Sunday Archive XVI: Mood Swings
From December, 2006. This moody little piece found me tempted to cut and run: Dissolve the company, leave DC, move to the country… I’ve been in cut and run mode for quite some time and never seem to get to the first step.
I didn’t post this article because it sucks. But also because, a few days later, I learned that dad was dying. By the time that was over, the article felt outdated.
There are things I hate about DC. It’s my birth city, I grew up here, but let’s face it – it’s a sad, fucked up, pathetic little town. The older I get, the more gentrification sweeps through the city, the more the client suburbs become strange and twisted salad bowls of disenfranchised immigrants and extraordinarily prices dwellings, the more the pretentiousness of the neo-yuppie set expands against a backdrop of cold, iconoclastic repression, the more I start to think that it’s about time for a real move. The last bastion of normalcy in this city are the queers. As I don’t operate in their circles, I’m starting to find myself adrift.
Focal points.
The family dissolved. My grandparents have now returned to West Virginia to live out their last hurrah. My uncle leaves shortly for a new job in Manhattan. Mom dead, father estranged, and the rest aren’t worth speaking of. With the old homestead now, as I write this, locked up by the realtor and forever out of our lives, there’s no longer a foothold in DC. We’re no longer a DC family. I’m a renter in the suburbs. There’s no where I can run to when the money dries up, no refuge or solace when life becomes crisis. It’s taken no time at all to accept the sudden reality of the last seven days – my grandparent’s exodus, the breathless clearance of the house, and the renter’s lockboxes snapping into place. It’s the final chapter of our family’s local history, and the last thing that was keeping me grounded here in this angry city.
The friends. They are also grounding forces. But with age comes a family, children, or the rocketing lifestyle of self-employed mania. Something that I also suffer from. Friends have become rarely visited – exhausted during the week, picnics with kids on the weekends, or, themselves, on short-term plans to leave the area. House prices, congestion, the people… All adding up to Maybe We Should Move Elsewhere.
Today a bike courier shouted at me on the street. One of a horde of racing freaks who don’t obey any traffic rules. Same in any city, mostly, and always a fear of mine – death by high speed bike courier. I felt the city-rage in me. It’s happened before, but now I’m starting to pay attention to these things in me. That city-rage, all part of life before, now seems unhealthy. The explosion behind the eyes that demands I attack. The purest reptilian urges that make people blow each other away on the road. So quick to madness. Exhausted before I even get to my desk. The commute, the crush of people, the rush out of the cattle run at Union Station, the knowledge that I’m about to spend eight hours of the day doing nothing. Advancing nowhere. Being mocked by friends and customers. Everyone exhausted and crushed.
Wanderlust. What has pushed me to travel and read and explore these last eleven years has begun to change. Where once the end of a trip was disappointing and heartbreaking, I now find myself longing for home. Not in the exhausted, get-back-to-my-bed way. Instead it’s a desire for grounding. Not settling down, mind you, just the need to end 32 years of transition. Still young, not family-minded, but tired. And tired of the old family home, too. So glad for that refuge in my past, I am fully aware of how sick that house had become. Life needs endings.
A woman has asked me: Could I maintain a monogamous, celibate relationship if I was with her. I love her and would be willing to –
No, wait. What am I saying? I’d have to fuck women on the side. Still, though, it’s the thought that counts. And, though I’d be sneaking women ten years my junior through the basement window and having brutal sex with them, I would gladly maintain a monogamous celibate relationship with this woman I love. She’s an ex, and we broke up long ago when I was under the clouds of emotional pain and hopeless youth. With age has come the bitter realization that her love for me, then scorned, was one of the most powerful elements in my life. She saved me at a time when I most needed her. Now, with age, and all sorts of new clouds of emotional pain and hopeless fading youth, we’ve entered a confusing point. For me, a strong need to be near her, to hold her close. And for her? She’s a lesbian. Some sort of cruel joke’s been played on me, I know. Fortunate that I’m getting used to cruel jokes. Our tug of war is approaching a conclusion: With the death of my presence in DC, do I now follow her? If she moved here to me, it would be compromise. A year ago, the same could be said of a move on my part. But, now, I’m entering a new phase that will, sooner rather than later, push me out of this area.
Finally, the question that keeps me up at night: Am I just dwelling?