Dwelling.
Maybe it’s not worrying about what gets lost in a fire… maybe it’s the fear I won’t find what’s really dear to me in the mess.
Like everyone I always fear what comes after when something good ends. It’s not about what I should do with myself after I’m alone — I learned to live alone young — but what do I do to restart?
I’ve started the process by cleaning. That’s what you do at 6 in the morning on a Sunday, when you realize you’ve lost control of your life and chocolate pudding isn’t enough. What started as a temporary room became an adorned home for a year going now. And what it’s adorned is just a box of things with forced meanings and vague memories.
——
Once a colleague called me up randomly, asked me for a favor. Am I, and will I, be able to show up somewhere to help a mutual friend? Being a sucker, I said of course. He alluded to what needed be done and leaked not a single word more, bring trash bags he concluded. He thanked me for not bothering to ask who we’re helping. I am a bag man, I have always been a bag man. Professionalism means discretion.
When I showed up I was told to brace myself. We both were writers and we both cringed when those words lingered in the air. The door would not budge without applying my body. Once inside the San Francisco efficiency all you can see were silver whippit canisters on the ground, they were everywhere, clinking like a Damien Hirst pachinko machine. What I was recruited for was to clean out a room left behind by a junkie. A junkie friend. A brilliant junkie friend with personal struggles that he ran from thirty short hilarious seconds at a time.
It’s suppose to be harmless, the white kids back on the block would use it and get riled up before the Friday night football games and rammed concrete walls in their helmet until it was time to charge. I wouldn’t know, I was in marching band.
I’ve been told it feels like love, these little silver canisters. A deeply satisfying detachment from the physical world and person. Launch you into another dimension. Maybe somewhere more beautiful than sitting alone in a dark room, walking around on top of canisters, grinding glass cups into sand, not even hungry enough to gorge on trash. With Ministry playing. Ew, Ministry.
I kicked a few around me feet, it must be good if every other head shop in the Mission only sells them by the distributor boxes that comes in hundreds. A pallet of which ended up in this man’s house. Cheap considering there was no legal pot back then.
My friend and I spent the night clearing out all the little dream passes. Bagging them and then running downstairs and dropping them into the trash bin behind a Walgreens guarded by the bums in the shadows. By the time we used up all the boxes of trash bags I brought we decided it was a good time to take a burrito break.
What happened to him, I finally asked.
He’s in the hospital. Yesterday he stood up and fell down. Doctor thinks he has vertigo.
Must be rough lately, I couldn’t judge.
He never asked for help with his troubles.
I nodded even though I didn’t know anything about his life. Finally I thought of something writer-y to say. The strongest ones never do, they think they can ride the lightning forever.
Yeah, he was happy before. But then she left. He’s been through a lot.
It’s hard to accept things we cannot change and it’s harder to give up thinking we know the difference, that was writer-y enough. I then sunk back into the best carnitas in town. I call it taco therapy.
Back at the apartment I rifled through the man’s life. The explicit instructions was to keep only things of value and toss everything out. I had a hard time following that. I imagine everything was of value, they’re all clues to a life of an older man high in his career, a good place.
The polaroid of a young him standing in front of some track-prepared Jaguars. His collection of writing books. His posters commemorating him and his work. His guitar. His vinyl collection. His bills. His prescriptions. His tax returns. His computer. His rotting food. His expensive hi-fi setup. His old school camera. His pictures of her.
I wanted to keep it all. I was young, full of empathy, I was afraid in the twilight of age I would easily forget and forgetting what I had would be the worst crime. I didn’t know when and how to stop in a junkie’s house. So I tossed it all. Not forgetting was why I ended up there in the first place.
——
I don’t recognize the person I was when I came here and now as I go through my accumulated crap over the year I don’t know the person I became. The books betray me to be a geek. The business cards scattered all about make me to be socializing but I’m as lonely as ever. All the mail and envelopes means I’m irresponsible. And all the drugs… I don’t know how the drugs got there.
It’s just stuff, stuffed into a stuffy tiny little room like stuffing. I doubt it’ll even fetch four figures on Storage Wars. I came here with a plastic tub and my laptop, told myself I can always get more stuff and fulfilled my own fears which fed my disgust.
The world is unlikely to run out of stuff in the long run. But they’re all of cheap quality. Three Apple mices lay by my hand. Trinkets, jujus, knickknacks on my desk. Clothes by the pound that need to be laundered. Shoeboxes of more crap cluttering everywhere. This is just the stuff I see.
You know how at a new restaurant, given overwhelming amount of options, you just end up standing there? The young risk trying something new, the old stick with what they know, and neither want to admit the urge of otherwise. When you rush you end up with something you don’t want, when you slow down and analyze you end up getting passed by. Paralysis of choice. That’s, ironically, by choice. You can decide, it’s not hard, but you lack the serenity to do so.
I was trained by the Corps to know hesitation kills. Critical decisions have to be made and they have to be made quick and you have to learn to live with the consequences.
It’s easy to forget how to live hard when you get soft. That’s what they warned me when I didn’t sign my re-enlistment papers. I lied and told them I’ll keep that in mind.
Today I have that in mind. I’m not going to be afraid. I’m not going to be regretful. I’m not going to cave. I’m just going to start. Anywhere, somewhere, and don’t stop. Today I’m tossing. Today I’m cleaning. Today I’m going to restart and deal with stuff, both the seen and unseen.
