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Thinking |
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Came through the door tonight from the city, fresh off the bus (where I was forced to endure to yet another inane conversation spoken much too loudly), and immediately headed for the computer so I could write this. Sometimes it pours out of me and I have to set it down before the moment passes and I don't want to deal with what is in my head. What IS in my head just now? Everything. And anything you can imagine. I came through the door thinking "Let me write." But I didn't. I went into the kitchen and watched something on TV about Princess Diana while I did the dishes. The sink has been full for a week and I just couldn't stand it anymore, the stagnant water, the greasy pot, the half-full drinking glasses. I stood at the sink and wondered how I will ever get this damn crick out of my neck. It's been there for weeks, lying in wait for me, sometimes painful sometimes barely so. My shoulders, my neck, my upper back: it's all out of alignment or something. It all is composed of knots, muscles tightly clenched, unable to swing free, unable to move the way they ought. Sometimes I'll get a pain all the way down to my leg and wonder if it's related to that damn bag I carry over my left shoulder each day. I think it's compressing a nerve. I was telling you what it is I'm thinking right now... I was thinking the dishes aren't the only thing I've been neglecting around here. My toilet tank has some bizarre leak which daily completely fills the garbage can I park beneath. I have a stack of reading material on the windowsill alongside the toilet that needs serious pruning. It is falling over on me as I do sit and do my business, reading Star magazine or Premiere or Guitar World or some book or another. The bathroom also houses one of two mirrors in my apartment. I don't look in either one of them if I can avoid it. I don't know about you but I get the feeling I am not aging gracefully. I'm getting these funny bumps on my nose and my eyes are tired-looking. I can't even talk about my hair. The bathroom mirror is the door of the medicine chest, screwed to the wall just above my tiny sink. I usually close my eyes when I brush my teeth. I finished the dishes, then wiped down my kitchen table. Which looks - as my mother use to say - "like it's ready to set sail" . Meaning it's a damn mess. I was spraying 409 on the tabletop when I felt an urge for my first cigarette since coming home. Only I don't have any. So I decided to head out to the Italian Social Club a half block away. On the way out the door I grabbed some cigars I can't bring myself to smoke, to dispense to the men at the club. The club is closed. It's after 11 PM and the lights are off. I needed a smoke so I lit one of the cigars with a trusty Zippo and stood outside puffing away. The neighborhood is quiet. There are only groups of young professionals heading away from the bar around the corner. This is how groups of young professionals walk in Hoboken: If they're all men they rearrange themselves constantly as they walk but always in a tight bunch of two or three abreast; groups of all women will do the same without the jostling for position; if it's a mixed group and an equal number the men will usually walk ahead with the women hanging back. You almost never see men walking alongside their women unless it's just the two of them. This particular group was mixed and firmly observed the "men ahead, women behind rule". The four of them were, in their mid-twenties and J. Crew best, talked as they headed west toward their roommate apartments and parked cars. The bit of conversation I overheard had to do with golf and jobs, the men discussing a new set of clubs one of them bought, and the women talking about some bitch at the office. I stood and smoked some more and saw our neighborhood cop making his rounds. I've been living here four years and there's only been a cop since the young professionals moved in. The khaki short crowd and the homeboys occasionally cross each other's paths and I doubt it's a pleasant scene. The cop disappeared and I stared at an all-too-rare open parking space directly in front of my apartment house, wondering where it was when I was coming home. More people passed by, some young kids from the neighborhood headed south on my side of the block, and some more young professionals still in their work clothes headed north on the other. The khaki short brigade has taken over my neighborhood. Post-collegiates drawn to Hoboken by tales of easy bar-hops and the plentiful attractive young men and women, they want to be near Manhattan but not in it. They want to walk to the bars and be where there's other young professionals relaxing in khaki shorts and backwards baseball hats. They want to listen to the Dave Matthews band and drink Coronas. Unable to find apartments near to Washington Street, they find themselves pushed further and further west. Now they are firmly here and even further west, all the way to Jackson Street, the western border of Hoboken, the street where the projects start. I suppose there's nothing wrong with any of that. I used to think "those people" quote unquote were freaks, some kind of godawful aberration. But now I know the freak is me. "Those people" quote unquote far outnumber me. I am the last of a dying breed. I don't work on Wall Street, I don't make lots of money, I don't golf, I don't go to faux Irish bars and I don't wear khaki anything. I once thought I hated quote unquote "those people" because they value all the wrong things in life, because they are throwbacks to an earlier, much worse time, because they seem to be driven solely by sex, money and power. But I realize I hate them because they seem happy. Whatever deals they've made to get what they want, however they may have compromised, they are always smiling when I see them. And if they are happy with their lives, with their golf bags and baseball caps and khaki shorts. It takes too much energy to rail against them - to rail against the future. I threw away the cigar and went back inside. I sat down once more at the Macintosh and tried to connect with everything flying around in my head. I was thinking about happiness and when I've known it. I wondered if I would know it again. I realized there are moments every day when I am happen, genuinely so. But that most of my day is taken up with worry. With brooding about the past. Or fixating on the immediate future. With wondering why I did or said a particular thing. Or trying to figure out how I will survive and prosper. I rarely get to be in the moment, to be totally focused on the business - or pleasure - at hand. Happiness is of the moment. You can smile at thoughts of the past. You can be glad about something coming. But true happiness has to happen NOW. You have to be in the moment. Which has been exceedingly hard for me. As much as I'd like to live as if the future is now, as though the past doesn't matter, it's a real struggle. Like tonight, as I sit here and type I'm thinking about these things (in this order): my apartment, my financial situation, my current ex-girlfriend and my show tomorrow. My apartment, once again, is a mess. There's crap lying all over and I am usually unable to locate things I need. It needs a severe douching. I began the other night to clean my files and thrown away outdated stuff. But there are miles to go before I sleep. And I am supposed to be out of here by the end of the month. I called my landlord a week ago and told him I was moving. He asked me to put it in writing and mail it to him. I haven't. I can't come to terms with all it will mean to move. As much as I dislike it here I am in love with my independence and don't know if I can live with other people, even friends, as I planned. And - like the young professionals - my work is in Manhattan. It has been causing me great stress, trying to decide what to do. But the financial picture is looking up. I got more work this week, good, high-paying work. I soon hope to be out of the hole I dug for myself over the last year. Which brings me to my current ex-girlfriend. It was a little over a year ago that she first wrote to me, after hearing me on the radio. She liked my show, wanted me to "look her up" if I was ever in her neck of the woods. I put if off time and time again, having just come off some fairly upsetting, very short-lived relationships. And then we got together and were shot out of a cannon smack dab into "Love Land". Before we even properly knew each other we were saying the "L" word. I suppose we were truly infatuated. We were all set to pair-bond. We told each other, over and over, in different ways, "You're the one and I don't have to look anymore." We threw around the word "marriage" more often than they do in a bridal shop. She made a point of impressing on me how she told certain friends and ex-boyfriends that I was "the one". I did the same. Then it all blew up in our faces. Now I spend so much time asking myself "What happened?" that even I get sick of the question. "What happened?" Who the hell knows? I have one theory, she has another. She says she can't be with me because I am sad and self-destructive. I think we're not together because she can't tolerate her own feelings, never mind mine. We cling to our theories like lifelines. We each need to feel we alone are right about what happened. All I can say with any conviction is that we tried it out for six months or so and kept running into one problem after another. The relationship ended twice and this last one seems to be a keeper. There are many reasons why this particular breakup has been so difficult. First, she lives far away and I've managed to cram my head full of every detail about her place in the mountains. It's become an escape fantasy for me to imagine myself ditching work, jumping in my car, peeling away, driving silently upstate, turning left into her driveway, parking the car, stepping through the crooked door in the crooked frame and down the narrow passageway past her high bed, into the living room, wood stove in the corner, sloping ceiling above, long, low couch, old chest opposite. She's always by the sink, eyes twinkling, making that face. I'm smiling back and feeling warm and secure. It's a powerful fantasy. Second, I know that much of what the current ex-girlfriend saw while we were together was not the real me. Hell, I know I'm no happy-go-lucky guy. I know I can be a pill. But I also know that I am at a really bad juncture in life, a time when all the chickens have come home to roost. All the bad decisions I've made in the past have finally caught up with me. I am living the consequences of my past thoughtlessness. This is the future I alone created. If I hadn't been so cavalier, if I had planned some more, not allowed myself to get in this hole, I wouldn't be scrambling just to stay alive. And I wouldn't be as damn crabby as I have been. And my current ex-girlfriend wouldn't think crabby was all I am. The third reason this has hit me so hard is that I've found I was truly in love with her. I thought maybe I was in love with the idea of her, with her saying she loved me. But it's more than that. I felt abandoned. Exiled. Stupid. Worthless. But mostly I felt I'd ruined everything. That I failed her and in so doing killed our relationship. She was someone I appreciated and admired, someone I truly enjoyed being with (even when we were bickering), someone I thought I understood who maybe understood me. I wanted to make her happy, maker her proud of me. I suppose our problem areas were the two big ones: trust and respect. We had a long distance relationship and would each get jealous over what we imagined the other to be up to while apart. I don't know if we trusted each other as much as we could have. And though I respect her and how she has struggled to make the life she has, I often felt I wasn't receiving the same in return. I don't think she fully understands what I've been through or where I come from. She doesn't see how far I've gotten, only how far I've yet to go. I don't think she believes I have what it takes to be a success in this life. I probably would be less devastated by all this if I could comfort myself with that simplest of clichés: "It wasn't meant to be". But even though I am a romantic (I cleverly conceal it behind all that cynicism) I am certainly NOT a fatalist. It would be hypocritical to everything I believe. I've never thought that these two people are "meant to be" and those two people are "star-crossed". Then I'd be a goddamned mystic, wouldn't I? I might as well be getting my palms and cards read, my chart done, my I-ching thrown. I think people come together for many reasons but mainly because they reflect each other in some way. We are all narcissists to some degree. Some of us are especially so and can accept nothing less than complete reflection. We want our partners to like everything we like, do everything we do, believe everything we believe, smile with us, laugh with us, be happy when we're happy. Some of us don't need as much reflection. Which leads to the last thing I was thinking about: my show tomorrow. Will it accurately reflect how I feel? Will I put on a "radio face", as I sometimes do? Will I read everything I've written and decide it's too self-indulgent? Will some caller berate me for going off like this? Who will develop a conversation and how will I know which thread to pursue? Should I use any of the ideas and titles I've been batting around in my mind all week: "My Greatest Victory", "My Darkest Defeat", "Procrastination: The Show I'll do Tomorrow", "The Best Piece of Ass I've Ever Had"? Or should I just let things develop spontaneously? I still don't know what the hell I'll do. I won't even know as I'm sitting down to do it. Which is why I love my show. It is of the moment. It changes constantly. It is a living, organic thing to me. I can only set it in motion and wait around to see what happens next. |
