【model】
“i’m an engineer so not being excited is a good thing”
i lived a twenty mile drive from riverside quarry from thirteen to seventeen. so watching this stupid, stupid, stupid, splendid rock roll its heavy ass inward, from inland towards the shore, felt inordinately poetic—like watching myself roll my heaviness towards the ocean, like watching myself make it, somehow, through everything that had happened on that soil. it’s a drive i made many times: from desert towards ocean.
i still have my boarding pass under a magnet on my refrigerator here in New York from the last time i made that journey. inland to the shore, and from that shore, onto a plane, and from that plane, onto this one. maybe it’s still up there because many of my memories from the west shore are difficult ones. so coming back here felt like finally returning home. a kind of perfection of fate—coming back to the place where i entered the world—that must've drummed up a kind of catharsis, from those last years in California. i know we've been ostensibly tasked to avoid cliches in this class, but, to be frank, i think i've grown too eldery: i love them.
and i’m not sure if we really can avoid them. they so tend to creep up on us in those most hopeless and highest moments—during wedding vows, during desperate crises.
i also know that saying all this was one of them. and that too. and so on. a for loop.
it’s really true. the longer i’ve lived, the more all those stupid, stupid, stupid, splendid cliches tickle my ears: almost like i can finally hear them for what they are.
so, alas, it’s true. i’m comparing myself to the rock: a hunk of stone with a difficult journey made in California. from the quarry, to the wharf, then out to sea/e. i think of how many humans it took, the many crossed paths and shaken hands, processes and paper, redundancies, stupidities, victories, and, my god, all that time. the best thing of all of all of it, to me, i think, is it’s so absurd a task. yet in that absurd goal: a seriousness, collaboration, dedication, and real danger concomitant with all of its little story.
i think that’s why there’s often a magic to difficult things: they sweeten over time, they still. how often they become miracles through the back mirror. the adage about the best way in dealing with muddy water: leave it alone. give it space. give it time. it’s a little bit easier to see how spectacular a ride it’s been for another, especially through the eyes of a third party. i can’t help be in love with all of it: the ridiculousness of all these humans doing all this stuff. coming together in infinitesimally minute ways, tinkering here and there with what they know to do.
it’s, first of all, crazy that it was /that/ hard to do—i thought of the way in which the cities built around certain technologies like the automobile and telecommunication have made something like this likely much more difficult (and certainly bureaucratically).
i think what is crazier is that it, ultimately, was allowed to happen. i feel near tears when i reflect on this. it’s like medicine for the misanthropy, the cynicism—my heart aches for all these humans, doing all this stuff, trying so hard to make it happen, whatever that means to them.
i had a period where i was trying, yearning, attempting, reaching for something tidy to say about it all, about myself, about my little behaviors and toils and impulses and prospective pasts and certain futures. about what i 'did'. who i 'was'. the thing is, the more i look, the more i find it all to be bullshit. but really, really, really, exquisite bullshit. like the rock. the work of living. doing this silly dance. elevating mass. i don't know why else i'm here.
cliche—forgive me.
. . .
“You just wake up one day and you’re dickless.”
a lot of what this fool said hit me. i kind of put it together a bit. like a little collage. so it’s him, but really me, but really him.
“I’m trying to tell you the story of my strange life. . .
doesn’t happen all at once. . .
It’s slow. You just wake up one day and you’re. . .
speaking to the lightning god, the ice god, and the cold-rainwater god.”
“My work, if it’s good, it’s gotta be about risk,
If it isn’t, it’s got no flavor. No salt in it. . .
Thinking you’re going to die makes you get radical in a hurry…
hilarious to come back and find out that I’m O.K."
One day I woke up and I was dickless. But like Heizer says, it was kind of a process. It probably was in the works for a bit.
Much longer than I could ever imagine, most likely. But it's true. One day I woke up and I was a pussy. Really scared of everything. Nurturing every chimerical force in the head. Worrying about what others think of me and anything I touch. Not listening to my heart. Not doing what I ought to. Not honoring this body. Wasting away. A ghostly ghastly feeling. It happened slowly, but I woke up in hell.
I, naturally, became very interested in figuring out how to get the hell out. This led me to places, some very far away, and others closer. Yup—I’m going to say it—I was stuck under a rock in a dug-out walkway, and all I needed to do was walk FORWARD AND GET THE HELL OUT but I was terrified the stupid rock was trying to kill me, or something.
I slowly realized that I needed courage. I needed to be brave. I needed a little philter of something—I needed to not be dickless. However, it’s a bit hard to get to a place that needs the thing that you are trying to get to that place for. That’s the problem with a prerequisite—the balance of it, or something, is weird, and often off. And often one needs a miracle.
Yet miracles seem to happen. In fact, most humans I know know of miracles! Which is a miracle in itself! It’s incredible! It’s splendid! It’s insane! I don’t know what to tell you of miracles, except for the fact that you need to walk the damn moving walkway out of pure faith, or grit, or desperation, or what have you, until the stupid moving walkway reveals itself to you as the greatest grace of all. Or something like that. Ugh.
"I’m surprised I’m still alive—I bet everyone is.”
