Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

It’s been a week. I realize, increasingly, that this space is a good inverse litmus test of some combination of how overtly busy I am combined with how ruminative I’m feeling about my life in general. While ideas and thoughts of what things mean or feel like are percolating, I tend not to write much here. When things are feeling calmer and more distilled, the outpourings tend to inundate this page. And the past week has brought much reflection.

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.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

My soul hurts today.

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.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I don’t think there’s a more devastating or demoralizing conviction a person can have than that their best years are behind them.

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?

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Emily bought us this doormat when we moved to Princeton that was bright and colorful and springy. It was made out of little cut up bits of foam-rubber flip-flops that had been recycled somehow. They were tied together with little narrow metal lengths of wire, like flattened-out paperclips, and the mat’s whole surface was over 50% air as the bits of foam alternated with blank space in a sort of cross-hatch pattern. Either you’ve seen the kind of thing I’m talking about or you have some idea or it’s just impossible to describe in language alone.

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.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Standing in the shower this morning, feeling the comforting jet of enveloping hot water as I was waiting for inspiration to strike on today’s Duck and Cover (didn’t happen till later), inspiration struck me on an entirely different matter. The shower is always and probably always will be a great place for thought – for most people, as my discussion of same has attested, but especially for me. I made a realization that I believe cuts to the quick of why my unhappiness seems so deeply entrenched, so likely to be permanent, and so inaccessible to the acknowledgement of so many friends.

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.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.