Cartridge

The only consolation I can derive from having finally finished Infinite Jest is knowing that I can just flip it back around and start all over again.

livejournal version

Today I was fact-checking a review of: A Widow’s Story: A Memoir by Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Ecco. 432 pages. $28.

It was incredibly depressing. Excerpted in the New Yorker, you can pretty much get the gist. Woman meets man, they share their lives for 47 uninterrupted years (though not to the extent you’d maybe imagine), he unexpectedly dies, she completely, totally, irreversibly falls apart:

“Mrs. Smith? Do you have someone to call?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like any assistance in calling?”

“No.”

These seem to be correct answers. It is not a correct answer to reply, “But I don’t want to call anyone. I want to go home now, and die.”

These thoughts rush through my head and I make no effort to deflect them, still less to examine them. It is strange to be assailed by rushing thoughts when I am moving and speaking so slowly–like one who has been hit over the head with a sledgehammer.

Already the time on Ray’s watch is 1:24 A.M.

Of course, reading this (and there’re about 300 pages more where this comes from), I feel immense sympathy for this person who’s lost the warm-blooded anchor she’s held since 1961, when she was a 22 year-old first-year graduate student at the University of Wisconsin (and soon-to-be mega-famous novelist). I have yet had no experience to approximate this loss. When I think of my parents dying…well, I just don’t. Even to say it feels like a kind of infernal invitation. I can go no further.

And yet. Last year my dad was very sick. Closer to that unnameable than I like to admit. He had a portion of his intestine removed, and when the two parts were reattached, they didn’t take. A tactless, bald douche of a surgeon went in and tried to clamp my father’s insides together with metallic fingers; it didn’t work. With my incontinent, semi-conscious father splayed out in front of me in a hospital “recovery room” antechamber, flanked by aunt and mother-ex-wife, this doctor-fucker mused in my mother’s general direction about my father’s potential anal-penetrative sexual predilections. Did he not see me, standing there hare-eyed and frozen in my bundles of winterwear and massless incomprehension? I had the strongest urge to laugh and vomit, simultaneously, like the painful sensation that precedes urinary release.

Later, when my father was settled and hazily conscious, mother, uncle and I went for a visit. I cannot describe the hospital pathos that entered my body and swam around my brain ’til dizzy. I have never more felt the primal urge for flight, like: this place is no good, full of beeping alarm mechanisms — see the pale, sickly versions of your origins: flee!

Instead, in front of an ash-faced father invaded by tubes and delusions, I felt water seep into my knees, stared woefully at my mother, communicating child-despair. My limbs trembled, I saw double. Sensing my helplessness through some as-yet-indefinable maternal magic, she brought me a chair and orange juice and somehow, miraculously, I managed not to faint.

Meanwhile, my father smacked his cotton-mouthy lips and presented a wholly foreign version of himself to me. (Have you ever seen someone defined by sobriety descend into druggy madness? No? Well, let’s just say it’s creepy.) Eventually he got better, but still I felt I’d seen something a bit too far, like a confession not meant for me. I saw into my own future — the future of illness and mortality and the loss of people who are not just others but sewn into my being in ways that don’t make sense even to me.

So. All of that to say that JCO’s memoir was moving and upsetting and absolutely compelling. I felt. Even just fact-check-skimming, it was crazy-depressing. I wanted to cry at points. Which would have been inappropriate.

But then there was also this other demonish feeling that crept along the sides of my consciousness as I was reading. This feeling of: you should be grateful, bitch. She met her life-partner at 22, and from that day on they never went a day without speaking. She had 47 years of this non-loneliness that is so incomprehensible to me I dare not even think of it as a possibility. So her husband died at 78? Long life. You had so many good years. Get over it.

But I can’t put my heart into it. The pain she describes — this “his skin is still warm but beginning to cool” — is so gut-wrenching as to be virulently empathogenic. I both envy and pity her. I want what she had, but not to lose it. Does that mean I’d take nothing, for the sake of preserving the fragile sense of emotional cohesion I maintain, mostly artificially? Are you kidding? Of course not. I’d take the 47-year-deferral of death any time. Every time.

return to innocence [part 1]

When I moved back to Portland in 2006, I had no idea what to do. I had a cohort and a place to live, but that was about it. The Portland house was set up even before I got there: five of my closest friends in a Craftsman on Clinton Street, on an incline, right off the bike route, the most attractive kind of traffic corridor. It was beyond irresistible. We called it The Stain. (My idea.)

I had just spent five months in Idaho, sleeping in the basement room of my mother’s house—my high school room, in fact, still painted an angsty adolescent crimson and brown—while working part-time at an independent movie theater, drinking too much, sucking up desert heat like a lizard, confused. I spent my off-days watching daytime TV, drinking Mom’s lukewarm coffee through Oprah, cracking my first beer at the earliest hint of Dr. Phil.

I spent the first few weeks in Portland porch-dwelling, swilling beer from the corner store across the street. Six-dollar six-packs of Anchor Steam, Rogue, Deschutes, it seems impossible now. In retrospect, Portland’s cheap, delicious beer didn’t do a whole lot for my long-term sense of well-being. But it felt so good at the time.

When I arrived it was still summer, and we would sit on the porch transitioning from caffeine to booze like the day was just one long beverage, waiting to be consumed. Pnut and I would lazily ogle the boys going by on their bikes. On particularly hot days, we’d prance around the front yard in makeshift underwear bathing suits, hosing ourselves off. The bike-boys must have thought we were putting on some kind of show for them, and to some extent we were. We even invented a playfully degrading term to describe them. Wieners. It was perfect. To us it meant hot, and to them it meant schlubby. They’d never know. I’d sit on the porch, drinking my coffee, and as an attractive boy rode by, slowing at the hilly exertion, I’d creak the screen open and shout inside to Pnut. “Wiener! Come look!” Thinking back on it, I realize that it was exactly this kind of hyper-ironic logic that explains my inability to get laid in Portland.

One morning I wandered pallid and under-functional to the Clinton Market for a restorative ginger ale, when I ran into a particularly insouciant college character headed to the same destination. In the face of my crust-eyed languor, he informed me that he had stopped drinking, by which he meant, he elaborated, that he was now drinking no more than five drinks at a time. (And thus was born The Greyscale.)

In any case, I didn’t have much saved up, so this so-called idyll didn’t last long. When I drove over from Boise, trailing my tinny little jalopy all the way along I-84 ’til my hands trembled at the road’s 80 mph measure, I brought along a “tip jar” full of cash saved. I think I managed to stow away about $200 that summer. I probably spent it the first week I was in Portland.

I started panicking even before I blew through my cash, applying to jobs far below my qualifications, unsure just what I was worth, underestimating as it turns out, but that didn’t matter much.

…

(to be cont’d. Fuck off, I’m tired.)

And then sometimes the roof caves in.

I WANT ON THE BUS

“And in Boise they cut through a funeral or wedding or something, so many dressed-up people in the sun gawking at Pranksters gathered at a fountain and all cutting up in the sunspots, and a kid—they have tootled his song, and he likes it, and he runs for the bus and they all pile on and pull out, just ahead of him, and he keeps running for the bus, and Kesey keeps slowing down and then pulling out just out of his reach, six or eight blocks this way, and then they speed up for good, and they can still see him floating away in the background, his legs still running, like a preview—
—allegory of life!—
—of the multitudes who very shortly will want to get on the bus…themselves…”

[Tom Wolfe — The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, p. 113]

Friday night

For God’s sake internets — DO SOMETHING.

artifact minus cathy

out to sea

You wake up. More precisely, you rouse. You have, maybe, still a burp or two left to expel from the bottle of wine you consumed the evening before, when you were lounging about your studio apartment alone, watching dubbed episodes of MacGyver and Friends. It was only at that late boozy point, while observing a man in a mullet deliver victims from impossible disasters from the comfort of your futon and a frozen quiche, that you let loose, laughing at the ridiculousness both of the television setup and your own personal misery. The truth is, you realize, pulling a thick white drape onto the provincial sidewalk just inches from your face, that you’re trapped here. Fuck.

And when you awake, your thoughts assemble one-by-one into a clanging dread you know only another day can diminish. From your loft bed at the top of a sturdy wooden staircase, you can see the beams of light shining in through the arched windows of your apartment. From this you discover it is daytime and that you are not where you want to be. The light rushes in to pounce on your night-time comfort, reminding you that you are stuck here for another day, that you must find a way to fill the time until you can permit yourself another bottle of wine.

You begin to cry. It is the kind of crying that belongs to tortures much worse than yours — the kind that invokes conveniently religious pleas to absolve you of whatever punishment you have incurred. It is a brand of intensely complete emotional divestment that later you will almost wish you could access, were it not for the fact that at the time you felt so bad you dared semi-truck trailers to run you over in the middle of the street.

When you have fulfilled your depressive moments, either through sobs or naps or both, you think of your ambitions, which at this point do not extend terribly far. You had planned to run this morning, but it turns out that you are slightly hungover, and that it is no longer morning. Perhaps you will venture out this afternoon in your unattractive sweatpants. But probably not. Not to mention, the only food you can afford today is a baguette and jam, with an afternoon snack of canned green beans. Not exactly an athlete’s breakfast.

You would also like to work on your “screenplay,” which these days consists of little more than extended descriptions of the sound the train makes as it passes almost directly next to your window several times a day, and the feeling you would have if you were on that train. You would also like to incorporate the homeless man you often see on your walks home along the tracks; the drunk one with the punched-in face that makes it look like he has no nose.

At night you will traverse your tiny, bougie town, with its rustic cobble stones and delightful quaintness. You will look enviously into bustling pubs containing the word Breizh in their title, and you will be picked up by unattractive Bordelais con-men named Pierre who woo all stragglers with the same quizzical line about tabacs and cigarettes. You will arrive at your new friends’ apartment on the other side of town, and you will be fed great bowls of soup and full cups of wine. You will laugh, and you will discuss the Franco dictatorship with Luisa, and Allison will listen with you, and you will all listen to Neutral Milk Hotel, and you will feel like maybe everything could be OK. Later in the night, the whole lot of you will go out and discover an abandoned dog, which you will name Pinche Cabron, and who you will be sad to discover actually has a caring (albeit homeless) owner. You will cover yourself in water-soluble paint, and when you wake up in the morning on the floor next to Allison’s bed, you will think: ‘I can do this.’

And then you will go home. You will eat a frozen quiche and drink a bottle of wine and sloppily prepare for the English courses you must teach the next day to 8 and 9 year-old children who refuse to learn the meaning of “Hello.” Your breasts will be squeezed by a precocious 9 year-old girl, thus providing the comic relief 6 months of tension have built up in you. You will, for reasons you can’t explain, tear up as you tell a version of the Thanksgiving story that would have made you vomit in every previous incarnation of yourself. You will, however, not throw up, wishing only that you could be there.

During these months, as I have outlined above, you will cry and cry and cry. You will wonder if it is possible to cry any more. You will not understand the depression that has descended upon you like an eternity of fog. You will, more than is entirely comfortable, think about the ethics of suicide (selfish v. selfless?). You will romanticize your previous life to the point that it will not be recognizable upon your return, thereby disappointing you.

But. You will make friends that you will keep for the rest of your life. People you would never have met under any other circumstances, and who — because of your shared misery (and, it must be said, frequent joys) — know more about your substance than most anyone else. You will see places that people have been talking about for thousands of years, and you will realize that what they failed to mention is that there are seriously a shitload of cats at the Coliseum. (I mean, like, thousands of cats.) You will drink real champagne with one of your best friends on New Year’s Eve on the balcony of an apartment in suburban Paris, and it will be more exciting than any party.  You will ride your bike along the cliffs of Brittany in the middle of a snowstorm in a flimsy oversized fleece jacket, and you will unhinge your jaw to laugh at the sea. You will walk the banks of Pont-Aven, making a brief foray into the Bois d’Amour to imagine just what Gauguin saw there. You will eat the most fucking delicious butter biscuits you have ever had in your whole goddamn life.

And when you come back, two months earlier than expected and severely damaged, you will yet again proclaim the experience a once-in-a-lifetime adventure that you wouldn’t give up for the world.

schizophrenic

http://liebenthal.blogspot.com/2010/09/last-week-i-held-wake-for-summer.html

Cathy Minus Cathy: my tribute to Cathy

ACK!

"Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate!"

"The bathroom scale is an irrelevant, inaccurate, insulting, confidence-crushing, personality-ruining device!"