livestock to pass through the streets, we had wine from a homemade wineskin, we waded through rushing streams, we took wrong turns, we got lost, and we fell in love with one another. We knew we were in love when The Walk began to feel like a long road trip with family—complaints about the distance yet to be travelled, complaints about things that one of us said/did to the other, tears, solidarity.

On a road trip I may have the discipline to look out of the window for say, 2 of 8 hours. When you’re walking The Camino you are looking out of the window for all 8 hours and things aren’t even moving quickly. I had thoughts before The Walk, but during The Walk you could say that my thoughts had thoughts. Chiefly, I concentrated on the constant rain and hail. This is because I, as a good upper-class American, am vehemently opposed to my own discomfort. If I were to see both a jogger and someone lashing their own back with a whip, I would feel that both were roughly the same goal. I have a remote to turn my fan on and off. I put product in my hair that doesn’t look like product but still functions effectively. I want to smoke, and so I do. I want to drink beer, and so I do. I want to sleep in, and so I do. The Camino’s premise is discomfort.

Anyway, this is what I thought about the rain:

Mutual discomfort can be galvanizing. It was for us. And now I know about the old loves, parents, dreams, favorite movies, mistakes, and authenticities of a few who can say, “We walked The Camino together.” Thomas Merton says, “The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men. The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit…God’s plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.”

A car could have gone to Santiago faster, keeping us free of pain, rain, and smelliness, but we would have lost everything. It seems that the pain, much because of like the rain, is what made our mortality and reality very real. And within a context of that awareness the pain and the rain served as encouragement to share honestly with each other, to listen intently to each other, and to somehow be glad that one foot continued to surpass the other. It seems that in the past I have spent too much time debating the creator of the process that gives us rain and too little time reveling in the pure existence of it. Too little time spent amazed that our greatest need falls from the sky, a miracle every time, and too much time annoyed that it is doing so. Walking for days in the rain taught me to covet and love it, to acknowledge that I need the rain and that needing the rain means that I’m alive and that it is good to be alive. Pain is much like the rain in this way.

*

And that’s what I remembered when my back was against the green door. And that’s when I reconsidered the rain. And I realized that I could walk in the rain and deal with pain because I’ve walked in the rain and dealt with pain. I’ve known the rain and pain so intimately that my skin changed and the invisible strings from my shoulders to my boots were tight, and I’d become heavy. But the rain and pain are not against me. The rain is the rain and pain is pain and in life we have rain and pain and if we didn’t, maybe we’d fail to remember that we are here. I thank God for the rain and the pain because they fall on me and I feel it. I thank God because—even though they make things slippery and hard to do—it is part of what we’ve been given. The pain is sometimes loneliness, and sometimes fear, and sometimes anxiety, and sometimes cancer, and sometimes a lie, and sometimes distance, and sometimes memory, and sometimes it is a water droplet; but I know it.

So when it rains, like it was against the towers and within the cones of light, and upon the cobblestone, statues, buildings and people, I’ll turn my face upward and feel what is real. I’ll feel each drop that lands on my shoulders, hands, hair, and face. Sometimes I’ll forget all that good stuff about the rain and pain, and the rain and pain will seem too heavy, and the strings from my boots to my shoulders will get tight, and I will try to remember that feeling the rain and pain is better than feeling nothing, and that though it has rained before, the rain has never failed to stop.

Misguided

When I watch TV or movie characters move for rebirth or escape I know that the show is telling me through the character that it's a thing that hopeless people do because they think that they will be the person they were when they were there before, or the person that they picture living there, or I guess most accurately, the person that they've always pictured themselves being. And that person, of course, only exists in the place that they will move to.

In baseball the way that ability or contribution is measured is changing. There was a movie about it, but a small example is a player’s batting average. Batting average is how often a batter converts his plate appearances into a hit. If he converts three out of ten appearances into a hit he is considered to be statistically proven as an above average hitter. What we know now is that this number can sometimes be deceptive. If in the first few weeks of a season a batter averages four converted hits out of ten chances, but an above average number of the balls that he puts in play are falling for hits, it is likely that the average of 400 will regress. It's even more complicated but what the numbers tell us is what we believe: over time the true ability and talent of a player will not in any way fall prey to luck. Each man will be exactly who he is as a batter.

I lived in Florida until I was allowed to choose where I lived. Since I've been able to choose again, after finishing school and all, I've lived in Virginia, Europe and Colorado in less than two years. I will likely leave Denver in the Spring and that is likely because I've not committed to living here because I tell people that I've been here (Denver) for three months despite having been here for six and that is likely because I moved here and realized a thing that I had already learned from TV and movie characters and that is that I think that more should be different than is different. I project this conviction upon the people I meet and I imagine that they too wonder why more has not been produced or accomplished or changed and I am embarrassed. Temporary solace is found in articles and people's story's that align with mine but ultimately we all probably just got hugged and praised too much for our Participant Ribbons.

My writing usually seems beleaguered but I'm not. It's actually hope, or a belief as deep as my character which knows that “it” will happen. The difficult aspect of the sort of life that I feel that I am living, a life similar to many who are my age, is not that our batting averages are lower than an average which would make us proud, but that we, despite outs and misses, in our deep insides, believe that the swings will eventually produce not only hits, but enough to compensate for all of our previous misses and result in an ultimately respectable batting average. A few of us may be right but a lot of us are delusional.

Maybe it is this hope that haunts us which leads to all great things that people do. Even though so many are told by their stats that they do not successfully turn three out of ten plate appearances into hits, literally everyone walking around continues to swing. And we know this because they are still walking around. Maybe swinging is the human compact. The agreement that we will all continue believing in ourselves despite the evidence because it is that everyone else continues to try that encourages you to try, and me, and as a result of everyone trying some people set records. Some people go to the moon, or manage fidelity, or listen with their eyes. Maybe moving around because we’re trying to be who we’re not is merely an observable signature of the most beautiful part of humanity. Maybe the conviction that we are better than we are is the misguided belief propelling we people towards the community that we cannot believe that we cannot have. 

Anyway, this is my happy thought and my happy story. Be buoyant colleagues. 

Sent To You

I love you.

I've never said or written that to anyone before and it looks disappointingly naked and little and like it's in a Facebook message. But I send it to you not in the way of a verb, or in the sense or hope of inspiring verbs, but in an inanimate way. It’s just a thing that is there. Like a stick or a river or something. I've thought of you everywhere that I've been for these years but not all of the time. Sometimes I leave you where you are and me where I am for weeks, but then I go to you or bring you to me. Never for long. It’s like remembering not to forget something. And then we each go back to where we are.

I know very little about how you have changed or even what you've been doing. I could wish that I loved you when we were together but I don’t because I couldn't have. All I could love then was the idea of loving. It was a nice thing to think about and imagine. The love I send to you doesn't feel as good. It’s more like an empty stomach nostalgic scared kind of thing.

If prayer actually happens then I don’t see why love can’t be sent from one person to another. I hope that we are someday old and overweight and sitting on a train each having lived separate lives, barely recognizable one to the other, and I hope that the train will be forced to stop because of snow on the tracks and that we will order wine and tell the stories of our lives to one another and it will be like another night that was the same and then we will go where we go except for the few moments when my eyes are closed and I’m planning my next day and then I cannot sleep and then I bring you to me or myself to you because I've remembered not to forget.     

-P&B 

I Don't Do What I Do

I saw a black and white movie after work. It’s modern but I saw it in a theater has free popcorn and expensive beer. Today Work was Starbucks. Tomorrow Work is writing websites for small businesses. I get paid much more for the writing but not enough. I worked at Starbucks while earning my degree. Now I work at Starbucks so that I can use my degree for work.

The movie was art and even if the plot didn't surround a twenty-something too “busy” not working to make the bed, it still would have been enough to change the course of my night. My nights never end in front of the computer. Not since The Bull or the story of We have nights ended here.

When I was 12 and in the family van riding towards Minnesota my little brother would sometimes hit his arm. “Whack.” Then he would “cry.” And then, if I had already done something stupid like talked back to mom or made fun of my brother, the van would pull over and I would likely be punished for hitting my brother. In retrospect I know that I should have been able to out-smart the six year-old, but at the time I wished for a witness. Maybe another older brother, in another car right alongside ours who could wave and yell and save me. Save me not just from the humiliation of requiring a spanking, but from being the instigator of the small sadness my parents felt, or the small disappointment they felt because their oldest son wasn't being nice to their youngest.

As a younger man than I am I saw a powerful leader getting others in trouble while he hit himself to make noise. Then I thought that I wasn't clever enough to outsmart him, to reveal the injustice, to be the other boy in the other car. Later I decided that it wasn't my smarts that were lacking, but the courage necessary to risk being blamed for another false hit. Now I know that it wasn't courage nor intelligence that inhibited my action. It was a too keen awareness that I too was doing the same.

In Denver my heroes have changed because my aspirations have been forced to. In college I would have called it settling but now I enjoy thinking of it as living while I’m living. My heroes were once Who I Thought I Would Become and The People Like That Person. Now the heroes are people more like me. A mom bringing pasta to her co-workers at the coffee shop despite living a different life than she once did. A bartender after hours, smoking inside and twirling her drink while she talks about an old love. A lawyer too scared to do something else, but a lawyer trying not to be.

I have no doubt that my heroes are like me so that I will be okay with me, but I’m also okay with being okay with me. My skin is dry, I’m embarrassed to tell people that I’m another English degree at Starbucks and I have no idea how I’m paying my rent. But a thing that I like to think that I know is that there are seasons. And I like to think that I know that they are all beautiful because of the other. Tonight I watched a movie that helped me listen to music with the windows down and look at the lights of my city. It helped me pass Netflix and bars and phone calls and Facebook. It helped me end up here again. I hope another artist who isn't an artist sees the movie too.

“It’s hard to explain what I do…because I don’t really do it.”

Trip's Ending

I’m sitting on top of a building in Istanbul. I can see Asia, the Bosphorous River, and some clothes hanging on wires. Istanbul is huge. I pictured something like Morocco’s Murrakesh, but I’m looking at something more like Mexico City. The place goes on and on; up hills, around bends, and behind me. They say that there might be close to 20 million people who call this place home.

I was in Serbia for seven days. NATO bombed Serbia a bit more than a decade ago and there are still bombed buildings that haven’t been torn down. I heard a story from a local girl about bits of a blown bridge killing a baby in a stroller.  A Croastian family stayed at my home during the war. They told us stories of bombs falling too. Around a table with the Serbian girl, an Italian, an Aussie, a Dane, and a Japanese dude, we talked about peace and war. Everyone except the Serbian girl who has seen bridges bombed, thought that our generation won’t stand for violence between one another.  We acknowledged that “other places,” places like Africa and South America and what not, may see war. But as for the developed places, we think that there are too many of us travelling and knowing each other and commerce-ing together for there to be violent conflict. The Serbian girl who has seen bombs thought that war is “what people do,” and believe it or not, she was even able come up with some historical data to support her theory.

A German fellow that I met in the Balkans told me that there is a statistic, some probability or something, that says that when a German is travelling abroad, if he is to find himself in a conversation with a local, that it is far more than likely that the Nazis, Hitler, WWII, genocide, or something of the like will be mentioned. He says that he’s just a copywriter. When I was in Berlin I learned that in the 1920’s and 30’s, during a time sometimes referred to as “golden,” that the people in Germany were eating bark from the trees of the park because they were so hungry. Gangs roamed the streets killing and stealing and plundering. I learned that life was so full of fear that authority of any kind seemed safe.

In the same city, while I was in line for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, I met a girl about my age, from Israel.  She described to me the honor with which she had already served her mandatory time with her nation’s military. She said that she had chosen to prolong her active service, and that she would be returning soon to continue her service. She attributed much of her nationalism to an awareness of the events chronicled within the monument that we were in line for.  I thought of her recently. There was fighting and Israel was involved and Hammas was involved and I was headed towards Turkey and then I thought of her for a second.

There’s one other guy on top of the roof with me. He’s a hostel fellow, a guy that I don’t know, and he’s singing songs out loud and talking in French to a cat that’s in his chair with him. It’s like he doesn’t even know that I’m here. He’s only one of three, (and I mean this), truly, certifiably crazy people who are currently in the hostel. There’s another guy who got kicked out of another hostel, and he does yoga like a severe narcoleptic falls asleep. Maybe I’m talking to him, and then he starts squatting. Maybe he’s making some pasta, and then he’s spreading his arms out and doing breathing exercises. Also, he speaks with himself. There are other crazy people too, though--outside of the hostel I mean. In fact, I know that the Yoga Guy is crazy because of another crazy person.  The other crazy person is a 40 something-year-old mom who got pregnant when she was 19 and is now “doing everything that she didn’t.” (Not crazy so far.) We met her when we first arrived in Istanbul. We got lost, walked for hours, grew frustrated, hailed a taxi, and then overpaid him to drive us the 100 meters to a block near our hostel. We went into a bar, asked directions, and of course, Mamma Party offered to show us the way. And then she asked if she could come up to our hostel’s terrace bar for a drink. (Starting to feel crazy). She did. And when we reached the terrace she was confronted by the Crazy Yoga Guy, because she happens to work at the hostel that kicked him out for being crazy. A few minutes later she made jokes about her redheaded son and told us that she likes younger men. (Crazy). I told her that my friend was younger than me. My friend said that he was going to sleep, I said the same, and we walked her to the bottom of the stairs.

There was a costume party in Oxford, darkness and rebirth in Germany, stories that will never be told from Amsterdam, expensive things in Denmark, talks of happiness in Krakow, parties in Budapest, romance in Cinque Terre, community at L’Abri, an Ausie with a smile and a voice in Belgrade, and now, in Budapest, there is the vastness of humanity. I can remember every single day from this trip. Really. I proved it to the friend travelling with me. I can go, chronologically, from day to day, and describe the day. No, not everything, but something from each day.  I know that I’m young, and I know that older people count that against me, but I’ve figured out what living is. Or I’m close. Either way, I know that it’s something like remembering everyday. It’s something like knowing the taste of homemade pumpkin soup in Poland, or something like watching the sunrise through a once cloudy Serbian sky, or something like missing your family, or something like knowing that my own problems really aren’t so big. Budapest is home to about 20million people and it’s only one place. 

The Nighttime Before Wednesday

I got out of bed at 11 only so that I could say, “good morning,” without lying. My friend and I have been staying with four polish girls for the last three nights. We sleep on a futon, in sleeping bags, and under blankets, and the girls laugh at us because we sleep cocooned, like Florida Boys in Poland. We wake up to the ambient hummings of the sounds of easy morning music, wood popcorning in the fire, and small polish feet carrying giggles around on tip-toes.

*

We’ve discovered a similarity of soul, we and these couchsurfing hosts.

*

Snow fell outside, the bathroom floor was heated, and breakfast was already made: cheese and tomatoes on bread, with tea, and eggs colored by chopped peppers. We decorated the bread on our plates, one piece at a time. We added hot water to our almost finished cups of tea, and because it was breakfast, we sometimes laughed about yesterday, and sometimes were quiet about today.

The polish girls went to class and work. We rinsed dirty dishes and swept the floor. My friend researched our next travel move, and I sat on the small porch writing for other travelers. I shaved, and then cleaned my hair from the sink for twice as long as I had shaved.

One of our hosts came home for lunch, we talked about the class that she had just been to, and then the one that she would go to next. Then she read for her next class, my friend held his head in his hand and wrote in his journal, and I read. One host left for her next class, and two others burst in the door from their last.  They laughed with each other, chattered in Polish, hurried my friend and I along, and then, at the door, asked; “Scarf? Camera? Wallet? Cigarettes? Lighter? And we showed off the one or two items that we’d remembered as we searched around for the ones that we would have complained about forgetting.  

My friend and I walked long-legged through the cold to the bus stop. Our cute hostesses bounced along, ahead, arm in arm, and turned to share their polish jokes in our English.  We all crammed on a bus, fell backwards and forwards for twenty minutes, and hurried off.

The girls led us down a street that remained urban for a block before developing quickly into woods patched with the season’s first snow. We climbed a muddy hill, stumbled down a muddier hill, and sat on rocks over a local secret; a blue-green lake far below limestone cliffs. We sat for a bit, had a cigarette, and returned without the help of the day.

We took the bus to Krakow’s, “Jewish District,” had a local specialty snack, (Toast with mozzarella, garlic, tomatoes, and olives on top. It was somehow great), and then we had tea and coffee at a snug shop where we sat on wooden chairs with fluffy cushions, and talked about what it feels like to be a proud Pole.

We went home and ate the pumpkin soup that had been prepared for us. My friend and I went to a late-night café, and our hosts’ movie was finished when we returned. We listened to our favorite songs and quietly watched their videos play through the projector, against a white wall.

Finally, to deter sleep, and so that we might know as much about the people hosting us as we did about our hosts', we asked them to tell us what events of the last half-decade had made them into the people that we knew. This is what they said:

1: “I came back to Poland and there was nothing for me. My parents were not like they are now, and home is not peaceful at this time. I had no desire or option, and I was just stuck with the winter coming, the sky gray, and only fields outside of my window. Finally, I was with my sister, and she told me about a dream that she had about me. She said that I was glowing in the dream, and that I was good, and that I was taking care of her. And then we talked over everything and I don’t know why but we cried. I told her about a memory I have about falling when I was learning to walk. It was about when I had one year only, and still I remembered it, and I fell while trying to walk beneath a tree. I remember still that the tree and sky were in my sight, and that everything was good. I know that it was something good. The good was taking care of me, from being all around me, and I just knew that it was my soul outside of me, or able to be reached from all of the outside of me, and I just know that it was making safe for me.

We went outside on the porch after talking over all things, and we knew that we understood everything in this time.  I was 18 and so was my twin sister. We were in the outside of that place, I remember, I was with my hat against my face for the tears, and my sister for some reason, I do not know why and neither does she, she went and got from a costume the wings of an angel and she put them on me. We saw the trees moving in the wind and we know that they are in pain, but we know that they are good. I say that this is the time when I say that I know my soul.”

2: “It was in high school and I was new and I was in the first class and I met a girl who is my friend. Others peoples say that we seven girls are a group of friends, the first girl and me and these girls, but there was this situation, and then we were all hating each other. But we were already by the other people thought to be together as seven, so we were stuck but we were not kind. I started to party, and change boyfriends, and I was like you would say a ghost. I fought with my parents, I moved out from with my parents, and we were not talking for 3 years. I was not happy with myself. Living alone was not right for me. But I wanted it to change, so I walked the streets of the city to be out of just being alone. Then I took this graduation test that I passed very well, and I thought that I could for the first time be good at something. It was then that I began my university studies and I met people that were like, “you are as you are.” The people in my studies accept me. “

And then my friend and I shared, and then we moved chairs around and made the sofa into a futon. For a few moments 1 took pictures and 2 drew designs. Now they are asleep. It is like the good around a fallen baby. 

Cities are for The Sleepless

There’s a quiet affliction amongst some of us. It’s not insomnia, but it’s something like it. It’s this daily acceleration of a searching desire—it’s growing and growing as the sun speeds to the top of the sky, stalls through the early afternoon, and then plummets through the earth. We grow more and more hungry, more and more anxious, and more and more desperate. We are the ones who don’t let the night end. We sit on porches listening to the night’s noises, thinking about those who are asleep, and reaching out to those who are still awake. We pace paths into the concrete, we read “the internet,” and we get lost in the epic love stories of Russian literature. We are The Restless, and we’re different than you.

*

I have a stupid theory about The Restless, and like many other stupid theories, it has to do with video games:

When playing a video game, there is a “difficulty” option available. This allows game-players of lesser skill the opportunity to lower the “difficulty level,” so that they may beat the game and save the world from aliens or terrorists or zombies or Nazis. This is, after all, the point of video games. We’re a generation full of world savers who are retreating to our alternate realities with each failed attempt to save the world that we live in. We dream of moments in the hospital, with the popular girl at our side, (we saved her) and we’ve exceeded all of the expectations placed upon us. Our parents are proud, the popular girl is in love, and we managed to somehow suffer injuries that do not affect our faces or testicles. We can win in video games, and it’s because the producers of video games understand us, that they gave us the option to lower the “difficulty setting.”

Anyway, The Restless are the world savers who are retreating to our alternate realities with each failed attempt to save the real world that we live in.

We welcome the brief respites from the reality of our self-perceived insignificance. And we all stay awake later than anyone around us, walking the streets in the rain so that god and man might know that we’re still giving that particular day a go of it. Our perseverance, our sleeplessness, is the badge awarded for our valiance.

It is never too late for us to go to waffle house. It is never to late for a coffee. It is never too late to chat with far-away people on facebook. It is never too late for anything because we roam the empty streets of a city knowing that we’ve taken victory over everyone who’s fallen asleep, everyone who’s conceded that “tonight,” is “just another night.”

We are the restless.

*

I used to say that I haven’t fallen in love, but I know now that, that isn’t true. I’ve fallen in love quite a few times. I’ve fallen in love with romances that never happened, I’ve fallen in love with girlfriends who searched my face for myself, and I’ve fallen in love with the girls who pass only with eye-contact and a recognition of similarity. I’ve walked the streets of a city after the living are asleep and I’ve run into you. I’ve stood in the rain because I need proof that I feel it, I’ve wished that I were different for sake of the people who love me, and I’ve maintained an ever-present departure date to discourage their investment.

I almost disappeared this last year. Or maybe I did. I heard older voices discourage my voice and my being who I am, and I dedicated myself to becoming a different, more acceptable, person. I lost a friend. I drove the dead, visited the dead, and shook the hands of the parents of the dead. I watched the poor be turned away because they couldn’t be helped, and I turned away for the same reason.

I learned the bible in my head and the church in my heart and I became more convinced of my inability to become adequate. I learned Dostoyevsky in my head and Breaking Bad in my heart, and I became more convinced of my inability to become adequate. I learned the love of a woman in my head and the breaking of her heart, in my heart, and I became more convinced of my inability to become adequate.

Being loved and being involved at a church are the two best ways to affirm your disappointment with your own character.

But I’ve found community amongst The Restless. We wonder whether our movement is a trait or a phase, we drink late into the night, and find the most magnificent stimulus that earth offers—because it is those stimuli alone that draw our attention away from the confusing and alluring nature of our own interpersonal quandaries.

Tonight, I tipped the kabob vender as much as the kabob cost because I was out beyond the time of the living. Tonight, I walked blocks and blocks before I realized that I had, because I was out beyond the time of the living. Tonight, I wrote about being awake beyond the living because I was awake beyond the time that the living retreated.

Some will think that this was a typed piece by a falling person, but some will think that they aren’t alone.

I’ve been gaining confidence.

I’ve received emails and messages from The Restless, and they say that they are with me. They say that they are not “they” and myself, “I,” but that we are the same. And it is for they that I write. The happily married, the well adjusted, and the gainfully employed are fine as it is. I no longer write for my vain aspirations of success, but for the few close Restless ones who read the pieces posted late at night and say, “I am not alone in this.” And I write so that I will hear The Restless say, “You are not alone in this.”

It’s true, that tonight, eventually, I will go to sleep. My insanity will grow as weary as my body and I will lie somewhere until I dream of being the hero that I’m not. The “difficulty setting” is simply to high for some of us. For myself. We’ll play, and we’ll try, but we just wont beat the game.

But I say that we are heroes. I say that there is something to the playing of the game at a level more difficult than possible. I love the mad ones, the ones who live and die failed heroes. Keep grinding heroes. Keep falling in love with the eyes you make contact with, with the ideas that you don’t pursue, and with the necessarily fictional versions of yourselves. Walk the city streets made for the sleepless and claim victory over those who have retreated.     

Growing Up is Funny

My sister recently sent me a video of my baby niece battling her biped-way from the sofa to my sister. She stumbled, used her hands for balance, and then gloated with a proud smile when she finally fell to my sister. I watched the video from a flat in Copenhagen, smiling and audibly cheering. I was happy for just about three seconds. That’s how long that it took to remember that I don’t want my niece to be able to move around. I want my niece to slide about a very little bit, to sit in chairs that she can’t get out of, and to eat a lot. I want her to be able to do these things, to be able to do no other things, and to do these things forever. These are safe things.

Isn’t that mentality sad? Wouldn’t it be grad if we watched all first steps, all grace-less beginnings, with such joy and cheer?

Me “finding myself” has been like an unsupervised toddler learning to walk. Yeah, it’s great when a kid learns to walk. The kid can’t drag ass forever. It’d be impractical, and worse, weird. There are, however, about billion new ways that a mobile kid can screw up. And just like all new walkers, when I discovered myself, or more accurately, discovered that I had a “self” to discover, I behaved like a champion, I scoffed at any notion that I might not be a perfect expert in my new skill, and then I walked my face into the first coffee table that I could find.

I recently had an epiphany. “Self,” I said, “there is a pattern here.”  

When I call the credit card company because I can’t figure out how to pay a bill, or when I’m asking a secretary how to fill out my own W-2, (it only works on women), I have a little thing that I say. I say it because it gets me help, but in this rare instance, I also say it because it’s true: “I’m a child in an adult world.”

And I am!

Each time I’ve done something new, I’ve done it clumsily. But for some reason, I continue to be astonished at my struggles. And honestly, other people seem to be surprised too. But why?

My young niece didn’t skip or dance across the room. She shakily stumbled. Yeah, she’ll one day be the most modest and talented dancer ever, but as of now, I’m just proud of her steps. I loved her and I cheered for her. What an idea.

I’ve decided to stop loathing myself for my stumbling and head knocking. I’m not sure what I’ve expected of myself, or what expectation of others I’ve undertaken, but this is me looking back at them as if through the awkwardly cut and narrated videos of my early childhood. This is me chasing the folly of a freedom forgotten. This is my bare ass, displayed in the face of my own self-assumed seriousness—and yours too. The stumbling steps of a new walker are natural. So too are the stumbling steps of adolescence, college, or young adulthood. Here’s some video of my own silly stumbles:

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New to School

In first grade, shortly after my parents paid for me to enroll in a private school in Macon, Georgia, I had to move my “Behavior Card” from green to red. I had to move my card because Ford Baggerly and I put ice in our pants. Ford Baggerly and I put ice in out pants because there was a girl named Jean who was mean. Jean was mean because her parents, by naming her “Jean”, had made it embarrassingly obvious that they despised her.

So, when Ford Baggerly and I put ice in our pants to gross-out Mean Jean, she told Mrs. Horn. When Mrs. Horn found out what Ford Baggerly and I had done, or more accurately, when Mrs. Horn was made aware of what we had done by our own demonstration of what had done—a demonstration, which we conducted by actually putting ice down our pants again—she made us move our cards from green to red.

Red is the color for the kids who are dolts.

But I don’t have a card to move anymore, and I’m betting Jean’s name is still “Jean”.

New to Independent Mobility: Version 1

Speaking of public school…I was allowed to ride my bike to school in 8^th grade. And by “allowed,” I mean that my parents made me ride my bike to school because I had withheld certain facts from them. And by “withheld certain facts,” I mean that I told my parents that I had basketball practice for a team that I wasn’t even on, so that they wouldn’t know that I actually had been given detention by Ms. Sawcyn for “treating the lesson as if it were a rude distraction from his own conversation.” Her words. I signed the note using my mom’s words, or at least her name, duh. 

Anyway, I ran into my friends’ mom as I was walking into detention. She asked me what I was doing at school so early, and I, of course, told her that I was there “to humor Ms. Sawcyn’s vanity.” And so, as things have pretty much always seemed to go, my friends’ mom went to Publix, found herself in the “Sauces” isle with my mom, and joked to my mom about my comment regarding Ms. Sawcyn. They apparently, really did regard her as being vain.

The humor was lost upon my mother.

We had some rules in our house, but the most important one to my mom was that we should always tell the truth. Unfortunately, I literally cannot understand why anyone would “always tell the truth.” My incompetence is not unfortunate because of the moral consequence, or even because of my mom’s wrath, but because another rule amongst my dad, brother and I, is that anyone who upsets Mamma Bird should be destroyed.

So that was when my parents decided to “allow” me to ride my bike to and from school. And to church. And to baseball practice. And anywhere else that I should should need to go.

I’m a lot of things that I wish that I wasn’t, and I’m not a lot of things that I wish that I was, but one of the things that I am, that I’m okay with being, is buoyant. Not exactly resilient, but buoyant. I just seem to keep popping back up to the surface. Just when the bubbles have stopped popping the surface and everyone around figures that I finally sank for good; bloop. There I am, bouncing around on top of the surface. I didn’t get there by scratching and clawing, or willing and working, but was just sort of shot up by some inherent property.

So, being a buoyant fellow, I met a young lovely on the bike path, made jokes for a couple of weeks, and then was permitted to touch her boobs. And yes, relative to her eighth-grade peers, she had some wonderful boobs. A real good pair of “oh my god, I’m touching boobs,” boobs.

A touch over one week after touching, I found myself in a circle of kids, behind the Walmart, getting punched in the face by The Boob’s Ecuadorian boyfriend. At the time I was still unfamiliar with the various advantages and disadvantages of differing socio-economic situation. If I had understood these advantages and disadvantages, I would not have ridden my bike from my house on the river to “fight” the Ecuadorian Boyfriend who rode his bike from the projects. But he was a good Ecuadorian Boyfriend. The perfect, “oh god, I’m getting punched in the face by an Ecuadorian Boyfriend,” Ecuadorian Boyfriend.

Ecuadorian Boyfriend was last seen working at a gas station. I, on the other hand, am growing my own boobs that I can touch whenever I please.

Boom. Buoyant.

New to Independent Mobility: Version 2

It is impossible to recount the myriad of “mistake” that I made with the freedom of the road. There isn’t a person alive who more enjoys driving, nor is there a person alive who has more abused it. I love it. It’s where I’m the best me. As a person, I’m sort of always going towards someplace and leaving some other place, and when I’m driving I feel like I can, at any moment, in response to any whim, go anywhere. I have an awful car, or at least that’s what you think, but it has so, so much passion. The Neon has never let me down, only I, her. The back two doors don’t have power locks or windows, the seat isn’t “attached” at all, to anything, water leaks into the car from the bottom, the floor mats have been missing for half of a decade, and the shifter is a moronic-metallic-sparkly blue. Basically, The Neon rules. And it’s because of The Neon’s flawless character that I must separate her from all of my vehicular transgressions.

Speaking of those transgressions: I’m not sure if I got my first speeding ticket the first time that I drove, but if I didn’t, it was the second or third. I’ve gotten tickets in six states, and I’ve gotten multiple tickets without leaving the car. I have never been pulled over and not been given a ticket. I’ve also been ticketed for expired tags, failure to stop at a stop sign, ineffective taillight, and of course, for misunderstanding, “don’t drink before driving” as “don’t drive before drinking.”

Driving hasn’t been all stumbles though.

When my best friend’s, girlfriend’s, sister was making a comparison list between her current boyfriend, (who was in a band, better looking than me, funnier than me, and her boyfriend, but a non-car-owner), and myself, I won. She later admitted the list to me, and upon our break-up, informed me that my ability to drive was just about all that I had going for me.

A year after that, being an older and wiser dumb-teenager, I started to keep a blow-up mattress in my trunk so that I could stay out past curfew and chase girls. I never managed to talk a girl into my accommodations, but I did once end up sharing the mattress, which extended from the back of the trunk to the front seats, with two other dudes. So there’s that.

And lastly, my best friend and I went on an epic road trip around the U.S., in The Neon. We tried to ruin her but we couldn’t.

I have a rap-sheet, car-insurance like a mortgage, and experience in jail, but I also have The Neon.

Buoyant.

New to Drinking

Scott Van Pelt, who hosts a daily radio show, often references the term, “Sunday Weird’s.” The term is used as a synoptic tool. There are some “Sunday’s,” or “day-after,” days, that fall into the category of the “Sunday Weird’s.” These are those days when someone, usually between the ages of 18 and 26, wakes up, and immediately thinks, “Weird.”

I will not catalogue the litany of alcohol-related screw-ups that checker my life because I’m no dumber than you are. But I will share a bit of a shameful “Sunday Weird’s” experience:

Study Abroad Center. Valencia, Spain.

I wake up and someone’s next to me. I think, “weird.” I put on my clothes but can’t find my pants. I think, “weird.” I check another room in the same apartment, (an apartment which is not my own), and I cannot find my pants there, but I do find my belt. I think, “weird.” I check the bathroom, a girl is in the shower, she screams, I say, “relax, its not a big deal,” and she tells me that she’ll “bight my balls off” if she ever sees me again. I think, “weird.” I walk down the stairs to my apartment, can’t get into my apartment because my key is in the pocket of my missing pants, I walk all the way down the stairs to the desk clerk, I explain the situation to the clerk, the clerk says that it’s not the weirdest thing he’s seen this morning, and lets me into my apartment where I find someone else’s pants on my floor. I think, “weird.”

I found my pants and don’t have any children or diseases.

Buoyant.

New to: Paying Taxes, Working, Being the Smallest Piece of Shit on The Organizational Chart

 This is the newest of the, “New Responsibility and Mobiliy,” experiences that I’ve encountered. This one sucks. The last year was worse than having to watch this season’s Auburn football team play on a continuous loop while laying in snow while naked. As if having to go to work weren’t enough, these people in the working world don’t understand how big of a deal we were in college. They don’t know that we dated people that a lot of other people wanted to date. They don’t know that our gamer-tag’s strike fear into the hearts of adolescents across the Internet. The suits don’t understand what sort of discipline that it takes to manage a four-hour trip to the library without neglecting one second of social posturing for sake of the distractions of our education.

I have watched the entire “Lord of The Rings” trilogy, made out with Miss Auburn, smoked a cigar, gone undefeated in corn-hole, smoked another cigar, eaten beer, drink-en Ramen, and written a paper that made my prof’s eyes bleed, all in the same day.

Those aren’t the stats of a guy who goes undrafted. Those are, Daniel Snyder sell all the shit you got so you can draft that guy, stats.

And yet, here I sit. Running away. Everything about me has had its ass kicked this last year, and now I’m posting embarrassing things on the Internet while sober. I’m hopeful though, because I’m buoyant.

*

They say that we’re “lost.” But we know we’re not. The inherent force that only we know about is growing more and more resistant to the outside forces pushing us further downwards. The moment is coming, and maybe already has, when the compassionate heart of our submerged generation will rise more rapidly than the commentary upon it, and explode far beyond the Gravity-Bound. Keep believing that you’re not as dumb as it all makes you feel. Keep the naïveté that feeds your hope for making a better world. We will rise.

We’re buoyant.  

More Than a "Good Time"

More Than a Good Time

There was a fellow who observed an astrological event about one hundred years ago. He saw that Venus, (or some other planet that is still a planet—I’m not quite sure which), was crossing between the earth and the sun. He came about some money and built an observatory called, Radcliffe Observatory, so that he could watch this planet do this thing over and over again until he learned something.  It was into the construction of the building and the acquisition of the necessary tools that he plunged everything that he had.

As it turns out, the event for which he built the observatory to observe, the criss-crossing of some planet, is something that only occurs every one hundred years. Surely, he must have known that there was a possibility that his pet event might be, for his lifetime, and anomaly. And surely, after a few nights of the thing that he thought would happen, not happening, he found other things in the vastness of space for his gaze to be set upon. But our observer did one-day die. And it was most probably while watching something not happen through his own, costly scope, on top of his own, grand building, with little satisfaction and much confusion.

This past June, the thing our observer had been watching for, happened. Far beneath the cyclical movement of planets, the students of Green Templeton College, at Oxford, sat in a common room full of cushioned couches and arm-chairs, while pattering upon keyboards, running their fingers along lines of text, and sipping tea. Learning and pushing and striving, these young souls with young minds, the talents of our generation, the great healers, inventors, and helpers to come—all traveling along their own curious orbits in the renovated and converted, Radcliffe Observatory. A building built by mistake. Our observer was wrong, but what this common room is, what his observatory has become, the room in which I now type, is right.

*

I recently asked a few friends to tell me “what they know now that they didn’t know before.” I did little explaining so that the answers wouldn’t be influenced at all. One friend, a new father, said that he knows now that being a man has little to do with his body having reached maturity, but much more to do with putting coffee on after a 14 hour day, so that he can be the one to “get the baby” during the night. A different friend said that birth control and condoms are both frustrating. And another friend said that he wasn’t sure how to say it, but “the whole seasons of life thing is starting to make more sense.”

I think that I’m in the second season of my life. I had one, from about 3 months old until February sixth of 2010, and another from then through now. During the first season I came home and dinner was ready, I played video games, and I rode my bike along with friends to Number 1 Chinese. The second season, which, unfortunately, is still in progress, has been a bunch of not sleeping, pacing on porches late at night, and being unable to read or write anything more interpersonally taxing than “See Spot Run, See Spot Walk.” I wrote something a couple of days ago that has been replaced by this thing that I’m writing right now. The scrapped post was, I think decent, but the only people who read this are in my family, and they would either be worried or whisper about my parents’ crazy son. It wasn’t happy. In fact, I think the reason that I haven’t written in a bit is because anything that I could have written, if I could write, would have been wearingly heavy for anyone to read. And it’s embarrassing. My skill may have developed, but not as rapidly as my fear of shame.  

I’m tired of my fear and I miss my fearlessness. Maybe I romanticize the past, but if I don’t, then I truly have lost my heart for the marginalized, my capacity to “go there,” into the deepest and darkest of states and thoughts so I might be able to write something familiar to those who have been there, and the security of a faith believed in and a for hope of a world that could be changed.

Is this a thing that happens after college? Is this a thing that happens to the “lost generation?” Is this a thing that is only happening to me?

I once spoke to people that I didn’t know, flirted with girls that I thought were cute, wrote pieces that, if nothing else, were at least honest, and at least felt like I was moving somewhere. Now, I’m a number, an “any person”, and empty thing. I’ve lost my passions and my talents. I’ve lost my motivation and my competency. I say that “I’ve lost” them, but I feel like they’ve been taken from me. I charge God with the man that the world has made me, and I resent him for being the maker of the world that has made me as I am. I accept less responsibility than I should, but that too I am ashamed of and feel powerless over.

I leave a day before I say that I will, I look into teary eyes without emotion, and I’m loved but cannot love back. I’m like the most emo of emo songs, Im a cliché that doesn’t know it, I’m a half assed Christian and a half assed non-christian. I can laugh and charm and chat, but I hate it and have little energy for it. I don’t care where people are from or what they do as a job, I only want to know the things that should be saved for special people. Don’t tell me what you’re favorite color is, tell me why you wear baggy sweatshirts to hide your body. Tell me why you silence the calls that are from your brother. Tell me why you’re travelling or tell me why you’re not.

I’m tired of discussion, the noises of conversation, and the way things are going. Change something. Stick with me beyond the moment when I ask you not to. Present some friction. Or don’t. But if you don’t, will you at least hold my tired head and my tired person in your lap? Be there when I want a lap to rest my head upon and be okay with me not resting my head upon your lap when you wish that I would? Tell me that I’m “okay.” Tell me that I can change things, and tell me that I can win the argument for purpose, and tell me that the existential camp is wrong? Or tell me nothing, “hold me fast,” and slide your hands through my hair. I miss my old girlfriends because by being my girlfriend, they said, “You are okay.” I miss my home because I’m better at sleeping when there.  I miss myself from before. I think that self was starting to build an observatory. I may have been wrong, but it could have been right, eventually.

*

I’m waltzing again, and again, for so much more than a “good time.” I need so much more than a “good time.” I’ll be damned if I spend all of my money on bad beds and bad food for nothing more jollies. And this is where I think that many of my peers can meet me. We are “hopeless wanderers,” moving away from things that are more easily described than those that we are running towards. Job to job, city to city, social cause to social cause. We have within our experiences the greatest exposure socially and geographically ever available to man. The age disparity between the boomers who birthed us and ourselves is, again, the greatest ever. And we are single till later, and a part of more ended romantic relationships than ever before. (See CNN “Lost Generation” for fact check.)

Lonely people surround us all. I wonder if our restless wandering is in search of a unity that facebook and transit have forever stolen. I wonder if, for me at least, this is why I want to be held fast, held when I try to leave, held when you know that even though I’m in your arms, I’m not with you. 

There’s a thing about men. There’s quality of foolishness and shortsightedness that is the ultimate of tragic characteristics. Men don’t care about so much as they care about injustice. The thief reconciles injustice through taking things for compensation, the sheriff reconciles injustice by attempting to enforce a moment of he perceives to be justice, and the man in-between reconciles injustice by ending himself. The last man may not put a bullet in his own brain or starve himself, but he will leave reality. He will stop feeling and thinking. The third man does not steal or enforce, but he does disengage. The first two are heroic because they will trade everything for a bullet to kill the other, but the third is disregarded because he accepts a muted existence so that he can survive.

The great motivator of unselfishness is the idea of permanent death.  The man who believes in permanent death commits himself to an idea, while the man who believes in a Heaven commits himself to himself. To believe in permanent death means to avenge the death of another or to avenge the impending death of one’s own self. To believe in eternal life means to commit oneself to the acquisition of that everlasting life. If I believe that I can attain eternal life, or that it is available to all who are righteous, then I can toil in the soil without remorse. But if I believe in the ethereal-mentality of life, if I believe that there is no life after this one, then the mistreatment of life is a crime that cannot be fully punished. And so the thief and the sheriff trade everything for a bullet to kill the other because they believe that this life is everything.  

The thief wishes to kill all authority because he has suffered and the authority claims responsibility. The sheriff wishes to kill all who object to authority because they are responsible for the loss of all that a man is entitled to. In the end, the thief and the sheriff kill one another and the man who has chosen to escape reality, the man who breathes through his mouth, is the survivor. The irony is that each of the three gets what he desires. The thief desires death, which is alright because Life has given cards of suffering, the sheriff desires death, which is alright because Life has given him cards of suffering, and the Apathetic Objector does not desire life because he has already gained it by not entering into the duel between the thief and the sheriff.  He lives because he does not care about living.

What muddles things is that the thief believes that he is righteous as the sheriff does. In fact, both believe themselves to be the sheriff. The thief believes that he is righting the wrongs committed by the unjust and that what is required of him is counter-cultural. The sheriff believes that he is righting the wrongs because what is required of him is to fulfill the desire of culture. The thief on the cross is not only joining the King of Righteousness because he asked to do so, but because he sacrificed his life for the acquisition of justice.