#15 (inventory, death)
"opposing schools of thought"
I had taken way too many pills. It was last Thursday evening and my migraine had raged for hours with seemingly no abatement from anything I had procured over-the-counter or around-the-corner, if you know what I mean, but I kept taking more and more in hope of a cure until I found myself exhausted from an uncomfortable cocktail of pharmaceuticals and pain, my heart rattling quick and violent in my chest, my breathing frighteningly shallow. The dusk and the absence of artificial light painted everything around me in gold and sepia. Aside from the air conditioner, there was silence. It felt strange, an excruciating moment in time stalled out in an uncaring universe.
I was in bed, not much of a refuge but at that moment the only place I had any right to be. My entire world was pain, the kind that made me remember oh-so-very-fondly the days in my life before I arrived at this moment, regrets of how I took all that time for granted, the resolve of not wasting my time once this pain went away - that is - if it were to do so at all. I would have went to the hospital but I was no longer capable of performing the actions necessary to get help. I knew I had poisoned myself. In between sips of water I would vomit on the floor; in response my migraine would leech more pain into me, an imprint not just for my head but over most of my body.
I might be dying, I thought. There's an old saying about how there are "no atheists in the trenches," but I didn't even think about God. I didn't even realize it until days later, because usually when faced with the possibility of death I'll panic and end up abandoning my trademark stoicism, but it never even crossed my mind that time. I remember asking myself to find the strength to tough it out. But what if I don't, I remember thinking. What if by some tragic turn of events I buy the farm like Elvis Presley all alone in my small (but fashionable) apartment?
Would it have all been worth it?
Billions of those among us now will never stray very far from their home village during the course of their lives, not to mention the ones who came before us in multitudes too numerous to count. I have flown in the air and floated in the sea. I have hiked in the mountains and wandered in the desert, over plains and prairies, marveled at the pine forests of the North and watched my step in the swamps and bayous of the South. It's all been in, over and around the continent of North America (regretfully) but that alone probably makes me more well-traveled than quite likely 99.9% of all the people who ever lived. I'm talking about total, like ever since we figured out how to walk upright, through the Stone Age, the Dark Ages, the Age of Enlightenment, and so forth. In other words, I'm satisfied.
This may be laughable to many of you jet-setting people of today, going almost at whim to London or Sydney and even Tokyo, but I know for certain that I'm the only one out there who's ended up in Hootenanny Holler. Who knows where the Corn Palace is? I do. Perhaps that isn't much to brag about but what I'm trying to say is, it's all relative.
Remember this now, if you ever find yourself in a similar position to my own last Thursday, to remember the places you've been to and the things you did while there to stage your own distraction. It kinda worked. Have you ever closed your eyes and seen certain places, not just as images rushing through your mind's eye but so much more vivid, almost real, like you're actually there? Lying there in bed I became my very own Fisher-Price Viewfinder: the shoreline of one ocean to another, mountains, mesas. Straw-haired girls I used to know with uncanny internal compasses standing in front of waterfalls, ghost towns, truck stops, monuments of our country's now-tarnished glory. Young men who acted as Sancho Panza to my own Don Quixote, smiling their reluctant, wan smiles, many years before they found windmills of their own to charge at, the pictures go on and on and further onward still, ad nauseum, et alli, ex libris.
But yeah, my life. I can't sit here now and deny I've ever made mistakes. I've made thousands of mistakes.
There have been many greater men than I in general who have ruminated before on the benefits of making these mistakes far better than I ever could. "A man's errors are his portals of discovery," wrote James Joyce. That is perhaps the only sentence Joyce wrote that I think I could ever acquiesce to. "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes," adds Oscar Wilde, the only thing I ever read of his being The Importance of Being Earnest but I can safely say even that was better than anything James Joyce ever wrote. Closest to my heart is Einstein's take on things. He's credited as saying that "anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." Such a man he was, the genius to discover the inner workings of the entire universe yet humble enough to break things down into truths so simple and pure. We need more people like him running around. And less people like James Joyce.
My mistakes: they don't feel that important now. There's no evidence of them to be found or maybe I just choose not to see them. I haven't learned from all of them but I don't think I want to. Over the years I've discovered while there are many battles worth fighting there are many more to just walk away from. This could easily be attributed to cowardice, but I don't care. Cowards haven't stared the beast in the eye like my melodramatic interpretations and manic-depression have forced me to do for so many years. Unlike me they haven't played the whoever-flinches-first game with things unspeakable while sipping a cup of coffee at the same time. Really good coffee too I should add, like Cafe du Monde. Okay so that isn't that great of coffee.
A RECENT EXAMPLE
"If you don't want to be my friend anymore," wrote my friend, "at least have the spine to say so."
I can't remember exactly what I wrote in response (I could probably muck through Gmail's "trash" and find it but I don't see the point) but I remember thinking about what I was going to respond with for a long time, a very long time. I still wanted to be his friend but at once I felt too stubborn to want to make amends. He called me a "pseudo-intellectual", for crying out loud, and it kind of pissed me off, although I knew he had every right to say what he said. It was only fair. Emotions conflicted, ramming their heads together and running completely amock and in the end I almost didn't care what would happen just as long as the episode could just get over with.
The inevitable reply, finally, after so much deliberation. "You're right, I don't have the spine to say it. I don't think I want to live through what it would take to get that kind of spine."
It isn't that I'm trying to stir up the recent past, rehashing what (I hope) has since been resolved. Maybe I am a pseudo-intellectual but what does that even mean, anyway? Who doesn't act smarter than they actually are? Anyway, it's just that it would be very difficult to find anything more relevant concerning the culmination of my thirty years and the attitudes these years have nurtured than that last sentence to my friend. If you don't believe it, read it again. If I died last Thursday from ibuprofen poisoning the sentence is undeniably the most profound, most true thing I've ever communicated to anybody, ever, and requires absolutely no further explanation. It's another thing that didn't occur to me until some time later, lying around with the Pope of all migraines trying to find a place to rest my head that didn't make my neck hurt worse as a result making my head hurt that much more and there's only a finite amount of things a person can throw up. I guess apparently.
*****
The final answer would be yes...it was worth it. I never found out what all the names of the flowers and the trees around me were but nobody knows those things anymore. I had some pretty good Mexican food. I think I saw a UFO once. I made a lot of friends and fell in love and knew for at least a moment or two what everything seemed to be all about before what everything isn't took it all away from me again. From afar, a handful of people adored me without ever knowing me in person and only from my words (this was obviously before the quality of my journal took a nosedive) and I appreciated it all, even when it didn't look that way I knew the magic of it. Once, when I was young, I floated out of my body and looked down upon me sleeping in bed. And one time I fell out of a canoe.
If I were to give it a grade: A- It would have been a solid A except for evenings where I should be having the time of my life, jumping over cars on my dirt bike or sailing a pirate ship and I won't even talk about women. Instead I find myself anonymous in an anonymous town, wracked with pain, contemplating my legacy.
[mp3] camera obscura - country mile
5.49 mb