Here, have a look and listen:

I know they didn’t write the song for me, really, any more than they wrote “No Children” for me. But the best music is about you, with all its rolling details and turns of phrase, and these are no exception. Although there is the ubiquitous soaking of alcohol in the Goats’ lyrics that doesn’t quite apply to me, no matter how close I came in New York that afternoon I landed from Liberia. The point, largely, is that this song seems a little more past tense than present, which is something. It’s not to say that I’ve made it, particularly, through anything other than a year. But reviewing 2011 seems a pointless exercise, while bidding 2011 farewell seems a bit more productive. The only thing that makes 2011 look like a tolerable year is that it wasn’t 2010.

What a great decade we’re off to.

I know last year at this time, when I sat down in this same room (my Mom’s lodge office) on this same computer (my then new laptop), I was emphasizing both looking forward to the West in the near future and not heaping pressure on myself to do much. Here, you can read along at home. Resolutions 2, 3, and 4 were basically entirely punted, a little bit because of 5, but almost entirely because 6 got altered in February when Farhan’s letter-writing campaign to the Rutgers administration turned into a full-time job and an indefinite lease on New Jersey for the foreseeable. How did I put those a year ago? “Significant reasons to stay.” The opportunity to actually make a living as a debate coach qualified, though I’m not sure I could have imagined it just a short 365 days ago.

What I think is most impressive about reading that last set of looking forward to this year is how much I overestimated the energy I’d have. Somehow writing a novel, trying to publish two prior ones, sinking myself into debate, and looking into Western cities seemed like a really minimal path. Maybe that says something about me, and I’ll grant that I went from spending 40-50 hours a week on debate to 70+ when the job came along, but I feel really overly ambitious in looking at that list. And I distinctly remember how constructing that list felt like cutting a lot of things and being really minimalist. The best conclusion I can draw is that you simply can’t understand how debilitating it is to go through a year and a half like the last one I’ve completed unless you’ve had a similar experience. Getting out of bed most mornings felt like a medal-worthy achievement. I’ve had several conversations with family and friends in the last month where I review a point in 2010 or 2011 and truly don’t understand how I lived through it. It’s like some deus ex machina that I don’t believe in some poorly written novel. There’s a gap in the action where the character randomly decides to ditch all his prior motivations and obvious conclusions and just keeps plugging along as though there’s some reason to. I don’t relate directly to the amount of despair I felt in most of the past year, but I also don’t quite fathom how I survived it.

Which makes looking ahead to next year a bit of a fool’s errand, except that there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last, to coin a phrase. I did once describe the entire project of blogging as giving myself the opportunity to look back a year later and see how stupid I was just a short year before. I wish I could find the exact reference or quote from sometime in the Introspection era, but I can’t. I may actually go to Jerusalem next year at some point, and/or Egypt, and/or India, and/or other possible places. Maybe I’ll hunker down and write a 4th book. Maybe I’ll never write again. The only constant of certainty is a certain amount of debate, and for that I am grateful. All of the highlights of 2011 revolve around a team that was not only the source of my strength in terms of self-confidence and enjoyment, but also friendship, camaraderie, and focus. RUDU spent the entire year in the top ten in the country, be it the top five of the last semester of 2010-2011 or the slightly lower rebuilding efforts of the past few months. We’re poised to not drop out of that perch for any of the foreseeable and some recent adjustments make me believe that we can have maybe our best semester yet open 2012.

What I don’t feel like doing for 2012 just yet is getting into specifics. Compared to 2011, there’s a lot that’s nailed down. I will be in Jersey the whole time. I’m not moving. I’m not changing jobs. I’m not doing much else besides maintaining the debate life I’ve built for myself. And I’m not complaining. I’ve been very fortunate that debate has gone as well as the rest of my life has gone poorly in the last 18 months. Every time the chips have been low in my life since 1990, I’ve doubled down on debate and gotten paid off. I don’t see an exception coming up. There may be only one thing in my life that I’m good at, but when you have the opportunity to focus on that and you really love it, that’s maybe all that you can ask for and expect out of life. Especially this year, in a global context, having confidence in a job and a community may put me ahead of most anyone. Perhaps most fully the person who I decided to excise from my life for a while in May. I have less curiosity about her life and her existence than I ever have since we met. It’s actually occurred to me for the first time in the last few weeks that I may live a long time and never want to reopen that line of communication. I don’t like giving up on people, but there are just some things in life that may be too awful to recover from. I’m not trying to turn this into a diatribe or an excoriation – it’s not becoming of a year-end wrap-up or a hopeful preview of the annum to come – but 2011 has helped me realize that maybe being the perpetual victim is not something I have to exacerbate. Emily may be right that “there’s just something about people that makes people betray [me]“, but that doesn’t mean I have to aid and abet the cause.

Maybe the better part of my personality is that which frenetically likes to dance, to throw myself into the cauldron and just doesn’t care what other people think. Emily said she spent a lot of time feeling very embarrassed by my behavior and attitudes in public. Maybe I should just live each day as though I were trying to embarrass Emily. She said I had a lot of growing up to do. If anything, I think I had to get even younger. Maybe the lesson of having someone excoriate and attempt to ruin your life is that embracing that very same life is the only ticket to hope. My reaction to Gwen’s constant lying was to start this entire effort to tell the truth, in painful detail, about everything. Maybe my reaction to Emily’s stressed-out concern for the opinions of others should be to ritually burn public opinion on a joyous pyre of the pursuit of life.

What better way to ring in the new year? What better way to embrace the fact of still traversing this crazy unpredictable forlorn but ever-hopeful planet?

This year didn’t kill me. People celebrate birthdays, holidays, and all other annual events most traditionally as a rallying cry for the fact that they remained alive, often against the odds. That plagues and storms, famines and droughts, wars and failures failed to dampen their spirits or take their last breath. So on the first day of 2012, I give you the full-throttled embracing of existence, maybe just for its own sake. It’s not what’s most important in life, but it does seem to be some sort of pre-requisite. As long as you keep walking the path, you might find your way. And you’re probably more likely to find your way if you’re dancing while you wait.

“And I love this place
the enormous sky
and the faces, hands
that I’m haunted by
so why
can’t I forgive these buildings
these frameworks labeled home”
-Weakerthans, “This is a Fire Door Never Leave Open”

Anything becomes rote if you do it often enough. That venturesome drive that seems so long and nuanced and strange becomes old hat well before it even becomes fully classified as a commute. That activity you try, tenuously, once or twice becomes habitual once you’re on your sixth month of it. School, jobs, favored activities all devolved into a certain sameness after a time. There becomes a particular predictability, a rhythm that things adopt. And because our brains are pattern-seeking entities, because they strive to make connections and simplify things and relieve themselves of the duty of actually working hard on any given topic, they start to fill in the gaps with the fruits of a well-understood routine.

There’s the oft-cited study (series of stuides?) on how we actually read, that we don’t process each individual letter when reviewing a pre-written tome, but actually recognize the shape of words and simplify them into recognizable outlines, as though all languages were actually written in pictographs. It doesn’t take a study to think about this logically and recognize that you yourself do this – this is part of why typos are so pervasive and resist detection so frequently, especially in online media. We get used to reading faster and faster, skimming through things, and our brain wants to process the words in the ordered fashion it expects, willingly overlooking slight misalignments in favor of the desired pattern.

But despite the pervasive nature of pattern-seeking when it comes to its impact on language itself, there is perhaps no greater place for it than visiting the places of one’s memory. Homecomings, reunions, revisitations of places are more ensconced in the humble folds of the past than the bright outlook of the future. In returning to these hallowed grounds, we not only give ourselves the opportunity to examine our past for what it was, but we look at our present only through the lens of the past. It is impossible for me to look at Albuquerque entirely for the city it currently is, anymore than I could look at an old friend with the fresh eyes of the objective observer just meeting them. Every new object or signpost or commercial enterprise is in the stead of an old recollection of that same region, every change a repaving of sacred former states of being. The expectation of the past hangs heavy of the living, breathing dynamism of the present. A visit to the Frontier is laden with hundreds of prior approaches, the company kept therein, the psychology of the person who traversed those same floors and tables. A tread on the campus of a high school is a time-machine to a bygone era, each subsequent alteration of the landscape an oversharp note in an otherwise harmonious memory.

It is this pattern of, well, patterns, that perhaps makes the most important influences on our life those which deviate the most from such predictable behaviors. Conversations, for example, while sometimes falling into certain cadences or rhythms, almost always evolve and adapt to the way life currently is, to the people actually being engaged in the discussion. This also probably explains the pervasive impact of media – books, TV shows, movies, even the news all change over time and are dynamic and new, even when falling into rote outlines of a typical story arc or local news gambit. Even if I know the outline for this particular film or news piece, actually hearing the words and seeing the images is somewhat fresh, far fresher than revisiting a favored restaurant or living space. My brain is engaged in a different way by content that I don’t expect to be exactly the same and I’m able to see things more for what they are than what they were or might have been.

Which is not to oppose homecomings outright, but to put them in a certain context. Do I ever truly visit the Albuquerque of 2011? Probably not. I visit Albuquerque, 1993-2011, the summation of nearly two decades of context to a place that continually evolves and changes but wears the imprints of its impact on my life like so many kaleidoscopic sunglasses over my eyes. No wonder people enjoy travel so much, the ventures to a place where the truly unexpected can unfold before someone’s eyes, where one replaces the tired outline of expectation with the bold vibrance of the really new. And why others more laden in fear and the search for comfort shy away from such voyages, content instead to ensconce in a realm that is known and measured and can be aligned to one’s expectations in a carefully crafted way, well-worn and practiced.

The challenge, then, is to infuse the old with the new. To find a way to truly see the places of one’s birth or rearing or careful inculcation with eyes reborn to the possibility of the world at large. To visit a place not ignorant of its past impact on one’s perspective and careful memory, but at least open to its growth and change and development in new and exciting ways. Hard, possibly impossible, to do in short fortnight-length jaunts to a place so tiered in past recollections, but worth striving for nonetheless in the quest to constantly live as fully and robustly and openly as possible. Only in the light of the unsettled future can we truly make the tribulation of our past meaningful, worthwhile, and just maybe in validation of all the tremendous suffering that has led us here.

May your road home wind in new and unforeseen ways that nevertheless deliver you into a promising future.

It’s hard enough to sum up the emotional import of any one show without trying to string together four, especially when each had their own distinct feel, ranging from the foreboding drunkenness over-present at the second (Left and Leaving) show to the unbelievable happenstance of running into four former APDA friends at the third (Reconstruction Site) show, four of the maybe 25 people I know in the eight-million-strong metropolis of New York City. The fourth (Reunion Tour) may have been my favorite, if only for the somber reverence of the crowd and the true appreciation of realizing that one is watching a band for the fourth straight night and desperately craves a fifth.

John K. Samson spent a small part of each show referencing Occupy Wall Street and encouraging people to participate, even evoking some excitement for the somewhat faded jaded revolutionary spirit from some earlier Weakerthans tunes and no doubt his prior stint with the band Propagandhi. Playing “Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist” each of the first three nights, including one impromptu in the encore seemed a clear reference to the growing fervor of a generation disappointed to miss out on the sixties but still desperate to change an order that has only consolidated its grip on power in the ensuing four decades. The Weakerthans used their platform at the Bowery Ballroom the way they have used their entire fifteen years in the limelight of the Canadian independent music scene – to live their values as they envision them, shunning overt fame, the chance to make it big, overcharging for tickets, etc., in favor of selling political books alongside their CD’s and T-shirts while selling out small clubs that fervently sing along.

I used the weekend to discover a couple other things too, like how surprisingly drivable lower Manhattan is from my current residence, taking just forty minutes to get to the venue from New Brunswick after I gave up on the subway after a miserably cold rainy night running under awnings to get from Penn Station to the BD line in its circuitous far-from-everything-but-still-getting-vaguely-where-you-want routing. (See also Tournaments, Fordham.) And it also occurred to me just how expensive New York really is relative to the rest of the world. People may complain a bit about the cost of living in the Bay Area, but the bridge across there cost, what, $4 and had a carpool opt-out for free? And BART would usually run you about $3-5 a pop to get pretty close to where you wanted to go? All the entrances to NYC now cost $12 by bridge or tunnel and the roundtrip train is $26 from New Brunswick, subway fare not included. I know that New Brunswick is significantly further out than Berkeley, but it’s not much further out than, say, Dublin or Pleasanton, and that gets you up to maybe $8 on BART. New York City is just a giant financial funnel and while I see its worth in occasional cultural access points, regular entry starts to feel like a life tax.

You may have to put a small X where I lost my way on this post. It wasn’t really supposed to be small-minded whinging about the cost of living, although one could argue that’s the only source of the angst and discontent abroad in the land, that that’s what it takes to knock Americans out of their complacency and into action is having to pay more than they can for things. Certainly the crass commercialism of traditional wealthy USA seems alive and thriving in NYC as compared to other parts of the world, though the Best Buy in New Jersey seemed full and bustling, even if the actual lines for items were pretty short. It is the great paradox of whatever this economic situation is that most people appear to be hurting and yet most everyone seems to have essentially the same quality of life as before, give or take some stress. There are exceptions and people who’ve been knocked from their pedestal, but for the most part the magic wheel of debt has kept spinning its web of lies to obfuscate the true nature of what’s broken about our system.

So you can forgive John K. and I and the other upbeat believers for getting excited about the present circumstances and the awakening possibility that we won’t have this same tired unjust system to kick around for the entire remainder of our lifetimes. And yet, it’s the personal poignance, as it seems to be with most every important band (Ani DiFranco certainly comes to mind) that overrides the political upheaval and potential tumult at the end of the day. We can raise our fists to “Futon Revolutionist”, but people probably relate more closely to the bipolar maturation of “Aside”. We can hum along to “Pamphleteer”, but there’s a reason “Left and Leaving” gets played every night and that one only once. The compelling nature of internal emotional struggle has got to be at the heart of why the two songs ghostwritten by Virtute the Cat get the loudest cheers, why “None of the Above” resonates so deeply, why we all feel heartened by “Reconstruction Site”.

This review is probably meaningless to anyone who doesn’t know the Weakerthans, but that’s probably true of every concert review and doubly important because you should get to know the Weakerthans. John K. batted away catcalled questions about the next album date and even concert date and his upcoming solo release next month portends the possible demise of an indy set that’s only released four albums in a decade and a half and sort of missed their every-three-years pacing deadline in the year before the one about to die shortly. John K. looks forever young, like the man who introduced him to me, but his supporting cast wears their facial hair a little hangdog and seems like the comforts of Canadian homefires might start to outweigh New York nights, no matter how much the bassist sweats while he rocks out.

John K. admonished us to go to bookstores. It’s the only place we’d be able to find him if he hadn’t somehow tried to teach himself to sing. I’m not sure my catchphrase “All the Poets Became Rock Stars” applies better to anyone else.

7 December – Fallow Show
Illustrated Bible Stories for Children
Diagnosis
Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist
None of the Above
Letter of Resignation
Leash
Wellington’s Wednesdays
The Last Last One
Greatest Hits Collection
Sounds Familiar
Anchorless
Fallow
Tournament of Hearts
Sun in an Empty Room
[Anne of Green Gables song]
Reconstruction Site
Plea from a Cat Named Virtute
Aside
Left and Leaving
—
One Great City!
Bigfoot!
The Reasons
Watermark

8 December – Left and Leaving Show
Everything Must Go!
Aside
Watermark
Pamphleteer
This is a Fire Door Never Leave Open
Without Mythologies
Left and Leaving
Elegy for Elsabet
History to the Defeated
Exiles Among You
My Favourite Chords
Slips and Tangles
One Great City!
Our Retired Explorer
Civil Twilight
Letter of Resignation
None of the Above
—
Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist
Plea from a Cat Named Virtute

9 December – Reconstruction Site Show
Manifest
The Reasons
Reconstruction Site
Psalm for the Elks Lodge Last Call
Plea from a Cat Named Virtute
Our Retired Explorer
Time’s Arrow
Hospital Vespers
Uncorrected Proofs
A New Name for Everything
One Great City!
Benediction
The Prescience of Dawn
Past Due
Everything Must Go!
Aside
[Anne of Green Gables song]
Greatest Hits Collection
Tournament of Hearts
Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure
—
Left and Leaving
Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist
Night Windows

10 December – Reunion Tour Show
Civil Twilight
Hymn of the Medical Oddity
Relative Surplus Value
Tournament of Hearts
Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure
Elegy for Gump Worsley
Sun in an Empty Room
Night Windows
Bigfoot!
Reunion Tour
Utilities
One Great City!
Watermark
Reconstruction Site
Our Retired Explorer
Wellington’s Wednesdays
Left and Leaving
Without Mythologies
—
Aside
None of the Above
Plea from a Cat Named Virtute
Manifest

I wanted to hold back on writing this post, or something like it, until I’d ruminated sufficiently to draw some conclusions. But as is often the result of meaningful mental inquiry, the questions have only yielded a fractal chain of infinitely more questions, with very little hope of satisfying answers on the horizon. And so I’m inclined to reflect on bathing in the questions rather than hoping to sew things up in a neat little bow. Fair warning, though, by the end of this (whose final sentences I can’t begin to envision yet), I may find some trite little cap to put on it, but I doubt it will be as holistic or satiating as normal.

A lot went wrong last week. My car, Emily’s car, the gift car, the daily needly little reminder of my past life (just in case you need a reframing of what my emotional state constantly confronts), got hit by a hit-and-run overnight driver exactly a week ago, on the eve of our departure for the GW tournament in DC. My discovery of this, which happened at some point early Friday morning between, say, 1 AM and 7 AM, between my return from the debate meeting and my departure for more debate, was made by looking for a mirror that was bent all the way back the wrong way. Further investigation revealed significant paint leavings and denting on the front-left part of the vehicle, along with broken headlight pieces from the offending party, which I petulantly picked up and put in my trunk as though life were some sort of CSI show where forensic evidence could be traced (and as though a hit-and-run-fender-bender were sufficiently significant to merit utilization of such tracing). I care less about material possessions than most and far less about the prettiness of my car than anyone (average car-washes per year: 0.33), but it’s still the type of event that just makes you hate your species. I had no time to file a police report when having to keep a schedule to make the tournament, and have functionally kind of lost the will to consider same since. It’s already blended into my reality. Something about losing everything makes you a lot more comfortable with losing a little more without seeking recourse. One’s sense of justice kind of loses its bearings when one has confronted enough unfairness.

Then one of our top debaters landed in the hospital in DC not once, but twice, facing a 103 fever and complications from dehydration and possibly bronchitis. I joined the waiting party for one of the two 5-hour late-night stints in the ER, envisaging flashbacks of my last big late-night ER waiting session and even the night I drove myself to the hospital with what proved to be kidney stones. Amidst the bleary off-lit reality of every hospital, the surreal pallor of medical danger and overtired health care professionals, I had time to reflect on how we enter and leave this society and the lives of those for whom this brink of death and destruction is as commonplace as debate has become again for me. The delirious walk back at 4 AM with the rejuvenated debater and our two cohorts felt like seeing between the lines of reality, peeking behind the webbing of the virtual reality and playing with the planes. And then of course I had a belly-punching kidney stone come in the next day, distracting me back almost out of any semblance of reality as I dealt with emotional upheaval of the vibrant community in which I am ensconced on all sides.

The weekend was not without joy, mind. There were connections and cross-connections aplenty, the opportunity for Fish to meet a good chunk of my team in DC, put them up, regale them with stories of my youth over poker and jokes and green chile mac-n-cheese. We spent a blustery afternoon walking monuments and strapping into the time machine that DC will always be for me, the hearkening of the longest single year of my existence, the 1987-88 stretch that broadened my horizons and, in retrospect, seems scarier for my parents every time I reconsider it despite my own blithe youthful excitement and optimism in that time. We took countless pictures (you can take a look), scouring DC for the photo opportunities more than our own experience, as though the chronicling of the moments was a vastly more important process than the moment itself. And in light of memory, in the full view of time, in the era of digital photography and instant re-editing, re-taking, re-imagining, it is hard for me to argue with this model. What do we have, ultimately, beyond our memories, our documentation and remnants of the past? Should we not be just as careful about their remembrance as we are about the moments themselves? Is that not, in many ways, the very purpose of this blog? Look at how many scenarios I’ve referenced by their artifactual telling in this same format rather than recount in renewed detail from the contemporary vantage!

And yet, despite my enhanced emotional bonding with so many on the team, despite the increasing feeling that I have found the wheelhouse of what to do with my time in this fugue state of pushing my own emotional ruins around into something that looks more like stacked rubble than strewn rubble, I feel a certain isolation. I could call this isolation generational, but I don’t really even see a gap between myself and my charges, let alone do I put much stock in that kind of temporal passage. More than anything, the isolation is philosophical, and its depth appears to be increasing. And while there are possible mundane causes, such as being on the East Coast, dealing with college students newly emboldened with their sense of questioning prior assumptions, even the self-selection of debaters perhaps, the overall trend seems somewhat distressing to an idealistic believer like me. It feels, more and more, like people are devolving toward some sort of faith in an uncaring, deterministic universe where meaning and purpose are replaced with cold hard economics, physics, and so-called facts. And it’s not exactly helping me fall in love with my species.

I’m smarting a bit, I’ll grant, from some selection bias over a few experiences I’ve had of late. Extensive Facebook debates and dialogues with hardened, if thoroughly illogical, devotees of science as their only religion. Near screaming debates with debaters about the unprovability of anything, relative probabilities, and the pursuit of understanding. Resigned sighs with the increasingly faithless over what their lot in life may be, how much control they may have, how much choice they even give themselves over who they spend their time with, how, why. And far too much contact with people who find the siren call of wealth, materialism, and the simplest of base pleasures to be sufficient justification for all manner of overt moral compromise. If the pillaging of my marriage tested my faith in any one person, in even the notion of the individual as someone who can have value and can be trusted, then the last week has seemed to test my faith in the whole lot of them, in the very idea of community.

And I’m exaggerating a bit. There are exceptions, as there always are. And overall, I’ve actually felt heartened and strengthened by my community, which has probably made this tidal wave of determinist resignation feel even more unsettling for its contrast. But the near-universality of declarative statements like everything coming down to economics and basic motivations or everything being a chemical reaction and physically explicable make me wonder what I’m even railing for anymore. It becomes wearying to be told how crazy one is ad nauseum. At a certain point, the crazy man has to resign himself to his fate, no matter how sane he believes himself to objectively be. For the reality is that objectivity itself fails to have much resonance when everyone is living in a different functional paradigm. Which is not an excuse for adjusting to and embracing the subjective wrongs of society as they exist, but it might be a justification for spending less energy beating back ceaselessly against the tide.

I feel like I’m being a bit vague. Summarative. Skipping steps, either because I presume that you know the course of my argument between free will and determinism, souls and science, God and nihilism, or because I’m losing my faith in my ability to persuade anyone young enough to be able to read this that there’s any question about these matters to be discussed. I also must acknowledge the extent to which time remains a factor in my life, in which no matter how much I try to avoid them, little biological necessities like eating before a long and demanding day, must be paid their begrudging due.

I think the point, ultimately, comes down to the point. Where to find purpose and meaning in a world that’s shutting such notions down like so many decrepit nuclear reactors, a world collapsing these concepts into careless mathematical formulae faster than we can even fully observe. My ability to find such direction in a direct personal bond with someone has been tested beyond its limit, snapping back in a possibly irreparable way. And thus I’ve turned to various pursuits of persuasion and influence, of digging myself out with work and effort all designed at further honing my skills as someone who has something to say about this lonely rock and its frantic inhabitants.

Some of my charges, the most observant or kindest of them perhaps, try to remind me that I’m having an influence, the old trite “making a difference”. And perhaps it’s true. Okay, probably. But it still feels, holistically, like I’m spitting in the ocean, or perhaps more pertinently trying to find a particular gob of spit in the ocean. And the process is starting to seem about that appetizing. What’s the point in being the exception to everything if you don’t get any company along the way? Am I simply doing it wrong? At what point will fatigue in hoping to be ahead of one’s time devolve into a numb alignment with the contemporary failings? And yet how could one then live with undertaking a course of action one already determined to be so problematic?

And yet, when examined closely, all of these questions seem to disintegrate in the face of the largest one of all, the one about the hope of companionship, which underlines and circles all these larger issues of isolation and distance and unrelatability. And maybe that’s where all the exhaustion and resignation comes from, in the end. It’s one thing to worry esoterically about the search for meaning coming up dry and empty after a long lifetime’s slog. It’s quite another if one undertook that slogging journey without so much as a soul for accompaniment.

I really wish I could peek at the future, just a glimpse or a hint or a sign. But to do so would violate my belief about the nature of the universe itself. Would I trade the indeterminate nature of the universe for a deterministic one merely to offer the opportunity to look ahead? Or would I immediately regret the missed opportunity to fleetingly agonize with my gobstoppered emotions?

My answer, like the rest of it, is indeterminate.

I wonder whether YouTube or this blog will last longer. One would think that by the time this question needed answering, the answer wouldn’t much matter. But then again, there are times when Angelfire would have looked permanent, or MySpace permanently dominant. There’s really no telling what’s going to last in this world.

Tell me about it.

If you’re reading this sometime after YouTube has folded, somehow, just imagine a song of bittersweet hopelessness that nevertheless speaks to some kind of hope. I think if I could just cleanly give up, then things wouldn’t be so hard. But there’s such a strong will to live and hope and try that it keeps the nerves sufficiently sensitized so that things remain painful. I’ve never had the capacity for just shutting down emotionally, in part because I probably think it’s immoral, so I just stumble through this bleary fog of unhappy accidents and drifty stabby memories.

I’m ready to skip to the end of the book just so I know what it’s reasonable to put myself through.

People are extremely adaptable. They will go through almost any contortion to convince themselves to have more hope than they should, that every opportunity they face is a lottery ticket that will take them straight to the top.

This, of course, is why capitalism is so powerfully persuasive at convincing people to vote against their own interests.

But when I take a sober look at myself, my life, I know what the score is. And I just don’t know how people go on in that situation. When nothing in the future looks better than the best of the past, what purpose is there in pursuing that future?

The doormat is etched into my memory, mostly a tactile one, the way the little sideways-tied bits of sole would give and respond to my bare feet in the smothering summer as I talked on the phone to Stina about my reconnection and possible visit with my first fiancee, how she convinced me that I’d be playing with a fire that would surely find a way to threaten my marriage to my second. How heartily I laughed this off, how above reproach it all seemed, and yet just a few weeks later how horrific that series of conversations in the wake of what happened. Were my theories of black-magic manipulation for the first still in any way valid, I would have blamed her. Were my Dad’s theories of programming in the universe what I fully believed, I might have blamed him (ha) or, rather, Stina. But we all know who’s really to blame, don’t we?

“I no longer believe she was crazy. There’s just something about you that makes people betray you.”

The green-pink-orange-blue-black of the doormat has been haunting me lately, the splintery wood porch it adorned outside of Tiny House, bedecked by slightly overbuilt plastic white railings designed to keep even the clumsiest of residents from tipping over the three-step-high elevation and into the grass. Pandora always used to skip those three steps and even Emily managed to navigate them without too much duress, something she of course failed to do with the fateful main intersection beside campus, the place where Prospect Avenue (”The Street”) slams into Washington Road just as her nose slammed into the asphalt on a day I still think might have been the one that knocked her brain out of alignment and into apocalypse. I think I may hold on to brain-tumor theories as long as I held on to the black-magic theories of the first time around, but I might know better already. The truth is that I just like weak, scared people who make decisions too quickly. Easy come, easy go. Catch ‘em on the bounce.

Don’t let all this mild criticism fool you. I still love these jerks. Oh not in any way I’d do anything about, at least not with the first, but the memory of love in my heart doesn’t fade any more than the recollection of any of the million things I’ve done wrong in my life. I can step right back into any time or date of your choosing with a minimum of effort and most of the brightest and most profound involved love with one or the other. I still look down on my right thumb and see the little stretch of straight white scar and remember fondly, creepily, fondly where it came from. I remember the explosion of the silly little plastic chain I couldn’t stop playing with, burst of letters all over the chess-cafeteria floor at St. Pius, how it felt like a sign in retrospect and how closely I clung to the equivalent silver box the second time ’round, only to have to hold it and its contents for the rest of my life like some giant bag. Maybe if I get it polished, she’ll come to her senses and come back to me, the idiot voice in my head has to offer. Maybe next time ’round, you should get something permanent, like an immovable stone wall.

Next time ’round. It keeps having to be said, whispered, asked about, like it’s some sort of destiny. Law of threes, right? Where are you, anyway? I don’t have these two jerks to talk to anymore, lovable though they are. One is sequestered in saving her own marriage, a favor the latter wouldn’t extend to me, steering a wide berth from the guy she almost bumped right into a couple months before fate took a nosedive. The latter, of course, is being kept at bay by myself in some sort of desperate bid to prove I have a dignity she refused to offer. It’s lonely without love. Lonely without people one has, did, will always love to talk to. It makes one feel unlovable.

It hit me hardest last night when I was driving home with a migraine, a real barn-burner, the kind that made me think a 1% chance of stroke might be worth it, the kind where spots fly and every noise and light is a hurricane of pain. It was so bad I tried to sleep in a 37-degree car rather than drive, but I knew soon it could kill me and sleep wouldn’t come anyway. And I thought about the person who used to prevent me from attempting that drive, I thought about the prior who used to try to absorb my pain (I mean literally) when I had one, the looks on the faces of love as they winced and agonized in pure compassion. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about with cave-dwelling, kids. I think by the end of that torturous hour home, it hurt more to know that no one cared if I drove that length than it did to see a passing streetlight shining in the same left eye that almost couldn’t see.

How the fuck do you fall out of love with someone?

It must just be me. I must be that easy to stop loving. Lord knows it isn’t a two-way street.

So where are you, three? And what do you have in store for me? Charm or fatalism? And how long is it going to take for us to figure it out?

Most people would probably say I’m too young to feel this old, to be this washed up and resigned about everything. But I’ve been through more than most people, in a sense, and I’m still reliving all of it. Every glance and touch and sigh and smile. I can almost picture taking three, whoever she may be, to the La Fonda and just praying to high heaven I haven’t seen this movie before. You can call it a pattern, you can call it routine, you can call it a sick joke, but life is cyclical as all the circles we see in our universe.

Debate went great this weekend. Poker continues to go well. I don’t have time for three, don’t have time for myself. Don’t want it. But it’s a strangely lonely feeling to not be able to share the news of success with someone. I mean, yes, there are someones, but it’s not Someone. It’s totally different. And here I am, older than when my father had me (and he was no spring chicken to parenting), watching most of my friends walk into aisles or sunsets and find out what I was talking about all these years. And you have to hope it all works out for all of them, but boy does that make you the idiot holding the bag if it does.

If you can’t spot the sucker at the table, you’re it.

Here my memory sits, feeling my toes playing with the little gaps in the soles over the weatherbeaten boards, first in contemplation of resolution of my past, then in devastation at the destruction of my future. Summer in full swelter, nights spent weeping to two and then anyone who would listen, broadcasting the epilogue of my heart into the postwar temporary housing and all the budding little families therein. I remember every crack and cranny of Tiny House and exactly where and when and how I broke down at the first phone call, at the e-mail, at every further denial upon her return.

I could really use a bounce.

It’s best described in an analogy far older than anyone I know – Plato’s allegory of the cave. The problem that I feel I’m facing is that I’ve been living a long time outside of the cave and was recently relegated back in, never to return to the outside world of sunlight and Platonic forms. And of course my community is a group of people who all have not only never been outside the cave, but mostly who’ve never even dared to imagine that there is an outside. Or people who find the outside to be scary or daunting in some way, actually undesirable. And so we have these frustrating conversations that basically go like this:

“Why aren’t you happy? Look at that shadow of a chair.”
“It’s nothing like a real chair.”
“What’s a real chair?”
“I couldn’t possibly describe it to you. Or why we are so far short of it in just looking at its shadow on the wall.”
“Well if you can’t describe it, how could I believe it’s any better? Be happy with your shadows!”

This isn’t entirely fair to everyone who’s been trying to help me out, but it’s getting at part of the main frustration and why there’s been so much head-butting and general dissatisfaction. I think the best moments or conversations or attempts are from people who argue that I never know when I’ll randomly be transported outside the cave. That I shouldn’t blame myself for my exile caveward and that there’s no telling when one will flit in and out of the cave, so just scrunch up your eyes and cross your toes and hope the cave disappears some time and you’re back in the world of the forms. Needless to say, I don’t find this a whole lot more comforting than those who question that there are forms at all, let alone that I’ve seen them. If there’s no telling when we’ll be in or outside the cave, it’s very hard to have any concrete hope, let alone reasonable faith that while we’re outside it we’re likely to stay outside it. My own metaphor for this is pianos falling from the sky, some of which are randomly benevolent instead of crushing, but all of which are as predictable as the meteorology of large musical instruments.

I’ve recently been thinking about going in for therapy, something long recommended to me by a lot of people, but also something about which I am, I think, reasonably skeptical. I fear being committed against my will for suicidal thoughts and tendencies, though I have to admit that I’m stable enough to make this less of a concern. I dread being diagnosed or attemptedly dosed. Most people these days, medical and psychological, feel that chemicals are the only solution to anything, obviously diametric from my own worldview. I worry about being told that morality or faith in God are pathologies, obstacles to be mowed down by the pursuit of happiness above all other concerns. But more than anything, I just feel that I’ve got intractable problems that I’ve thought long and hard about in a more self-aware way than most people dare. A lot of the marginal advice I’ve been getting about the benefits of therapy have touted the ability to speak freely without fear of judgment. I think this blog alone is testament to how little I need that in addition to my daily routine. People have also discussed the ability to dredge up the past and analyze its impact on my current perspective. I could write a dissertation on that, have my patterns and the causes of my hopes and fears so well understood and rehearsed that I could offer them as a three-act play impromptu. So what is the benefit? What is a therapist going to be able to tell me that I don’t already know?

And more importantly, how is a therapist going to wrestle from the cave with the idea of forms? At best, they can get me to accept that a monochrome world of fingery visages on the blank pockmarked rock is a fair substitute for all the colors and dimensions of the greater universe. It’s almost directly reflective of how I anticipate they might try to “cure” my manic depression – spouting the virtues of moderation for the mere sake of moderation without ever having experienced the soaring highs or crushing lows of a full range of actual human experience. When one has been truly happy in life, the daily routine acceptance and resignation that most Americans confuse for happiness becomes intolerably unappealing. When one has seen the full shape of what life has to offer, the pale glow of its shadow is just window dressing. Wall dressing. Silent hushed motion, signifying only the whispers of a memory of what truly mattered.

He asked me why I thought people were superstitious and it seemed pretty obvious to me that people are because they seek to exert control on their environment or circumstances in a way that they know they can’t otherwise in life. While we all like to think of ourselves as being in control of our own destinies, the reality is that none of us has particular control when we hold just one-seven-billionth of the power in our planet. I’ve discussed the cacophony of wills extensively before, but it’s crippling to really internalize how much that abrogates our free will into a collective free will as disjointed and chaotic as our world itself. No wonder people try to claw each other’s eyes out getting into the 1% where that one-seven-billionth can seem like one-one-millionth for a while.

If we believe that we secretly control events larger than ourselves – sports outcomes that we watch on TV or in person, the life or death of someone far away, the heart of another person, the thought processes of a debate round judge – by simple actions of routine or pattern, then we can believe there’s some connection between our own personal effort and the outcomes that affect us so deeply. And once there’s confirmation of some sort of link, however tenuous or absurd, between writing in a certain style on the chalkboard or saying a particular set of words or wearing a hat in a particular way and the desired outcome, then repeating that becomes almost holy.

We all hunger for free will, all crave the ability to dominate merely our own lives. And while we all probably have more actual will than we acknowledge when we’re not being overtly superstitious, the fact is that humanity’s not actually well organized yet to maximize reasonable choices for people. Most people do most of what they do with the verve and volunteerism of one with a gun aimed squarely at their temple.

Is it any wonder that I sit here waiting for my life to come back to me? Maybe today, maybe if I mismatch my socks and think only the best thoughts, maybe if I don’t sleep enough to let the nightmares in, maybe if I can ward off the migraines and do everything she would have wanted, look at the clock at the right times and focus my mind in just the right way, maybe I can find a little hope that this message will travel across the universe, the Atlantic, the bridge between half-souls, and remind her of what she threw away.

I am patient. I can do this.

The cruel reality is different, of course. Like any superstition of debate or sports or life, I’m winking at myself. I see the image of her, hopeless and claiming to be tempest-tossed, citing the need to commit an affair and cast aside compassion like they were mandates from Heaven of which she mildly disapproved but was robotically forced to comply. I can imagine her eye-rolling at reading this, the clucking sigh she used to make about how naive, idealistic, stupid I was. Like she had a monopoly on understanding the universe and how it was out to get her.

The universe isn’t out to get anyone. We use our limited will as an excuse for abusing each other. As soon as we wake up and realize that no matter how little will we have, maximizing its utility for good, compassion, and the further maximization of will is our best hope, then we might start making the best use of our individual slices of light. We can all hold a candle and watch it dance in the harshness of wind and rain, or we can join together to merge our lights into a fire that could burn all the architecture of the past that holds us back.

Hoping our light will magically be transported to create that conflagration is surely not enough. But I can’t do this alone.

There is the medical student from Temple who comes in to discuss high-level philosophy, suggesting to the assembled table at 3 in the morning that maybe they are all merely past memories of someone who doesn’t exist. He guesses almost the entire plot of my third novel at one point, quietly, accidentally, making almost everyone but me eye-roll as I sit more erect and alarmed in my chair and fold my cards. Twenty minutes later, he busts out of money and twitches a bit before asking someone at the table for a loan. Eventually he finds traction with the way-up nurse who’s passing time before she goes to work with in-home elderly in need of care, offers his watch as collateral, gets a third guy to vouch for the watch’s quality, and reboots with a crisp $100 bill for another run at busting out just a few hands later. He promises to be back in an hour with the money, letting the woman keep his watch as promised, but he never returns. Maybe he didn’t exist. The woman debates briefly what to do with the watch and where she might sell it before departing for her employment.

There is the drunk who everyone knows is going to bust out after just a few hands, maybe winning one or two beforehand. There are many of these. They are the poster-children for why this whole operation should probably be illegal, was illegal for a long time, may yet be illegal again. It is arguable that it is the alcohol doing far more of the damage than the gambling, but it is also hard to imagine where the money is coming from to fuel the kind of waste that can be observed on any given night. At least this is a game of skill, though it’s hard to imagine why we allow skill to equate to standing in our society. The problems that money creates.

There is, relatedly, the story one dealer tells us of her table earlier tonight, unprecedented in her experience she says, wherein the losing player asked for his money back after cryingingly imploring that he lost his child support money and was (understandably) sure his four-of-a-kind would win the hand. She describes in vivid detail the awkwardness of the experience, the apparent grief of the man who eventually wandered away bewildered, the discomfort of the winner who offered $10 of his winning hundreds so the man could at least get a taxi home, the overall unreasonability of putting up one’s child’s support money on a game, ultimately, of chance. It takes a cynic like me at the table to suggest that maybe it was all an act, a sacrifice of dignity and honesty for the sake of recouping some dollars. This is before the watch guy shows up, but my suggestion to the dealer that she ask after the man’s kid at a future table has her in paroxysms when I follow-up with preparing her to hear “What kid?” Life has taught me all too well where people tend to rank honesty, their emotions, and money.

There is the drunk couple who shows up, resplendent pretty people in resplendent pretty clothing, fresh from a wedding with some hours to kill before their flight will return them to the girl’s home in Indiana for sedentary Midwestern living. They’ve both played before, but the girl never prior in a cardroom, and she intones stage whispers in my ears as she begs for advice in stern tipsy confusion about the arcane procedures of the poker table. I make an effort to be patient and kind as all poker tables require, only periodically cracking that this may all be an act for her to extract maximal compensation from the encounter with the casino. At one point she looks me in the eyes and asks where I’m from, says she feels like she knows me, like one of her closest friends is just like me, and there’s a hint of something heavier behind all the hiccupy banter and discussion of the way things work with cards and chips and felt. It is when her boyfriend gets busted out and wanders off in confusion that she begins to complain about his carelessness and my distaste for this particular movie mixes with my natural inclination toward it, like I’m in some sort of Eternal Sunshine infinite loop to keep making the same mistake, a moth infinitely drawn to the bug-zapper. To the point where it’s almost a relief when the lanky bearded boyfriend ambles back to collect his girl and all her chips (she’s tripled up or so in an hour under my tutelage) and stumble toward taxi, hotel, plane, Indiana.

There is the man who talks loudly about divorce, growing apart, the final date of September 12th and his kids of 8, 6, 4. He is wearing a Dallas Cowboys hat, a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt, a Dallas Cowboys watch, and holds his cards in place with a weighty Dallas Cowboys coin of some sort. At one point he stands up from his chair, having downed four beers after the five-hour curfew on such drinks was lifted at 7:00 AM, and lifts his shirt and sweatshirt to reveal a Dallas Cowboys tattoo on the back of his right shoulder. He and I have nothing in common, but we have everything shared in this average American life I have somehow been left to lead in my own wandering wake. I wonder what it’s like to be his six-year-old girl, what his wife must be like, how she tells the story of their separation, whether he started drinking at 7 AM only after the breakup. There are times I have to be reminded to play because I find this person, obnoxious, unpleasant, brash, and loud, to be so compelling.

There is the woman who speaks in Russian on the phone to her husband asleep downstairs, then in person to him as he awakens and drifts upstairs, reminding me how much of that language I’ve forgotten but also of how much of any language is the basic exchange of extremely simple phrases. How I almost get one of their jokes well enough that concealing my reactive mirth is challenging, especially knowing that those who speak in a foreign language publicly take being understood as akin to CIA-level eavesdropping. It is such an easy assumption to make in America that your mother tongue is oblique to anyone you haven’t already identified as sharing your heritage.

There is the man who talks about his wife and child like they are quartered soldiers in his home, not ones he quite resents but rather respects in spite of their slightly uncouth way of being with his property. He is delicate but off-put when she calls, he is one of the nicest people I have ever met at a poker table, he is someone I don’t really want to share my story with but feel I almost must for the sake of his greater appreciation of his own life circumstances. You can tell people to appreciate what you want all you want, but does it sink in in a way that’s meaningful? People are going to want what they’re going to want and the first rule of wanting something is that you yourself must decide that you want it. Other people’s efforts to sway and bend must be couched and timed almost perfectly to have any impact whatsoever, and even then it rattles down the echoey wind tunnel of resistance like a thorny pebble trying to nestle in your foot. Even when you know it’s right, it grates and demands extractive rejection. Even if you end up looking at the remaining indent and missing it almost immediately as it sails away into the just-hurled-at distance.

There is the dealer who asks about my sweatshirt, the sweatshirt I always get comments on, the one from Nepal, that prompts a whole discussion of that trip and my life and brings me almost to tears. Merely because I remember that day so vividly, feel its slice across time as we waited for the shops to open in Kathmandu, the impulse purchase that became my identity the rest of that trip and for some time to come, the unpredictable randomness of me selecting something orange, red, and brown when all the colors of the rainbow were available, including the normally preferred green, blue, and gray. The colors were brighter there, our last day in Kathmandu before heading out to the rest of Nepal and India, Emily encouraging me fervently to get something for myself despite my unmaterialistic inclinations, complimenting how warm and comfortable and happy I looked in the wide-sleeved selection, reminding me for years later, like my Yellowstone sweatshirt and the honeymoon thunderbird T-shirt from the Vancouver Aquarium, that she always knew when I should get something I wanted.

Everything I own is a souvenir of Liberia.

It was not my night at the poker table and it was entirely my night. It broke my October winning streak but it took twenty solid hours at the table to do so. It was a total waste of time and it was an encounter with humanity that evoked more depth than a hundred hours of conversations with apologetic friends and eager young debaters. It made me never want to go back there again and it made me want to go back the next night. It consumed my weekend in pretty much all the ways a weekend can be consumed: physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

I stepped outside to find the same daylight I’d encountered when entering the place, a wan grayish bluster that sent, finally, cagey crinkled leaves rattling down the asphalt. It has been summer all October. We’re headed for a fall.