I Have a Dream, Sort of

~~~~~

OK, this is maybe the last time I will say this (although - brace yourself - probably not), but I had the hardest time in the world today dragging myself to the computer. To this seat, right here, to type...

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. we had the day off of work, which I really don't think was MLK's point, achieving more leisure time - but you know what, not complaining. Now because of the occasion I really do wish I could report having done something super-productive and astounding with all of this extra time, but - as ever - I am afraid I am going to disappoint: I somehow managed to waste the entire day.

Where Martin Luther King strode bravely into hostile Southern towns, I shamelessly made my way over to the couch. Where he sought justice in a nation of divided souls, I tore through kitchen cabinets for something - anything - starchy to eat. By two o'clock, I'd consumed maybe three-and-a-half meals and had downed enough coffee to fill a Yugo. During all this I also became horribly mind-trapped by a Monster Quest marathon on the History Channel. The History Channel. Again, what this has to do with poor MLK I do now know. But, still, I could not stop watching. Finally, exhausted and slothy, I fell asleep for several hours. And this was in bed, mind you, not even on the couch.

Not exactly elevating the human race, me.

I hate days like this, ones that start off with promise, all of my ideas and intentions ahead of me, and yet - by mid-afternoon - you realize that the bloom is off the rose. It's 2:45, almost 3 o'clock, and you have barely sealed an envelope. You stand there wondering where the day went, and why you spent so much of it reorganizing your medicine cabinet. And that's when it happens: your panic-chakra starts freaking the fuck out. Bells and lights and sirens blare a warning that this day is but a tiny fractal of your entire life: time is passing, tires are spinning wildly, but how far have you gotten, really? When my thoughts start whipping around my head like this, like wild octopus parts, that's when I start reaching for my spiritual rope-ladder, my go-to guru: Oprah.

But it's still way too early - Oprah will not be making her appearance for another hour or so - so I eke out my time, rearranging drying dishes and telling the octopus to leave me alone. I gather up my blankets and my grilled cheese sandwich, set up my life raft on the daybed, and turn on the TV. This day, as the show begins, Oprah promises me (in a commanding voiceover) that she will be profiling people around country and their tales of struggle and triumph as a tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Right, Martin Luther King Day... I feel a slight twinge now, because I am afraid that that perhaps this show might try to be a little too important; I think today I was only looking for ordinary-meaningful... like a show about a dentist, say, who realizes the true meaning of life, but only after losing all his teeth in a batting cage accident. But after a brief flint-spark of doubt I reverse my vote. No, this is OK, this is perfect, I try to tell myself. I really need something perspectivey and purposeful right now anyway. Besides, I have my grilled cheese, I have my blankets. I have Oprah to guide me through (or distract me from) the this thick fog I am in. I couldn't be happier and more reassured. So, the show starts off fine, and she's hitting all the right notes. I say an inward wordless equivalent of You go, O, although admitting that now makes me feel kind of self-conscious and sad. So, anyway, I am watching the show. And then - and even now I don't know why - but things begin to turn. Something is wrong.

True, there were actual people on camera, with actual stories, and they talked and said important things about their lives, but it started to resemble one of those soups you taste and... you can never quite say what, but something is missing. Meanwhile you are still hungry and are left wondering when the main course will come. It reminds me of when you accept an early-evening invite to a friend's, thinking there will be dinner (and so you politely don't eat in advance), but then you get there and instantly see that there are only cheese and crackers, and a small dip resembling paper-mache paste, and in that moment you feel the same horror that Mia Farrow felt upon first seeing her devil-baby. Suddenly it's the Donner Party - but with light jazz - and you just know that you are going to starve to death.

But, despite this, while watching the show I did manage to experience the occasional actual pang of actual emotion. (Let's just forget any talk of tears; I did not even approach a fine mist.) And I really truly held on for as long as I could, trying to be generous to Oprah's intent, giving her the benefit of the doubt. But I think she finally lost me when she had all those children (of the requisite "every nation") start marching up the - well, it wasn't even a peak per se, it was more like a hump... marching up the meadowy hump of a rolling California nature-preserve, all the while reciting the "I Have a Dream" speech against a score of heavy church organ and gospel singing (which, normally I love). But, sadly, what should have been inspiring was in fact anti-inspiring: seeing all these kids, like bad actors forced to do a cold-read, wrestling with these beautiful lofty words when they still can't even write their own name. It was like watching a midget trying to lift a refrigerator. By this point I was squirming. The last straw finally arrived in the form of a helicopter-cam shot, lifting up above all the brightly colored Tide-commercial children, presumably to heaven.

OK, that's it, I'm out. I have dishes to stack.

Even with the lost dream of seeing a good Oprah show, I realized - as I lined up all the big mugs on one side and all the small ones on the other - that I still managed to come away from it with a tiny bit of perspective. (Mind you I can find perspective in a brick, but hey...) My life, compared to what African-Americans have had a history of going through?... I mean, come on. No contest... Even though I will complain about anything and everything until the end of days, I do actually realize that it's not all that hard to be a confused, procrastinating, thinning, 30-something, gay white male. OK, well maybe it is a little. I mean, I have other problems, too: teetering finances come to mind, as does my fear of writing, and getting on airplanes, and speaking in meetings, and feeling nervous and never good enough in just about every situation. Oh!, and saying "sorry"... I say that all the time. Why can't I stop?! It's like an addiction!...

...right... Back to other people's problems.

So anyway... I think that all of us - ok, well, some of us - share the same universal concerns. We all want to get over ourselves, and we all want our lives to matter. We want to figure out what we are doing, and where we should be going, and what's the shortest route to take to get there without having to use Mapquest, because that site is just a problem. But, unfortunately, there are a million tiny reasons why we don't do the things that we should, why we continue to waste one day after another, American Idol being one of them.

The one quote out of this whole Oprah mess that stuck with me was this... OK, actually, it wasn't Oprah who said it, it was Martin Luther King - and I wouldn't exactly call this a quote because we are after all relying on my memory here. But basically he kind of said something like this: "We should not wallow in our fears; we should instead always live and speak from a place of possibility. We should always be dreaming forward." Which, if you think about it, is just another way of saying, "get over yourself," with an added sprinkling of, "look outside your window, decide where you want to go, and - really - just put down the Cheetos and go there." Because you're just not going to get there any other way.

Well, I don't think I will be going on any glorious marches today - it's too late for that - but maybe I can at least put down the junkfood of my inner-bullshit and start stretching a little. Besides, I know I am not ready for The Big Walk - I am still way too whiny and resistant (just ask my workout partner). But that's OK, I'll just take a smallish trip tonight, over to Greg's house for dinner with friends, which is fine by me. Normally I love to tackle the big issues, but I have already spent too much time today, looking within, and have found myself to be not only lacking, but slacking. I am always saying I need more time alone, but - like the crazy-but-cute guy in Target who looks mesmerizing while still two departments away - getting to know yourself is never the magical pairing you dream it will be: it always ends up a lot more messy and court-order-y. So I am standing myself up (ha ha) and heading out the door, all Gloria Gaynor references aside.

One final observation in the Blog Entry That Will Not Die: seeing all of the old footage of Martin Luther King, it struck me that he was always surrounded by people - throngs and throngs of them. I think he had something there. I think this idea we all have of rugged individualism, of self-sufficiency, is a little bit of bullshit. As much as we hate to admit it, we always do best hanging onto the flotation-device of others. Life is just too crazy to fight the sharks alone. Plus, maybe you won't get picked off first.

So I'm done. Time to rejoin the flock. If I can't exemplify any other Martin Luther King qualities today (I guess slack and sloth don't count) then I will at least start with the simplest step, one that I can do. I will surround myself with others, the best defense against life's messiness and confusion.

So it's off to Greg's...

A little post-script: We ended up watching Showgirls. So much for "lofty."

~~~~~

The Terriers of Our Discontent

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Very recently, by way of my snappy new blog, I've shared my writing with a few people and they have come to the encouraging (but, frankly, rather burdensome) conclusion that I should continue. Although I felt instantly relieved and excited, I have also gone through waves of nervous chihuahua-shakings: if only I hadn't shared.

Not so long ago, there was still time to have escaped; I could have slinked away to some night courses at Hampshire College for Chinese paper-folding, or whatever. But I'm afraid - for me, at least - that it is too late. Thanks to my usual craziness, because I just had to, I have gone ahead and yapped and yammered to anyone with a set of ears about my wanting to write. People know this now, and I can sense them peering at me through their opera glasses, ahem!-ing in the dark, waiting for me to produce something more. If I don't continue, I will forever be viewed as The Little Train Who Couldn't. So now, for me, it's like the endless march of Napoleon's soldiers back from frozen Russia - the only thing to do is to keep moving forward, or die.

Ah, Boldness... sometimes I totally fucking hate you. Like the premise of a bad sitcom, it's as if the ambitious side of myself is some scrappy and spastic terrier I have been court-ordered to live with - one that will ruin any perfect day, charging off ahead of me, free of its leash, knocking over garbage cans and mauling postal workers. All I want is peace - some empty canvas on which to scrawl my laziness - and maybe a coffee from Starbucks (a large, please, none of this "venti" crap), but what I inevitably get is always something more to chase after, or to clean up.

And yet it was this same spazzy terrier who came to my rescue a few years ago, when I was trapped in the mine collapse of a bad job with nothing to hope for. I was living in a southern Connecticut city at the time, and every single thing about my existence just did not jibe with me. I hated the whole urban, we're-just-as-hip-as- New-York thing. I hated having my car stolen, or (for reasons I still don't understand) being called a white variation of the n-word while walking two blocks to the CVS to buy a candy bar. Ironically, I also hated how the city was gentrifying, brushing away all the scuffed and scruffy coffee shops to make way for the latest silk-scarf boutique (starting price: $100) or maybe yet another overpriced fusion restaurant. Fusion... please, let's just not.

Worse (with the admitted exception of a few good people), I was completely invisible at work. I mean like Sue-Reed-from-the- Fantastic-Four invisible. I sat through legions of meetings, unable to say anything that I was actually thinking... I guess now would be a good time to mention that I was working in a fancy real estate office, one that was largely responsible for all of the gentrification downtown. (So now you see.) I am sure that, had I even said half of what I was actually thinking at any given moment, I would have found myself two hours later shuttling my personal effects out to the car. (I can almost see the New Guy now, what with his spider plant and the cutesy picture of him and his girlfriend playing miniature golf, laughing uproariously at their shared ineptitude.) And yet - in small fits of optimism - I would still occasionally try to speak up at meetings, thinking I could productively contribute some small idea, thinking I could make a difference, thinking - like the spouse of an alcoholic - that if I cooked the steak just right that somehow the relationship would be okay.

Now, I know I am occasionally prone to exaggeration, but I swear to you that whenever I tried to say something in that meeting room, and I mean any time, people would instantly pretend to have auditory nerve damage, or to suddenly become fascinated with the dogwood outside the window. And then, after a tiny breath of a beat - just enough time for a small piece of my soul to flake off and die - they would all continue their conversation from the last thing that was said before I had spoken. I would sit there in that odd floating moment, wondering if I actually existed.

And then - without fail - five minutes later it would happen...

Someone would suddenly say the exact same thing that I had just said five minutes earlier. Every single time that this happened (and if memory serves, it was many) I would look helplessly around the room for the slightest microburst of acknowledgment - a reassuring nod, or a kittenish "hang in there" glance - but it never came. Besides, by then, tens of nanoseconds had passed and everyone else had moved on. They had other things to do, so busy were they congratulating the guy who had just presented his Big Idea, patting him on the back and high-fiving him and carrying him around the room, dumping the big orange bucket of Gatorade over him, in a manner of speaking.

I would sit there like Helen Keller at a poetry slam, wondering just what the hell it was about myself that was not telegraphing. Was I not using the English language correctly? Did I forget to use nouns? I would start to float away from the conversation then - like Leo DiCaprio in the cold north Atlantic letting go of that bobbling door at the end of Titanic. I would dissolve into the world of my notebook, drawing tiny jagged scribbles... all the while hoping they didn't notice that I was drawing tiny jagged scribbles. (God forbid, I know, but my activities might have been interpreted as not giving a shit.) I would draw a sphere, and then a cube, like I learned to do in high school. And then I would shade it, always on the left side. After a few moments I would look up, tuning back into the present, into the Echoing Canyon of Injustice, where the voices were still bouncing off the walls, saying the same thing over and over: Oh, my god, I have never - ever - in my entire life heard such a truly fantastic idea!

Right. Except that they did. Five minutes ago.

You know, for all their simple gingham innocence, the Amish are really advanced in one terrible way: they know best how to torture and kill a man. With the same elemental elegance they use to raise a barn, or to churn butter, the Amish have found that all you have to do to make a soul slowly twist and die is to excommunicate them, to let them flap soundlessly in the void. There is nothing more painful than feeling that you don't matter. And after four years of clinical trials, I am here to tell you that their method absolutely works. Is 100% effective.

. . .

Another fond sepia-toned memory of this time in my life revolved around producing roughly half a billion colorful and detailed reports for a very muckety-muck executive of this same muckety-muck company. This was a man who, under extreme duress (if they waterboarded him, say), might have been able to come up with my first name - and even then it would have been a coin-toss as to whether he actually got it right. Now mind you, this was after working for the guy for years. Passing by him in the hall, too, would leave you feeling no more reassured: as he approached, he would seize up like a man soaked in gasoline being forced to walk on hot coals. Now, I will never know for sure, but I think his secret fear was of having to say hello, of having to look you in the eye, of - egad! - having to acknowledge you as a human being. I think the contact would have ruined him, would have somehow destroyed that fragile, grumpy, baby-bird ecosystem that he had going for himself.

So this was the fun fella I spent lots of long days trying to please (why?!), producing these mammoth, but ultimately meaningless, reports. I won't get into the sad ins and outs of it, but these documents required barges of effort, and tons of photos of buildings were needed - photos that... well, guess who ended up taking them every time? It is much easier (and will help move the narrative along) if you just stop asking and accept the fact that it was always me because basically no one else in the office was going to do it, that's why. Now, no one ever quite said it, but I strongly got the impression that, for everyone else, it would be entirely beneath them to have to go out on the street and actually take pictures. It was grunt work. The one or two times I suggested to someone - as nicely as possible, mind you - that they might enjoy taking their own photos (which, after all, were for their own project and had nothing to do with me), that it was a beautiful day outside and it would make for a nice walk. Well... you would think I had asked them to go scrape barnacles off the side of a ship with a rusty tuna-can lid.

And so it was - many tearful times - that I would find myself on the streets in the dead of winter, camera poised, my fingers like hotdogs in dry ice, waiting for just the right pedestrian to wander into frame in front of one of our special buildings (preferably someone who telegraphed a jaunty propensity for spending). Sometimes I would literally be climbing onto a rooftop - in dress clothes - to get just the right shot of the city at dusk, or a particular building at a particular angle, or whatever. And then I would sprint back to the office - Jackie Joyner-Kersey-like - hoping these pictures were the ones that would please him, and work them into the report.

And yet, more often than I care to say, his assistant would briskly hand a draft page of the report back to me. Without fail, there would be a thick red line through the latest photo, with only the cryptic clue "No!" scribbled nearby. Then I would head out into the cold again, hoping that I would be more accurately psychic this time, never knowing what the first photo had either too much or not enough of. Now I know you are probably thinking that all I had to do was ask him, that I was making things harder for myself. But, trust me, this was not a guy you just popped in on, like asking a lady-friend out to lunch. His was the realm of dead stares and dismissive monosyllables, and you would often leave his office like the last survivor in a zombie movie, who finds that his best friend had just been turned: you would ease away from the scene, with halting backsteps, mentally calculating how close you would land to your all-terrain vehicle once you turned and ran, leaping through the plate glass window onto the street below.

. . .

So, anyway, that was just the photo portion of the report. Rest assured, there was a whole lot of other stultifying horribleness packed in there as well, all of which had to go through countless revisions and discussions - and more revisions. And then, at some point, finally - mercifully - it would all be done. It was over. I would sit there, giddily exhausted. I would hit "save" for the final time, and arrange a few stacks of colored post-its on my desk, making them look just so. And then, the same way every time, she would suddenly appear. The Big Guy's assistant would materialize in the darkened space of my doorway and before I can even say a word - like a cunning slave maiden - she would whisk the report away from me... like the baby Moses being run down to the river.

The next day I would arrive at work, all crises ended, and the silence would set in, like water seeping into the cracks of an abandoned foundation. Weeds would grow. Time would pass and life would go on, and I would wonder in small moments about my little report: where is he, how is he doing? I would hope he is happy, wherever he is. But word would never come. I knew I had created something really rather super-great (or, well, at least I think I had), but I would inevitably end up feeling as if I had painted a Picasso and then immediately fed it into a paper shredder. I just never heard anything about it, ever again.

One day, months after one of these phantom births, I was at my desk (which, I might mention, was more like a countertop in windowless supply room), feigning interest in something, anything, when all of a sudden there came a knock. I turned around to see a face I might have passed once or twice before in the hall - he was from the department downstairs, which might have been called Yet Another Department of All Things Boring, or somesuch - I was never good keeping track of all these corporate names and titles. So, anyway, this guy just stood there, staring at me, a little too intently for my taste. And then - right then and there - he just proceeded to open his mouth and say all of these magical words to me...

He said he wanted to tell me that they (whoever they were)... "they" had all been having a meeting, during which my report was presented. He asked, in a hushed and reverent tone, if it was actually truly me, the one who had created it, looking - but for the discount business suit - like one of those monks charged with finding the next Dalai Lama. I didn't know what to do. So I just sat there for the next five minutes as this guy positively beamed and just showered me with petals of praise.

Like I often am in this kind of scenario, I reacted inwardly with pigtailed giddiness and outwardly with just the flattest of stares. I have always had this problem: I don't know what to do with compliments. Most of the time, even when I am at my most calm and collected, I am positively dying for positive feedback of any kind, whatsoever. I am very much a tropical plant in this regard, requiring monsoons of kudos to stay healthy and blooming.

But I am also terrified of compliments. There was this horrible - really truly horrible - reality show a few years back now where they auditioned all these people for "talent" - and then - week after week - encouraged them through round after round of competitions. But what they forgot to tell these sad and defenseless people was that they were picking the worst singers, the worst dancers. It was only revealed at the end of the final competition that it had all been a "joke". This was on live TV, mind you, in front of millions of viewers. How these people did not commit suicide I will never know. Thankfully, the show only lasted one season. But I think it was the worst thing I have ever seen on TV, because it was my total personal nightmare.

And this is how I feel about compliments. I feel like I am always potentially on that TV show. That the walls will slide away, the stage lights will come up, and the cameras will zoom in towards me as the audience is revealed. Can you believe he believed it? they would holler as they elbowed one another, laughing.

Now, I know I can be ever so slightly mistrustful. Suffice it to say I am working on it.

So anyway The Guy From Downstairs, as quickly as he had appeared, was suddenly gone. I sat there in silence, holding his compliment in my lap like a dead fish. An odd sensation arose then as I realized that all of the work I had been doing for Mr. Muckety-muck, all of this time, was actually seeing the light of day somewhere - others were seeing it. All of my children were leading productive lives in faraway lands, maybe not the lives I would have chosen, but they were OK. And with this thought there suddenly erupted a radically unfamiliar feeling: the tiniest sense of pride, like a lemon seed sprouting up above the rim of its styrofoam cup.

. . .

So this was the place I was in at the time that my terrier began to stir, and to growl. Despite my one wonderful little movie moment, the growling lately was coming more and more. That scruffy guy of mine, he knew - better even than I - that this was not the best use of my existence, of my ticking time here on earth. Basically, I was killing myself for people who would not have shed a tear if I suddenly dropped dead - they would probably have just stepped over me on their way out to lunch... lunch at a fusion restaurant. I was in this very upscale company and yet, for all the hard work that I did, I still walked into that office every day feeling I was viewed no differently than an unwed mother plastic-spooning her Peanut Buster Parfait at the Dairy Queen. I suppose I could have just pulled the plug on my crappy PC, gathered up my up my plastic owl and my dinosaur poster, and walked out the door. But, really, Kids with paper routes probably had more money in the bank than I did back then (although not much has changed in that category - ha ha). I just didn't know what to do or where to go. Frankly - I was a frustrated mess. Had I written my story back then it would have been called, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Swings," and on the cover would have been the image of a parakeet, hanging from a noose.

But this is why Maya Angelou is on Oprah and I'm not.

But honestly, despite the tendency to break myself down like a used cardboard box, there really truly is always (in some great subterranean cistern) this bubblingly potent optimism that I have in reserve. It's not a sunny-Sunday buttercup-yellow form of hope - god knows I am only momentarily capable of that variety; it is much more like pewtery rainclouds that swell and then release, dousing the desert. The water, like a flash flood, wipes the landscape clean, but it also brings new life...

I knew I had to make a change, but I didn't know how. But my little guy had been keeping an eye out for me, scouting the trail on up ahead of me, sniffing in the dark, looking for the slightest whiff of air or oxygen, anything that would indicate finding my way back to the surface, back to a life that - frankly - I never quite had, but that - by this time - I sure as hell was ready to start living.

The light of the tunnel that he finally led me out of revealed another state. I mean literally another state: Massachusetts. A whole new place to live, and to explore, and a bazillion new and friendly people I would never have known, all moving through brightly-colored days, with none of the repressed anger or soullessness I was surrounded with in that bad land behind me. All of this new life in this new land was due to him. But I guess that it also helped, too, that I finally started turning down my inner iPod enough to be able to hear him. Like someone slowly waking in a burning house, his barks of alarm had been going off for a whole lot longer than I had actually been hearing. But thank god I finally did hear. I wouldn't be typing this if I didn't.

I didn't used to believe it, but that guy looks out for me, 24-7. Yet, even to this day, I still often don't listen, and he gets really quite angry, barking wildly, and I end up yelling at him, "What, goddamnit, WHAT?!!!" But most of time, we get along, and I have learned to trust him. Best of all, he has also learned over time to sniff out and growl ominously at anyone who appears on the Universal Registry of Bad Apples: anyone who maybe has a few too many ice cream scoops of The Crazy in them, or who appears friendly but is actually so invisibly negative that they slowly melt you, like a chocolate bunny in the microwave. My early-warning system, he spots all these problems for me from 20 miles away.

I am so glad that he woke me, a little over two years ago now. I would certainly have died back there, in that windowless office with the dripping ceiling tile. OK, I know: not died, per se... that's melodramatic. But, certainly, I would at least still be there withering. Looking back, it really was just in time, though. Because, you know, when it comes to your life, any amount of wasted time is a form of death - it is life that you are just never ever going to get back. So when I see others now, in similar circumstances of blandness or emotional devastation or just plain horribleness or whatever, I offer the simplest of advice. It is what has worked for me. Do what you have to do, I say. Life is short, I say. Listen to your inner terrier and just, please, wake the fuck up. He's barking for you; he wants you to live, I tell them, when nothing else will work.

Although I tend to leave the terrier part out.

~~~~~