Monday morning. After a fitful night of sleep in which I dreamed about being given two abandoned, tamed, and not yet fully grown lions to care for and trying to get someone from animal control to help… a night in which I woke in a tangle of sheets and quilt, I had a quick breakfast (waffles and coffee, always waffles and coffee) and began reading poetry. The line I stole for my own attempt at writing in the gray light of dawn was, “there are times when your life is not on the upswing.” I was trying to connect the dots between times when life has not been on the upswing and my desires to more fervently pursue the things I love and enjoy. When life isn’t on the upswing, I become a dreamer, a builder of the fictional communities that I would like to see and maybe inhabit. I imagine running a studio space for artists, or a bar with live music where I can both book and hear bands several nights a week, or finding the time, talent, and patience to be a better writer.
As I read, I came across a poem by Michele Herman, “Notes on Communication.” I looked her up. Except I didn’t look her up. Instead, I looked up Michelle with two l’s – also a writer. The typo was my fault. When I found the correct Michele, I read her essay on who she is not – a well-written piece about her encounters with two-l Michelle. Briefly, I thought about reaching out to one-l Michele or taking her writing workshop. I shrank from the prospect. Like most dabblers, I have an uncomfortable relationship with my writing. I have enough rejections to believe that talent is the issue. But every once in a while, I convince myself that persistence and practice and discipline (or lack thereof) is the issue. Sometimes I think my lack of life experience is the issue. My life experiences, for the most part, lack drama or tension or whatever it is that might compel someone to keep reading. Stated another way, in more capable hands, my mundane life experience might approach the sublime. I do not possess more capable hands.
This is the part where I think this is two personal essays: one about my desire to be a more competent writer and one about my desire to build community or be a part of something bigger. Maybe they’re the same desire, same essay.
The other week I was daydreaming about expanding the food pantry that I run – turning it into more of a community center. I was looking to see if there were vacant spaces to rent. It was a short hop from that daydream to going down the rabbit hole of looking at businesses that are for sale in the city. Despite never running a restaurant or cafe or bar, I began to believe that I could run a restaurant or cafe or bar. There’s a man in Arizona with the same name as me who specializes in buying and selling businesses. Maybe there’s a missed opportunity there. Maybe he’ll read this and reach out to me. Arizona Matt meet San Francisco Matt.
As a little kid running lemonade stands and a car washing service, I was obsessed with understanding profits and losses. As a college student and adult, I played business simulation games. I may shake my fist at our big C system of capitalism, but inside, small c capitalism runs and hums its little capitalist engine. I like small businesses because they are, in many ways, an attempt to answer for what is missing at the neighborhood level. Mr. Hooper’s store on Sesame Street made an outsized impression on my definition of business as a form of community service and community building. It’s why I love the local bar, the local coffee shop, the local bookstore.
But that was the other week, and this morning’s monkey mind was only partially focused on community.
Tuesday morning. I couldn’t settle Monday’s monkey mind and abandoned the writing mid-thought. Today it swings from different but tangential vines. More poetry. More reverie. More wishing I were better at this and not knowing how to get there.
A poem about growing up listening to her brother’s garage band – more specifically the details of the garage (tools on the wall, oil stains) – sent my mind to the white shed in the backyard of the house I owned in Yardley. The shed had attached to it a pigger coffin (a small wooden box meant to hold a pig carcass). The owners made their own sausage and jerky and had on the kitchen table a mail-order catalog of meat processing tools – grinders and knives and other metal things. I think there was also a big and bloody slab of beef in the kitchen sink on one of our tours of the house. I couldn’t remember if I removed the pigger coffin or if the owners removed it before we moved in. I vaguely remember coming across a tarp that might have had written on it in black sharpie, “pigger tarp.” When I thought of the shed, I remembered the lawnmower and the smell of gasoline, the clumps of dry grass on the wooden floor, the rusty tomato cages stacked and piled in the corner, my various experiments with bone meal and fertilizer and composting. I thought of a selfie I had sent to a woman on the morning before our first date – me in sunglasses and ball cap getting ready to mow the lawn before the midday June heat set in.
Despite the description above, I only contemplated the shed for a brief moment. I read other poems, including one about not wanting to die in the bright lights of a hospital, but instead wanting to be “bent to the tide, lifting a shell…” I was still thinking about the house in Yardley – how two different women I dated convinced me to make it more my own. The second of the two, the one I sent the selfie to, eventually moved in to the house and in the process of doing so helped me discover an aesthetic. We got rid of the heavy curtains and replaced them with lighter sheer ones. We added more plants and replaced the big stuffy formal sofas with a more sleek and minimalist modern one. The overall effect was that the house seemed brighter – literally, more light came in. This felt like a metaphor for the change this person introduced in my life: an opening up, a stripping away, an abundance of and appreciation for light.
Sitting in my apartment here in San Francisco, on that more modern sofa with the blinds up and sunlight pouring in, I looked at the black bench this person had left behind (because she knew I liked it). I spent a few moments lost in the remembering. I tried to remember the ways in which we were intimate with each other, but couldn’t (at least not the physical part). Instead, what I could remember was her house in the city: bright yellow walls, the tall windows in her bedroom and thick curtain rods, the area rugs and side tables, the flowering tree out front. With the details of setting and place being most vivid, I began to wonder if it was presence I missed as opposed to this specific person’s intimacy. What seemed special or memorable was knowing someone else’s space and having them know my space. By comparison, physical intimacy seems thin and superficial. I came to the conclusion that I’ve come to many times before – she was more influential on me than I was on her. She left things behind and may not have taken anything of me (or mine) with her. Few things so one sided can survive – memory becomes a one way street. I was also surprised by the near forgetting of touch and sound. If there is a definition of letting go, this seems like as good of one as any: when the forgetting outnumbers the remembering. I took a walk.
By the time I had returned to my apartment, I had been distracted by lots of other thoughts. I was miffed at the group of runners standing around talking and taking up the entire sidewalk forcing me into the street. I was seduced by the smell of flowers growing through and around the gates outside of a house on the corner of the street. I was mentally pulled in the direction of work and finances and the to-do list.
I poured a second cup of coffee and returned to the sofa and the poems I had been reading: Life on Earth by Dorianne Laux. I felt stuck in a minor place of awe. In one poem, the speaker weaves together snow with seeing a show in New York with the day she learned her sister died. “It wasn’t snowing, and then it was,” … “She wasn’t addicted and then she was” … “all night we had been laughing and then we weren’t.” The next poem, “Waitress” was about the speaker’s time as a waitress and the day she was fired and what she remembered from that time in her life. I don’t know if any of these details are true or real, but they’re believable. And as I read, I had this sinking feeling that I’ve lived most of my life on autopilot not paying attention to the details. If I’ve had “times in my life” or phases, I wouldn’t know how to capture them. I don’t think I could remember the details. The metaphor returned. The house had changed, more light came in, but I was also learning to see things differently. I was in the midst of a relationship where the details became inescapable.
Wednesday morning. It’s blustery, gray, and rainy. I have that slight tickle in the back of my throat that suggests a cold might be coming on. Every night for the past three nights, I’ve woken up hourly or every other hour throughout the night. My sleep has been peppered with strange dreams. Three nights ago lions. Last night, I was going through a metal detector and set it off – foil condom wrapper in my back pocket. I couldn’t figure out how to go back and get the rest of my stuff (keys, glasses, belt) without having to go through the metal detector again. I hate not knowing what I’m doing or getting things wrong. Two nights ago I was attending the Oscars (seat B51 that I initially thought was B15) – I also might have been playing in a band at the show. I didn’t know any of the songs we were supposed to play and didn’t know know how to play guitar but was hoping nobody would notice that I was faking it.
At some point during last night’s fitful sleep, I began to wonder about my mind. More specifically, I began to wonder about losing what little mental capacities I have. I don’t possesses any physical skills, and my mind (the ability to think, write, communicate, remember) is all I have. In bed, thinking through this at some ungodly hour in the morning, it occurred to me that the novel Infinite Jest might have been, in part, about the author’s concern of losing his own mind. The main character loses the ability to communicate yet thinks he’s communicating just fine. So much of art is about getting what’s in the mind out into the world as clearly as possible without losing anything in the translation. So much of relationships are about trying to “get” or understand this other person. Viewed this way, much of life seems to be a series of gestures in which we hope to be seen, understood, and maybe accepted. Small excursions into other geographies, be they people or communities or literal places.
Earlier in the day yesterday, prior to the fitful sleep, I recalled a recent text conversation in which someone said, “forgive me if we already had this discussion.” It made me think of the lapses in my own memory when I’m talking to people. I’ll sometimes remember that I was talking about something very specific, but won’t be able to remember with whom. This, in turn, made me consider the possibility that wanting to meet often while early in the dating process (which used to be my M.O.) might be a subconscious workaround designed to help with my attention and memory. I have often tried to figure out why some relationships sparked on the first few dates and others didn’t. The commonalities I can pinpoint are good/playful banter beforehand, a physical connection on meeting, and reinforcement in the form of getting together again within a day or two of first meeting. The question I posed to myself (much like the thought experiment about the intimacy of sharing spaces) was, “what if this is all because I have shit memory and require strong imprinting in order to maintain interest?”
The throughlines, if there are any from these last few mornings, are shitty nights of sleep; details and memory; and wanting to do more (writing, community, relationships) but maybe not knowing how, where to start, or how to solicit help. As is often the case, I seldom have answers or concise conclusions and in the meantime have done a decent job of making myself dizzy and/or tying myself in knots.