From a Plane after PAX West 2017
(I've been looking cautiously back through older things I've written. I post this primarily because it shows how frozen I've been, within myself; some of the phrases and attempts at revelation here are shamefully similar to what I've written to myself in recent weeks. I've been fighting to get past self-devouring, trauma-frozen fear of hurting myself by speaking freely for well over a decade. I'm not going to stop fighting, though.)
“Some of these will not get bigger. Some of these kids will never grow up.” I pick cherry tomatoes from a garden and we choose not to wash them. It’s good to eat a little dirt. Some full, ripe, and red. Some smaller, but still red ripe. Higher up the vine, even smaller tomatoes, yellow and green and still trying their best.
Smoke coming down from the mountains. British Columbia ablaze, California smoldering, Texas draining. Fires on the west coast; floods around the world. Grown-up kids in cartoon costumes avoiding eye contact. Crying in front of a computer game about singing even though you aren’t the hero. It’s what you can do, so you do it.
The buses in Vancouver say, “SORRY NOT IN SERVICE”. In Athens, they don’t say SORRY. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen a bus apologize. If so, I couldn’t remember it. I was struck by decency.
Art on the walls, plants on the ceiling. Music as a matter of course. It can be so nice to be a human, in a safe place, surrounded by accumulated fragments of human kindness. I tried to be especially grateful, because my feet were dry, my legs were dry, and nothing needed to be dragged to the curb in a sopping broken heap.
The U.S. sweats through its shirt, uncomfortable from ambient hate. The countryside seethes shadows; we’ve been made to fear the forest, fear the darkness, fear the strange. We could look out for each other, but instead we do this. There is nothing in the woods except ourselves.
More than once in my life, I’ve felt like my own ghost. I sang in silly voices for my friends, and can’t shake the feeling that the one who truly loved to sing is gone. But it’s still me. Something erected barriers between me, walls of control and containment. I learned to be afraid of myself, or what I might be, or the ways I could explode. I soaked the wood with water so the bridge would never burn. I lost touch with myself. I lost trust in myself. I’m still just testing the footholds, seeing if the wood will bend. If the creaks have something dire to portend.
—
Jace and I traverse Seattle’s heart to find a place to see the end. Twenty-five years later cannot wait another day. A diner promised coffee and pie; we’ll have salads while we wait. Black and white zag electrics on the bathroom floors. But when it starts, we can’t hear Gordon clearly. That's funny. Enormous speakers for pop, timidly tiny for Twin Peaks. So we bail, hit Caffé Vita where there’s one tiny pie awaiting, and walk back to the apartment. We talk about celebrities we’ve met, and the trans-media feeling of a television figure sitting just there, in the bar. Like Panama City, but you can’t escape. We have to call Showtime to ask why we can’t log in; but as soon as we call, we can, and we laugh with the phone tree man, and someone in the background laughs, too.
Like this: I’ve tried to log in for 10 minutes, changed my password twice, and still I can’t connect. Finally we call.
“I’ve never called Showtime before, so let’s do it.”
“I didn’t even know you ~could~ call Showtime.”
We’re waiting, and I click the button again.
“Thanks for calling Showtime, how can I help you?”
And just as he says this, it works. I’m in.
“Well, I wasn’t able to connect for a while, but just as soon as you answered, I could! So I guess it’s all good!”
“Oh! Well, is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No, you’ve been great! You did great.”
He laughs, and so does someone else.
“Well, thanks for calling Showtime. Have a great evening.”
“You, too!”
And then we go through 2 hours of televisual torment exaltation, in the comfort of a strange apartment, coffee and a pastry, everything resolved and then unresolved, and then we lay on the floor and pace around the place moaning and saying, “God. What?! God.”
We’re happy to be there. Grateful for the strange. Glad we made it this far. Jace says, “I’m grateful to have lived during this period, so I could watch Twin Peaks more or less as it happened. If anything is remembered 500 years from now, I hope it’s this.”
I expect to be dead in a year or five, the way things are going. I don’t expect to be remembered widely or well. Jace says this is okay. That it’s liberating. I don’t know if I feel that way.
I used to want to make meaningful art. I guess I still do. But I want to focus on bringing joy and compassion into the world, in whatever ways I can, even though I’m not always good at it and I don’t always do it right.
—
Walking around PAX for a few days is enough to drive me into despair. Who are all these people? So many faces I’ll never see again. There are too many people to even begin to comprehend. Each of us is living out our tiny piece of human history, in the midst of the massiveness of our personal history. Two people I’ve never seen before take each other’s hands and smile. One man gently rubs the back of the man to his right as they walk past a towering screen showing bullet holes and carnage. Beautiful young people have transformed themselves into well-loved characters; one woman dressed as Mercy is told, “I’m shipping you so hard right now,” and Mercy laughs back, “I’m being shipped a lot today.” I can’t shake the feeling that we are engaged in a form of irresponsible excess. I’m here because friends are here; because I can help them a little; and because I work in this industry and ought to try and meet more people. But why do I work here? Why am I doing any of this? What year is it?
—
The sky is orange with smoke from the north. Does tree smoke turn things red? Was the moon red last night because it shone through the blood of evaporated trees?
—
I stopped being honest with myself. I stopped writing freely. I feared the voice of my father, the eyes of my mother. I was convinced that I was in error, and that the things I wanted were wrong, whatever they might be. I retreated inward, stopped sharing, stopped confessing, stopped communicating. I’ve lived for years in my own shadow. I have not followed my dreams; I have shaken them from my mind upon waking. I have been convinced that every moment mattered too much to take action. I have been convinced that vanishment would be better than punishment. I have learned to hate my own inclinations, because why are they always so wrong, why do the words come out wrong, why has my life come out wrong, why did my dreams die, why can’t I get it right?
Now, I don’t quite think that way. But nothing has quite come in to take its place. There’s still a gap between me and me. A shrinking gap, but one I contemplate before each leap.
I'm told to live in the moment. I don't really know which moment this is.
—
Waking my laptop from sleep. It rushes through messages from recent days; what did I miss? What did we say? Did you see this? Did you see this? Did you see this?
The untethered insecurities of a hundred men will kill us all.
—
I'm pretty sure there's a bone broken in my foot. I stumbled up the steps once, moving things into Jada's apartment, and kicked my left foot pretty hard. It's been just uncomfortable enough to make me suspect something is broken, but not bad enough to stop walking around. I don't want to go to a Canadian clinic, because I don't want international paperwork. I don't go to a Seattle clinic, because I don't want interstate paperwork. I wish I never had to go to the doctor, deal with the paperwork, the expense, the guilt. Getting x-rayed eases the mind one way or another, but being x-rayed when nothing's broken is a hundred-plus dollars down the drain for simple certainty, and I'm spending all my extra money to go on this trip in the first place. America is a fucking train wreck for us all to be afraid of what the doctor will cost.
So I hobbled for a bit, but that put strain on my knees, so I resumed walking more or less normally, and most of the time it doesn't hurt. I know from experience that I can have a cracked foot bone that mostly doesn't hurt; but is just uncomfortable. I don't want my foot to heal wrong, or to not heal at all, but uncertainty and expense keep me from investigating. Maybe it's just bruised. But it's almost definitely broken.
Most of my major injuries have been self-inflicted accidents. Head injuries, broken arms, broken toes. I move too quickly to be this fragile. I get more timid over time, as rushing forward has mostly just hurt me. I move more slowly, speak more slowly, hesitate and assess the safety of any action. Usually for long enough that the decision becomes irrelevant. The moment passes.
It's hard not to feel guilty about an accident. I mean, things are bound to happen. But there's a gnarled claw in my mind that snatches at how I could have foreseen this; if I'd just moved more slowly, or taken more breaks, or maybe just not taken this trip in the first place. What did I think was going to happen? How did I expect to plan a cross-country, cross-border trip with just a few days' notice and not get hurt somehow? How many more mistakes will I make? There's plenty of room for more, if I don't watch out. Even if I do.
—
I mostly feel like writing when I travel. Maybe I leave myself more time to think. And usually the first thing to come out is a kind of purge, where my worries and difficulties uncork and spill out. Maybe the reason I don't write most of the time is because this is what comes out. Maybe I don't listen to myself very carefully a lot of the time because this is what it sounds like in here.
Not all the time, though! It's a habit of mind that I want to break, the harboring of derelict ships and ghostly crews. This trip has been full of laughter, and friendship, and love. I am deeply grateful for the people I got to see, and to know better, and to meet for the first time. It is remarkable that people I met once, a year ago, seem so glad to see me again. How can this be? I so often feel like I deflect from the surfaces of strangers; maybe that's just because there are so many people and we aren't meant to be friends with all of them. But when we meet people who click, for whatever reason; if the context creates friendship, or eye contact conveys understanding, that's kind of it, isn't it?
But it's harder for me to write about those things. Especially publicly. I'm afraid of misrepresenting, or really of making some proclamation that someone else might take issue with. Friendship is private for me; but for some reason I fret publicly. I should maybe reverse that stance.
—
There's easily too much of everything.