All my friends got flowers in their eyes
but I got none this season
all of last year’s blooms have gone and died
time doesn’t give a reason
hey baby do you ask yourself sometimes
what you need to be forgiven
everything that you ever done wrong
is the reason that I’m driven
straight to you

Waiting here for you
wanting to tell you
how I get my ends and my beginnings mixed up too
just the way you do
I thought if I told you
you might want to stay for just another day
or two

(It’s just like answers
that come in small packages that go in the mail)

Waiting for the trains that just never come
beginning to believe in
the disappearing nature of
the people we have been
we have begun to change
into the worst kind of people
so unkind
oh apologies
no apologies
this apology
doesn’t describe
the way
it feels
to feel
for you

Waiting here for you
wanting to tell you
how I find myself
slowly disappearing too
just the way you do
I thought if I told you
you might want to help me to remain
with you

I just wanna stay for a little while
I wanna stay a little while
oh come on come on come on come on

There’s a night life falling down on me
I just feel like a change
beneath the sun in the summer a sea of flowers
won’t bloom
without the rain
but oh this desert life
this high life
here at the dying end of the day

I wasn’t made for the scene, baby
but I was made in this scene
baby, it’s just my way
I don’t wanna go home alone
I wanna come on home to you

Waiting here for you
wanting to tell you
how I line my sky with all the silver I can use
just the way you do
I thought if I told you
you might want to stay for just another day
or two

(Isn’t that just like
disappearing into the sum of yourself
and the person you are disappearing into
it’s like one plus one equals nothing at all
one plus two equals nothing at all
one plus me equals nothing at all
one plus you equals one plus you equals you equals
you and you and you and
nothing at all)

-Counting Crows

“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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.