Conclusion

I’ve been having a hard time writing lately.   I’d like to
blame it on more-than-normal stress factors that have wrapped around me
since November.  There are plenty of little incidents that have
come about between November 15th and January 15th that could be called
life changing, or life shattering.  I’ve been to a reunion
luncheon for my grandfather’s rapidly-dying Parkersburg High School
class of 43, I’ve crossed swords with family members, I’ve been
reunited with lovers as well as my father, estranged for 18 difficult
and lonely years.  I’ve met human traffickers from the Philippines
and done Jager Bombs with bisexual truck drivers. Those latter two I
found in a small bar hidden behind a Days Inn in Atlanta and, now, I
wonder how I got out of there alive.

This week, I started to write an article about the holidays, putting
all of that seasonal depression anxiety behind me and trying to cope
with the fight my aunt and I had at Thanksgiving dinner about how bad a
person I was, in her Zoloft eyes.  Then trying to look
analytically at the shell of Christmas designed to appease a spoiled 10
year old who’s allowed to run free – to the point where she shits and
pisses wherever she wants and beats her mother with a riding
crop.  My cousin’s always good for an article, it’s like writing
about some feral wolf-child.

Increasingly, though, the holidays have become more emotionally
damaging.  As my grandparents age, one of them poorly, and as my
cousin and aunt drive deeper into a world of self-abusive terror, what
was once comedy has become, quite simply, pathetic, corrupt and
heartbreaking.

I gave up on that article.

I decided to move on to an intimate article about the girl I once loved
and, if you’re asking me over drinks, I’ll confess that I still love
her.  Though, here, I’m drinking coffee and the white stuff falls
hard outside my windows as a DC Saturday grinds to a snarled snowday
nothingness.  In this state, if you could actually make it up the
hill to my house and have a cup of this coffee, I’d tell you that I’m
not sure about the love thing.  I’d talk about chemical
connections and emotional comfort.  I wouldn’t splash scotch into
this particular coffee – only the best beans cross my threshold – but
it would be tempting as we sat and looked through these picture windows
at a winter wonderland, a frozen suburban forest barely able to
breathe, the tumble-down wooden fence marking the end of my property,
half an acre from these windows, tilting towards us and coated in white
while the neighbor’s toolshed bends beneath the weight of snow and an
old branch that’s hit the roof.

I would talk about the essence of love, and how this woman once touched
me and has remained with me as a spirit.  Just like the blacks
used to say in the 60’s – you got to be a spirit, not a ghost.
While my love for this woman was and is on some spiritual level, she,
herself, is a ghost.  When I met her again, we came together as if
we had never been apart.  Every movement, every thought, every
feeling was as natural and comfortable as if we had been a couple for
the last six years instead of strangers.

In my article, I wrote about how that comfort pulled me forward and, at
the same time, seemed to push me back.  That, of course, is the
definition of human confusion.  It’s also something that holds us
all in place.  I wrote about how there are no other women who have
touched me in this way but, between you and me, that’s a lie.
This girl in question simply stuck with me for 15 months as lover and
muse, the others who struck me on the exact same chemical and emotional
level didn’t enter into the same orbit for reasons dictated purely by
chance and circumstance.

Writing about the love of my life goes nowhere when I can name five
other loves of my life and rest easy with the knowledge that a sixth
one will come.

I tried hard, though.  I started three different articles, and one
even got up to 20 pages.  I might return to those, but they didn’t
really strike me as worthwhile.

I moved on to an article about my father.  I went down to Atlanta
and saw him for the first time in 18 years.  He had run away in
1986.  His last promise to me was that he was going to
Charlottesville, VA for the weekend and he’d be back on Monday.
Perhaps sub-consciously, I had scheduled to see him on a Monday.
I didn’t think about that synchronicity until I started in on the
article.

I don’t really understand what my father was running from.  The
waters were troubled, sure, thanks to my mom’s dramatic insanity.
But is that an excuse?  She was a woman who, from childhood, was
violent and enraged.  As a nine year old, she held my aunt off the
Bel Pre bridge in Parkersburg and threatened to throw her into the Ohio
River.  She would end her life by driving into a tree at top
speed, her body and her car consumed by fire.  When my father ran,
from her and from his own demons, I was left entering adolescence with
this woman who, though she sacrificed much to stand by me, filled my
days and nights with terror.  I moved through my teenage years on
eggshells.  The slightest hiccup would bring mom down on me in a
fury I have never seen from any other person, and I work in customer
service.

Seeing my father again was nothing like I expected.  As I wrote
the article, I realized that I didn’t know what to say about this
meeting.  Eighteen years is a long time, a lifetime, and, looking
back, it all feels like some absurd dream.

I abandoned the article, and I started writing one about that
dream.  How strange that my life up to this point seems like
someone else lived it.  I look at pictures from three years ago,
and I recall the scene as if it were from a movie.  Perhaps we all
live in a movie, but my family has made it so that the movie has been
removed from any sense of emotion.  I have not enjoyed nor have I
been disappointed by the film.  I’ve simply sat alone and watched
it in silence.

I left that article behind because I feared that everyone feels that
way, so, who would want to hear about it?  On the other hand, I
wondered if I was the only one who felt that way and, if so, reading
back on what I had written, I obviously wasn’t able to describe it
properly.

I started on an article about the men I met at Riley’s Irish Pub by the
Days Inn in Forest Park, Georgia.  That’s somewhere to the east of
Atlanta, the city looming in the distance.  One, Jun, was a
Filipino who brought immigrants over at the cost of $3000 a head.
They worked at various jobs as illegals until they could pay him
back.  The other, Glen, was a bisexual truck driver who was five
wives into his life and owed half a million to them and the
government.  He was planning a way to get to Costa Rica and vanish
forever.

Glen’s son had died, and he blamed himself.  He’d been into drugs,
he said, shipping them across the country on the blue highways, weaving
around and away from the interstates.  When they finally caught up
with him, he put in 10 years and came out of jail in the service of the
Feds, working as a Narc.  That’s how he made his money, but enough
was enough.

Glen drifted in and out of anger, his hands becoming steady only after
eight beers and four Jager Bombs – shots of Jager dropped into a full
glass of Jack Daniels.  Jun, however, always had a steady hand,
and the eyes of a predator.

That article had promise, but it was too late.  I was gummed up
with the thoughts of a woman, her image and her smell, her flesh, every
little flaw all burned into my mind.  I was frozen in place by my
father and the world around him that should have been part of my world
but, now, will never be.  Not really.  My childhood is
over.  Shattered elbows and car crashes, lost bikes and college
and student loans, loves lost and diplomas and drunken nights and
moving violations and two decades of those awful, depressing family
dinners have been missed.

I thought about that as an article, though I didn’t work on it. How, at
30, I’m suddenly quite unexciting.  I’ve built my world and
there’s not that much to share, and the desire to share it in that way
– catching up with an erstwhile family member or taking a new lover –
has faded.  My family has been diseased since well before I was
born.  The only commonality is blood and, through that, a
stone-age clan feeling that says it’s okay to stand side by side and
throw back enemies.  Sitting with my father, I summed up the
missing years in half an hour.

While plotting out that article, I wanted to go on a bit about how I’ve
been forced to live the present.  How the past is so painful and
so embarrassing that I’m only able to turn it into amusing
pseudo-fiction online but, face to face, I wouldn’t be able to hold
myself together long enough to get to the gritty details.

A shrink may say, well, that’s a problem.  But I think they’re
obsessed with the past. Hey, if you and I are drinking at a bar, do you
really want to know these parts of my life?   The answer
should be no, because there’s so much more we can talk about.

This is the problem with meeting new friends and taking new
lovers.  I have no past.  I can sum it up in half an
hour.  When you put all the parts together, it’s just so goddamned
terrible.

That’s what really stopped me from writing this week.  Too much
has happened that deals with my past self, my stagnant self.  If,
perhaps, I had reunited with old drinking buddies, or the insane
Japanese exchange students who filled me with Sake, or a couple of the
self-abusive one night stand girls, I’d have something to write
about.  The dangerous and the psychotic, the depressingly amusing,
the off the wall antics that can turn barrooms upside down and horrify
human traffickers and violent truckers.

Instead, I plodded through a few points in my life, piled all together
in a three day weekend coming after a months-long seasonal depression,
all of it marked by death and illness, anxiety and Zoloft, faded
memory, failed love and lost childhood.

I trashed all the articles and wrote this one because, after days of
writing, and over a hundred pages of soul-baring whining, I realized
how surprising it is that I survived all these years, and did so
without any assistance.  Loans and credit cards got me through
college, not a single friend stuck with me until recent years, I was as
good as orphaned by my parents and the financial and emotional
well-being of my remaining family has been shattered.  While my
life has been scarred forever by this past that I can’t seem to
remember living, I have, somehow, in that fugue state, managed to hit
all the marks no matter the expense.  The problem I was having
with articles that looked backward (and inward) in a deeply serious
light was quite simple – it didn’t matter.  Nothing really matters
except the act of moving forward.  How to deal with all these
things that have built up in me since right before Thanksgiving Dinner
at our harshly lit family table – since I was 12, really – is so easy
I’ve just not been able to accept it.  It’s the greatest life
lesson, the greatest solution to all of our problems, repeated in
movies and music and to each other every day:  Fuck it.  Fuck
it all.