The trouble I've had writing lately is organizational, I think. My life, being routinized, lacks a real narrative structure, at least, to me, a conscious one, so I simply record random facts seasoned with opinions. I just deleted a post again. In the past, the vast majority of my posts have concluded with a reference to where the post began, no matter how subtle. The subtler the better, really. Many, if not most posts, it was unconsciously done, but when I did it, I saw it and thought, "Voila!" I had developed a storyteller's knack.
My classroom lectures were much the same. I mean. . . I was usually surprised and pleased.
Now I struggle with the same narrative day after day after day. The groove is too deep, it seems, the record stuck on repeat.
Now that's a fine trope that takes a moment. I can imagine telling a room full of freshmen such a thing and getting back the blank stares of incomprehension.
Here, I think, I can introduce a random fact. My mother went to lunch with her neighbors yesterday. When I asked her if she had a good time, she said that the food was ok and that a string trio perfomed.
"That is why Dan and Donna went. They enjoyed the music. It didn't bother me."
Sometimes my mother's hillbilly ways break me up.
Her ninety-one year old neighbor's daughter drove them.
"She retires in July. I asked her if she was going to travel. She said oh, yes!"
My mother delivered this in a gleeful tone as if discovering some marvel.
I said, "I had wanted to travel, too."
"Yes, I told her you were stuck with me."
This was delivered with the same dull glee. Sometimes her hillbilly ways are not so endearing.
But yesterday I did have lunch with T and his wife. They are very sweet to me, and T's wife said they were going to build a place for me so I could come stay with them. I was pleasantly shocked by this as I believe most people only tolerate me.
"That would be swell," I said, "but I will be dead before my mother. The life I am living will take me to the grave."
I do not say this for effect. It is something I believe with all my being. It is my Sisyphean fate.
A hillbilly's marvel is really only anything just beyond arm's reach. A hillbilly's life is never gleeful. One thing is much like another. When, for instance, my mother returned from a Viking Cruise down the Danube one Christmas with her friend, I asked her how it was.
"The buffet on the boat was fine. The boat would stop and we would get off and walk around."
"What did you see?"
"Just some old churches. There were Christmas lights."
The buffet was o.k..
There is a scene Jim Jarmusch's film "Down by Law" where the three main characters have escaped from prison and having come out of a vast Louisiana swamp find themselves standing by a railroad track.
"Standing by the tracks, Jack and Zack are exhausted, irritable, and bickering. They look around the flat, repeating wilderness and grumble about how every place looks exactly the same, emphasizing the circular, existential nature of their journey."
I had to look that up to make sure I was remembering correctly. I doubt that I have seen that movie since it came out in 1986, but that scene burned itself into my brain as it perfectly captured the essence of my childhood and adolescence lived always on the outskirts of life in the poorer, uglier stretches of the world. One thing was as good as another. A roof over your head and something in your belly. A six pack of beer and a pack of cigarettes.
O.K. I'm working to make something out of nothing here. T's wife chose the wrong part of the restaurant in which to sit yesterday, a small backroom with nothing to look at but one another. I ordered fried squid which was terrible.
When it was time to go back to my mother's, I called her and said I wasn't up for cooking. I stopped at the store and bought some sliced ham and a pack of sliced cheddar cheese for sandwiches. When I got back to her house, it began to rain. It was early, but I was sick with the remnants of vertigo and bad squid, so I said fuck it and poured a scotch to take to the garage/porch. Hillbilly that I am (again), I sat in an old chair covered in some found material among the garden tools looking past the garbage can into the future. In a little while, my mother came out to join me, but the rain had turned into a squall and she wanted to close the garage door.
Back inside, I decided to make a sandwich. And I swear, it was the best thing I have eaten all week. I put a slice of ham and a slice of cheddar on a piece of bread slathered in honey mustard, folded it in two, and ate it in a few bites. It was wonderful. I made another, then another. My mother had one, too. We watched the news. I had another whiskey.
It was Friday night I remembered.
I searched for something to watch on t.v. and stumbled onto "Vladimir" on Netflix (link). I watched three episodes, then took an Advil PM and went to bed. I slept eight hours without moving. If you don't use it all the time, that shit is like heroin.
It is Saturday. There is another pop-up "vintage" market in the hipster part of town. I don't know if I have it in me to try to mingle with the crowd. "The force that drives the green fuse" has dwindled. I may just sit and stare. One thing is much like another.
Voila. That's the best I can do. I've tied the ending to the middle unless you count the photo at the top. If only I had begun en media res. . . .
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