Short Form

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.