Posts Tagged ‘death’
Tête-à-Tet, And Various Other Miscellanea
I’ve now been abroad longer than I ever have before, by about two weeks and a few days. No homesickness, per se — the opposite, in fact — although I do miss friends and family, naturally, and I would happily murder a random stranger if I thought it would make a proper burrito spontaneously spawn in my general vicinity. I’ve finished the CELTA successfully, and have partied like a rock star (which is easy to do in Sai Gon) this past week with my fellow CELToids and Tet revelers, both foreign and local. As I write this Tet, as the Chinese or lunar new year is called here in Viet Nam, has more or less wound down — businesses are reopening and the streets, while still not as crowded as normal, are getting busier. And I’ll probably spend a nice, quiet Saturday night tonight reading a book (actually it is now officially over, and I did spend Saturday night at “home” reading).
This is going to be a long, meandering post, as there is much I wish to reflect upon for my own edification. Between meeting so many different people, the borderline insane intensity of the CELTA and the borderline insane intensity of the ensuing celebratory debauchery – I’m too old to be watching the sun come up several days in a row, dammit – I feel the need to unburden my mind and make some sort of linear sense of it all, if that’s possible. I’ve crammed more living into the last six weeks than I’m accustomed to – and I think that’s a good thing (although I probably overdid the debauchery a bit, but what the hell) – but now I need to step back and ponder things.
Plus it’s a good excuse to loaf all afternoon in a café, not that one needs an excuse to do that in Viet Nam, as café culture is flourishing here (thank you French colonialism) even as it fades away elsewhere — kind of ironic, that. In fact, loafing in a café is what I was doing last weekend in the picture above, recovering one steamy afternoon from the second of several post-CELTA all-night revels. What you see on the left is the sublime taste of nirvana that is Vietnamese iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk. When it is served traditionally like this, you have to wait until the coffee stops dripping from the grounds suspended above the glass, and the anticipation is sweet, sweet torture.
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The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters
It’s funny, but not in an amusing way, but rather in an odd, “isn’t-it-strange” kind of way, how sometimes it all comes flooding back, the ghosts and the memories they bear. A month or two can go by, and there are no dreams, even though it comes up in casual conversation, that death of a loved one.
But they are never far away though. They are always there, lurking just below the surface, that frail veneer of normalcy you present to the world. You know this, because you’ve lived with it for some years now. But sometimes, there are stretches of time when the environment around you, the fates, and your own mind all collude to lull you into a false sense of security; perhaps you even foolishly dare to think that you are “over it,” as if you ever can or will be over it – as if you have a choice in this matter — when deep down you know that can never be. That at best, you’ll adapt, like an amputee adjusting to losing a limb: her life goes on and she learns how to do without, but that phantom pain never quite goes away — indeed, it flares up when she least expects it.
In much the same way, you never know when something will whisk you back into those moments to relive yet again for the gods-only-know-how-many times those awful, terrible moments, the dreadful movie playing behind your eyes in all its vivid, mental Technicolor glory. Sometimes you don’t see it coming; the most tenuous reminders – a smell, an uttered phrase, an object on your dresser – they can collude to send you back to those moments unwillingly to live them all again. And sometimes it’s just for the briefest of moments before you can return to your façade; sometimes the ghosts even let you sleep unperturbed.
On the Road at 3 a.m. with Bobby and Beth
What is it about the open road at night, nothing but moon and starlight, the hum of tires on lonely asphalt, and the occasional snippet of summer insect song through an open window as I drive along, that soothes my restless soul?
What is it about the humid, warm wind rushing through my hair and over my face as the soft, silky voice of a British siren whispers in my ear through the windy din that brings peace to my restless heart?
Even with no particular place to go, and the knowledge that I’ll have to turn around and point myself towards “home” eventually, well before the dawn comes — what is it about this suspended, sublime moment of sound and motion that brings solace?
The Disc Doctor Has Left the Building
And this mortal coil.
Watching all of the fuss over Michael Jackson the past few days, marveling over all of the people mourning his death, holding vigil at his star on Hollywood Boulevard, or wherever those things are kept, I couldn’t help but feel angry. Why are these people crying and carrying on over someone they have never met in real life? Okay, fine, you enjoyed his music … but you didn’t know him, so how can you truly mourn him? Are your emotions that cheap?
I can’t help but think that the multitudes of fans we see on video carrying on over Michael Jackson in the streets of cities all around the world are ones that have never lost someone truly close to them – never had someone they dearly loved taken from them – and that they are fools, one and all. With their crocodile tears they mock everyone past and present that has watched someone they truly love and know die.
But such is life. For the first time in some months, I dreamed of my father, the other night. I guess Michael Jackson’s death is big news even in the realm of the dead; the ghosts are stirring and agitated.
I’m Sorry, Dad
I wrote the following text below the cut (the “read more” link; you’ll get to it eventually) on Thursday afternoon, the evening after I finally cracked. In engineering terminology, my psyche finally suffered a catastrophic malfunction. I’d been waiting for it – had been wondering why it had not happened yet, following Dad’s death four short weeks ago. I’d been wondering if and when it would all become too much. Wednesday night, was the last straw, as it became evident to me that my two oldest siblings decided beyond all doubt that their vanity and personal demons were more important than honoring our father’s wishes.
And I broke – and only by the slimmest thread of self control did I keep from literally breaking everything I own. In the end, I wasn’t psychologically strong enough to do what I believe what my father would have wanted me to do.
And I went to a very dark place inside my soul. A dark, dank little cave that I haven’t visited since the spring of 2001, following my mother’s death; this has been my third visit to that place since December 1999 when, but for a “grave”(heh) miscalculation, it would have become my permanent place of residence. After writing what follows, I felt much better; I guess it enabled me to come to terms with my failure, that and the new cadre of ghosts that joins those my mother’s death left behind to keep me company.
I decided not to post it right away, however; I decided to give it a few days and read it over. For one reason, writing when one is emotional is not necessarily a good thing – sometimes it can be powerful beyond measure in its passion; at other times the force of that passion can completely wreck the writing, tearing it asunder and making it descend into melodrama, even as you put it down on the page. The second reason is because I have mixed feelings about keeping a truly personal blog. On one hand, I’m an intensely private person; I often fit the cliché of the loner. On the other hand, when I look at others’ blogs, the ones I truly enjoy reading, they tend to be of an intensely personal nature; they are the ones in which the authors lay their souls bare (they can write well, too). It’s probably not surprising that the blogs I enjoy the most are by published fiction authors.
So, I suppose if I’m going to keep a blog, then it might as well be one that I would actually read, were I on the other side of it (I’ll let you decide if I can write well or not; obviously I believe that I can). Furthermore, despite my private nature, there is something cathartic about publishing your innermost thoughts and feelings on a blog for all the world to read – it lets one bare one’s soul without the embarrassment of sharing that with someone in person. Plus, the reader gets the powerful words and compelling emotion without the drama and tears. If they’re uncomfortable, they can stop reading; if it’s someone I know, they can choose to acknowledge it, or not, as they see fit, when we meet in person.
For a misanthropic, navel-gazing loner who only maintains a handful of good friends, it’s the perfect psychological vent.
Another reason I’m glad I waited is that on Friday – it being early Saturday evening as I write this – bitch-ass Fate decided to deal me a coup de grâce: I got laid off from my job. That kind of helped me put everything in perspective, I think, because in spite of what conventional wisdom would suggest I should feel, I feel relieved. I liked my job, liked my coworkers and my employer, but lately, even before my father died, I had had trouble with motivation – in short, I just couldn’t feel motivated anymore to do something that I didn’t have a passion for. It has been like staying in a relationship with someone because it’s comfortable, not because I’m still madly in love with them. My career had become just a job – a cool job, but just a job nonetheless. I’ve actually felt that way about journalism for several years now, but with all of the shit going on following my father’s death, I was finding it extra difficult to do the job – I just couldn’t find it within me to care – so I think it is for the best, even though the future is now even more uncertain than it was before.
One of my good friend’s favorite quotes is from the movie Hero; the lines in question are spoken by Bernie LaPlant, played by Dustin Hoffman, to his son Joey as he explains his philosophy of life.
“People are always talking about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or something and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn as you get older is there ain’t no truth. All there is is bullshit, pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life like when you get older is – you pick the layer of bullshit you prefer and that’s your bullshit so to speak.”
I suspect my dilemma with regard to my career and everything else right now is that the layer of bullshit I have come to prefer is near the bottom, if not precisely the bottom itself. Maybe I’ve always been that way, and I just took 40 years to figure it out. All I know is, if I don’t wake up and the first thing in my brain isn’t “Hot damn, I can’t wait to do my job today,” then I don’t want to do it at all any more, because, well, it’s bullshit otherwise. Out in California you often hear the phrase “I work to live, rather than live to work,” often to justify some heinously long commute, or to justify some mind-numbing, soul-crushing drudgery in a cubicle farm. I think at this point in my life, I’d rather just “live to live,” because everything else is bullshit, I’ve come to conclude. It’s cliché, but it’s true: one must follow one’s bliss.
Granted, truth is subjective, and so is bullshit. But then, I’m a loner at heart, and now that both my parents are dead, the only person I have to answer to is myself. So, whatever the future holds … it won’t hold a lot of bullshit, as far as I’m concerned. I may end up living in my Subaru down by the river, but damn it, it will be on my own terms, and there won’t be any bullshit involved – I won’t have to be full of shit, convincing myself to do a job that I don’t care about, and that doesn’t matter to me at the end of the day.
If I ever get laid off again, I want it to be a tragedy, because I loved that job, and because I couldn’t wait to do it each and every day I got out of bed. No more bullshit, that’s my motto.
So yeah, whatever self censorship may have taken place in the past here is no more. I’m posting what I want and everyone else can bugger off if they don’t like it, future employers included.
But be prepared, dear gentle reader; what you are about to read, should you chose to continue, isn’t a fluffy box of kittens with a side order of Carebears. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
OK, that was a bit over the top. But it is gut wrenching stuff, if I do say so myself. And lengthy. May want to go take a leak and get something to drink before you click.
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