Episode Four -- Feeling Like I Did Back Then

We now live in Boston, MA. I don't have a job, but I am going to a job fair on Monday morning. I don't really want to get a job, but I don't want to teach either. I have always assumed -- more than assumed, just thought about as an inevitability -- that I would commit suicide. This isn't a cry for help, and I'm not trying to send a message. I seriously just figured, in a Roman, Hemingway and Hunter Thompson manner, that I would reach a point where I would figure that enough is enough. It turns out, though, that my debt would transfer to my wife. I didn't know that. It also turns out that if we divorced, the debt would float into the air like ether. However, my parents would likely have control over my burial. I assure you such a burial would be Medieval and stupid, and they would put my corpse on a slab in a drawer some five to ten feet off the ground. For the record, I plan to be cremated, and my ashes are to be spread in the cold northern Atlantic. Anywhere north in New Hampshire or north of there would work.

Here is a sketch I wrote about our move:

The adjustment here has been difficult. We get lost all of the time, it's noisy and people are piled on top of each other, and I miss the woods. The pizza is unbelievable, though, and M loves her classes. I'm still unemployed, but I am signed up for a job fair that is happening on the 22nd. Since that is the first full day of fall, I'm expecting a lot of good to come from it. The move was hell. M was still packing after the truck was loaded up, and was still working on her "room" at 10 30 the night before we were to leave. Keep in mind that we still had to drive to Indiana and pick up her dad, then drive back. We ended up getting back to O__ at 3 30 that Sunday morning, and the original plan had been to get up between five and six and head out. I was so goddamn mad that I stopped speaking to her for two days. What else? When I got to Indiana (we had to go in separate cars because she left hers there --no point in having two cars in Boston) at 1 00 in the morning, we found out that one of her parents' dogs has cancer and only a few months to live (he's only four). So we were exhausted and crying and then headed back to O__. We got out of town about 1 30 Sunday afternoon. We had reservations to stay in Albany, but we only made it to 300 or so miles outside of it on I-90. We ended up staying, I think, in Syracuse. So we got up the next day at 5 AM and hauled ass at 70 plus mph to get here by 2, which was when we were to meet the movers. They shined us, and the replacements did, too. We got the truck unloaded sometime the next afternoon. Then all the stuff with the phone and the internet: it took two weeks for the internet to get set up, and two and a half for the phone. Something about "bad copper." M still does not have an assistantship, and our youngest dog cannot adjust to going on walks in town. She is skittish; everything scares her, and she is particularly terrified of anything on wheels. As I said, though, M loves her classes. Also, the people here seem really great. They have been friendly and helpful, and overall it all seems very blue-state cool. [end sketch]

That said about the people, I should just tell you that we are living near undergraduates. Our building has young professionals and graduate students in it, but this being a crowded east coast city, there is another clump of buildings right across the alley from us about twenty-five feet away. Most of them are fine, but there are some retards who blare their stereo -- rap, no less; is there any form of music that so perfectly indicates how vile and degenerate this sick and dying culture has become? -- and have loud conversations on their balcony. I hope that they get brain tumors the size of pool balls on their brains, and I hope they spend their final days bleeding from their anuses, nostrils, mouths, and ears. They're not the only loud people, of course. I'm just too old to live near undergraduates. I know I'm a failure. I know that my dissertation is incomplete and I don't have any money and I'm depressive and overweight, but I can't help but think and insist that I deserve some dignity in my living arrangement. That I deserve to be able to read a book without having to put in ear plugs because of the "music" and "conversation." And our sink, which drips and seeps into my brain while I'm sleeping, the drip drip drip that is a torture to me and my teetering sanity, the sink that the maintenance man said might not get fixed because they would have to turn off the water in the whole building and there are rules and it would be "a whole fucking production," our kitchen sink leaks and it is driving me over the fucking edge. This is why people get jobs that they hate. They do it for the money, so they can live in decent neighborhoods away from trash and scum and noise and so that they can get their sinks fixed. They do it for dignity. They sacrifice the dignity of their work, they whore their minds and souls for the dignity of decent living conditions. This is what I learned. I think I am at the point existentially where I could actually become a salesperson. When I sell out, I'm going to sell out spectacularly. I'm going to own my own house in a quiet neighborhood and I'm going to pay off my debt. I'm going to keep a shotgun by the door and have the whole house wired with alarms. I'm going to install those flood lights that come on when they detect motion. I'm going to build a wall around it that's nine feet high and three feet thick. I'm going to strewn barbed wire across the top of this wall and I'm going to live in the basement.

My ears are becoming infected from the earplugs. I'm tired and I miss the woods.

I have a post that I wrote on my word program that I won't post because it's disturbing and even more offensive than this one. I might post it anyway at the end of this one. I haven't decided.

The last two books I read featured characters who started dissertations but were unable to finish them. This is seriously a coincidence. The first was All the King's Men, and the second was The Book of Daniel. I have thought about it, and I think Nausea fits into this. I can't remember if the character in Nausea was working on his dissertation, or if it was merely an academic piece. It was an historical work, I know that, which is what the dissertation in the Warren work was to be. I'm at the end of something here. The trick in such times is to be able to imagine and build the next phase while transitioning out of the one that's ending. The digits in my age equal nine and in December they will equal zero. I have been depressed since at least the eighth grade. Life is not worth living. This is also not a cry for help; it is a statement of fact. We go through life accumulating images in our minds that are too horrible for us to bear. When we die, the images go away, and that is heaven. Heaven is relief, heaven is forgetting, heaven is the images that is our consciousness evaporating into the cosmos.

Here is that post I wrote the other day. I'm sorry:

Frank Sinatra Ate My Pancakes—10 September 2008

So last week we made the move up to Boston. It took about sixteen hours to get up here from O__, Ohio and it was worth every bit of effort to move each and every centimeter. Living in O__ was much like being trapped in a rotting, cancerous anus. The bulk of the student body of M___ University should be stuffed into ovens Auschwitz-style and their ashes should be used to fertilize organic farms. Their SUVs should be dismantled and recycled, and their parents should be rounded up and beat in the face with hammers while midgets mutilate their genitals. God should issue an apology for creating such horrible people, and then He should take a Massive Shit on the Composition and Rhetoric Division of the English Department. He should also drown the Business School in his Divine Piss.

But seriously, the people up here seem so much more decent than the Fuckwads and Showersacks that populate O__. God, I hate that fucking place. I cannot believe I lived there for six years. I’ve had chemotherapy treatments that were more pleasant than specific class sessions I endured as a teacher at that school. I’ve had cancer, I’ve been run over twice, and my parents abused me in a multitude of ways, but somehow I look back at my time in O__ as some of the worst years of my life. These students and their emotionally retarded parents are the motherfuckers who think that Sarah Palin was a humdinger of a choice for vice-president. These are the Deranged Country Club Nazis who think that Obama has it in for America. These are the Shrill Patriotic Charlatans who support the troops and Bush’s War in Iraq but would never consider enlisting. And at this point I have to give credit to Palin and her family. They are indeed pro-war, but her oldest child has enlisted. This is the kind of consistency, decency even, that is lacking in the Young Republican set of M___ University in O__, Ohio. These folks are the ones who think that cutting taxes on the eve of war makes perfect sense. These are the ones who will loot the treasury and burn a hole in the sky. They will raise the oceans and drown brown people and polar bears. They will mock science but laud Darwin in his Social Guise. They will lock up black people for smoking crack and poor whites for taking meth while they snort coke with their Hotshot Wall Street Yuppie Scum Friends. They are the cancerous mass on the human species. They are what’s wrong with America, with the World, with the Universe.

In other news, we still don’t have a phone or internet service. I typed this onto Word and used a library to post it [I didn't, actually post it from a library]. Before we left M___ University the wife and I wanted to do something that summed up what it was like to live in the Midwest. So we went to the Creation Museum in some horrible place in Kentucky just across the Ohio River from Indiana. It’s North of the Cincinnati Airport, which is actually in Kentucky. I have pictures. I plan to write extensively about our time at the museum. Places like that are why pot exists. I don’t smoke pot [pause] anymore, but I kind of wish I had blazed a fatty in the parking lot of that place. Yeah. More on that later.

I still don’t have a job here. The lack of the internets ain’t helping none, but I’m not too worried. I feel like I should go off on the election, but I don’t think I will in this post. I feel like the vitriol of the first couple of paragraphs of this post should suffice. I will say that I’ve started to reread All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. Please please please read it if you are at all interested in American Politics, or American Literature, or what it means to have Ideals while having to live in the Big Bad World. I recently wrote an email to one of my best friends, and in it I said that I hate human beings. He replied to that particular comment that human beings were indeed bad, except when they were writing plays and creating art and et cetera. I was a bit put off by his response. It was sunny when I wanted stormy, hopeful when I wanted hateful. After a few chapters of The Great American Novel, though, I kind of concur with what he wrote. So there’s that.

I guess I should write more about the move. Maybe later. Until then, here are a couple of random thoughts:

I love my plants. I fell in love with the tree that lived outside my window in O___. Knowing that I was going to move this summer, I grabbed some of its springtime helicopter seeds and germinated them. Three survived. They are Ashe, which I named because it’s the Dominant Male (please hum to yourself now the theme from the American version of The Office); Mailman, which I named because it doesn’t really look like the tree from which it came, which led me to think that maybe another tree got its seed in there (I might have named it Milkman); and Bounty, which I named because I germinated it on a paper towel. If I think of it, I will post pictures of these trees. I also have a Fichus that I got nine and a half years ago, a plant that my wife rescued from the garbage at the OSU Writing Center (who the fuck throws away a living plant?), a plant that was given to participants of my wife’s cousin’s wedding (a real asshole, that guy – love the plant, though), and one that I think came from said wife’s grandmother. Mailman took the journey kind of hard, but I think it will be fine. I rode up here with my plants and my two dogs. Wife rode in the truck with her dad. That guy will likely be the subject of a number of posts. I love him madly and admire him with a sincere and genuine sense of affection. He is a real gear-grinder, though. Politics is where this is headed. As I said, we’ll save it. [end 10 September post]

As I said, I'm sorry about all the hate. Fall is coming. My mind is bound to change for the better. For a little while, at least.