Part 2: Numbers and Boxes

Something Big:

Something Big, capitalizing on human miss-supposition, a greater fear of loss than desire for gain, and the complexities of some confusing thing called, “macroeconomics”, is on the attack. Something Big is happening. The Boss has become The Employee and The Employee has become The Unemployed. The past decisions of wisdom and fortune, the decisions of 2006, have become today’s decisions of disaster. In the coffee shops, where the masses of Big Something are headquartered, drawing circles in newspapers and joining Feel-better-about-yourself-because-you’re-trying-to-get-a-job.coms, people are saying:

“Once, my house could have been sold at this price, but it is now valued at that price, and so I’ll need to work at least twenty years longer than I’ll live.”

“I earned a degree in this, but I’m a part-time that, and I’m afraid that more school will only qualify me for a different this, and a similar that, and I just don’t know what to do.”

“I hired employees before Something Big began to happen. After the employees became people, they became friends, and because I couldn’t fire my friends, we are all unemployed; all troops of Big Something.”

“My daughter drives my car from my apartment that she lives in to the school that my money pays for. My great-aunt lives with my mother in a house that I own, my dad’s heart and wisdom are with the Lord, and I, the man who searches the eyes in the mirror for something remembered, the man who has no choice but to take his daughter’s car and school, evict his aunt and mother, and forget his father—I live in hell.”

Those statements, spoken intimately between strangers who share everything in common, are our battle cries. We are Big Something and we aren’t merely surviving Something Big, but we are living.  And that is our weapon—despite circumstance, to not merely survive, but to live; A group ethic. This weapon, or battle strategy, was not created in hidden laboratories, or suggested in the essays of Big Something’s philosophers, but in the collision of despair and humanity.

The Ethic of Living:

Ms. Amy’s skin, which is the leathery wrinkled sort, the type that proves many years of Florida’s sun, stretches across bones and muscles that have earned relaxation and reward; But Ms. Amy labors. Working the register is the attack of Something Big. There, Ms. Amy has no choice—it’s a fact of survival. But when Ms. Amy’s undaunted blue eyes begin a dance that her body follows, joyously flowing to the overhead music, it’s an act of revenge, a claim of hope, and the vivid execution of The Ethic of Living.

Jeremy, comfortably seated in a black, leather chair, spends his mornings scouring the net for an opportunity. He’s got kids and a wife and god knows how much other stuff to worry about. He, of course, is looking for a job. And since there aren’t jobs, this obviously means that he has seen pictures of Arnold’s mistress, follows the stocks that he no longer owns, writes letters that he’ll never send, and beats the heck out of a Sudoku book. I mean he absolutely, American X style, curb stomps that little yellow booklet—black coffee on the stand next to him, khaki-panted legs crossed, and brown eyes passionately fixed on the boxes so unlucky as to be empty—the once defeated Jeremy has victory over that book. He’s a man over that book. The numbers and boxes and ink are defenseless against him, and I know that Jeremy’s defeat of numbers and ink is an act of revenge, a claim of hope, and the vivid execution of The Ethic of Living.

I spent the first week of my new life, the “what now” life, scouring the internet for opportunities to write. There weren’t any. I got into a pyramid scheme that I soon got out of. I decided to go ahead and write a wildly popular novel. But the story was about me with a different name, and people would know that the screw-up in the book was me, so I didn’t. I resolved to walk to the offices of Florida Today, where I’d demand an opportunity to prove myself, but it’s hot, and so I didn’t. I did a lot of didn’t.

My despair met my humanity.

I graduated an English major who thought himself a writer, but yesterday, as an act of survival, I used a chainsaw to cut wood that I then stacked. The wood lost and I won. I, like Ms. Amy and Jeremy, had victory. Something Big has been happening, and it’s forced us to the coffee shops. And this herding, this galvanization, has created Big Something. I’m as stuck to you as I am to Big Something, and just as we people have always done when coalesced and desperate, we will have victory in the life of one another. We’ll see the morning and evening colors that Something Big cannot blot, buy coffees for the strangers that Something Big cannot keep from our love, dance with the bodies that Something Big cannot tire, and ultimately, through all of these vivid executions of The Ethic of Living, the numbers, boxes, and ink will submit to the new, hopeful, living nation of Big Something.   

Part 1: No resolution, and apparently about nothing—of course

I left the hotel at 7:15am, allotting an hour for transport to Madrid’s airport, and another hour and a half for check-in, security, and a casually sipped hazelnut latte. This, however, is not what happened. In reality I boarded the plane in a rush of sweat and panic. Of course I had waited at the wrong bus-stop, disembarked at terminal 1 when I needed to be in terminal 3, walked a mile to the Air France check-in, found out that I would need to leave a bag in Madrid, that the flight was closing in ten minutes, and enjoyed zero sips of the Coffee Giant’s latte.

But I did catch the flight, and easily transitioned in Charles de Galle airport from one Air France flight to another. And I ate a juicy, overpriced burger in terminal A of Detroit’s modern airport. And I slept soundly on the two hour flight into Orlando International. And I incessantly spoke of café’s and people during the familiar ride to our home.

When I was throwing the “necessaries” from one suitcase into another I noticed that the things I couldn’t leave behind had absolutely zero practical value. My passport from the Camino de Santiago made it, as well as some awful gifts I had gotten for family, but clothes and books were left behind. The check-in attendant laughed. While I was running to security I realized that getting rid of my extra bag, the one that I couldn’t take with me, would actually be very difficult. It was the day after the raid on OBL’s compound, security levels were high, and apparently the entire Spanish army, brandishing huge guns, was in Madrid’s airport. First I tried to stuff the suitcase into a trashcan. This, you can imagine, looked conspicuous. Me, sweating and panicked, shoving a suitcase into a trashcan. People actually stopped and looked, murmuring to one another. I looked around with saucer sized eyes, yanked the wedged bag out of the iron trashcan, and took off in the direction of security. I thought about leaving the bag next to the trashcan, but remembered the ominous warnings against leaving baggage unattended. I saw myself running away from an orphaned bag, trying to explain, in Spanish, to the guards who would be shooting at me, that I had only paid to check one bag and was forced to leave another. I was upon security before any reasonable solutions had come to mind. When I told the guard that I wished to leave a heavy suitcase in a trashcan, (I don’t speak Spanish), he was obviously alarmed.  More guards came over, tightly gripping the black stocks of their automatic rifles, and tried to understand what the young American nut was saying. Eventually one guard, holding my bag at arms’ length, walked it through the scanner, and allowed me to proceed. And I ran. Luckily, only five days earlier I had mistakenly sprinted through the same gates of the same airport, so the path was familiar. But the sprint was a long one. And since I had worn jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, thinking myself handsome, and that I would make every guapa Spanish chick wish she had met me while I was in her country, I, as I mentioned earlier, accumulated a great amount of sweat in all of the obvious areas, and arrived at my gate breathing as if I might had smoked three packs since security. Also, I’m sure that I had already been red-flagged and secretly followed.  I sat next to the creepiest people on the plane. A couple, the guy from Canada and the girl from the Netherlands, she matching his un-trimmed nails with her unshaven legs, flirted via some perverted computer-game lingo. The short flight was long.

Drinks of all kinds were complimentary on the flight from Paris to Detroit. This wonderful fact combined with a growing realization that my time abroad was indeed over, made me avert my eyes from average movies like, The  Company Men, and, Love and other Drugs, so that I’d remember the theater of it all, and keep my eyes dry. I was coming home to a loving family, a familiar bed, and a country slam full of English-speakers…But I was also coming home to unemployment, financial desolation, (I literally had zero dollars. No money), the storm of a legal cluster-fuck, the shameful residence of a college graduate in his parents’ home, and high school ghosts that still haunt. I had gained much, maybe even some of myself, but it seemed like everything that I had been sure of in Spain, all that I had accumulated, was as worthless as the euros in my pocket.

Two days after I returned from Spain my mom drove me to a mandatory meeting with my state appointed counselor. Brimming with confidence, and as much charisma as I could muster, I joked with the secretary, pet her dog, and smiled with my eyes while I told Sally, the sweet, elderly counselor, that yes, before being caught, I had driven under the influence. I told her about the night that I was arrested, that I wouldn’t trade the embarrassment and shame, and that I now know that no night, no extra drink, is worth the sacrifice of freedom and finances which the DUI has cost me. I told her about Missouri sending the wrong information, and how what was supposed to be 30 days without driving has turned into 6 months in the passenger seat. Sally said some really nice things about me, and that, “yes”, sometimes people like me, with good parents, a college diploma, and a vocabulary stocked with 4 syllable words, are caught. She assigned me as little counseling as possible, (3 thirty minute sessions in 12 weeks), and apologized for having no choice but to require, because the state requires it of her, that I attend weekly AA meetings. Even while I was still with her I was deflated. Three more months without driving, more shameful meetings, and an increased sense of the feeling that I had at some point transitioned from perpetrator to victim. Sally hugged me at the end and told me that one day I would laugh at “all of this”.

My mom and I went to lunch afterwards. She told me that she was sorry things had turned out as they had. I remembered that I created the situation which allowed the possibility of “all of this”. I had. But I’ve made things hard for myself before. I’ve never had cancer or lost a loved one, but I have, thanks to my own mistakes, endured hardship. And from those times, and those mistakes, from the loss of friendship and loss of self, learned that “this too shall pass”, applies to everything. I told my mom, as we walked from the car I couldn’t drive to the restaurant where I couldn’t order a beer, that, “this won’t stop me”. And even though I didn’t say what it wouldn’t stop me from doing, but earnestly meaning it nonetheless, my mom said, “I know”. And I believed her. And it won’t. And I know that it sounds like something Rudy or Andy Dufresne would say, but I wasn’t embarrassed to say it. Because sometimes the hardest things to get through are ourselves. And I knew that AA couldn’t be bad for anybody, and that I’ll spend more time with my little brother because I literally can’t go anywhere without him, and that one day I’ll be able to drive a friend home, because there were so many times that I couldn’t. And I also knew that August 1^st, when I can drive again, that I’ll probably drive the lonely Neon, at four dollars a gallon, to the goddam North Pole.   

“I know that It’ll pass. I know that things will change and that This will be a memory. I know that other people have gone through worse and I know that I deserve whatever comes to me. I know I’ve escaped many times, I know that It was stupid, I know.

But I’m so weary.

The strings from my shoulders to my toes are being tightened. My heart beats in my head and my brain thinks in my stomach. It’s late and tomorrow will be better because it’s forward. I only find peace in the memory that the eyes to see exactly how dark tonight is, will equally appreciate tomorrow’s light.”

I wrote that a long time ago. I was on the airplane looking through folders and files, and I couldn’t remember what “I know that it’ll pass”, came from. I’m not sure what night it was on, or what was happening, but it’s true, I mean the thing that I found peace in.

Yesterday I was looking through my most recent journal and I found a line that I had written. It said, “what if the stars blotted out the streetlights”. It was scribbled apart from everything else, crossing the horizontal lines of my moleskin.

First of all, I actually like that line. I rarely feel successful with a sentence or a thought, and it’s probably that I had no idea what I was saying, but I think it’s pretty good. When I read it now I think of how we see each other—and how it’s sad that This Person’s or That Person’s streetlights often blot out their stars. The next thing I thought of was a mountain top in Hawaii, and how everything turned to stars after the sun had set beneath the clouds.

Neither the stars nor the streetlights had moved, but I had seen something different.