Brought DMT to the DMZ
My jacket has grown ratty.
One massive patch of leather has peeled away from the back, just above my right shoulder blade. I remember sitting on a subway train with N one morning and as I rose from my seat at our stop, hearing a tear that I didn't believe could possibly belong to me. Since then, bits and pieces of its leather have begun to flake off. The pockets have grown holes, which have then widened such that only flaps of fabric are left. A corresponding weathering-away blossoms over my left shoulder blade. Each sleeve's ends have shed some of their skin. The outside of my front pockets, which have for so long reflected the outline of their contents (whether cell phone, iPod, or something else pocket-sized), have taken on the complexion of a healing wound. The leather has become as a scab, only there is simply the breaking and none of the reforming that attends the healing process.
I loved that jacket and still do. And I've joked with KJ that once that next portion of my advance hits my bank account, I know to what it will go. This year's tax situation has doused that fire.
I'm writing right now in the living room of a friend's apartment in East Hollywood. This is the second time I've found myself on this coast in I think as many weeks and the last stretch of travel I hope to see for some time.
The Friday before last, I had the opportunity to visit Cambridge, Massachusetts and speak at Harvard Law School on the topic of mental illness, law school, and addiction. Not the traditional environment in which my "story is shared," but throwing caution to the wind (and perhaps tacitly committing to having left the legal profession behind quite definitively), the Q&A time I found especially edifying. The audience, largely female, held deep concerns and it seems as though they'd been holding them within themselves for quite some time. After the first question was asked, the floodgates were opened. Earlier that week, a Harvard Law Student, in his first year I believe, had passed--under circumstances it seems disrespectful to speculate--and I brought into the talk my own experience of losing a dear, dear friend to the abyss. The talk warmed me, in part because I felt, as I've been longing to feel of late, imbued with the notion that I was acting in concert with some greater purpose. Putting my skills, myself, to use in a particularly effective manner. The intersection of legal education in the United States, mental health, and death occupies territory whose discussion is pretty much verboten. It sits at the center of a fraught Venn Diagram. I have an audience for one of those topics, sometimes for two, but rare is the audience with which talk of all three at the same time can resonate.
The joy was short-lived, as a missed train ended up derailing plans with a beloved, plans whose derailment unearthed grievances and hurt that had only the shallowest of graves.
Before healing could run its course, I was off to Virginia for two days for work. I came back Tuesday night to tense conversation, then, Wednesday, spent the day traveling from New Haven to Los Angeles. The trip had been planned under vastly different circumstances. Initially, I was to come here to interview for a job in teaching. I'd advanced to that round where I would be called upon to teach a mock lesson. Earthquakes had so rocked the foundation of my situation that I was now coming for what seems increasingly like a vacation, is one in all but name, to visit a good friend from film school (at whose desk I currently sit) and perhaps reconnect with some other friends out west. A law school friend of mine who, in a fashion I found both courageous and heartening, left corporate law to follow her passion into animation. A young law student I'd befriended in Palestine who was now doing entertainment and music-related legal work. On the Dreamworks lot, I got to see where they keep the Emmys and the Annies and the SAG award and the Oscars. Got to stand not two feet from them. I'd have pressed my fingers to the glass but for the security guard sitting nearby. The Palestine friend and I caught up and discussed Syria over hookah at a favorite haunt of his in Culver City. On the way there, I saw my first in-person Supreme store, replete with youngsters lined up around the corner of the block. In the absence of a bus system with which I was familiar, Uber became the primary mode of transportation, one upside being that I saw much of the city I might otherwise not have, the other being that, due to the prevalence of Uber Pool, I found both drivers and fellow passengers here to be particularly chatty.
I've finally had the chance to meet my podcast buddy's dog, a feisty gray-and-black thing named Grayson. Very much an adolescent boy in its energy and need to be played with, the way it runs around with its sharp teeth showing, how it leaps at you and paws you uncaring of how its claws grip your skin or the fraying leather of your jacket. In my circle are people who genuinely love their pets. They do unfathomable things like let their dogs lick them on the mouth. They often match their animals for energy. They spend titanic amounts of money on them. Their spirits lift when in their pets' presence. Consistently. They take an inability to be a constant presence in their pet's life as an indictment on their humanity. It's all less alien to me now as it was before I'd known A and spent time in her menagerie, but I still can't bring myself to join their legion. I'm too poor, is my excuse. Or I can barely take care of myself, I tell them, it would be an irresponsibility of the highest order to put another living thing in my care. Plants suffer in my custody. It would ruin me spiritually and emotionally for my character defects to stand in the way of my nurturing a thing that could whine and vocalize the hurt it feels. It already does. Ruin me.
More days, I find flakes of the jacket on my carpet floor. One line runs like a knife scar along my left forearm where a backpack strap had perhaps once run its course.
For the past several hours, there's been a birthday party across the way in this same apartment complex. The front door has been open and children run along the walkway and Spanish machine-guns through the air. If I peek out from where I sit, I can see red and yellow and blue balloons. A TV blares but people are talking over it. The front gate has been left open.
Today (Saturday), my podcast buddy took me to Roscoe's where I had the Obama Special. Late last week, he'd taken me to In-N-Out. The two most important California staples, he'd told me. More important than the Hollywood sign that looms large over us.
Blasting the new Kendrick Lamar while cruising down Hollywood Blvd. An Uber ride with a 23-year-old black actor who'd just booked a commercial, conversation about Xavier Dolan and Damien Chazelle that fires him up enough to attack the script he's been working on with renewed vigor. Another Uber ride where I'm in the front and a girl in sweats is in the back on the phone for the entirety of the ride, recounting the epic adventure she endured the night before and that has led her to this moment where she's Uber-ing to where she'd parked her car at some point during the previous night's odyssey. Billboards everywhere, advertising Bosch and Veep and Guerrilla, all types of television. Not as many movies as I'd expect, but there's new a Alec Baldwin flick. And Adam Sandler, it looks like.
Travel occasionally aggravates certain impulses in me. The trip to VA, I found solace in spending time alone in an anonymous hotel room. Maybe part of that was me having work I needed to get done. Maybe part of that was fleeing personal tumult. And here in LA, I've gotten some things done, but not nearly enough, and the lassitude that pinions me back in CT, it seems, will follow me everywhere. The voyaging has been so hectic of late and the transit so pregnant with things getting done that time for reflection dwindles. When it does occur, and perspective inserts itself, epiphany body-slams you. It's tempting to read it all as travel wearing away at the leather to reveal the fabric beneath. I think that weathering began long ago. But perhaps it's simply moving into a new place where the lighting is different, angled such that you can see what has fallen off and what lies beneath.
It looked nice, an upgrade stylistically. It had joined my closet early in my sojourn in Paris. It was what I wore to both protests. It was what I wore to work at the AG's office when the weather called for it. It was what I wore to my first meeting with my publisher. I'd imagined I would wear it in author photos and when my picture was getting taken on panels. I imagined wearing it to fancy dinners or on outings throughout New England with KJ.
I forget myself in that jacket sometimes. For all my talk of being mindful of the evil that men do or are capable of, for all my talk about self-awareness with regards to a person's capacity for cruelty, blindness still strikes. It's not the bruising that startles so much as the recognized tendency. Noting the pattern. Seeing how little has changed in the face of malevolent impulses. The lighting is different here in LA. I know that the tearing sound comes from me.
Selfishness prompts me to read a cosmic balancing in all of this. The book stuff is beyond my wildest dreams, so something has to be going wrong after so much has gone right. Someone very dear to me sent me this essay a few days ago, someone I'd once been cruel to, and if there is silver lining here, if there is evidence of a star's persistence amidst the night's darkness, it's that wounds can be mended without the wounding negated. Scar tissue is different from skin. Sometimes stronger, sometimes more tender. A different set of clothes perhaps.
I don't know if I'm any closer to being a Pet Guy than I was when I started this entry, but I recognize the selfish utility in it. Well, selfish to a degree. Come home every day to a thing that will love you unconditionally. But that same thing will leave offal for you to clean up. It'll tear through valuable things and not understand that it has broken your heart. It will occasionally endanger itself by maybe running into traffic or getting into it with another animal or simply wandering out from under your eye. It will depend on you, and thus burden you. But it will love you, and as far as loving in return, you can't beat a pet for practice, it seems. And maybe leather jacket is a small sacrifice in the face of that.
One massive patch of leather has peeled away from the back, just above my right shoulder blade. I remember sitting on a subway train with N one morning and as I rose from my seat at our stop, hearing a tear that I didn't believe could possibly belong to me. Since then, bits and pieces of its leather have begun to flake off. The pockets have grown holes, which have then widened such that only flaps of fabric are left. A corresponding weathering-away blossoms over my left shoulder blade. Each sleeve's ends have shed some of their skin. The outside of my front pockets, which have for so long reflected the outline of their contents (whether cell phone, iPod, or something else pocket-sized), have taken on the complexion of a healing wound. The leather has become as a scab, only there is simply the breaking and none of the reforming that attends the healing process.
I loved that jacket and still do. And I've joked with KJ that once that next portion of my advance hits my bank account, I know to what it will go. This year's tax situation has doused that fire.
I'm writing right now in the living room of a friend's apartment in East Hollywood. This is the second time I've found myself on this coast in I think as many weeks and the last stretch of travel I hope to see for some time.
The Friday before last, I had the opportunity to visit Cambridge, Massachusetts and speak at Harvard Law School on the topic of mental illness, law school, and addiction. Not the traditional environment in which my "story is shared," but throwing caution to the wind (and perhaps tacitly committing to having left the legal profession behind quite definitively), the Q&A time I found especially edifying. The audience, largely female, held deep concerns and it seems as though they'd been holding them within themselves for quite some time. After the first question was asked, the floodgates were opened. Earlier that week, a Harvard Law Student, in his first year I believe, had passed--under circumstances it seems disrespectful to speculate--and I brought into the talk my own experience of losing a dear, dear friend to the abyss. The talk warmed me, in part because I felt, as I've been longing to feel of late, imbued with the notion that I was acting in concert with some greater purpose. Putting my skills, myself, to use in a particularly effective manner. The intersection of legal education in the United States, mental health, and death occupies territory whose discussion is pretty much verboten. It sits at the center of a fraught Venn Diagram. I have an audience for one of those topics, sometimes for two, but rare is the audience with which talk of all three at the same time can resonate.
The joy was short-lived, as a missed train ended up derailing plans with a beloved, plans whose derailment unearthed grievances and hurt that had only the shallowest of graves.
Before healing could run its course, I was off to Virginia for two days for work. I came back Tuesday night to tense conversation, then, Wednesday, spent the day traveling from New Haven to Los Angeles. The trip had been planned under vastly different circumstances. Initially, I was to come here to interview for a job in teaching. I'd advanced to that round where I would be called upon to teach a mock lesson. Earthquakes had so rocked the foundation of my situation that I was now coming for what seems increasingly like a vacation, is one in all but name, to visit a good friend from film school (at whose desk I currently sit) and perhaps reconnect with some other friends out west. A law school friend of mine who, in a fashion I found both courageous and heartening, left corporate law to follow her passion into animation. A young law student I'd befriended in Palestine who was now doing entertainment and music-related legal work. On the Dreamworks lot, I got to see where they keep the Emmys and the Annies and the SAG award and the Oscars. Got to stand not two feet from them. I'd have pressed my fingers to the glass but for the security guard sitting nearby. The Palestine friend and I caught up and discussed Syria over hookah at a favorite haunt of his in Culver City. On the way there, I saw my first in-person Supreme store, replete with youngsters lined up around the corner of the block. In the absence of a bus system with which I was familiar, Uber became the primary mode of transportation, one upside being that I saw much of the city I might otherwise not have, the other being that, due to the prevalence of Uber Pool, I found both drivers and fellow passengers here to be particularly chatty.
I've finally had the chance to meet my podcast buddy's dog, a feisty gray-and-black thing named Grayson. Very much an adolescent boy in its energy and need to be played with, the way it runs around with its sharp teeth showing, how it leaps at you and paws you uncaring of how its claws grip your skin or the fraying leather of your jacket. In my circle are people who genuinely love their pets. They do unfathomable things like let their dogs lick them on the mouth. They often match their animals for energy. They spend titanic amounts of money on them. Their spirits lift when in their pets' presence. Consistently. They take an inability to be a constant presence in their pet's life as an indictment on their humanity. It's all less alien to me now as it was before I'd known A and spent time in her menagerie, but I still can't bring myself to join their legion. I'm too poor, is my excuse. Or I can barely take care of myself, I tell them, it would be an irresponsibility of the highest order to put another living thing in my care. Plants suffer in my custody. It would ruin me spiritually and emotionally for my character defects to stand in the way of my nurturing a thing that could whine and vocalize the hurt it feels. It already does. Ruin me.
More days, I find flakes of the jacket on my carpet floor. One line runs like a knife scar along my left forearm where a backpack strap had perhaps once run its course.
For the past several hours, there's been a birthday party across the way in this same apartment complex. The front door has been open and children run along the walkway and Spanish machine-guns through the air. If I peek out from where I sit, I can see red and yellow and blue balloons. A TV blares but people are talking over it. The front gate has been left open.
Today (Saturday), my podcast buddy took me to Roscoe's where I had the Obama Special. Late last week, he'd taken me to In-N-Out. The two most important California staples, he'd told me. More important than the Hollywood sign that looms large over us.
Blasting the new Kendrick Lamar while cruising down Hollywood Blvd. An Uber ride with a 23-year-old black actor who'd just booked a commercial, conversation about Xavier Dolan and Damien Chazelle that fires him up enough to attack the script he's been working on with renewed vigor. Another Uber ride where I'm in the front and a girl in sweats is in the back on the phone for the entirety of the ride, recounting the epic adventure she endured the night before and that has led her to this moment where she's Uber-ing to where she'd parked her car at some point during the previous night's odyssey. Billboards everywhere, advertising Bosch and Veep and Guerrilla, all types of television. Not as many movies as I'd expect, but there's new a Alec Baldwin flick. And Adam Sandler, it looks like.
Travel occasionally aggravates certain impulses in me. The trip to VA, I found solace in spending time alone in an anonymous hotel room. Maybe part of that was me having work I needed to get done. Maybe part of that was fleeing personal tumult. And here in LA, I've gotten some things done, but not nearly enough, and the lassitude that pinions me back in CT, it seems, will follow me everywhere. The voyaging has been so hectic of late and the transit so pregnant with things getting done that time for reflection dwindles. When it does occur, and perspective inserts itself, epiphany body-slams you. It's tempting to read it all as travel wearing away at the leather to reveal the fabric beneath. I think that weathering began long ago. But perhaps it's simply moving into a new place where the lighting is different, angled such that you can see what has fallen off and what lies beneath.
It looked nice, an upgrade stylistically. It had joined my closet early in my sojourn in Paris. It was what I wore to both protests. It was what I wore to work at the AG's office when the weather called for it. It was what I wore to my first meeting with my publisher. I'd imagined I would wear it in author photos and when my picture was getting taken on panels. I imagined wearing it to fancy dinners or on outings throughout New England with KJ.
I forget myself in that jacket sometimes. For all my talk of being mindful of the evil that men do or are capable of, for all my talk about self-awareness with regards to a person's capacity for cruelty, blindness still strikes. It's not the bruising that startles so much as the recognized tendency. Noting the pattern. Seeing how little has changed in the face of malevolent impulses. The lighting is different here in LA. I know that the tearing sound comes from me.
Selfishness prompts me to read a cosmic balancing in all of this. The book stuff is beyond my wildest dreams, so something has to be going wrong after so much has gone right. Someone very dear to me sent me this essay a few days ago, someone I'd once been cruel to, and if there is silver lining here, if there is evidence of a star's persistence amidst the night's darkness, it's that wounds can be mended without the wounding negated. Scar tissue is different from skin. Sometimes stronger, sometimes more tender. A different set of clothes perhaps.
I don't know if I'm any closer to being a Pet Guy than I was when I started this entry, but I recognize the selfish utility in it. Well, selfish to a degree. Come home every day to a thing that will love you unconditionally. But that same thing will leave offal for you to clean up. It'll tear through valuable things and not understand that it has broken your heart. It will occasionally endanger itself by maybe running into traffic or getting into it with another animal or simply wandering out from under your eye. It will depend on you, and thus burden you. But it will love you, and as far as loving in return, you can't beat a pet for practice, it seems. And maybe leather jacket is a small sacrifice in the face of that.