There was a period for three months last year when I was unemployed, probably depressed, definitely understimulated, and going through some sequence of personal turmoil that could best be described as joining the real world. It didn’t look like I thought it would, things like that very rarely do, but there was something involved then – short reading, copious amounts of short stories and essays.
I’d spend my days waking up too late, feeling worthless for missing that morning rush of applying for jobs (“When 90% of jobs are given out!” my mother reminded me). Of course, I was attempting to find “real” jobs, jobs requiring skill or a degree or were at least in the vicinity of the office of someone with skill and a degree. So, I’d send out resumes, update cover letters with minute variations – case worker! Case manager! Youth advocate! Editor! There wasn’t a position I didn’t claim I was perfect for, and I kept hitting wall after wall, so, to ease the personal incertitude so squarely housed in my bedroom, I’d leave. To the Espressoria for two hours – sometimes more – book reading. Sometimes I’d walk, iPod in tow, down the populated length of Arapahoe to 17th and make my way to Buchanan’s, dreadful in the school year, but perfect in the May and June netherworld of departed students, as I could sit in their busted green armchair and stare out at the sparsely populated Hill of the summer, always doomed to the world of odd thoughts what I read opened up to me.
Not whole books, that would require an attention span, an indefinite span of time devoted to reading in coffee shops. Everything I read was short – short stories and essays, occasionally the types of “fact” books I could feel no emotional devotion to. Even though I probably read the length of 7 or 8 novels in this time, I couldn’t commit to something of that size – only something 15-50 pages of length, only something I could eat up the better part of an hour with then walk away.
Rick Moody at first. I’d browsed through my copy of Demonology for some quick stories, but the longer ones mattered most – “The Mansion On The Hill” that gets so sly with its misery, and “On The Carousel,” simply one of the truest, compact pieces of fiction I’ve ever encountered. Moody has a tendency to italicize every fourth or fifth word and it gets to be the strangest of motifs, but it never dulled my love.
From there, the whack-job works of David Foster Wallace. From there the classicism of Isak Denisen. From there Joan Didion’s great book of essays The White Album. Wallace and his “Little Expressionless Animals.” Denisen’s “The Pearls.” Didion’s “The White Album.” In each, the language was precise, the goals lofty and thought-expanding, and they perfectly invaded my thinking from start to finish.
I handed my ex a copy of Tobias Wolff’s “Face to Face,” only to receive looks of bewilderment. No one else admired what was consistently blowing me away (for a time, at least – my wise friend Zach in California knew better, matched every short recommendation with two of his own and tales of how he’d written the author to express his appreciation. He understood.). Each one featured something different – “Face to Face” stared with mesmerizing scrutiny at a man of clouded, odd actions, and no one else could understand my awe at the choice of doing this in first person – another veil from which the scrutiny must pierce through. Wolff excels in this sort of thing, of course – his “Hunters in the Snow” needed simply an all-you-can-eat meal to probe the depths of the way men need to keep secrets from each other, and the inimitable ways they accept these secrets anyway.
Here’s the reason no one understands it like me, though – these goals incorporate the “closeness” of experience I seek out in all forms of art. The short story is the best equipped to log each of these experiences, to gape wide-eyed and sometimes fantastically at each strange turn and thought under the umbrella of human interaction, from the minutiae to the ridiculous. Like Alice Munro’s quasi-stalker in Australia in “The Jack Randa Hotel.” Like the mystical power of choices not yet made in Haruki Murakami’s “Thailand.” The feet-in-the-rain specificity of Marquez’s allegory “Monologue of Isobel Watching It Rain in Macado.” The allure of gossip in Eudora Welty’s “A Piece of News,” of an exgirlfriend’s urn in David Benioff’s “Neversink,” of the inability to leave a bar in Hemingway’s “A Cool Dry Place.” I ventured far and wide – Stephen King’s ability to make even the lamest story a rapt experience, such as “Grey Matter,” the tensest work ever to be written about people being turned into puddles of gruel, or such as Roald Dahl’s “The Boy Who Talked To Animals,” which featured a longing that surpasses description, even if its intended audience is 12-year-old’s.
I needed each of them, each strange turn of each strange screw. I marveled at the fantastic tragicomedy of George Saunders and the precise ultra-minimal realism of Raymond Carver. I admired the conceptual thread and goals of Murakami’s After The Quake and (based on Zach’s recommendation) ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere – books with ambitions lofty and simple enough that only a set of short stories could accomplish them. I fell in love with Joan Didion’s and June Jordan’s essays alike. I needed them all and I still do – even with the full financial independence and dental insurance and HIPAA contracts that signify “real world,” these short works remind me my mind’s not so out of the ordinary, and why it matters to keep saying that when it comes to minds, none are ordinary, not exactly.
Friday, June 30, 2006
24 In Quick Takes
24 in Quick Takes
1.
In Buffy The Vampire Slayer's wise and underrated final season, there was an episode called "Help," written (typical for the Rebecca Rand Kirschner, the show's weakest writer) without a shred of credibility, but with a haunting ending. In retrospect, the ending must have been decided first and the rest of the episode become an excuse for it - Buffy, in her new position as Guidance Counselor at Sunnydale High, meets Cassie, who swears (via precognition, natch) that she'll be dead in a week. Buffy, certain she can change her fate, stops all the supernatural foes in Cassie's way but woefully doesn't understand that Cassie has a terminal health problem. In the penultimate scene, Buffy and Dawn cry together, wondering why to bother if they just can't help anyway.
Dawn tearfully says, "So what do we do?" It cuts to its final shot: Buffy coming into the office the next day and sitting at her desk.
2.
For those of you who don't know, I work in an alternative school doubling as day treatment for emotionally disturbed middle schoolers. Today, my favorite kid was arrested. Randy - not his real name, I signed far too many papers - was on probation, violated the terms, and without divulging too many specifics, I'll say I will likely never see him again. My time in day treatment has been a rough entryway into the world of mental health - I see what happens when things work, I see when it doesn't. I later asked about a couple of other kids of ours who'd wound up with similar fates - neither are doing well.
Yesterday, before we knew of this, I was asked to join Randy's treatment team, as I seemed to be the adult he trusted most. I was honored - I love this kid, and I quite easily forgive all he's done. In fact, considering the actual experience of my daily work life, it's safe to say I am a forgiving person in general, and have a high threshold for the sort of things 14-year-olds will do. Randy - a bright kid, a kid who wants to go to college - wanted to turn things around. He recorded an impersonation I did of Arnold Schwarzenegger on an MP3 player.
We waited as my principal asked Randy to gather his personal belongings from his locker. I asked her what would happen to him. With a mournful look and a shrug, she said, "Detention and lockup maybe?" He'd used up his warnings, and once you've been to day treatment, the likelihood of a last straw is higher than normal.
Later, a teacher told me in her last job in mental health, they used to measure success rates simply, "by the number of kids who, at age 18, were not incarcerated." Not necessarily employed, in school, childless, or healthy - simply, not incarcerated.
One unquestionably true fact in James Frey's A Million Little Pieces: 15% of those seeking treatment for substance abuse addiction will stay clean. This is in a highly successful treatment facility.So what do we do?
3.
The pleading lyrics to Sleater-Kinney's "Night Light" that I thought of all day: "How do you do it, with visions of worse to come/ live in the present and spin off the rays of the sun."
4.
Of the many many revelations in the extraordinary season premiere of The Sopranos, none was more chilling than the sight of Eugene Pontecorvo staring at seashells on his end table. An eyeline match with the sea-shells and Eugene's eyes (embodied to typical Sopranos perfection by Robert Funaro) revealed he was seconds away from hanging himself. We watched every excrutaiting twitch and huff that eminated at the end of his life.
Eugene wanted to retire. He'd gotten inheritance and wanted to move to Florida, to be done and finish his years with his wife and kids. But his son was on drugs and in "The Family," the oath trumps long-term dreams.
How do we get the things we want in life? How do we do good deeds with our time, make an impact? Go right back to work like Buffy or stare at the seashells like Eugene (who never "did good")? How can you keep up the hope when the best you can hope for, sometimes, is not incarceration?
5.
I bought a shirt from Hollister this weekend. Hollister doesn't seem like a clothing store, it seems like the most happening cabana around. There aren't racks for merchandise inside, there are hard maple shelving. The room is barely visible, lined with chairs, magazines, deafeningly cheerful pop-punk music, mannequins with no arms or heads, but perfectly defined abdominal muscles.
It occurred to me that in order to plant the notion that you wanted to buy their clothes, Hollister had to convince you that you were living your life in the wrong way. This is what people are supposed to do - chill by the beach in California (even in Colorado), look at fashion magazines, not be able to hear your closest friends, and be determined by the success of sculpting your body parts.
The salesman who helped me wore a bright pink muscle-t shirt, plaid shorts, flip flops, had a dyed blonde mohawk and looked perfectly at home. Later, when I saw him in line for food at the Hot Dog On a Stick, snow blowing outside, he looked more ridiculous than the yellow-and-blue striped hotdog server behind the counter.
6.
My dad was dejected last Fall at the notion that Bush's miserable approval ratings - only slightly higher than Nixon's post-Watergate - would never lead to an end of the Republican order. He said to me, "Sometimes I think we were wrong about things in the 60's, that people caring then was just a fluke. This is the way people really are. They don't care. We can't do any good."
That feeling has to be rampant in the Democratic party - what other explanation is there for not staging a coup when President Bush makes statements as baffling as "I ask you not to focus on the bloodshed, but on the positive influences of the War in Iraq."
What are those, exactly? The civil war? Still, no talk of a coup, no certainty this Fall's election will be at all useful for getting any Democrats elected (and who doesn't sometimes feel like also adding - why would we want to?).
I still believe all I can try to do with my life is make things better when I leave my life than when I came in. My father might not, but he continues to be the only lawyer advancing liberal defenses in El Paso and Teller Counties in central Colorado. He remains my favorite person on the planet.
7.
My roommate and I this evening watched Andrew Bujalski's uber-indie movie Funny Ha Ha. Shot on 16mm, and with dialogue realistic enough to make you certain you're catching every recent-college-grad's average Friday night, the movie had the DIY aesthetic of a 70's porn movie, and a storyline in which most people who attended college would recognize themselves (not necessarily a compliment).
The message I got from Funny Ha Ha? Life is a string of rather awkward, fruitless encounters, none of it meaning much of anything.
Marnie, its main character, turns 24 towards the end of the movie. She sits on the steps of an ornate public building and writes a list of goals - learn to play chess, spend more time outside, don't drink for one month.
I identified with the movie - for any of it to work, I'm forced to - but probably not for the reason it wanted to me. I identified with feeling aimless, a wanderer in a nonsensical play of encounters that don't add up to anything of clear purpose.
I'm with Buffy, though - I'm going back to work tomorrow.
1.
In Buffy The Vampire Slayer's wise and underrated final season, there was an episode called "Help," written (typical for the Rebecca Rand Kirschner, the show's weakest writer) without a shred of credibility, but with a haunting ending. In retrospect, the ending must have been decided first and the rest of the episode become an excuse for it - Buffy, in her new position as Guidance Counselor at Sunnydale High, meets Cassie, who swears (via precognition, natch) that she'll be dead in a week. Buffy, certain she can change her fate, stops all the supernatural foes in Cassie's way but woefully doesn't understand that Cassie has a terminal health problem. In the penultimate scene, Buffy and Dawn cry together, wondering why to bother if they just can't help anyway.
Dawn tearfully says, "So what do we do?" It cuts to its final shot: Buffy coming into the office the next day and sitting at her desk.
2.
For those of you who don't know, I work in an alternative school doubling as day treatment for emotionally disturbed middle schoolers. Today, my favorite kid was arrested. Randy - not his real name, I signed far too many papers - was on probation, violated the terms, and without divulging too many specifics, I'll say I will likely never see him again. My time in day treatment has been a rough entryway into the world of mental health - I see what happens when things work, I see when it doesn't. I later asked about a couple of other kids of ours who'd wound up with similar fates - neither are doing well.
Yesterday, before we knew of this, I was asked to join Randy's treatment team, as I seemed to be the adult he trusted most. I was honored - I love this kid, and I quite easily forgive all he's done. In fact, considering the actual experience of my daily work life, it's safe to say I am a forgiving person in general, and have a high threshold for the sort of things 14-year-olds will do. Randy - a bright kid, a kid who wants to go to college - wanted to turn things around. He recorded an impersonation I did of Arnold Schwarzenegger on an MP3 player.
We waited as my principal asked Randy to gather his personal belongings from his locker. I asked her what would happen to him. With a mournful look and a shrug, she said, "Detention and lockup maybe?" He'd used up his warnings, and once you've been to day treatment, the likelihood of a last straw is higher than normal.
Later, a teacher told me in her last job in mental health, they used to measure success rates simply, "by the number of kids who, at age 18, were not incarcerated." Not necessarily employed, in school, childless, or healthy - simply, not incarcerated.
One unquestionably true fact in James Frey's A Million Little Pieces: 15% of those seeking treatment for substance abuse addiction will stay clean. This is in a highly successful treatment facility.So what do we do?
3.
The pleading lyrics to Sleater-Kinney's "Night Light" that I thought of all day: "How do you do it, with visions of worse to come/ live in the present and spin off the rays of the sun."
4.
Of the many many revelations in the extraordinary season premiere of The Sopranos, none was more chilling than the sight of Eugene Pontecorvo staring at seashells on his end table. An eyeline match with the sea-shells and Eugene's eyes (embodied to typical Sopranos perfection by Robert Funaro) revealed he was seconds away from hanging himself. We watched every excrutaiting twitch and huff that eminated at the end of his life.
Eugene wanted to retire. He'd gotten inheritance and wanted to move to Florida, to be done and finish his years with his wife and kids. But his son was on drugs and in "The Family," the oath trumps long-term dreams.
How do we get the things we want in life? How do we do good deeds with our time, make an impact? Go right back to work like Buffy or stare at the seashells like Eugene (who never "did good")? How can you keep up the hope when the best you can hope for, sometimes, is not incarceration?
5.
I bought a shirt from Hollister this weekend. Hollister doesn't seem like a clothing store, it seems like the most happening cabana around. There aren't racks for merchandise inside, there are hard maple shelving. The room is barely visible, lined with chairs, magazines, deafeningly cheerful pop-punk music, mannequins with no arms or heads, but perfectly defined abdominal muscles.
It occurred to me that in order to plant the notion that you wanted to buy their clothes, Hollister had to convince you that you were living your life in the wrong way. This is what people are supposed to do - chill by the beach in California (even in Colorado), look at fashion magazines, not be able to hear your closest friends, and be determined by the success of sculpting your body parts.
The salesman who helped me wore a bright pink muscle-t shirt, plaid shorts, flip flops, had a dyed blonde mohawk and looked perfectly at home. Later, when I saw him in line for food at the Hot Dog On a Stick, snow blowing outside, he looked more ridiculous than the yellow-and-blue striped hotdog server behind the counter.
6.
My dad was dejected last Fall at the notion that Bush's miserable approval ratings - only slightly higher than Nixon's post-Watergate - would never lead to an end of the Republican order. He said to me, "Sometimes I think we were wrong about things in the 60's, that people caring then was just a fluke. This is the way people really are. They don't care. We can't do any good."
That feeling has to be rampant in the Democratic party - what other explanation is there for not staging a coup when President Bush makes statements as baffling as "I ask you not to focus on the bloodshed, but on the positive influences of the War in Iraq."
What are those, exactly? The civil war? Still, no talk of a coup, no certainty this Fall's election will be at all useful for getting any Democrats elected (and who doesn't sometimes feel like also adding - why would we want to?).
I still believe all I can try to do with my life is make things better when I leave my life than when I came in. My father might not, but he continues to be the only lawyer advancing liberal defenses in El Paso and Teller Counties in central Colorado. He remains my favorite person on the planet.
7.
My roommate and I this evening watched Andrew Bujalski's uber-indie movie Funny Ha Ha. Shot on 16mm, and with dialogue realistic enough to make you certain you're catching every recent-college-grad's average Friday night, the movie had the DIY aesthetic of a 70's porn movie, and a storyline in which most people who attended college would recognize themselves (not necessarily a compliment).
The message I got from Funny Ha Ha? Life is a string of rather awkward, fruitless encounters, none of it meaning much of anything.
Marnie, its main character, turns 24 towards the end of the movie. She sits on the steps of an ornate public building and writes a list of goals - learn to play chess, spend more time outside, don't drink for one month.
I identified with the movie - for any of it to work, I'm forced to - but probably not for the reason it wanted to me. I identified with feeling aimless, a wanderer in a nonsensical play of encounters that don't add up to anything of clear purpose.
I'm with Buffy, though - I'm going back to work tomorrow.
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