[These are the thoughts running through my head tonight. Strange times but aren’t they all? Often I feel as if I’m standing on the edge of a deep, dark unknown, peering out into the void with my tiny consciousness and the built-up arsenal of my previous life experiences as weary guides attempting to point the way. Meditating on the trajectory of my life, the phases and changes, the pivotal moments, the big decisions, the plot twists, the shifting characters. It is not lost on me that I am beginning to stare down the barrel of middle age. I hope that my arc has yet to begin its descent. I hope that I am still rising. Youth is gone, been gone a while now, only my mind has taken a while to catch up. I’ve been trying to read Kerouac today. I find myself not able to stomach it. This is so strange for me because Jack Kerouac has long been one of my biggest literary heroes. After dropping out of college I immersed myself in the College of Beat. I read all the Jack I could get my hands on. At age 19 I worked at a book store for a short while. I built up their literature section with volumes of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Burroughs, Huncke. It was quite a selection there at the Waldenbooks in Columbiana Mall for a few months! These writers spoke to me on a deep and profound level at the time. Themes of alienation, fear, modern life, suburbs, cities, America, drugs, sex, the whole swirling world of counterculture thought spilling forth from the pages of their books. I wanted to be one of them. I read and read and read. I wrote only a little. I smoke a large amount of marijuana and drank an even greater amount of alcohol. After several years of bumming around and getting my “kicks” I got a wake-up call. The story of that wake-up call is beyond the scope of this little essay but I can say that I had a profound and moving spiritual experience high in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1993. It was then that I began wanting a home, needing a home, fantasizing, plotting, scheming and planning on how, what, when and where I would take the next step into adulthood. I was twenty years old.
I’m thirty-seven years old now. “Time and love have wounded me with their claws.” (Bob Dylan) I’ve lived a very full life, even at this age. Last night I finished reading You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe. I was deeply impressed with his writing and the scope of the work. I have known of Thomas Wolfe for a very long time, due in a large part to the fact that Kerouac idolized him. YCGHA was the first entire book of Wolfe I have read. I haven’t read Jack Kerouac in years, maybe even a decade. I looked on my shelf and found a copy of Lonesome Traveler by Kerouac and picked it up. I purchased the book on February 25, 2000 at Borders Bookstore on Montezuma Avenue in Santa Fe, NM at 3:55pm. I know this because the receipt is still in the book. So, anyway, I started reading it today. On the first attempt I got about 20 pages in. The second attempt I made it another 20 pages or so. I couldn’t get into it. I couldn’t relate anymore. The themes were fine; America, traveling, digging people on the road, adventure, drugs, booze, sex. That is all well and good with me. But the writing...God...the writing...I couldn’t stomach it. I feel like such a heel saying this but it was just horrible...painful to read, honestly. I believe that Kerouac had an amazing mind and a brilliant insight but I have to turn my back once and for all on his notion of spontaneous composition. I get it. Blow out the words like notes in jazz improvisation, let it drip and run with feeling and emotion and free yourself of all hang-ups. I get touched by the muse myself from time and time and just let it rip. But I think his experiences and ideas would have been better served by a little more restraint and clarity. But that’s just me, that’s the thirty-seven year-old me. I’ve lived now. I’ve been there. What was once a call to wander now just seems...I don’t know exactly...an excuse to be a fuck-up? That was too harsh but reading Lonesome Traveler earlier I couldn’t help but think just that.
But Kerouac wrote. He did it. And I have not written a single book so I’m not really in a place to judge him. Instead, I can look at myself and my own life’s arc and see the changes that have taken place in my mind and development from the simple fact of not enjoying the work anymore.
On another note, I’ve also been thinking a lot about the next chapter, of my life, I mean. Throughout my life I’ve been sensitive to moments where it seems clear that I am “rounding a corner”, moving into a new phase. In sobriety these moments have been amazingly punctuated with feeling and emotion. In the past, I softened the moments with smoke and booze. Now I just live through them, fully aware and alert as to what is going on around me and inside me. It’s been a thrilling and sometimes terrifying experience. This year has brought on a very heavy sense of mortality. My father has been very sick. My mother is hanging in there as best she can but mentally she is not completely there. She is fragile. To my complete surprise I’ve found myself being the person they can lean on. I can’t overstate how amazing this is for me. I feel truly blessed to be present during this time. I am overwhelmed with gratitude that I can somehow, in such small ways, show my love for them by the simplest of acts. Tonight I drove out to their house to scrub the garage floor for them. The beagles have reverted to peeing in the garage, the little bastards! My dad is thin and now wears a beard because his face is too sensitive to shave. I’ve never before seen my dad with a beard. He would shave to go out to the curb to fetch the mail I shit you not. My mother was sitting in the den and I was startled by her appearance. She had two black eyes..purple really...or “magenta” as she said. Over the weekend she had fallen in the yard while tending to her plants and landed face-first on the ground. Heart-breaking. I don’t know if I am prepared for this. But it doesn’t matter because it is happening and there is nothing I can do to stop the clicking of time. We trip blindly forward always. There’s no reprieve. We summon the courage and meet life head-on with what we’ve got. If anyone ever deserved love, care, compassion, tenderness and attentiveness from me it is my mom and dad. The things they’ve done for me in my life...I can’t even begin to recount them here.
Life seems to have 3 main components: work, family and romance. I don’t know where I heard that or if I made it up but it sounds good, it sounds about right. I’m sure there are other things but these 3 are pretty primal. Each of these have been completely insecure for me over this past year. Everything has been uncertain. It’s been wild. If you’re hitting on two of the three the one that’s not firing isn’t felt as badly because the other two are taking up the slack. When only one is hitting, you’re dragging. When all three are seized you’re pretty much fucked, dead-in-the-water, paralyzed. And that is exactly how I’ve been feeling over this past year. This time last year I fell in love with a woman, an amazing woman...came out of nowhere. It was hot and heavy and completely unexpected. I had also begun working with a woman in a loose partnership supplying nutritional meal plans to clients. I had a kitchen to work out of, family was good, romance was in the air. It was one of the brightest moments I’ve had in years...many years. Round about May-June everything fell apart...the romance, the nutrition business, my father’s health. Major crash back down to earth.
I’m not claiming to be a victim by any means. I hope that my words don’t paint that type of picture because that is not my intent. I’m just trying to make some sense out of the past year and the way that I’ve been feeling for many months. I’ve tried. I’ve really tried. In the summer I started working for myself, no start-up money or anything, no business plan, no....nothing! Just me and my knives, God and the kindness of strangers, friends and family to scoot me along in the right directions. I’ve tried to step up and be a good son. I honestly don’t know how well I’ve done. I always feel like I could be doing more but part of the frustration is the helplessness of it all. I can’t cure my dad’s cancer. I don’t have that power. I can’t make that woman love me and want to be with me. And as far as being in business for myself goes, well, that is a work in progress. I’m learning so much. I’m trying to make it work. So much of it is outside of my skill set. I’ve spent my entire career behind the swinging door of the kitchen. I’ve lead platoons and brigades of cooks into battle night after night, day after day, year after year. Someone (the hotel or restaurant owner) always footed the bill. All I had to do was show up and do my job: keep the food cost down, put out a quality product, manage the staff and keep labor costs under control. Those things I can do. Total comfort zone. Working for myself (or more specifically directly with the client) has been a sea change for me. Way out of my comfort zone...marketing, liquid capital, expenses...all of it...leaves me pretty bewildered. I didn’t go to business school. I have no business experience. I went to culinary school. I have culinary experience. So in many ways it’s like I’m starting all over again. To be honest, I can’t even believe I haven’t had a “regular” job in almost two years. It’s amazing to me. Ahhhhh, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a regular paycheck again! To be able to KNOW that my rent was going to be paid and the power was going to stay on. I’m not complaining, only explaining. Words on the screen and the catharsis begins.
This arc? It’s rising. The corner is turning. Life is happening and by the grace of God I’m present for it today. And for that I’m forever grateful. Just don’t make me read Jack Kerouac anymore, k?]
P.S. It’s 6am. I’m not checking for typos. MG
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