The Blue Socks Chapter
given the stretch of history or given the stretch of so much more than history one begins to suspect that thousands or millions could have already noted this but we have scant record of it for the reasons not given above for the existence of so few books which is to say after some time or after some time after that or after that or after or at some time not specified and even at some time whose time has come once but then left again you will wake up. or at least some of you will some lucky number of you.
how simple it is to move from absolute disorder to being able to say something about it. or not simple but nearly impossible but achieved in the twinkling of an eye. metaphorically speaking.
right now I want eggs which has nothing to do with anything in particular but there was a time I remember wanting eggs or pancakes or syrup or coffee just before dawn as now I want them and that has everything to do with what I was just saying which was that appetite has a way of insisting on attention to its declared needs and wants. There are eggs across the street but even the diner with the do-it-yourself signage which surprised me when I got here because where I was from most things decorating storefronts were manufactured somehow even if they were one-offs and not nearly as many old faded coca cola or pepsi sponsored signs. when were those introduced into whatever catalog merchants consult when they need a sign?
when I was young, my father, who worked as an urban planning engineer, brought home a catalog of road signs. it had never occurred to me that anyone would publish such a catalog as it seemed to me that roadsigns fell out of heaven readymade or at least came from some sign shop in some prison somewhere and especially in that place and time I doubt that free competition in road signs had been going on for long but there it was and I wondered whether they would deliver to my house. not that I had enough money for a No Parking sign or a Stop sign or a street sign that said something like John Denver Avenue but I did want to know whether anyone at all could order from this catalog or if one had to have some sort of license to own road signs.
these were the real deal thick metal and reflective coating and everything. like those found in the bedrooms of a few lucky friends who either found them lying around with no one looking or dumped in their back yard or something. I do not know where they came from besides originating apparently from a catalog but I did want one.
speaking of appetite.
when I first arrived here in this city I felt acutely the need to progress as quickly as possible from being surrounded by strangers to being surrounded by familiars and so I did the only reasonable thing and fell in love with everyone.
this turned out to be unreasonable.
there is a story to all that but to tell it in its entirety would be boring as all get-out so allow me to say this and that is this and that is there is something luxurious about suicide if undertaken under cover of youth only half-spent and a future still foreclosed to everything that is not abandoned to the exuberance of haphazardous exuberance. or if not luxurious exactly then elaborate and complicated and seductive in ways only the most chaotic possibilities are seductive. or the way in which a dream with several pieces missing will not admit that those pieces are necessary components of the infrastructure of reality.
do you see what I mean?
it may be that I am not talking sense but that is not the same as saying nothing at all.
not that I recommend it. employing anything like romance in the service of self-obliteration, that is. it is just as likely as anything else that romance will split without warning and you will be left with suicide only which is bare and raw and wants to kill you without any sentiment whatever and to leave no residue capable of mourning itself which is what the romantic really wants: to be present at one’s own funeral so that finally one can grieve those crucial but absent or mangled introjected compassions that one needs in order to survive as one of the living.
as it is my introjects all shriek at me about how everything I do is the wrong thing no matter what I am doing or when I am doing it. and by that I do not mean that my superego militates against my aspirations and dreams oh no it is much more mundane than that it would rather complain that I have not brushed my teeth or that I should be cleaning something. anything. it does not matter what as long as I am cleaning and I suppose this might be a complication left over from minimum wage jobs where cleaning was the default activity even when the object of the job had nothing to do with cleaning but gods forbid you sit still and rest for even a moment after all they paid you hardly anything not to just stand there. not to mention the very complicated relationship I still have with that summer we had chores to complete every day while our parents were gone but instead my brother chose to coerce me into undressing etc for him. but that will be later by which I mean it is not yet time to go into all that.
when they say that suicide is no solution they may be both very wrong and very right to the extent that for one party it ends the possibility of any more possibility but whether that solves a given problem must surely be relative to a varying circumstance but also to a usually unpredictable number of other parties it leaves a gaping rip right through the middle of their houses which will not set right again until they too either succumb or succumb for they will succumb no matter how messily or neatly they manage to do it. what does it solve for them except possibly the answer to so how have you been. it might resolve a few things or make them clearer or it might not do that at all.
I have sat white-knuckled grasping at the seat of my chair to give my hands something at which to claw away without giving them myself at which to claw away which is what they thought they wanted but I knew their real desires better than they themselves knew them.
it is impossible to regret suicide.
that chair sits in the kitchen now I have a different chair in which I have sat unable to stand shivering and sweaty undergoing something they called detoxification but it is not toxins you sweat out but your body being manhandled by the ghosts of puritans trying to build a new kingdom in a curiously crowded land where they found nothing worth keeping in the condition in which they happened upon it. later I might say something about the way in which our bodies have evolved endogenous painkillers that keep us from suffering the very real agonies of being alive. should we choose to augment them someone somewhere will make it their business to see to it that we do not do that very often if ever again.
it is not clear to me what they hope to achieve thus.
I played my first game of spin the bottle at age 34. this is a game best played when you are in love with at least a few of the people playing the game and as I was in love with everyone in the room that simplified some small number of the multiple complications I was negotiating at the time. there was no way I was going home hungry but on the other hand in that life—the life where I was still looking for that same mother figure we have all been looking for except those looking for father figures or brother figures or sister figures or cousin figures or aunt or uncle figures or back yard swimming pool figures and all of them stand for the great welcome from planet earth that we are only able to receive when we are absolutely helpless in the arms of someone who has been here a little longer after that time we might wish to return to those arms but there is no going back to the psychosis of infancy and there is no going back to a time when a full stomach and a warm lap and an open face were all that we needed to thrive—in that life I dreamt it still possible to be that heartily and wholly welcomed.
I am told this is unrealistic. I can imagine why that might be, which is to say I can imagine that adults generally are not disposed to surrendering every scrap of their autonomy to another equally encumbered by encumbrances adult and the reason is both simple and complicated in that as infants our needs are complex and nuanced but their practical manifestations are limited in expression and apparent routes of fulfillment although they are not as simple as they might appear to, say, a stranger looking on who cannot recall what it was like to be small.
the twinkle of an eye for instance is for one who does not yet speak a kind of enigmatic signifier in that the glint of light itself only there for an instant can be read in so many different ways except that the reader in this case has no language with which to read and so the whole thing drops into obscurity but from that obscurity it will pester us without mercy and without resolution until we die.
the short of it all being that once language begins it is not possible to give it up completely and resubmerge oneself into the significant chaos we were born into. and so no matter how much she loved you whatever look she gave you was inescapably split into ordinary day-to-day patter on the one side and on the other into that part that would not be comprehended and which energized memories without words which is to say without definitive form other than the longing for that open face. which you would not have been able to see had she been able to look at you like that.
there was bourbon if I remember correctly freely flowing into the spin the bottle game. I recall a man in underwear. while we were still looking for more to drink dawn broke on uncertain feet and we squinted our way home eventually. there is this flowery smell here in the air just about year-round and between that and the fog and the drinks at 5am the world was a sweet blur. Wearing last night’s formal wear and not even paying attention to whether I should stand shamed before all the other sleepovers on their way back to their own rooms I thought to myself that adolescence might never end for me. I think it did but quickly abruptly and without ceremony of any sort and I still miss it even though it nearly killed me twice.
all those with whom I was in love and a few with whom I was not were somewhat mistaken about me at that point but as it has turned out I was also mistaken in what I thought I knew that they did not. and probably I still keep getting it wrong to the extent that no take gets it completely right but getting it right rather quickly has become irrelevant to the whole project of becoming me. to be slightly more concrete I am no longer convinced I was headed for manhood nor that I ever made it to manhood nor that I am going to nor that it waits for me at all discretely. that said sir has a better ring to it than does ma’am and I am not sure I can explain why.
the Blue Socks Chapter continues
in two weeks or maybe only one!
