Saturday, December 22, 2012

TWENTYTWELVE

I wish I were the type of person who did this every week. Or every month. Or every mesocycle.

I'm going to say that I do it every year, but that's probably an exaggeration.

But what's important is that I'm doing it now: reflecting.

And documenting.

And reliving.

And feeling.

And since it's the almost the end of the year—actually past the end of the world—I'll start from the beginning.

It was a warm January. I rode a lot and worked out at David Barton while looking for a "real" job so as to avoid going back to bike tours once again. The synchronicity led me to think I'd find one with Groupon so I could work out at David Barton before and/or after work. 

But then the one-month free trial ended and Groupon hired someone else—many other people.

Some time around February I started learning to code and started dating Martha, an Obama campaign worker. It's hard to separate January from February from March since I stayed mostly at home during the day trying to build a rideshare website à la Mitfahrgelegenheit.

March, I remember because that was the month Will quit drugs and channeled all his anxiety into writing music. It was a relatively peaceful month; he mostly stayed in his room writing acoustic songs.

The months after that, however, saw drug experimentation reach a whole new level: Molly, Coke, daily THC, Mushrooms, etc. Which created quite  the unsettled home life for me. I remember coming home from bike tours—which I still ended up doing—and he was filling our space with tape loops fed back into distortion pedals and delay. I tried calling it noise music, but that description was one word too long.

And then there were bike tours and more Martha; in between there was more coding.

Martha couldn't take up too much of my time since hers was already being all taken up. 60 hours a week at minimum, most of her weeks were more like 80 or more.

I'd meet her sometimes for diner and drinks at 11. Or I'd just meet her at her place at midnight. Or 1. Or 2.

2 was where I drew the line.

Life was pretty full: gainful employment that I was tired of, ungainful work on my website ideas, and a part-part-time girlfriend. I hardly noticed that I wasn't making any music.

Like Rilke says to the young artist, you have to ask yourself how great your need is. If you don't need to write poetry or make music, then why are you doing it? 

I think I still have a need deep down but that it was drowned in this strange sense of obligation.

Obligation kills fun.

By September, I had some job prospects making websites, and so, mimicking my departure from Chicago State happening on my birthday, I quit bike tours.

I got an ungainful gig doing coding for a Chicago-based startup called Dabble with offices in an "incubator" called Catapult on the 25th floor of some random office building downtown.

[Not so random, it turns out: a month or two after roommate Will moved out, I ran into him there—there where he's been working all along.]

Then I got a small gig working for a gun website where you can track your purchases of various guns, ammunition, and accoutrements. 

And no, the website did not use the word accoutrements. 

And then real work. And love. November was a good month. While every other dude was growing mustaches—[what is it about my personality that loathes such mass movements?]—I was living the dream. I went with Martha to her family's Thanksgiving and we got to suddenly spend a lot more time together. In fact, all the time. And it was good.

We came back both feeling dreamily in love and unable to imagine the future.

The future, which was fast upon us.

Over Thanksgiving she convinced me to join her and her sisters in Puerto Rico, a trip which had been planned for months and was a nagging possibility in my mind for as long. My feelings about going were a tangled mess of Ego, Superego, and Id reasons, but Martha helped me overcome my hesitations and bite the bullet.

The day before she left, 5 days before I was to join her, she got a job offer in DC. The dream was over; the mental dam that was holding back the waters of reality burst and we were sinking and swimming—simultaneously.

To be fair, I sank for a good couple of days. Then I went to join her and put it out of my mind. Or mostly. It's not the kind of thing you can forget emotionally so, while I felt relaxed and present, I also felt more fractious and disagreeable. I didn't want to be with anyone but her while feeling this pressure to get the most out of my trip.

In the end, I think I exhausted myself, physically, emotionally, and sexually.

We got back and had 4-5 days of togetherness before she left.

I denied my exhaustion and ignored the reality of her leaving. It was easier to imagine her departure as the end—of the world or whatever—but a big fucking punctuation mark beyond which I couldn't see past.

Doing so, I was able to stay relatively happy with the situation and get the most out of our time together. After she left, however, I gave in to my exhaustion and had 3 days of hangover-like doldrums. And after the 3rd day I rose and it was good again.

The untenable whirlwind of the last few months was over and I was alone again. Not lonely but alone. My head cleared and I felt like me again, not realizing that I had not felt myself for quite some time.

The big question for our relationship during the campaign was about how we'd be together in a "normal" life. Still not having had that, the question lingers as wide open as ever.

And now it's the holidays. Christmas has made me so sad in years past. One awful Christmas 5 years ago, my hear was rendered in asunder and every one since has reminded me more and more forcefully that I'm alone—a loner perhaps—in a world of families.

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