One of the wildest aspects of becoming an adult is realizing that nothing is anything.
This, I think, could be freeing. It could be freeing to note that nothing matters and one can truly freak what they feel in this one small lifetime. But as a kid…as a kid and as a teen….I honestly thought at some time I would feel that I had become some thing. I thought that my existence would have some sort of very defined meaning. I had a grandmother who saw I was a writer before I could properly spell. I really thought at some point that would become meaningful in a wider sense.
I think it’s true that the writing both does and does not matter. In the scheme of things, the writing will be read by some but also in the scheme of things, the writing will be read by very few. I am not downplaying my accomplishments, I am simply aware of reality on a global scale. We are small, small, small. What is meaningful now will fade to obscurity later. I suppose it is also true that what is obscure now, in hindsight, may surprise the masses.
Last Wednesday my girlfriend inquired about my newsletter. “What do you mean?” I said. “It was supposed to come”, she responded. My newsletter comes out every other week. I was so sure it’d come out the week before, but no— it had not. I cannot tell you how much it burned to know that not only did I not keep a commitment I’d made to myself and others, but also I didn’t even notice.
My self-esteem often hinges on these things. The act of writing, the act of sending. Do you have a thing like this? A thing that feels so much like your job on earth that to fail to do it feels like a failure to thrive? My jaw hung open when I learned of the conundrum of my missing newsletter. Fuck, I thought. I really have to get my shit together.
As I said, life is small. Life is small and I don’t know what to do so what I do is take a shower. I used to think taking a shower washed away some repulsive something, that I could step out of the shower and be reborn. Now, I step out of the shower and I am the same, but still I am clean. My dog has been biting more, but now I see that she is asleep wrapped in a blanket with one tiny paw by her bearded jaw.
We are in the mud together, my dog and I. When she bites me, she is often curling into me, nuzzling her soft head into the palm of my hand. Something switches for her and she is born anew, she becomes an entirely different creature with a wild gaping maw. She will go nuzzle, nuzzle, nuzzle, BITE! It doesn’t hurt, not really anyway— but often I cry. It roughs up my feelings, though I know it is not personal. She bites me because she is nuts, and she is nuts because she has something going on in her brain that causes her to have seizures. It has nothing to do with me. I tell myself I can be sure that she loves me because she still wakes up every morning and bounds her face into my chest as if she’s discovered the freshest shiniest treasure she could possibly find.
I still wish she wouldn’t bite me, though. Especially on the days when I have so many feelings roiling in my own body that they threaten to overflow.
This past weekend I went to West Virginia, and the weekend before that I went to West Virginia, too. My girlfriend has a special connection to the land there, and to be honest, I didn’t know much about it. I wanted to see it anyway. I am such a west coast guy. I have basically never been anywhere and I want to see it all.
I could cry thinking about my girlfriend and I and our dogs in West Virginia. We hiked in places that looked like nothing I’d ever seen before— red, orange, yellow leaves and giant ferns and giant boulders to climb on. Both weekends it rained, the first one requiring us to bust ass to get down a three mile road back to the car while thunder and lightning cracked all around us. My nine pound dog quit halfway on that one, so I carried her. When we got back to the truck we looked like four drowned rats with four big smiles. We drove down the mountain on a bumpy steep road for an hour, and then we ate pesto pasta and kale salad in a fluffy bed while watching bad TV.
I’d marry that memory if I could. It was perfect.
Wow I relate to using showers to cope so hard. I don’t think I’d realized I did it until I read this here.