But this is a very confining space, not unlike the Overlook
Hotel in winter. While in transit, we
have no satellite link, and we’re too far from shore to communicate via cell
phone. (Though in a cruel twist my cell
does pick up a roaming frequencyband, but I think that’s just the platform’s
dedicated satellite phone. I try to make
a call on it anyway once a day but it never works. At least, it hasn’t yet.)
And even though I have roughly 20 gigs of books
(hellllllooooo, Pirate Bay!) on this little computer of mine, well, sort of
like having 250+ channels on your TV but no lease on life, it gets kind of
old. (Especially when I realize that
about 4 gigs—all the earth science and astronomy—are corrupt PDFs and won’t open. I was looking forward to the Encyclopedia of
the Solar System! But all isn’t
lost. I still have nearly all of the
Cambridge Histories, which would take me about fifteen years to read, not to
mention the acoustics books that I need to study.)
But being cooped up is a bad thing. I need some physical variety, a bit of
activity, in order to tolerate sitting down for any length of time and
concentrating. As my mother told me, I’m
not a true hyperactive (people who compulsively keep moving at all times), but
I’m kind of borderline. A confined space is not a healthy environment for me, especially when I can’t
communicate with my family or get any information about the world.
(Thoreau, I’m not. As
he put it, a ten-year-old newspaper would tell him as much about current events
as he ever needed to learn. And this is true: there’s always trouble, and we humans are still
vicious. So it’s not really news.)
Enforced idleness is a chance for the mental bedbugs to come
crawling out and rule the night. In my
case, the bedbugs are green and wear white a white capital D on their backs. They sing a rasping and malicious chorus of
dreams strangled by cowardice and drowned with alcohol. Even the knowledge that I have a wonderful
family, who all make me glad every day for the accidents and choices that
brought them into my life, isn’t much defense against these bugs. Because they wake up memories of my earlier
life, before I met Kate, before Eva and Eliot were born or conceived. The only cure is kind of a therapy, how I
force myself to walk through the choices I did—and did not—make as a younger
man, and understand myself better now.
In one of his interviews, Joseph Campbell (my intellectual
hero) talked about identifying your most cherished possession, goal, facet of
your life—and then giving it up.
Willingly letting it go. Now
there is a mystery in this, how abandoning the one thing you wanted most, gives
you a lighthearted kind of courage to pursue the rest. Only I’m a congenital worrier (like Kate is),
so lighthearted courage is an ephemeral thing at best in me. More often, what I’d call courage is deciding “*bleep* this, I’m sick and tired of how this is going,” and then acting to
make a change. (Kate has seen exactly
this response in me many times. It leads
to mixed results.)
More often than not, when the bedbugs are rasping their evil chorus, any fresh determination I find within myself is of this sort. I missed my chance in college to start putting my empathetic instincts and my love of attention to work in an acting career. There are times, like when I’m sitting idle in a floating metal shed on the hot water of the Gulf of Mexico, that I wonder what on earth I’ve done so wrong. And the one coherent answer I have, is that my life is much more than time spent in a metal shed on the water.
Furthermore, it's not all unrelated to Kate, Eva and Eliot. There are many nights--at home or away--when I lie, eyes open in bed, terrified that my irresponsibility with money (buying a condo before I'd gotten a job? And worse, at the height of the price bubble? Come on.) and my wandering career choices have doomed my wife and children to struggling, semi-poor lives. That would be an outcome for which I can't forgive myself.
More often than not, when the bedbugs are rasping their evil chorus, any fresh determination I find within myself is of this sort. I missed my chance in college to start putting my empathetic instincts and my love of attention to work in an acting career. There are times, like when I’m sitting idle in a floating metal shed on the hot water of the Gulf of Mexico, that I wonder what on earth I’ve done so wrong. And the one coherent answer I have, is that my life is much more than time spent in a metal shed on the water.
Furthermore, it's not all unrelated to Kate, Eva and Eliot. There are many nights--at home or away--when I lie, eyes open in bed, terrified that my irresponsibility with money (buying a condo before I'd gotten a job? And worse, at the height of the price bubble? Come on.) and my wandering career choices have doomed my wife and children to struggling, semi-poor lives. That would be an outcome for which I can't forgive myself.
So let’s just say this has been a buggy week. Living in a small metal shed with nowhere to
go and nothing to do but read will be like that. (For the record: I like to read. I don’t love to read. I own a lot of books. That was mostly therapeutic shopping in years
past. I mean, hey, it’s possible to have
a sense of humor about things and say that I’m a good working example of a lot
of 20th- and 21st-century neuroses. But anyway…)
That’s exactly the problem with idle time on the water. Altogether too much “me” time. The crevices of your navel start to resemble the Himalaya. So
the real cure, I suppose (since there will always be bedbugs in my mind) is a
return to life where things are actually happening--that is, leaving the Overlook Hotel behind.
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