Better to Fade Away?

This is not a pity party.  I promise.

It's just that lately, I seem to have this conceptual art project going:  how to die without thinking about it.

Let me be straight:  I've never contemplated suicide.  My obsessions have always been rooted in the abstract.  My dad's father, unfortunately, did kill himself for real, in American Samoa of all places, when my father was 15.  15!  I look at my daughters and realize that Grandpa Don was on a whole different level of fucked-up-ness.  I'm nowhere near there, and I'm rapidly approaching his death-age of 55.   I know that when my father turned 55, it was a hard year for him.  I didn't understand it then, but I do now.

Luckily, as screwed up as I am, I've not ever gone there.

However, something has manifested that both surprises and un-surprises me.  Maybe you need to be middle-aged before you start looking back and then can't deny that there has been a pattern.  Or maybe you need to make small improvements, as I have been doing, to see the difference.  I don't know.  Maybe you can help.

I quit drinking alcohol about two months ago.   I've done this on and off throughout my adult life; it's really no big deal for me to do it.  The problem is that it kind of tweaks my social life and makes me have to do work in different places. Ultimately, it's a good thing, though.  There is the embarrassment of not being able to hold liquor the way I used to: call that the impetus to quit.  And then, over a period of sobriety, I realize that certain social bonds wither away without the booze.  Others stand sad and neglected.  I start to fix that, and realize what I'd been missing amid the ha has: undeniable connection.   This kind of connection is formed inside of box playhouses when you're a child, or on the playground in junior high, when you are a pariah and someone finds you interesting in spite of it all.  It continues amid the bomb craters of drunken weekend hookups (love during wartime), when a special person hands you a perfectly ripe pear.  Or extends a hand at a party that took extra guts for you to walk through the door.  These people come back to life with a special shine when you are sober.  Or, more truthfully, when you are making plans for sobriety.  It resonates and makes you want to continue.

Hard work, eh, when some sunny days you just want to sit down with a beer and laugh?

I do miss that:  Colleen, Miah, Wendy, I do.  I can be an excellent partier.  But as the sober comic Marc Maron says, "I got my drinking hours in.  I filled my quota."  I'm done for now.  Probably a long now.

On the same note, I recently started what I call my evening constitutional.  I walk for about 45 minutes at dusk, up and down the very steep road in front of my house.  I put this idea off for a long time.  If you could see the road, you would understand why.  But I was frustrated with my inconsistent ability to get to the gym, which is 20 miles away.  And as I've aged, and because of my thyroid cancer, I've gained weight.  I've been walking almost every night since June.  If my daughter Lucy comes with me, we talk and look for animals.  We do the think normal families do around the dinner table.  If I'm alone, I listen to music or watch an episode of Narcos.  Or just marvel at the beauty surrounding me.

 After about a month of watching me do this, my neighbor Melody asked if she could join me.  I didn't know her well before this, but now I do.  I have not only lost eight pounds, but I've gained a new friend.  Moreover, I feel really good about an aspect of my life that usually feels terrible.

Yay, self-improvement!  All of this good stuff makes me inventory the rest of things and I see all the stuff that I do that leads in the general direction of an earlier death:  my love for junk food (Coke, especially), my occasional cigarette, my terrible sleep hygiene.  Where does it stop?  I guess it all stops the day your heart stops.  And do I want to live that long?  I honestly don't know.

I honestly don't know!  Sometimes you just want to live the rocknroll fantasy:  better to burn out than fade away.  Sometimes you love to cheat.  It's how it is, right?

I'll let you know how it's going later, but I feel pretty good right now.

 

The Real Deal

Here I am again.  Nice to see you.

I'm teaching creative writing again, after so many years, the last copy of my syllabus exists only on a diskette.  I am really not legit anymore.

On the bright side, having not seriously written anything for the last twelve years, I'm so out of practice that the exercises suggested in the textbooks I'm considering actually look fun.
So I might try to do the homework along with my students, just for kicks.  Zen mind, beginner's mind.  I have no excuse anymore. I disentangled myself from chairing the academic senate again at the end of this year.  It was a tough year.   What the job required, ultimately, was more interest than I actually had.  I did what I could, which wasn't much.

As my students say, I ain't trippin.

About that, anyway.

The big machine that sucks up money is in warm-up mode.  We just cleared the lot, and several simultaneous projects are happening: well, temporary power, grading, paving, septic...and then there is the house, which in my OCD-ness build a to-scale model of out of Legos, then covered it in cardboard painted blue:

This is very close to what the house will look like.  Cape Cod-style meets industrial, with some old-fashioned Greek proportions.  Galvanized steel roof.  V-channel rustic siding with six-inch trim.  Big sliding doors that disappear into the wall.  Not pictured: a lean-to glass greenhouse attached to the kitchen.  Cat5 or 6 hardwired into every room.  Solar-heated radiant floors.  Reverse-osmosis water treatment.  Two five-thousand gallon water tanks.

It's bigger than I thought.  The garage is actually underneath, which makes it three stories tall.  It will have three bedrooms, three full bathrooms, and an apartment bootlegged into the side of the garage.

It's going to be very expensive.  Go big or go home.  I just don't know what to say in my defense except that I've waited almost twelve years--Jeff and I have waited almost  twelve years, and I will be much much closer to 50 than 40 before I'll ever see it.

This is our dream.  This is where my creativity has been for the last few years.