Touching the Rut With My Left Hand

Essays

Aug 16

I woke up. I blinked. Somehow it’s mid-August. Trains run, people walk, groundhogs dig, and I splay catatonic, knees up, touching the rut with my left hand. I ate jelly beans. I didn’t exercise yet. Sundays are a soft mix of freedom and malaise. Color me beige.

Who have I taken the mirror selfies for? It’s a serious question for my Self. Can’t we go back to taking real photographs and printing them to show just the people we love? Or to frame them to look at until a better one comes to swap it out. What am I doing with my life? I build things, but do they ever become more than two stories?

I take my phone on walks. If someone were to ask me why, I would say in case of an emergency with my kids. My kids are both adults. They are healthy. It’s an excuse to keep the technological umbilical cord connected at all times. To take a photo of grass to post instead of sitting on a bench and watching it be.

Everybody is doing the same things everywhere. I am part of the problem. This website and these essays are the strong pull in the other direction. From mind to screen in minutes. But then I go and post about it, and the impact dissolves into the confetti in the corner of my old government offices after yet another lunchtime birthday celebration.

I think most hoarders secretly want their house to burn down. They think the problem would be solved, but it wouldn’t. There will just be a new house to put new stuff. That’s social media. If Meta deleted all of my accounts, I would feel lucky. Then, at some point, I would convince myself again that they were a necessary evil for business. And the cycle would start again.

The first time I wanted to hurt myself was when I was in high school. I can’t remember why, but I am sure it had to do with a girl. Relationships are so hard on us. I went into my bathroom and tried to punch the mirror until it shattered. I was too scared to try hard enough to shatter it. I couldn’t even do that right. My hand didn’t even hurt the next day.

I had a vizsla for eleven years. Petting his fur was like caressing one of my grandmother’s mink coats that filled the closets in my room at her house. A visceral act of love and a coping mechanism through smooth strokes. To rub your face against your pet’s fur is to drink from the Fountain of Youth.

Sometimes I just lay in bed and do nothing. Then I get antsy and look at my stupid phone or computer. I am capable of stillness, but use excuses to terminate it. I really don’t have anything that I “have” to do all that often. My schedule is built for efficiency, but it also creates the tire tracks in the ground that I run my hand over.

It seems like it would be fun to stand outside in the rain. I don’t like feeling wet. Drying off after a shower is mildly annoying to me, but if there was a life-size hair dryer, I might keep it on for fifteen minutes. I like heat until I am hot. Then all I want is to be cold.

I want to go on a silent meditation retreat, but I don’t like people telling me what to do. I wonder how they would tell me anything if I wasn’t doing it correctly. Would they write me a note?

Some days when I was walking home from school in California, my friend’s mom would pick me up in her minivan. But not every day. Some days, I would be exhausted and watch it drive by. I felt like that day she just didn’t have it in her. My mom and stepdad weren’t part of the carpool, so picking me up every day would make no sense for my friend’s mom. I wonder if she saw me some days and was like, “Not today, kid. Keep walking.”

If they had mailbox baseball leagues growing up, I would have played shortstop and batted .347 with 27 dongs and 123 RBIs. When you are doing it, it’s a crazy rush of adrenaline. It’s insane what I thought was okay when I was younger. I used to throw rocks onto the highway. I was more dangerous than I thought. However, when I dropped water balloons out of my window in Brooklyn Heights onto someone just walking by, it’s still funny. It’s awful, but it’s hilarious. I can’t give that one up.

I once had a girlfriend who was running a double or triple life on me. She kept trying to break up with me to save me from her, but I kept negotiating a truce. I didn’t miss all the signs; I ignored them. I could tell you from day one what was going on, but I put myself into the charade. I was a mime trying to create a box for us to stay in.

I’m not doing as much as I thought I would today. I don’t want to do much for a while. This is the ebb and the ridge of floundering. At least I am honest.