Ah, I keep trying to forge ahead... with whatever this is, long neglected, with the fairly secret song of the day blog, long neglected, with the phree musique blog, which is pushing a month past getting back online from its summer vacation...
"I'm tired of waiting for the moment that never comes
while I watch you making millionaires of bums..."
Why write? I have my own reasons to write, right now, and I could sketch them out fairly easily, comprehensibly. I don't really want to, though. Because it crosses into the personal in a way I don't really feel like exposing, basically. Stay cryptic, stay safe, it all looks artier that way anyway, right?
I used to keep a journal. I guess I still keep it, in the sense that I still possess all of the books, thousands of all but illegible (to anyone but, mostly, myself - even I am baffled by my handwriting at times) but I don't write it anymore, haven't for a long, long time. Between late high school and early post college I wrote almost every day. I think I've gone over this before. A lot of recent postings are enigmatic extractions of those pages.
This is about the day I died.
June 24, 1994
"I've been half avoiding this for hours now, ever since I got the half assed notion (of the variety I'm prone to and find myself helpless to shake) that it was time to write the "big one," the mind numbingly accurate entry that would blitzkrieg the past seventeen years and mark the End of an Era.
Obviously that kind of thinking is setting yourself up for a fall: and I don't relish the thought of sitting down to that kind of task with the iron cast knowledge that within twenty lines I would have hopelessly mired myself in a sea of meaningless digressions.
Still, life is composed of these kinds of foul paradoxes: the fact that concentrating on the goal fouls the journey that allows you to attain it (the pustulent cloud hanging over this insane issue of my "purpose" in life), the problem of justifying gracious mercy with the need for justice (the final issue that has probably forever screwed my chances of finding a place in any acceptable religious group), relativism versus objectivity, the necessity of pain for the existence of pleasure... The list goes on and on..."
But not so much as I do. Honestly, I came here with the idea of transcribing the whole of that entry... but my god. It goes on. And on. And ON. Nineteen pages. Of course, this was during the brief hiatus I spent at my parents' (then) home in Montevideo, MN between college ending and my entry into "real life" that began with the move to the city I've lived in ever since, Minneapolis MN. I didn't have anything better to do with my time and I could sleep as long as I wanted to. Now there is this small human being slumbering peacefully above and over my left shoulder, who likes to get up around six thirty, seven, and the days of my staying up all hours and dragging my ass out of bed late late in the morning are done. I've got no problem with that. But though I question the wisdom of those long ago writing jags, and despite the relative surfeit of freedom that allowed them, I can't help admire a certain tenaciousness in tackling this sort of ill defined attempt at completion at all. Cockroaches and beetles are discussed, the break up of a relationship, college, many visitations and commentations of journal entries from the four years prior, and a long, long commentary on an episode of the British sci-fi comedy serial Red Dwarf called "Thanks for the Memory" (which I incorrectly remember at the time as "In Memory of Lise Campbell" - in which the crew of the titular space craft discover that they have lost a significant period of their immediate past memories. They follow a signal trace from their ship's black box to an alien moon where they find a grave with a marker stating "To the memory of Lise Yates," who turns out to be a woman one of the crew members dated when he lived on earth (which, given the premise of the show, was 3 million years in the past). It's not actually that important.
"In the end, the lost day(s) plot in science fiction has always gotten me, I don't know why. It has the capacity to give me a serious case of the willies. There is something about that scene when they come upon that inexplicable (at that point) tomb, commemorating a girl from Lister's memory, a grave containing memories. Something else, a scene after Rimmer has realized his memory is false - out on some kind of observation deck... but that eludes my memory
Maybe it's nothing. Anyway: so much for rambling preamble."
I watched the episode several times since, in this wondrous era where the most obscure rental DVDs are mailed to me upon request. But I could not pin down that feeling, whatever it was I saw and wrote about and then wrote about writing about. You can replay the tape, but you can never recapture the moments. When I first saw that, oh, yes, I remember those times very well. It was the summer after my senior year of high school, and I was on fire. I'd earned a full ride to college and I believed in my heart that I would find all the answers there. Red Dwarf was something I happened upon, dwelling in merry obscurity (from my tiny town hick perspective, I know now it was well known and had quite a following, but in little Montevideo it was the sort of completely obscure thing I delighted in) on late night television, a weakly received signal of the cities' public television station (good old channel 2), gift of the ridiculous complicated aeriel on top of the house you almost never see any more in the era of cable and sattelite.
And I am here, now, thinking, oh man, here I go again.
But no, no, I can wrap this up right quick, there will be no nineteen pages here. The briefest sketch. I know that I am doing the same thing here, now, in this brave new century that seems to me to be going so badly wrong, but is probably not that much worse (or better) than the last, as I did some twelve years ago. I called it a "my character assassination and the final suicide of self-concept," I was writing under the influence of the introduction to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 in which he engages in a similar sort of announcement of the end of his "first life..." like everything, that reads much differently today, now doesn't it?
Just this: the college thing didn't really work out for me and I was trying to deal with it.
All I was doing in that long spool of handwritten text was searching for a moment, and that is all I am doing today. I think I understand it a bit better now, but I don't know that the impulse is any less misbegotten.
"There is not much else to say.
Except this:
There is no use trying to describe the eerie sensation of coming upon that shallow grave where you tried for once and all to bury your past, your memories. At best, you may end up by discovering that nothing is ever really lost... and that the pieces were always falling into place, if only you knew. But that is another, longer story. The task for the moment, as always, is to close the box and get on with the first day of your New Life - which is every day."
So let it be written, so let it be done.
JMH #2, R.I.P. 6/24/06
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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