Sunday Archive XV: More notes and drafts
A classic example of how the articles come together. Email the first paragraph to myself, then pick up whenever I get to where I’m going. This, from April of 06, eventually became Small Nights.
Wingman night out. Score chicks, score then hard, score them all night long.
We were on codenames. Ghost Man, Merlin and me. Best outfits on, shoes polished, cash and carry. I had a doll on one arm, some strange little brunette who had crossed into the no-zone about twelve and a half minutes ago. Merlin, he was wise. He bought himself a dark corner and slammed the drinks down. Ghost Man – now, there’s one for you. I’d lost track of him several times as he faded on and off the dance floor, weaved to the bathrooms to vomit foul blood, returned with several women and pawned off the sad and sick to my anti-social camp by the bar. Merlin knew what Ghost man did not – I was, once again, about to be ejected for drunk, disorderly and wildly bitter.
——————
Man, what was on my mind this day? From June 06:
Has Circumcision Desexualized Me?
Ever since my carefree days of wall-to-wall drunken sex (which would have been last Tuesday if I actually had someone to have sex with besides my housemate’s favorite coffee mug, which I then replaced in the cabinet), I’ve not responded well to blow jobs. This is one of those things that I’m uncomfortable discussing with my peers because, contrary to what you may think, guys don’t sit around and talk about this stuff unless it involves fucking the girl from advertising in the ass. Actual sexual problems don’t come up…
Unless you’re talking to me.
I was camped out at a pub in Northern Ireland, hungover and exhausted from an Easyjet jump that found me stumbling through Glasgow at 5am, on a filthy bus at 6am, and battling my way through the very Eastern European-chic GLA to the departure gate around 7am. Three beers in, sometime in the late morning after a long walk under the unexpected Savannah sun, it suddenly hit me that I was going to die. When my buddy arrived, unshaven and filthy, as all Ulstermen are, and in mid-rant with that aggressive accent you get in Belfast. Obviously drunk, he joined me and started in on round after round while launching a series of complicated thoughts at me, one of which was his opposition to circumcision. The mutilation of the penis.
———
July, 2006. General angst.
I feel that my life has been one, long crisis. Though these crises are common to us all — deaths, moves, poverty, injury, sickness — they’ve smashed into each other every year since I was 12. I’ve reached a point where the yearly crisis is not only expected, but received with numb resignation. I shrugged off my mother’s suicide. Well, tra-la-la. Just this year’s big show.
I mark the beginning of this sad family tradition when my dad left us high and dry. He vanished and my mom’s already unstable mind went deep into illness. Never to heal. She wasn’t the sort of woman who came back from the edge. My grandparents, blaming themselves for mom’s obvious mental problems, sacrificed everything they had to support her and me through years of turmoil. Without the money from dad and the family business, what could have been a serious crash was cushioned thanks to the grandparents — a housewife and a schoolteacher. This cushion was the seed for what would, eventually, become a half million dollar debt against their house. Mom’s suicide in 2000 would be the breaking point, my grandparent’s ultimate failure, that would lead to Big Darkness and health problems over a slow, horrific six years until, finally, the clear finale of the Long Crisis. The grandparents forced to a nursing home and the house sold, every penny going to that half a million debt and the fees for the full time care my grandmother now requires. Twenty years of guilt and pain coming to an abrupt, cathartic end. Nursing home found, grandparents out, house emptied and sold all within eight weeks. Generations of junk hauled out of the dusty corners and thrown out, dissembled, distributed to those of us who still care about heirlooms and what our family once was.
In the final hours, moodily walking the forested acre lot and drifting through empty rooms, it became clear to me that this was an ending. That’s something that life does not often give. With death comes the lingering feelings of loss and regret, the breaking down of someone’s life, maybe lawyers and probate, houses to sell and shit to box up, that corny knick-knack you put on the shelf that always brings it back.
It began as a crisis. This major shake-up that stretched over two months and meant the loss of our family home, the departure of the clan leaders who would die for us, the breakup of our small, broken family, the end of our only refuge. It was a seemingly demented whirlwind decision to go to a nursing home seven hours away, ripping our dying matriarch from our arms, whipping the old homestead out from beneath us and revealing a debt that can’t even be imagined on a sober night.
We crashed. Our minds began to dwell. We cried. We argued. We tried to make my grandfather see reason. We became unreasonable. Fractures began to show on the grim, Protestant surface of our life-hardened West Virginia family. This latest crisis was the worst of all.
Then came those last hours. Then came that empty house, with only trash left behind. The crisis became transition. The receding floodwaters of crises past. What has gone on under the roof of that house for the last twenty years is, for the most part, a series of painful episodes that need to be shelved. For the first time, a stranger on my own property, I realized that change is possible. That what had been trapped under a roof had now been exposed to the open air, the sun, the wind. An ending. One motherfucker of an ending.
————-
Looks like I was writing to some ex girlfriend. Could be any of three or four girls. They’re all the same. From July, 2006.
Now, to revisit our weekend conversation, before your family decided to rattle your cage on Sunday morning.
I’d like to do something of a rulebook, especially in light of one of your concerns — “putting me through” the problems that come with you.
First, in review. Where am I? I’m of the school that says embrace love. What the hell? Run, baby, run. And, for you, I have a deep and good love. It always has been, though it took ten years to even begin to express that. That’s expected. I’m a screwball. Oh, injury, as the poets say. But it’s taken me ten years to even begin to figure EVERYTHING out and find the true path.
To address your fears that you’re meant to be alone, or you destroy relationships, or whatever, the best thing to do is set up rules. We’re in a unique position. We know each other — flaws and strengths, habits and reactions… On this foundation, it’s easy to rebuild something we did not have before, and many others have difficulty learning.
———
July, 2006. I guess the above girlfriend pissed me off…
These women. I’ll tell you, I don’t see the point anymore. The chase, the management, their swiss-cheesed brains, the emotional turmoil, the guesswork and games. How ever did the matriarchy in those ancient of days survive? With the women today, I’ve come to believe that they never did rule the world. That the patriarchy has always been in place.
“Nach, I’m detecting bitterness.”
“I’m just exhausted by the endless pursuit of pussy, love, belongingness, need.”
“Is ‘belongingness’ a word?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. It’s certainly not the right work. Belonging would do – “
“Shut up.”
“If you’re going to wax Bukowski, then you should try to show some – “
“Okay, fine. Are we heading out or not?”
“Yep. Get us some chicks!”
“Oh, god.”
He laughed, “Just kidding. We’ll go out and get drunk and be mistaken for faggots again. Again and again and again.” He swung the door open and stepped into the long, lonely, glaringly lit hallway of my apartment building, then he spun around and, with wide, haunted eyes, said, “Come play with us, Nacho. Forever and ever and ever…”
“Now I don’t want to come out into that hallway.”
“Let the ghosts devour you, Nach. At least you’d find belongingfullness.”
July in DC. Night falls on a 95 degree day dripping with swamp humidity. Things speed up slightly, the choked streets begin to run and our fellow pedestrians shake their heads clear and walk with a bit more confidence through the early evening. Windows and doors are open, bar and restaurant noise
———–
July, 2006. Trying to remember what girl was in my life at this point. But, man, I hope she was the one who died last year. I started to clean up the below, but decided I should just keep the insane ranting style.
Love. Companionship, kinship, power, ecstasy, fucking, melting, combining, uniting, strengthening, surrendering, lying, seething, sharing, forgiving, regretting, confusing, enjoying, understanding, joining, standing, falling, failing, succeeding, losing, gaining, believing, fearing, welcoming, needing, wanting, knowing, holding, breaching, building. Healing. Togetherness. I had love, in you, and ran. I felt it, shared it, knew it. Denied it, refused it, lied to myself. Then tried to replace it.
For the last ten years, I’ve sought women out in the hopes of making the connection that you and I had. That spirit deep love that defied our emotional anguish and suffered so greatly under our misguided youthful mania. Slowly, almost daily, I began to realize what we had. Like a book appearing in my mind one letter at a time, completed only after a six year long shake-up that began in the despair of my mother’s suicide and ended in the powerful spiritual clearances of the past few months.
There was Christine, the next door neighbor, a smile I could fall into, six years my elder placing her in the alpha position, eyes that understood. We fell apart calmly, politely. There was Stephanie, the witch, who took my cock and put it in her then turned cold and angry. There was Kirsten, who used me and left me for another man. There was Nicole, the old friend, who fell hard for me and tumbled into confusion and self-loathing. We last came together as the Columbia broke up, and that was the last time I had sex. That was when I realized that I was filling voids and creating unrealities in the hopes of living a false life. I saw a personal betrayal. Was I letting myself down in these women? Cheapening my own spirit by seeking connection with others? I entered a period of abstinence and I don’t miss any of them. I turned my focus towards my personal projects. I finished a novel, and I built the house that has led me to grow, survive and succeed today.
With each of those women, though, I did feel hope. Love was always possible. A lifetime on that cliff edge but still, even with them, afraid to step forward. And they, too weak, too bound, to break me open. Filling their own voids at my expense. Healing their own hurts with my irreplaceable strength and energy. Exhaustion began to define my life.
They did not remind me of you, they were not replacements for you. On my path, they were experiments, attempts to understand how and why you and I became so linked. To a mind not taught how to love, you were a mystery. For many years, I pretended that you had betrayed me. My view was that you had cheated on and hurt me. I built a fictional universe where you became evil and cruel. I could easily put into words and pretend to feel one thing: Hatred.
There wasn’t even room to idolize you, or try to replace you, because you became a bitter enemy in my mind. The final defense against what we had was to so thoroughly trod upon what we had that I warped it into darkness and negativity. I turned this love to hate and tried to cling to that.
But I was aging. The distance grew between me and you and mom and dad and my younger self. The walls, as with any fortress, crumbled and decayed. I was moving forward with my life and my dreams, I was learning new things and building new friendships. With each book finished, each CD listened to, each minor problem, each step taken, each laugh from a friend or loved one, the pain of my youth sloughed away. Again, letter by letter, sentence by sentence. With that shedding came simplicity. The understanding that all things must happen and all things can be survived. The false hatred I had built around you shattered. Though, still, what you were was unclear. You were not like those other women, you were greater. So false hatred became fear. By then, as I declared celibacy in the face of my early changes, you were (as you are now) unattainable. Though, as we opened communication, I wished then (as I do now) to come to you and be with you for the lifetime I was denying. Though that thought wasn’t in my head. I speak now, looking back at it, and describe it. Then – it was confusion. For a long time, talking to you was torture. It was forcing me to face the feelings I had for you. But it was also dispelling hatred and lies. Inadvertent therapy. Even then, as our relationship grew again, and after I saw you again, I wasn’t able to admit that I still loved you.
What about the other girls stopped me from growing a new bond, and growing away from you? Now, I would say it was their emptiness. Their own specific injuries that had turned them away from the ability to function. The lack of a free spirit. I require a strong woman. Someone not just able to communicate with me, but also able to inspire me. This is, not necessarily, solely your domain and ability, and I am aware of that. Idolatry is not a problem. But wishing yourself replaceable, or fearing misguided emotional tendencies in what I’ve said and how I’ve lived, is an escape hatch. Since I’ve used that escape hatch for a decade, I can only say that the water at the end of the chute is black and poisonous.
——–