I feel a little sad and empty right now. Just in this moment. I don’t know why. I “shouldn’t.” My wife and I recently had our visas to Spain accepted which means, after close to two years of discussing it, planning it, selling a house, moving out of California, doing a Kafkian amount of paperwork, we’re actually, finally, seriously moving out of the United States for a while. To Spain.
And so I “should” be happy. (There I go “shoulding” all over myself again.) And generally I think I am happy. (Am I?) I don’t know. I feel tired. Physically tired, sure, but also psychologically exhausted. Half dead to the world. I feel sick of dog walking five days a week, which I’ve been doing for the past six months, since we left Lompoc, north of Santa Barbara, CA, for Portland. I feel spiritually tired. Ready for change. And change, most assuredly, is coming. We leave on April 2nd for Spain.
We have a lot to do over the following four weeks: Get our bottom multi-unit rented out. Sell our car. Sell or get rid of most of our stuff. Pack. Get the cats their health certificates. Etc. The hardest part—the absurd amount of paperwork and bureaucracy—is thankfully over. (We almost gave up too many times to count.)
I guess I just find Life tiring because, among other things—including the simple fact that life is tiring—I am…me. A sensitive artist, a man who’s always been a few beats too hardcore and intense for his own good, who often takes things too far, who has had a very deep inner life mixed with a fearful-of-people-yet-desirous-of-people personality.
I find myself missing things lately. Highway 101, specifically the section in California. California itself. Santa Barbara. Even Lompoc, a town I couldn’t wait to flee, I somewhat miss. (I’m sure this is mostly ephemeral and superficial.) Some of it, I think, is that, living in Portland, we’ve gone through many months now and on and off rain, cold, wind and even a little snow. Which is nice sometimes—I like the change from perfect sunny Southern California—but also depressing.
And there is some depression. That’s part of it. Not serious depression. Nothing clinical or anything like that. Just seasonal. Psychological myopia. Boredom on some level. I both cling to and resist the daily adult routines of life. I grew up in the upper middleclass with an equally fanciful and imaginative author mother so my experience as a child was sort of…unrealistic. I am a lot like my mom: I have her intelligence, her creativity, but also her anger and mythologizing sense. Her rich imagination. Her living in somewhat of a bubble, aka the bubble of her own mind. The apple doesn’t fall as far away from the tree as most of us would like to admit.
But life is good. I know that, objectively. My problem is simply that I want it all. And I want it now. Why not? My mom always made me feel like the world owed me not only something but many things. But of course it doesn’t. Never has. Never will. This existential ride called life is one wild machine trip. Racing towards the stars, the great black unknown. Infinite space. Eternity. Nothingness. Cessation of consciousness. The bleakness of reality.
My physical body is still strong now—at 42 years old—but I am aware this meatsuit will not last. Nothing does. Buddhism is the answer: Acceptance of things as they actually are right now, and right now, and right now, etc.
Writing, for me, has always blazed through on the path of least resistance. It’s not that I even want some kind of linguistic, prose legacy or anything like that. I don’t need to be David Foster Wallace—I’m not and never could or will be—and I don’t need to be a genius (obviously I am not; I am far too stupid for that level of cognitive ability); all I really want, I think, is to feel sublime in this life for just a little while as my fingers punch the black keys and create order out of chaos, create something magisterial and honorary and true.
Sometimes I wonder if life has any inherent purpose. At moments I feel it does; it must, but at other moments I feel the utter pointlessness of this existence. Neither is necessarily “good or bad,” but rather are just natural, organic states of being.
Somehow writing is medicine for me. To treat my tarred soul which refuses to be part of The Crowd. I have—for better and worse—always been my own person, my own failure, my own creation, my own man. Deep sensitivity. Deep self-awareness. Vulnerable confusion. Wisdom gleaned from the gritty toughness of life which even a privileged upbringing can’t protect you from.
I see love. I want love. I crave love. And I know I have love. From my wife. From my family. Friends. And even myself, when I’m not trying to change the way I feel in this precise moment.
The irony of it is that, just in writing this little ditty of less than 1,000 words, I feel better. Writing is much more intuition and knowing (vision) and practice than “learning” or certainly “thinking.” Thinking only pulls you away from the art of prose expression. The search is for clarity.
The search is always for clarity. In all things.