a year or so or more ago i was traveling the frozen roads of late winter vermont and listening to these good songs and i miss the sense of adventure that was.
sew your fortunes on a string
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nightmares
a dream i had:
my wife and i were in bed getting ready to go to sleep and we heard water running and i told her, you better go check your bathroom and she went to go in but the door was jammed shut and she pushed and pushed and then opened it and screamed and started backpeddling and there was a lightning bolt and a giant black grizzly bear came charging out and into the bedroom and then i woke up.
inefficacious living
i’ve been seeing and reading alot recently about “efficient living”. about “Getting Things Done”, treating your body like a temple, sleeping enough every day, eating right, etc, etc. as if there is some sort of holy grail of self-discipline that yields success, happiness, and infinite spiritual contentment.
i’m not entirely so sure about all this.
so let me postulate, instead, the opposite: there is no such thing as efficient living.
it is an illusion, a myth grasped desperately as we drown, a byproduct of myopic fantasy. what i read as “living efficiently” means living selfishly, and therefore alone. to me it means not making other people’s schedules part of your own. to me it means having no other responsibilities beyond yourself and your work. it means setting love, friends, and family aside. it means a dullness.
or maybe it just means i don’t get it or haven’t figured it out yet.
and the tech world puts such a premium on the rockstars and ninjas who burn their lives up in a magnesium flash of python code, mountain climbing, and locovorian vegetarianism, and at what cost? mighten we not benefit from the insights and creativity inherent in those founders, developers, and designers, that seek the broad and slightly indirect path?
funny too that this is also in such opposition to the rest of the creative endeavors out there – in playwriting, the premium is on self destruction, as it is in painting, music, etc. is the tech world limiting its creative potential in the service of a false idea? why do i sound like carrie from sex in the city? omfg.
and isn’t this a wee bit of a self serving theory of mine? and yes, good sir, gentle madame, it is indeed; i am a poster child of inefficaciousness. let me not be the one to cast the first stone, and for those who have found sustainable, organized, efficient self-regulation, kudos and congratulations and i admit to no small degree of jealousy.
and while, yes, of course, i would like to be more focused and directed, more zenly tasked, as it were, i do still take a certain relish in stepping over legos and into playdough, in answering phone calls at the farmers market or bathside as my daughter plays in her bubbles. i enjoy the simultaneous juggle of the eggplant parmesan, the recounting by my wife of her most recent humorous episode of life, the soft incoming ping of email in the background, the swill of the 2nd martini through the exhaustion of the previous night’s 11pm conference call between india, dc, vancouver, and my own small little hamlet of vermont. maybe it’s just that i have HDAD or ADD or whatever it is they call it these days. or maybe there really is something about the inherent disorder of it all that just feels alive?
or maybe it’s just that things are complicated, and i just enjoy it that way. i know you know it’s coming, but here it is anyway: i think it’s time for a little avril up in here; as always, she gets it right.
Thoughts From The North, Pt. 2
Mike, with his beard, he saw in me a friend and sat next to me. Be careful, think about it, he said. He was addicted to crack and was divorced because of it. Two years in rehab, mostly it was because of Bennington and the emptiness that is here. I bought him a prairie fire. Two, actually.
And then at Allegro, the snowboarding waitress, 25, thinking about kids, her boyfriend’s older, 31 or something, so maybe they are ready. She is a wanderer, sort of tired of Bennington after 6 months; her lease is for a year. She was interested in me, surprised by my 4 martini’s and 3 glasses of wine. She offered to drive me home, but I told her I was walking. Instead, I went up and met Mike and the rest of the kids for another round, drinking red bull vodka’s and playing with pitbulls. I stumbled home at midnight. Got to the room and barfed alone. When I woke up I was broken and the room smelled sad and I wanted to leave as fast as I could. I missed my friends from the last night and regretted that last shot.
I recovered, I guess, eventually. Around 2 in the afternoon. Burlington, so much happier. You can feel the difference.
That day, I89, eastbound outside of Barre, a milk tanker crashed and exploded. The silver steel was black and twisted, shredded and against the embankment as I drove past it, going the other way. A crane was already there, and trucks waited to patch the melted highway. Al was quick to speculate driver error. Al drove a pickup and knew about these things. They usually happened for understandable reasons, like black ice. But this morning? It was too warm for black ice and two people were dead.
Thoughts from the North
There’s a sadness here, to this place. Empty, low hanging silvered clouds clasping the peaks; the town’s closed. Lynn is trying to rent her house for 1300; her mortgage is 2500. She’s underwater, a teacher, and old. This is a state of dreams, she said. She knew she wanted to live here when she was 6 and moved here shortly after that. Things turned out a little different than she had hoped.
The college up on the hill is dark and has been since mid-december, the empty dorms standing cold and waiting for the 19 year olds to come back and spend. Instead there are deer, in the snow, quiet.
On a bridge in Rutland, over the train tracks, a long disused smoke stack stands against the sky, the train car wheels evaporating into rust. On Snow Road, over Rupert Mountain in the middle of Janurary, nothing running but the sapping lines and my engine, in the sun setting winds. The power is intermittent and there is a prayerfulness that meets me wherever I go: spend, spend they say to me. My money comes from the city, where it is made with seeming magic.
A hooded man walks down Main Street. The traffic lights needlessly flashing red.
In an anonymous ubiquitious field of snow a winterized horse stands and stares at a motionless rooster. Their wordless exchange a matter of monumentally quiet import.
Lynn reminded me that everything is expensive and there are no jobs. I nodded shamefully. Everyone here is a teacher or a bartender, a baker or an artist. Bookstores with no readers… I wonder if they know the earnings they strive for would destroy their reasons for living here. This is a state entwined in a catch 22, a place destined to service the engines of economy in the cities. Names, like “Boston” and “New York”, are pronounced with reverance and awe and longing disdain, the same tones we use to speak of the beautiful women and men who don’t know our name.
Driving today, through the roads, I realized that I love it, in part, because I can imagine it as I would like it to be. Passing past a picture perfect farm – the images left in my mind have no reality. Only the poetry of simplicity, beauty, unreality distilled. The completeness of the disconnected.
Here and tonight, I am happy, at rest, lonely, full of ideas, cold, young, and jaded.