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.