What is with my aversion to writing about real life? Or bring down to the personal level, my own life? I’m bored with it. Or is it that I don’t want to look at it too closely? What sort of things can I be avoiding looking at? That I’m thirty-six and alone, that I have not found that woman I’m destined to be with. That I wonder if love is a fiction, at least for me. I don’t want to hear you self-help readers say, “You’re just afraid you’re not lovable.” I’m more afraid that I just won’t find her out there, or that I’m incapable of loving someone. I’m great at being enraptured, lustful, entranced from afar, but let me in too close and I’ll start to see the cracks in the teacup.
Okay, enough on love. How about children? I ache when I think that I might never have children. I think kids are the most miraculous beings on the planet. I immediately smile when I see a child walking towards me, holding a grandparent’s hand, or riding on a dad’s shoulder, or even sleeping in a stroller. They pick me out of the crowd too, and smile back. It’s like they know I’m connected to them in some way. Or is it just that they can’t repress a giggle from seeing a 6’2” kid smiling back at them??
What else? Writing. God, writing. Don’t make me look at this debacle. Writing was to be the thing I live for, the life’s work that provides meaning, a purpose-maker, navigator, reprisal for all of those empty spaces mentioned above. But my love and joy of writing has dissolved, left home, abandoned me. It’s like you work for something (albeit half-assed) all of your life and then detour off course and realize while you’re lying in bed at night that you’re not going to get it back. Sometime a number of years ago I strayed. And where am I now? Working at a utility company as a SQL coder. A data gopher. I don’t want to look at this too closely, and maybe that’s why I have such distaste in my mouth when I sit down to write, especially about any thing real. It’s something like running into an ex-lover on the street and having to hug them and say how wonderful they look. It’s like kissing somebody you really don’t want to kiss but feel obliged to. Like getting laid off and seeing the smug face of your old coworkers when run into them at the grocery store.
See how I shelter myself with metaphor. A thing like a thing like a thing leaves me three steps removed from the truth, and I can finally digest it. I’m waiting for July 1st, when I can leave this truth and reality crap behind and go back to my delusions.
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2 comments:
Um, what happens July 1st?
For all of June I was going to write daily about what's really going on in my life, rather than the purefuly fictional or delusional stuff I usually write. I somehow got this great idea after reading the get trivial blog for a while, and even your own stuff is much more biographical than mine. July 1st I'm allowing myself to go back to the imagined life I'm more comfortable living in. What's that short story everybody has to read in high school, about the ordinary guy who has an overbearing wife, and he lives out this fantasy life while going to the grocery store, or something like that?
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