I have the belief that if you want to know how to do a thing drunkenly, you need to spend some time practicing it whilst you are actually drunk. For this reason today I spent an hour or so playing the fiddle while drinking hot toddies. Now it is 5:30 pm and I am moderately sauced. I am the level of sauced that is an awkward combination of irritable and anxious, midway between desires to continue drinking properly or take a nap and sober up.
In this state I have been sitting in bed paying the bills and contemplating my life. In a month and a half I will turn thirty, and the gravity of the big round zero in that number has me thinking about it way in advance. I don't like it. I don't like that I've been around for three decades already. I keep thinking of the various five-year plans I have constructed in the course of my life and then haphazardly abandoned. I think about the things in those plans that once seemed important to me. Are they still?
The kicker I think are the things that I never wrote down because they seemed like such obvious goals there was no need to precisely articulate them. I think these are the kinds of thoughts that I have been mulling over on backburners for years without consciously and attentively addressing them. These are the kinds of thoughts you tell people on the bus when you are chatting honestly with a stranger, and when you articulate them audibly you are forced to recognize that your ideas do not make sense.
This one time I sat next to a guy on a greyhound bus and we talked for three hours. I was nineteen and he was thirty-ish. I had an Ameripass, which was this kind of greyhound ticket that was good for any bus anywhere in the states for a two month time period, so I sat next to a lot of people, and a lot of them were crazy. This particular guy had actually negotiated being on this bus in part because of me, because of our brief interaction over the borrowing of a lighter and a cigarette. He had changed his schedule to be on the same bus with me, something I suspected which slowly came to light over the course of our conversation.
He told me his name and I immediately forgot it. I told him mine. After a few minutes of casual pleasantries, I asked him why he was going west and he wouldn't tell me. He didn't want to answer certain questions about himself. I decided to level with him. Look, I said, I forgot your name. He started to tell me but I stopped him-- that's not the point. What I'm saying is that even if you tell me your name again, I'm going to forget it. The option we have before us on our three hour bus ride is this: we can be polite and cordial and have a casual conversation about nothing particularly relevant, or you can tell me the real reason you're heading west and maybe we can actually discuss something of interest. In either case, when we get off this bus I won't remember your name. The result is the same. The options are boring or interesting.
He thought about it for a second and I could tell he was really thinking. I could tell too that other people on these buses sometimes worried about me. I could see their concern, and I found it plainly comforting but didn't contemplate it any further. The guy said he'd give me a hint and see if I could guess. He said he was going west to one of three counties where a certain activity had only just recently been legalized. He said a couple of those counties were near Las Vegas. He looked at me and waited. I considered this a fair way to introduce the topic, seeing if I was really up to discerning the likelihood that this guy was headin' west to be a prostitute. For a few seconds I attempted to suppress a shit-eating grin as I considered whether or not I wanted to feign ignorance. No, not my style.
He only liked to sleep with couples. And he felt like he had been born to do this work. He was doomed, from the day he was born, to do this work, and was going to spend the rest of eternity in hell because of it. His idea of hell was a particularly interesting one. He believed that the sinner repented by repeatedly engaging in the sinful act, over and over, eternally. He said that he figured it wouldn't be so bad for the first couple thousand years. But then, you know, it would be terrible. About that time, he asked me to marry him and I changed seats and went to sleep.
It was an interesting bus ride. There were a few points as he was talking where I could tell he was probably saying his actual beliefs out loud for the first time in his life. I will allow that it is possible I am entirely wrong, and that actually this guy was pulling my leg for a good long while, and maybe enjoying it a bit too much. I don't think this is the case. There are seven billion of us now, and this character was a real person I sat next to on the bus, and I'm the real person who talked to him for hours because it amused me to do so.
Ten years later I don't think I'd have the same discussion. I wonder though what deeply-held beliefs I've nurtured in dissonance and never adequately articulated in the intervening period, whilst I was so interested in the lives of others. What would I say to my 19 year old self were I to sit next to her on the bus? She would pry and I would say I think the world is ending. I would say it makes me sad when I see children. I would tell her I still don't have a clear vision of how I can do anything, and I'm beginning to think I should just move as far out into the boonies as I can bear to be, get a rocking chair and a dog and try to relax. Take up knitting. Maybe a little recreational knife-throwing. Learn to whittle. Grow some vegetables. Avoid making any better mousetraps, so the world leaves me the eff alone.
I probably just need a vacation, but damn there is nothing like working in the service industry for five years to make you not care about a stranger's random opinion of whatever. I long for the day when I don't have to go home and read yelp reviews about me. Oh I'm sorry your server was just ok man, especially since you consider it compulsory to actively judge everything all the time. At least I'm not in prostitution. I bet those reviews are brutal.
I listened to a radiolab episode yesterday about the slinky. Rob Krulwich was all weirded out by the idea that if the sun vanished, we wouldn't find out for 8 minutes or so. He didn't like the delay, the 8 minutes of being blissfully unaware. It sounded like he felt tricked by reality. It got me thinking about determinism, inevitability, my own death. Thinking of the two ideas simultaneously, I was imagining the sun as my death, the distance between us as my life. I'm falling always towards this inevitability, and I know this. It's the nature of existence. Only I don't know how long it will take to get there. It's as if my death is already a real and concrete thing, approaching through space-time already, and I'm blissfully unaware. Maybe it's difficult to convey how unusual this sensation was for me because usually I feel kind of surprised that I'm still alive.
There is a privilege operative to idly contemplating what kind of life would make me happiest, and how best to lead it. Is this a true statement? Lately I've been prone to little panic attacks, fits of anxiety that well up suddenly unbidden from no apparent source, my heart racing and face flush. It feels more like a nervous tick than anything associated with anything. Chaos theory. I imagine that in a neighboring universe, the sun has gone out. In this world I am fine, I'm okay, it's just a bit too close for comfort. Other times I wonder if my body has forgotten how to burn calories and like a fire suddenly encountering a knot in some dense wood, my heart slows and then races wildly. Hey there, I say, calm down.
It's thirty, I think. I turn thirty a few days before the end of the Mayan calendar, and the theme of the party is "I'm' turning thirty and the world is ending." But what is the party like? Once upon a time, I believed that almost any problem could be solved with the right party. I keep trying to envision this party. I got to send out invitations soon. How do I want to inaugurate the coming decade? I envision the party and nothing seems quite right. Champagne, potlucks, dancing, karaoke. What did I used to like about parties? What would I want out of a party if it was really the last one? Could the people I love most get along long enough to share a meal? What is the point?
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