Midnight Draft: A Long Unedited Screed

Saturday at home, approaching midnight, it feels heavenly to take the laptop to bed and watch a movie. But I haven't yet, I sit at my desk, another hour or two of work behind me, an entire day behind me further, mostly misspent on random small projects never completed. It's an odd sort of ennui. I'll break out of it in a minute.

Thursday was a social night. I was half and half about going at all, and decided to. First stop, the Crocker Art Museum, where a short film with Sunya in it was supposedly showing, but a friend met outside said it wasn't. Four of us (more or less) went to a friend's, picked up two more, eventually wound up in the laser-shot darkness of a downtown dance club. I feel increasingly out of place at these things, conscious that the people having the most fun are literally half my age. I have fun too, I like to dance, I love my friends, I'm surrounded by people who love me, and I especially love a good deep house DJ, but still, it's weird, I'm fifty seven, don't I have a book to write or something? We left after an hour or two for another friend's house, a young man who's a DJ among other things and inherited from his parents a small slightly decrepit house on a huge weedy lot where he can have parties all night and not really bother any neighbors much. Not being such a people person and, again, old, older than most policemen, I never truly relaxed, and when it was evident my co-conspirators weren't going to sleep, I put myself in the car for a nap. An hour of that, a 5am drive home sipping gas station coffee, took the kids to their various schools, and sat at my home desk working all day, by Friday night I was a little tired and just before a party was to start for a friend come to visit from Oregon, I fell asleep, and happily stayed asleep until sunrise.

Sunya was long gone by then. About the time the kids started school she went with a different friend to a different part of Oregon, awake throughout the drive talking business and noting the weird geography of the upper end of the state, where she remains until Monday, working yet more angles of her varied career. I puttered about essentially alone the entire day, a rainy day, hoping to organize my living space somehow and accomplishing nothing like that, overwhelmed with the sheer variety and volume of it all, and pondering the weird misanthropy that has so defined my life.

I've seen it more clearly lately. It seems very obvious and unfortunate, and I hope I see it only because in some significant way I'm leaving it -- leaving the shadowy grip of the trees and thus seeing the forest. I haven't put it together yet, but there are some elements.

When with other people or just another person, much of my consciousness is taken up with a vague confusion, a sense that I don't really know what's going on or all of what they mean to convey to me. It's rare that I'm confident to just be myself, without filters. I don't lack basic confidence in myself at all, I only lack confidence that I actually grasp the situation. It's difficult to explain but it ties to my long-held feeling that I don't really get what people are saying to me, that I can parse the words and comprehend the sentences but there is often a subtext my misunderstanding of which not infrequently manifests in a question or statement that completely misses the point. I've learned to be cautious, which often means I've learned to be silent.

I don't really know there's a subtext, but most of the time conversation and interaction feels awkward because I just know I'm not getting it all. People speak with two languages, the verbal and the non-verbal, and if you imagine someone who's ever so slightly autistic and doesn't fully comprehend the full spectrum of human communication, maybe you can guess what I feel like much of the time: Half blind, half deaf, and confounded as to what if anything to do about it.

No one today would guess at this, but I was awkward in my childhood, and by high school was accustomed to interacting only with people I was forced to or with the very, very few whom I allowed into my bubble. When I graduated there were two people I trusted. Everyone else was a stranger and for a year or two after high school, whenever I interacted with someone who was not one of those two, I was very conscious of it, and careful, and as much in avoidance of the situation as possible. I grew out of that in time, but meanwhile there was at least one significant effect, maybe many.

It's never been satisfactorily explained why I didn't go to college until my mid twenties. I rebelled, I had my own path, I wasn't inspired, these are all true. But mainly I remember just not knowing why people bothered. Lately I've speculated that this was an outcome of my high school career not including many conversations. I was out of the tribal loop. I had my best friend and I had my girlfriend. I talked to pretty much no one else, and thus never absorbed the tribal knowledge that led so many to continue on with their schooling. Instead, I just wanted to be a writer. Writers didn't have to go to school. As a writer I needed to interact with no one. As a writer I could claim to have an avocation and spend my time lost in fantasy. And so it was natural to pick as my main influences my favorite writers and to try and direct my life to be sort of like them. Howard and Lovecraft led dismal little lives and died young forty years earlier but that didn't matter, I wanted to be like them.

I grew out of all that, thank goodness, except the non-interactive tendencies remained, and even today, with all this partying, I still get that way. I'm a good faker, people think I'm cool, and by and large I think they don't get that I'm often just confused. I've learned to get along in this life and can navigate the channels set before me. I just have a hard time navigating the channels not set before me. Thus the social dependence, i.e. my social life mostly being a reflection of Sunya's, and also thus the lack of career leadership, my career mostly one of being good at the work that someone else has come up with. Leave me alone, as today, and I flounder.

Well, no, that's a stretch. Today's floundering was a reflection of how buried I am in the shit collected by myself and various dead family members that I can't just throw into a pile and burn. Maybe I should. I took a stack of records to a shop today, all musicals and soundtracks, and he gave me a dollar for two of them and didn't want the rest. The classical records are worthless too, all of them. Does it really have to go to the dump? No, they take up room in the garage, awaiting some art project -- alongside piles and collections of other objects, while countless cubic yards are still taken up by things yet to go through the time-consuming filtering processes that will lead to use / sell / discard.

All this while my writing soundtrack has been the Pandora stream seeded by Desert Dwellers and like most music, and all music that evokes sweet encounters with the romance of our dimly-lit desert city, it adds to the loneliness. I'm lonely a lot. Not just when my partner is away, but almost all of the time. I don't feel lonely when with someone whom I get and who gets me but that turns back to a sort of loneliness after some time has passed. It's evident that I need something in this life that I don't know how to get, and sometimes, more and more often, I feel as though I've passed the point of learning anything new, and that in this time of questioning and seeming finally to gain understanding, I'm only getting to know myself in time to know who I will be the remaining years of my life.

If that sounds depressing, pull up some Desert Dwellers, Eastern Sun, Kodomo, Bahramji, music of that ilk, and imagine yourself in a candle-lit pavilion, the sweet smell of the desert dust passing in a cool breeze, beautiful people entering and leaving your vision, meeting one another, sometimes meeting you, but always going away, while all possibilities for transformation remain remote, held off by something inside yourself you just can't identify.