“Get busy living or get busy dying. That’s goddamn right… I find I am so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”
-Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding, The Shawshank Redemption

Depending on who you listen to, hope is either a dangerous thing that can make men crazy, or maybe the best thing in life. It’s probably both. I’ve had a hard time today, though the last 24-48 hours have been pretty good overall. I’ve looked at two or three apartments in New Brunswick worth applying for, done so, and gone on to conclude that I may just need to flee to the West sooner than later. I have no earthly idea what I want or what I should be doing. My compass is broken.

Nevertheless, I feel a certain optimism as I approach the coming days ahead. If nothing else, things will be resolved, will come to some kind of conclusion so long deferred. As impossible as this situation has been for so long, it promises to get a little less impossible soon. A little. Best not hope for too much.

I can’t believe I’ve made it through the last six weeks.

I am doing your dishes
for the last time
trying not to drop tears
or nasal runoff
into the too-hot soapy water

It’s not too late

All of a sudden she disappears
just yesterday she was here
somebody tell me if I am sleeping
someone should be with me here
cause I don’t wanna be alone

As already indicated, it’s been a crazy last few days. The way things are going, almost everything is becoming believable at this point. But before I knew the extent of the damage to the apartment here or the extent of damage my body had suddenly started taking, I decided to go to a Counting Crows show in Montclair, New Jersey, since they had extra tickets for the 18 August show. And since I’d missed the show I was scheduled to attend on July 31st. And since I needed an emotional bloodletting, of which Counting Crows shows are the best kind I know. And since I don’t care what happens to me anymore. And since I just need to find a way to get through the next eight days, likely in many ways to be the most painful of my life thus far. Those of you who know what’s going on know exactly why that is.

I wanna be the knife
that cuts into my hand
and I wanna be scattered
from here in this catapult
what a big baby
won’t somebody save me please?
won’t find nobody home

I found Montclair, New Jersey to be something of a dying small-town community feel nestled in the midst of an industrial wasteland. This probably sounds a little worse than it is, but I haven’t exactly been in the most flattering of moods lately about anything. Everything looks dead or dying, everything seems to be atrophying, everything has the stench of broken dreams. The miniature downtown of Montclair seems to be built around the newly reopened and revitalized Wellmont Theatre, a pretty nifty little venue long fallen into disrepair and recently rescued. If the fellow line-waiting front-row patrons are to be believed, the ceiling is still in danger of collapse and they have a thin excuse for netting up there to make sure no one takes a direct plaster hit if so. Against the odds, the building remained intact not only while I bought tickets, waited an hour or so in line, and jetted up to the second row on the floor, but even through the duration of the emotional turmoil unleashed when CC and their friends took the stage.

All of these quiet battered voices
wait for the hunger to come
we’ve got little revolvers
and stupid choices
no one to say when we’re done
well I don’t wanna bring you down

This is part of their summer tour and their summer tours lately have been subheaded The Traveling Circus and Medicine Show, an innovative amalgam of whatever three bands they have grouped together, all switching out songs and sets and playing two acts with an encore like a seamless 20-piece band. It’s not exactly my favorite incarnation of the Crows, but it works pretty well most of the time, even when they have an angry joke of a white rapper as the third piece in their triage. There’s a rockabilly sensibility to this manifestation of their live act, but this particular show lacked most of the boisterous highs one would typically expect to come along with that. Adam Duritz seemed more dazed than I felt, often staring into space and almost muttering lyrics in a dejected haze. It wasn’t sloppy or misdelivered in any way, though – it was deliberate, calculated, crafted. It spoke of a person whose life has whizzed past him, leaving him to contemplate the rubble. It spoke to me.

I wanna be the light
that burns out your eyes
cause I know there’s little things about me
that would sing in the silence of
so much rejection in every connection I make
can’t find nobody home

I wept, literally, through six of the songs. Having been to something like ten Counting Crows shows, I have long come to expect that they will move me, that I will find them religious experiences, that the poetry and pathos of the live delivery will shake my foundations and reignite the core of my soul, for both good and for sad. What I am often not prepared for is that even my expectations of transcendence will be exceeded and surpassed. That the phrase “Awareness is Never Enough – It Must Always Be Wonder” is so frequently made corporeal in those unexpected moments of a CC show. What song will they build into what other song? What meaning will be encompassed or recalculated in such a way as to render the entire deepest voice of a song bare in a new and scintillating light? What will cut so hard and so fast to the quick that one’s heart will bleed anew, pouring forth a whole new reason for pouring? This is the emotional breakdown and rebuild, the evisceration and glinting hope, that these shows offer.

I wanna be the light
that burns out your eyes
cause I know there’s little things about me
that would sing in the silence of
so much rejection in every connection I make
I wanna be the last thing that you hear when you’re falling asleep

It was actually Augustana who offered me one of the most painful and beautiful moments when they stuck “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” in the middle of “Boston”. I openly bled tears, taken back to both a moment on a bus in Scotland convinced I was going to die when that song came blaring over the speakers to give me hope and also to the understanding of the song’s original purpose: an open letter to a suicide, committed to voice too late to make any difference for that one but submitted all the same in hopes of saving others. Suddenly the fact that “you don’t know me and you don’t even care” was cut back by the fact that we’re all “stuck in a moment and can’t get out of it”. It was at that moment, after a long soliloquy on growing up in light of “Up All Night” and two songs before “Catapult” that the song selection stopped speaking to me and started being for me, about me, through me. By the time “Time and Time Again” was paired back-to-back with “Richard Manuel is Dead” near the open of the second act, I was slayed and begging for more.

I wanna be the knife
that cuts into my hand
and I wanna be scattered
from here in this catapult
what a big baby
won’t somebody take me please?
can’t find nobody home

It’s impossible to explain everything I’m feeling or thinking or going through now, or was then. It’s impossible to explain the importance of “Richard Manuel is Dead”, Emily’s favorite Crows song, or the precise implications of the way Adam sang “A Murder of One”, centering on a to-me-unprecedented line of “I need to change,” observing and reflecting on the painful nature of growing up through things one shouldn’t have to experience. By the time “Rain King” was offering hope “With a Little Help from My Friends”, I’d already settled in a numb fuzzy-faced coma of crying to the point of catharsis. It was no wonder that I stumbled home to find a dumpster overturned by the storm in the parking space normally reserved for the Prius and would be in the Emergency Room within a few hours, dealing with the extraction of kidney stones. Every day, hour, minute, is its own special trial. And like the singing of a song or the passing of a kidney stone, the pain embedded deep in each moment makes the overall picture impossible to even grasp. No wonder Emily seems capable of such callous calculation and diffident distance. No one could hope to understand what’s happening without living through each second. Even me.

Caravan
Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby
Omaha
[NOTAR]
Up All Night
Stars and Boulevards
Boston (with Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of)
Steal Your Heart Away
Twenty Years
Catapult
[NOTAR]
Why Should You Come When I Call?
You Ain’t Going Nowhere
—
Four White Stallions
Time and Time Again
Richard Manuel is Dead
Safe and Sound
A Murder of One (with Doris Day)
[NOTAR x2]
Just Like a Woman
Dust
Shot in the Dark
Sweet and Low
Come Around
A Long December (with A Murder of One)
Hanginaround
—
Rain King (with With a Little Help from My Friends)
This Land is Your Land

(Augustana songs in italics; NOTAR songs not named)

This is getting absurd.

The Counting Crows show was a great experience overall, despite manifesting as an emotional woodchipper that forced me to hysterical tears during at least six songs. I’ll write up that whole situation at some point – I was excited to post the setlist and review after spending a first night here in Princeton.

Turns out I wasn’t so lucky. I went to sleep with a good deal of pain in my left side and it was so excruciating at 5:00 in the morning that it woke me up. I spent a panicky half-hour wanting to throw up and being unable to, then looking up appendicitis, discovering my pain was on the wrong side, and still being concerned anyway. I wound up deciding to head to the ER. After all, no one’s here living with me to talk down from the ledge or reassure me or offer me anything anymore.

Turns out, five hours of hospital later, including my first-ever CAT scan and first-ever IV, that I have kidney stones. Yeah. Also known as perhaps the only human experience more painful than childbirth. Because that’s what I needed about now. A good old-fashioned medical walloping. Hooray.

Lots more doctor’s visits to come to determine why I’m getting them and what I can do to mitigate. If you need me, I’ll be ducking and covering under the bed and trying not to blink.

A prevailing theory behind the recent series of events to befall my life is that I am actually the living incarnation of the Biblical figure Job. Suffice it to say that this theory just got a big boost from recent events up north in Jersey:

Public Safety and the Department of Facilities assisted residents of the Butler Apartments who were affected by the severe thunderstorms that generated high winds and dumped rain shortly before 5 p.m. by establishing a shelter in the Frist Multipurpose Room.

Cots and toiletries were available, and Dining Services made food and beverages available to Butler residents who were not allowed to return to their homes. Because of the downed trees and power lines, homeward bound residents of Butler Apartments were instructed at 6:45 p.m. to go instead to Frist Campus Center. Residents at home were informed that they should not go outside, as those who left their homes in some instances were not being allowed by municipal emergency responders to return. These displaced residents also were being asked to seek shelter at Frist. University shuttles were sent to Butler to transport residents.

Early estimates were that fallen trees damaged at least four homes at Butler, among trees that fell in more than a dozen locations across campus. There were no injuries.

Given Emily’s and my calamitous history with insurance claims in the past year, including an overturned moving truck, a direct three-car collision while we were stopped at a red light, and Emily tripping in a crosswalk and landing on her nose, it would only be fitting that our house was one of the four in the direct line of a falling tree. I won’t know for sure until we get some all-clear updates from Princeton and I wander back up that way anyway, which will probably be Wednesday at the earliest.

In light of the way things have been going, it would only make sense if the house that hosted the best year of our marriage decided to literally fall apart under some disastrous series of events. I am not trying to tempt fate or egg on disaster, but I am at that point of existence where I feel utterly incapable of being surprised. If my return drive to Jersey involves being chased by a localized hurricane that is exactly the size of a car footprint, it will hardly faze me. We are at the stage where more ridiculousness only enhances the eventual story to be told some day when, incomprehensibly, the pain might not be quite so acute.

Humans are adaptable creatures. This is usually cited as a great strength of our ridiculous species, a reason for hope and even celebration as we embark on conquering new vistas and narrowing distant horizons. And yet there are great drawbacks to our adaptability. We are able to justify horrendous atrocities to ourselves in the name of adjusting to a new set of circumstances, always with that watchword of “survival” as the ultimate goal, either implicit or explicit. Nearly every wrong you can think of has been committed in the name of survival, of adapting to or creating a new better reality, of protecting someone from a possible allegedly greater wrong.

As I confront the daily struggle to survive amidst my new set of circumstances, amidst the leaden weights that have been dropped from the clear blue sky upon me, I feel most threatened by the idea of becoming someone I don’t want to be. I am all too aware of the fact that I’m capable of adapting to this new reality, of finding a way to merely adjust and survive and see this through to the other side. But it’s terrifying and dangerous. I don’t want to watch myself transform, in the name of surviving, into a jerk, an asshole, a terrible person. And it’s all too easy to see how it could happen. I could become callous, diffident, uncaring, indifferent to the feelings and tenderness that got me into all this mess in the first place. It is perhaps the almost universal gut reaction to this kind of cataclysmic romantic rejection to go out and destroy other hearts, to rend people in two in the name of vindication or justice. I don’t even know how to help myself. And it is this, more than anything perhaps, that inclines me toward ending things instead of seeing how I can survive.

Of course the conundrum has another side, namely that ending things itself would be an even graver insult to the hearts who remain as recipients for my own care. And that still holds me back, ties me to the unimaginably painful mast of this tempest-tossed limbo I traverse each day. But each evening as the mast splits in the storm, forcing me over backward in spine-rending acrobatics, I wonder whether this sacrifice is worth it. How long can I watch my vertebrae shake and bifurcate without hardening my own heart? How many bones do I have to lose before I become someone I can no longer respect? I spent part of the last year being proud of myself for the first time in my life. Is it worth living if I can never get back to that place?

In the meantime, the backdrop for this debate remains the back rooms and spare couches of the loving local friends who are all too willing to put up with my drifting, shiftless state. Days of the week, days of the month, it all slides by in a gentle unnoticed rain. August 2010, the all-time low, the new standard for devastation in my sad little existence. How unfathomable, how rare, to have to suffer through this alone, still at a distance, waiting humbly and quietly, though of course tearfully too, for the prodigal wife who just won’t come home. Who has endless little practicalities and plans and even beach vacations between her and the reckoning with what she’s wrought.

Do something for the future every day, my friend says. Yes, but. What is the future? Why is the future? Who, most importantly, will be living in that future? Do I even like this person who could possibly survive this calamity? Do I want to see this through and find out who emerges from that rabbit hole? What if that person looks back and laughs at me now, wonders how I ever could have cared so much about anything as to get this caught up? This is how villains are born. This is the backstory on the sophisticated character studies of those capable of the worst actions. I fear my own future, even more than I fear the pain it will take to get there.

There are two ways of looking at morality in the world. At least through one lens of slicing it. You can follow Hippocrates and say that one first ought do no harm. The logical conclusion, ultimately, is that a person sitting alone in their room doing nothing for a lifetime is doing more good than those following the more action-oriented American ideal of flailing about wildly with good intentions and hoping some of those land in the right direction. Do, do, do says this latter perspective, and ultimately the good you do will outweigh the ill. I have always been more with Hippocrates on this one, but never had to witness the provocative hypocrisy of those who feel that they can use as a platform for good the worst possible treatment of another human being.

Lonely empty room of nothing, here I come. Here I am. I may never do again, but at least that puts me ahead of harm.

Our conversation was short and sweet
It nearly swept me off-a my feet
And I’m back in the rain, oh, oh
And you are on dry land
You made it there somehow
You’re a big girl now

Bird on the horizon, sittin’ on a fence
He’s singin’ his song for me at his own expense
And I’m just like that bird, oh, oh
Singin’ just for you
I hope that you can hear
Hear me singin’ through these tears

Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast
Oh, but what a shame if all we’ve shared can’t last
I can change, I swear, oh, oh
See what you can do
I can make it through
You can make it too

Love is so simple, to quote a phrase
You’ve known it all the time, I’m learnin’ it these days
Oh, I know where I can find you, oh, oh
In somebody’s room
It’s a price I have to pay
You’re a big girl all the way

A change in the weather is known to be extreme
But what’s the sense of changing horses in midstream?
I’m going out of my mind, oh, oh
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we’ve been apart

-Bob Dylan

“Well you can fall for chains of silver
and you can fall for chains of gold
you know you fall for pretty strangers
and the promises they hold
well you promised me everything
and then you promised me thick and thin
and now you just turn away and say ‘Romeo?
I think I used to have a scene with him.’”
-Indigo Girls (via Dire Straits), “Romeo and Juliet”

I am almost too depressed to post. I am undergoing this kind of self-enforced torture that comes from thinking through various thoughts which inevitably lead me to something that references some shared part of the past, only for that to jolt me like an electric shock with the idea that this memory, this idea, this concept, whatever it may be, is dead to me. That the past runs thick with poison and the toxicity is threatening to drown everything in my entire memory. I understand the naive desires of those depicted in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. I comprehend why people voluntarily submit to electro-convulsive therapy, to lobotomy. The process of training one’s mind to set off alarm bells at every fond remembrance is just too painful, too time-consuming, too angsty.

How low can the needle go? I found myself asking this question as an almost rhetorical device for this very process, only to of course realize that such was itself a reference from the past decade, the nine years of my life destined to be obliterated or rigged with criss-crossing booby-trap wires until it’s finally paved over. A snowy drive through the hinterlands of Vermont, New Hampshire, then cross-eyed tired by the time we got to Route 1 between New Brunswick and Princeton. The Kia spinning out under Emily’s wheeled control, the fortuitous placement of the raging semis that dodged us in seemingly every direction before she righted the ship. How thinking through the memory prompts the ultimate and obvious question: what if the worst had happened that day? That day, or a handful like it, so many incidents and accidents along the way that would have cut things short in such a more natural way. It is hard not to yearn for revision, rewriting, re-evaluation, no matter how catastrophic. It is hard not to root for things that could have precluded being here.

We can’t pave the past, of course, neither under the desires of a cataclysmic edit nor the obliteration of surgical removal. We have to live with it, live through it, again and again, eliciting the cold sweats and terror of how quickly a lifetime of memories can be replaced by a graveyard of ghosts. I am haunted, eternally, watching each transformation as golden amber days are rusted into bitterness before my mind’s very eye. When I started this little note, it was about a steamroller or a bulldozer, about new unforgiving asphalt come to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. But nothing is so simple. Instead, it’s the deadly breath of an ice queen, an ice age perhaps, come to blow the life out of all that was good. But instead of bland asphalt, we have only the suddenly broken pieces of what was so recently whole and vibrant.

This is not the way things ought die. They ought decay, wither, descend slowly into the gloom. Cliff-jumping into the abyss is for madness.

You should know that some of the things I’ve posted since the late crisis began have upset Emily. We have discussed the possibility of certain amendments or edits and she feels they would blow things even further out of proportion. So I’m sort of posting this instead, as a way of both smoothing a couple things (maybe) and also just examining and analyzing the precariousness of my current position and why that leads to me making decisions that you or Emily or someone else may disagree with.

Throughout this situation, and crystallizing once I got to Liberia and finally saw Emily in person, I have been of almost precisely two minds about the whole ordeal. On the one hand, I am incredibly hurt, both by the specific results of the series of decisions Emily has made and especially by the way she has conducted enacting them. On the other hand, I am still deeply in love with this woman and want only what is best for her. This would be easier if I felt less hurt, easier if I could hate Emily somehow, and much easier if I could not simultaneously hold both of the feelings I hold at once. But the circumstances are what they are and I don’t see any real way to change them. It is impossible to fathom feeling any less pain, except maybe extremely gradually and painstakingly over time. I have no interest in hating Emily. And so I persist in this vaguely twilit state of near-schizophrenia.

Compounding this, of course, is my deep desire to live a life in public, with special focus on emotional honesty. Now many of you may just disagree with that approach to life on face, in which case I don’t know why you’re reading this. You should examine why you’re reading this and maybe find some merit in this approach after all. Or maybe you’ll use words like “car crash” and “train wreck” and I think that will also tell you something about yourself and your approach. In any event, this is how I’ve chosen to approach my life and it includes the effort to try to hold myself to a standard of consistency as a human being that most people don’t even spend time thinking about. I’m not saying I hit the mark all the time or that the existence of this blog is evidence that I’ve advanced in some way. But I see no reason to start abridging things now, at the most critical juncture of my personhood that I have ever faced. If anything, this tool and approach to life become infinitely more important in a crisis, not less.

Part of what frustrates Emily is that she doesn’t have a blog of her own that she uses to talk about her emotions. She has a blog, but she hasn’t posted since this all began. She has no interest in open and wide-spanning communication about this and thinks it’s inappropriate on face. At the same time, she’s happy with the way things have turned out, so there isn’t much for her to try to deal with. It would be interesting to see how she would have reacted had I done something like this to her. But as the person who doesn’t see a roadmap to get to September 1st, much less beyond it, I have more of a need to deal with things, to explicate, to create a record of my own journey and progress, and to share that with everyone.

You should understand and internalize how much I want Emily to feel loved and supported right now. That’s not always clear, because I am often reacting to extreme emotional duress and suffering that inclines me to lash out or to rail against the sources of that pain that I find incomprehensible. But I am not trying to get you to dislike Emily. I am interested in everyone supporting Emily and her moving on to have the best life she can under this set of decisions. I want to be her friend and I want her to keep her friends. Please don’t interpret anything I say or do as an infringement on those goals.

At the same time, I’m losing enough of everything in my life right now that I simply can’t afford to willingly sacrifice more. I have to process in the way that will help me survive this situation. I have to appeal to friends and even acquaintances to discuss the unfairness of this set of circumstances. I have to recommit myself to a life lived in the open because this is the only way I survived prior challenges and heartaches. I am an idealist, and while a world without privacy may sound like hell to you, it’s my conviction that it’s as close to utopia as we can get. The most any one person can try to do is live their life in accordance with their own ideals and be thoughtful about what those ideals are. That’s all I’m trying to do here.

Please understand that it’s hard. I really hope none of you ever have to find out how hard this situation is.

Been doing a lot of thinking lately. Obviously. If you want to play along at home, imagine the best thing that has ever happened to you in your life. Imagine that this had lasted for nine years. Now, imagine that instead of being a source of solace and comfort for you, a font of inspiration and confidence, it is transformed almost overnight, without warning or even coherent reason, into a source of betrayal and pain.

Anyway, this prompts a lot of thought. And key among the thoughts is the one of where the future will be, if there is a future to be had at all. I have really made extremely little progress in figuring this out for myself. I know I will not be living in Princeton anymore, and I’m pretty sure there are wide swaths of the country I can rule out for either lack of friendship/support or lack of interest in ever being there. Georgia comes to mind. Iowa, maybe. Seattle, a town I’d desperately like to live in someday, is just too far from any close friends. Same goes for anywhere abroad, except maybe parts of Mexico. Though I hear it’s tough to do regular border crossings.

There was a list at some point, though the list sometimes feels too narrow and other times too broad. Two cities have risen near the top, though they both are towns where I have no super-close friends. In one of them, I do have a whole debate team that would be the main source of my sustainability and interest for the year I could spend there, there being New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the other, I know no one, but would be a short jaunt from the Grand Canyon, long established as my spiritual home and epicenter. This one being Flagstaff, Arizona, the town I just told my friends in LA after Kunkel’s wedding would probably be my first choice of places to live if practicality were no object.

It’s by no means exhaustive – there are plenty of other places both west and east that are in contention. And even if they contend for 2010-2011, there’s no telling how much longer I’d stay in the same place. Both New Brunswick and Flagstaff would kind of be project towns. The former being a place to throw myself into debate, hoping to find satisfaction from fulfilling the coaching commitment I already made to a group of exciting and improving youths on the verge of their potential. Probably for just one year at the absolute most, to fulfill the commitment and see this year’s batch of seniors through while still laying the groundwork for a program that will (hopefully) have arrived by that year’s end. Flagstaff would be about me becoming a bit of a Desert Rat, spending maybe up to half the nights outside or in tents as I tried to hike every trail in the Canyon or maybe even embarked on an endless jaunt through the wilderness. To get in shape, to heal myself and restore my faith in the soothing light of the high desert. The same could be done, with more familial support and less natural perfection, in Albuquerque. Maybe – maybe – even somewhere in southeastern California that’s in range of all the friends I have in LA.

In thinking about these choices, it’s become increasingly clear that I will have regrets no matter where I go. And not just in the sense of the decade of regrets I’m only starting to come to grips with in my own head that pertains to the crisis writ large. If I go west, I will forever regret reneging on my commitment to Rutgers, feel bad about leaving the program I was helping to build in the lurch at the outset of arguably their most critical year. I will writhe that the opportunity to work with those kids is another casualty of what Emily has done to me, that the kids I’d be turning my back on would be unwitting victims of her recent rash actions. Conversely, of course, staying east offers numerous challenges to forming new bonds with people. For reasons I have been routinely unable to fully explain to others’ satisfactions, I feel enormously uncomfortable in the east. I find it to be cold (not physically – I like that kind of cold), uninviting, harsh, unwelcoming, and populated with people generally even more emblematically so. The idea of embarking on my most fragile and vulnerable year of existence on Earth in such an unforgiving environment seems almost pathologically stupid. And so I would regret, every time I was sad or lonely or desperate, surrounding myself with the forbidding world of the east instead of the relaxed, warm, and welcoming confines of the American west.

These are not the only factors involved, of course. Proximity to friends and family are huge, and made more complicated by the idea of sort of choosing between friends, or rewarding friends in some de facto sense for being near other friends and thus creating more of a safety-net community. It’s arguable that I shouldn’t try to do anything this year, instead drifting for weeks at a time from one friend to another. This seems bad because of the aimless stasis and limbo it might engender, but also seems safer in some ways and more likely to remind me of how much I have to live for. Not one of these choices is easy.

There’s also the factor of being too much of a dead weight on friends. I’m not saying this so that forty people e-mail me in the next 24 hours and reassure me that they are happy to do whatever they can for me – I already know you all feel that way. And thank you. But at the same time, I can feel the palpable toll that I and this situation are taking on the people that I care about. Anyone I stay with for a while ends up seeming exhausted, drained, and almost annoyed. I get it. It’s human. I am too great a burden to be shoved on any one person right now, or even a collection of people. Folks have to live their own lives, get married, have good times, embrace experiences that are not convincing their friend why there’s a reason to go on. And here again is perhaps the case for New Brunswick or Flagstaff, somewhere that the relationships I rely on day-to-day are tinged with less overall overwhelm at the depths of what I’ve lost. Granted, that may be infeasible – it’s possible that no one will meet me for 3-5 years without immediately being confronted by me as a broken semi-person. I don’t know. But there’s something to be said for forcing me into a situation where I have to form new bonds. There’s also a lot to be said for the idea that I wouldn’t do that even in a town where I knew no one, that I would just draw inward until my very sense of an outside world collapsed entirely.

There are no right answers. Such is the nature of calamity. There may be hope – maybe, I’m not sure – but there are no right answers. And so I continue to spin my wheels in futility, to face my impossible choices and decisions, to try to talk over the repetitive intractability with those who’ll listen. I know how I feel about regions of the world, though, but this isn’t the only factor. And I’m still not sure how I feel about the world at all, and whether it can still be the place for me.

I am trying, as calmly and slowly and rationally and logically as possible (under the circumstances) to figure this shit out.

“There’s got to be someone we can trust
out here among us.”
-Wallflowers, “Three Marlenas”, as heard at Home Depot today

Yesterday was almost an okay day. I couldn’t tell you why. I guess part of it was that Emily and I weren’t bickering over e-mail as we have been wont to do lately. Today is harder, for reasons again mostly inexplicable, but perhaps in part related to our correspondence. Emily chose today to contact a lot of her friends and a fair number of mine to state in a very detached way that we were “going our separate ways.” It was a hard e-mail to read, mostly because of how emotionally vacant it seemed. It also left out any mention of the guy who’d been the catalyst and centerpiece of the whole question. I know she thinks that this isn’t about the guy, but to tell the entire story without there being another guy just seems to make the whole thing even more cavalier and capricious than it already actually is.

Whatever. Ultimately, everyone tells themselves a story so they can sleep at night. Me, I cut my hair.

It’s a complicated issue, this one of the haircut. Obviously my hair has a lot of symbolic import for me and it was important to mark the occasion of mourning and loss with a physical loss that reflected the kind of sacrifices I’ve been told I have to make against my will. It’s also a little bit about someday being able to attract someone else, getting my hair back to the length that turned the most heads back in late high-school and early college. And more than even being in a position where I might be able to actually attract someone else anytime soon, it’s largely about feeling like I could. I feel so profoundly unlovable right now that any small glimmer of hope or confidence is an incredible boon.

So now my hair looks like this:

Ariel and Michael accompanied me and held my hand (and my hair) through my first professional haircut in over two decades. I was insanely nervous, but was very pleasantly surprised by the demeanor and approach of the woman who actually took the scissors and clippers to my head. I’m really pleased with the results and could have even gone a little bit shorter perhaps.

Largely because of my nerves and my caution to get it right, I didn’t end up donating the hair. Many people have asked about this already. I wanted to, but found the hair donation centers to be remarkably picky about how they want their hair delivered and precise stipulations. That’s their right, I guess, but they have to understand it’s going to deter a lot of marginal hair donation. Anyway, the hair instead ended up on the floor:

I am overdue for an actual shower where I think my hair will start to wave and bounce up a little and take its more permanent shape. It’s such a little thing in some ways and yet feels like such a big deal. I guess everything feels like a big deal, part of reducing the scale of the horizon down to a day or even a few hours at a time, just trying to muddle through and find the next thing to look forward to, the next thing that isn’t totally desolate and bleak. The days may just alternate for awhile, struggling between really arduous and surprisingly not awful. Fish’s car died today and I can sympathize. The energy it takes to go, to try, to move, to be, is just overwhelming.

At least I’m still capable of contriving a way to give looks like this occasionally:

So it goes.

Today is a little better, for no apparent reason. I think it might be good to not leave the house for days at a stretch. Although my haircut is scheduled and isn’t a home visit. I expect to put some pics up at some point. You should be prepared for my hair to be partying more or less like it’s 1999. I’ve had really long hair for a really long time.

In the meantime, here are some numbers for you:

1: The number of known readers who have finished The Best of All Possible Worlds.
3: The number of books I have finished reading since the crisis began (White Noise, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Snow Crash).
4: The number of games the Mariners have won since the crisis began.
12: The number of pounds I have lost since the crisis began.
17: The number of days elapsed since the crisis began.
17.8: The number representing my current body mass index (BMI).
27: The length, in inches, of my longest hair.
46: The number of people who have contacted me in some way to express condolences on my situation.
50: The number of dollars you will have to pay to haul away Fish’s “antique” mirror.
82: The score for my first game of bowling last night, being the first sub-100 tally I can remember getting since I first learned to bowl in my youth.
124: The number of pounds I currently weigh.
125: The score for my second game of bowling last night.

New image up top, to reflect what’s going to be a new theme around here for a while. This is the best metaphor, the best way of putting this new chapter of my life that I can imagine. The image is carefully selected: there may be lights along the way that offer the chance at reaching points of new light, but there’s really no telling if it’s a tunnel or a cave. I’m calling it a tunnel because of my incredible faith and pure buoyant optimism. I’m sort of serious. The more that I talk about people and life with other people, the more I realize that what separates me from others is my ultimate idealism. That I spend most of my life sad and disappointed because of how far short things fall from the ideal – most other people have given up on or never believed in that ideal in the first place.

Today Fish dragged me out of the house to run errands with him: bank (my errand), grocery store, cell phone shop, Home Depot. I got sad. Really sad. Sort of unshakably sad. I’m still waiting for the anger. Emily’s waiting for it too. Everyone knows it’s coming, can sort of sense it on the horizon like the palpable evidence of a thunderstorm two hours before the lightning is first visible. But I think I may drown in the sadness before I even get the chance to be mad. I realized anew, wandering grocery store aisles or staring out the window of the Verizon store, how much of my own self-worth and self-perception was wrapped up in being Emily’s husband. How I would prop myself up day-to-day with little thoughts of something nice Em had said or done for me, some little evidence of concern or care. How all I ever wanted was to truly be loved by and love one person, how every one of those 2,568 days was a blessing, even if I didn’t appreciate it enough on every one of those days. How I got used to the best thing that ever happened to me. How I would’ve done things differently if I’d had any idea this was even possible.

I had gotten scared of dying again. I had noticed my vulnerability, my fear of death, my sense of having something to lose. I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t care what happens to me. I feel a sort of vague intellectual pull that I should care about this, but I just can’t bring myself to really care. The idea of finding another person who I love and trust even half as much, who I can think about marrying or discussing offspring with, it’s just ridiculous. It’s unfathomable. Emily and I were so compatible and so profoundly matched that I just don’t even want to go through the emotional conceptualization of thinking there could be someone else who could compete in my heart. It’s exhausting. Breathing is exhausting. Picking up one foot and putting it in front of the other is exhausting. I just want to sit and stare into space and be listless until my muscles start to atrophy and my body folds in on itself like a limp punctured balloon.

Tonight there will be bowling. Tomorrow a haircut, probably, though the thought fills me with dread and fear even though a certain removal in mourning is necessary. It’s about putting another little headache lamp up in the rafters to maunder aimlessly toward. An artificial light to offer simulative promise of the real light to possibly come some day. There were so many times during these past seven years that I felt unbridled jubilation and euphoria over one thing or another. Some things directly related to Emily, some only tangentially as part of the life we’d constructed together for ourselves. And I would catch myself in my happiness, in my elation, and try to hold it like a lightning bug in a jar. I would know that there would be sorrows and depths unfathomable to come (again, I was more concerned about death than divorce, but still) and I would try to bathe in the warm light of the moment’s satisfaction, to bank it against future withdrawals. I would tell myself that no matter what happened to me, what I lost, I would always be capable of getting back to that moment, to that feeling, to that incredible sense of rightness with the world. I would grab on and say to myself, sometimes literally aloud, don’t ever let yourself lose sight of the capability of this joy.

I am trying, dear past self. Dear naive, unknowing, complacent past self, I am trying so hard to listen to you, to hold on, to find a way to drag myself through the hard unforgiving rat-infested stone tunnel. Oh God, I am trying. It is so hard to care, to want to try, and yet I know, today at least, that I must. Or I should. Or there might be some vague reason to.

Future self, send me a signal. Tell me there’s reason to hope. I’ve spent so much of the last decade trying to send reassurance back to my 1990’s self, telling him I wish he knew that it would be okay. I need it again, all the more so. Life doesn’t get any easier just because it passes. I thought it did and I was wrong. I was just lucky for a while.

I was so lucky.

Cuz I used
to be a superhero
no one could touch me
yeah not even myself
and you were like a phonebooth
that I somehow stumbled into
now look at me
I am just like everybody else.
-Ani DiFranco, “Superhero”

There was a long debate when I first got into that song about whether it was about someone losing love or someone who’d been a self-defensive cold-hearted bastard all their life actually admitting they were falling in love for the first time. While I strongly defended my own relatable interpretation of the former, I ultimately had to concede that in the context of all the lyrics, the rest of the album Dilate, and Ani DiFranco’s own prickly self, it was clear that Fish & Co.’s latter interpretation was actually accurate. However, I quote it here in its old familiar (to me) sense. It’s about losing everything.

I recently lost everything. Everything. I’m confronted each day by the enormity of what I have to confront on a public stage (my life, this blog, my future) and how overwhelming it seems to catch everyone up on the events that so quickly precipitated the dissolution of my marriage. It’s vast. It’s embarrassing, more than anything. Losing love is difficult in the best of times, but having one’s wife of seven years who one deeply loves cheat on one with a guy she’d known for eleven days and call one the next day to inform one of her intent to divorce? It’s the most embarrassing thing imaginable. It reduces all existence, all feeling, all possible thought to a sad little rubble of pure pathetic. My life had steeled me for the possibility of trauma, of sudden unexpected deaths of loved ones. But there was nothing, even the horrors of the PLB situation, that prepared me for this. Every day, every month, every year of marriage better girded me against the idea that something like this could ever possibly happen to me. And then it did.

You should know that I don’t have a monopoly on the feelings or perceptions of this situation. Emily has been upset at the way I’m telling this story to people at times. She doesn’t have the right to be and I don’t much care, but it’s worth throwing in a little disclaimer that she thinks a little differently about a couple of the events than I do. The fact is indisputable that the day before she met this other guy, everything in our marriage seemed great to her except for the reality that we were far apart from each other and had been for a long time. The next day, she was diffident and ready to give our marriage the emotional heft and loyalty that one would offer two-day-old Thai leftovers in the fridge. She has backfilled the story of this overnight change with dissatisfactions about compromises and conflicts in our marriage that were typical and predictable in any marriage, that are in fact the basis and nature of any union between two real people in the real world. The day before the other guy, she felt these were just a part of life; the day after, she decided they were irreconcilable. I would feel a lot better about her perspective if she didn’t say things like the fact that she wanted a marriage without compromises, that she thought she’d be more compatible with someone else because they could go biking and swimming with her. From my perspective, she is indulging in a fairy tale brought on by the extreme stress and duress of our long absence and distance and her ensconcement in a very surreal world called Liberia. From her perspective, she thought that what’s happened was inevitable, even though she spent fifty days missing me in the most clearly articulated terms possible.

Emily doesn’t have a blog, at least not one where she’s likely to talk about her feelings. I think things would be better if she did. I think she would be better off if she did. I wish Emily all the best at this point – we are trying hard to forge a friendship and keep things on the bright side of the road. I still love her, and that extends even all the way to the self-sacrificing extent of wishing her happiness without me. But the story must be told at some point, without being gratuitously gory. This blog itself and my whole attitude about open, honest communication is largely the product of a previous situation of deception and heartbreak. I’m not going to react to my wife giving up on me overnight and cheating on me with anything but a redoubling of that effort. And so even though I am now just like everybody else, a divorced 30-year-old man in America with forearm-length trackmarks of my past romantic sufferings, I also have this resilient commitment to the record, to the life lived wide-open, on display, to a heart whose absorbed slings and arrows can be examined, rotated, note-taken, processed. It’s the only thing, along with my friends who read and report, that gives me hope.

People I’ve talked to recently have all commented on how well I seem to be doing with everything. I spent 30 hours on planes going out to Liberia, four extremely challenging days (and especially nights) there, and 16 hours on planes coming back. It’s a lot of time to think, to self-flagellate, to wonder, to contemplate, to cry. It instills self-awareness, perhaps my highest value amidst all this, made all the more profound and vital for both Emily’s apparent lack of same and for my own imperative need to check my own possible overreactions against reality. Everything for a long time to come is going to come back to the idea of being self-aware, of trying to promote a realistic sense in myself that I know what I’m doing, that I’m making decisions for the right reasons and thinking those through. It works pretty well when I’m talking to someone, doing something, not alone with my thoughts. Then it all starts to slide to the abyss whenever I’m alone, whenever I have to deal with things on my own terms. Falling asleep is the hardest. I never had trouble falling asleep before, almost enjoying the little boxing up of the day and the week and the thought processes I was literally putting to bed for the night. Now it’s the end of the world every time.

I’ve moved to Philadelphia temporarily to reduce the alone time. Living in Fish’s spare bedroom, maybe for a few days, maybe a week, maybe more. Emily returns in about a month, knowing when she does whether she’s going to spend the next year in Liberia or back in Princeton. We will give the state of New Jersey word of her intentions then. I won’t be fighting her, but that doesn’t make it my intention. I foresee wrestling for days with applying my name to the dotted line. It’s so dull, so pathetic, so embarrassing, so sad, so American. A seven-year marriage. A divorce. A disposable culture, a disposable world. Disposable feelings. Those leftovers will probably go bad eventually, might as well chuck ‘em now while we still have the chance to buy other food for dinner.

This is not my life. This is my life under the pale descending shadow of a meteor that looms over everyone, lurking in the recesses between your worst nightmares and the last horror film you saw.

People say, when being particularly self-aware, “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.” Almost always, they say it not as a recognition or an absorption of that reality, but as a way of disregarding trivial thoughts of doom. It’s a prayer for the normal, a supplication for the predictable. They do not say it because they are going to change how they live with that bus in mind. Instead, they say it as a way of showing how many days they have lived without getting hit by that bus, as though this somehow proves the bus is a phantom, is impossible.

You could get hit by a bus tomorrow. I’ve been hit by a few buses in my time already. Watch for flying buses.

About an hour from getting on my way toward the plane to take me away from Monrovia, which means I’m still a good five hours from the plane actually getting airborne. Things run at a slightly slower pace around here. The good news is that my flight is 16 hours from take-off to last landing (JFK in NYC), as compared to 30 hours on the way out here. Also two take-offs and landings this time as vs. four.

It’s been emotional. It is utterly clear to me that it was the right decision, though even clearer that the best possible decision would’ve been to come out here on Monday the 19th. I will never get to undo that one, though at least I didn’t make it worse by not flying out here at all.

Still an incredible number of decisions to sift through on my return, including how to try to craft a life for one after living for two for so long. Every assumption, location, and activity is on the table. Options start to narrow in my mind, only to explode again with further thought. It’ll probably take at least a month before I’m anywhere close to a single decision.

Tag, August, you’re it.

I want to thank everyone for their tremendous outpouring of support as I confront the very difficult task of putting my life back together in the wake of a seven-year marriage I never thought would end.

But I’d also like to ask everyone to support Emily as well. I’m not happy about the way she’s handled all of this, but this is very hard for both of us. And it’s very important to me that I remain friends with her – my commitment to her may change with the events that have transpired in the last two weeks, but it doesn’t end. We don’t agree on every aspect of our marriage and how it dissolved, but Emily is always going to be an important person in my life and she needs love and support to get through this time too.

Not everyone knows Emily that well and that’s fine. But if you do, reach out to her. She’s isolated out here in Liberia. This is tough for both of us. And it’s something that both of us could use your help getting through. We’re going to try to get through it together, so helping each of us is helping the whole effort.

I’m in Liberia, where my marriage just ended. It’s a long sad sordid tale of woe, to be told in full detail at some point when I’m feeling a little more stable. It’s 29 July in Liberia now, sixteen days from my 7-year anniversary with the love of my life, who on that day sent me this e-mail in reply to an e-mail note sweetly wishing her well on that day:

Thanks love…
This actually made me cry, but in a good way.

I’ve decided to declare that today’s going to be good and I’m going to make it happen by sheer force of will if I have to. I had the rest of my breakfast burrito fillings this morning, so I’m off to a pretty good start. I may or may not go to some Bastille Day party at the Alliance Francaise tonight. Either way, I’ll be thinking about you all day and missing you.

Hope you get to do something wonderfully fun, and I’ll try to plan something cool for us to do once you get here. And then we’ll go to Egypt, so that’ll be kind of awesome.

Thanks for marrying me. It’s been amazing so far, and I’m really excited to find out where the next seven years take us (I promise that it won’t be to anything PIRGy).

I love you.

Love
me

God help us all.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.