Photo: Brogan, Terrence, So…what’s THAT about?, 2007
I despise the American idea of “success”—to me, it just looks like an arbitrary, bourgeois target that Flaubert trashed 150 years or so ago.
–Overnighter 28, November 10, 2005
There are a few new clerks at the 7-11; otherwise not much has changed there. One of the new clerks is named Carolina—she was hired about two months ago. The other new one, I have forgotten the name of. But Gil, Other Gil, Asif, and Manjit are all there. Singh still manages the place. A 12-oz. can of Modelo Especial is still $1.11 including tax.
I’m walking a decent amount. I’m giving talks, I’m writing, I’m drinking less but better, I’m better with Lynn, I’m in a Lenten group, I’m contemplating the souls of others. The magazine rack at the 7-11 is filled with covers filled with beautiful women this time of year.
~~~
A year ago, I was in bad shape. Lynn and I were rocky. I was alternately drinking hard and drinking not at all. I had low levels of confidence. My days were unstructured and largely unoccupied. The site wasn’t paying for itself. I resented being obliged to write off the year on others.
Oh—the writing was good, but that’s the way it goes when you’re not.
I took the occasion of the anniversary of my father’s death—always a poignant date in my life, and perhaps even the whole pivot point between the me who was and the me who is—to step away from many things.
As it turned out, the year was even worse than that, and yet, not so bad as that.
~~~
A year later, I’m in a far better place. I no longer have the kidney stagefright feeling (and encore) when inhaling cold air. Some people we cared about passed on, but others made themselves better. The expected annus horribilis is over. In fact, it included abundant amounts of Hermosa, which was as Portugal to it.
~~~
Yet—the garden, once so important, is fairly a mess at street level. What’s unusual is—I don’t care.
Irises sprout abundantly but purposelessly; their purple is shocking, but I’m not shocked. The roses are cartwheeling towards Easter blooms; their structure is good, but I’ve done almost nothing to make them so. Ferns are fluffy; I could care. Let nature take over. It’s now other things, easier things, that I’m most atuned to. The hum of the hummingbirds buzzing each other on the honeysuckle, the hiphop mockingbird getting badass in the walnut tree, Sid and Nancy, the two bluejays, flying below radar, the crows powergliding in and out, the way kids imagine jets to bend in air, the carpenter bees popping into anything yellow; that’s what I marvel at these days. The fact that the grass looks like hell or that the nasturtiums are not obeying any kind of geometry I have been indifferent to. I’m fifty now: my head’s up, not down.
