It Plays, I Lay
There is always too much time until there is none. Days are endless as they are pointless, exercises in tedium, spent scrolling through the void and takin’ what you’re given ‘cause you’re working for a livin’. You’re gonna die — everyone does — but you don’t know exactly when so it’s best to just ignore it, shove whatever thoughts you have on the issue into the deepest recesses of your mind. May as well push everything back there, actually, since you only use ten percent of your brain. The rest is storage.
And anyway, you always have tomorrow, which conveniently just so happens to also be the first day of the rest of your life.
The thing about tomorrow being the first day of the rest of your life, though, is that so is the day after that, and after that, ad infinitum. It may very well be the promise of a new day, but a promise can also be a lie. It all depends on follow through. Do I mean what I say when I emphatically agree with someone that we should “hang out more”? I do, at the time. But then time passes.
Most of my activity takes place in the mind, much to the continued detriment of my body, but I shift enough that bed sores don’t set in. Avoidance doesn’t solve problems, it actually compounds them, but try telling that to a 39 year old woman who is telling you she already knows this, a 39 year old woman who just spent the last three months not writing a goddamned thing save a note about the New York City subway system on her phone (“It’s miraculous until it temporarily inconveniences you”).
I am the type who will read an email and, instead of replying in the moment, mark it as unread so it sits at the top of my inbox for days, weeks, months, a constant reminder of my failing as a friend or confidant. There are, por ejemplo, currently over 400 emails languishing in the inbox of my low listenership podcast, the listenership of which I should (and do) appreciate.
But doing nothing in light of the necessity of something is just another thing I can punish myself about, unarguable evidence that I am a fraud, which I’ve been on the hunt for ever since I stopped drinking again (six months and 18 days ago, but who’s counting — I have an app on my phone that does it for me).
And anyway, you’ve gotta flail yourself while you’re still alive, because you can’t when you’re gone (even if you believe in a malevolent afterlife, I’m pretty sure the demons are the ones who do the flailing, unless they’re the childhood bully type who bark “stop hitting yourself!” whilst operating your own fists).
And yes, I know my oldest friend has “treatment resistant” cancer and may very well die of it and that’s why I’m not talking to him, duh. It’s also why I’m chain smoking while writing this, because John never smoked and he still got fucking cancer and so eat shit, statistics. Months ago, I finally texted him after months of silence and will now share with you the paragraph of his response that made me start sobbing:
“About a year ago I was talking with my sister and we both shared the sentiment that, if given any sort of health development where we knew we were gonna die, we’d essentially be cool with it. When yr gone yr gone. That was fuckin naive because now, given the news that this could truly take me out, this supposedly easy to treat cancer, I absolutely do not wanna die - for the very same reason I previously used to justify my indifference at dying... when yr gone yr gone! I was thinking about everything. I was thinking about how you are one of my very best friends and, inarguably, the friend I’ve had the longest and will always be emotionally the closest because of how much history we’ve shared and it bummed me out how much I’d took for granted that we’d be friends for years and years to come and now, if I were to die, in retrospect I would put a shit ton more effort to hang out at whatever possibility I could have made. Just time wasted and under appreciated.”
I don’t want to think about taking John for granted. I don’t want to think about John, period.
I don’t want to think about him wearing a “My Aim is True” shirt in his fourth grade yearbook photo; I don’t want to think about his father, who chain smoked in the garage all day every day and yelled “John! Your little friend is here!” whenever I came over; I don’t want to think about his mother, who wore bathing suits as clothing and played Neil Young extremely fucking loud while painting sunflowers; I don’t want to think about his sister, a decade older than us and possessive of superb musical taste who introduced John and therefore me to Jon Brion, a lifesaver attached to an anchor located off the coast of California which gave us someone, something, to care about during some of the most painful and nihilistic years of our lives.
On Fridays we would cut school, often literally running away from a wheezing, windbreakered campus supervisor, escape the Hell of Hollister and drive through the Wasteland to Los Angeles, where we’d sit criss cross applesauce on the sidewalk outside Largo, arriving hours before the doors opened with the flexibility and enthusiasm of youth because we had to sit at the table directly in front of the stage, had to make mental memories of every movement made by the object of our pubescent passion. The brain held more storage then. We were so goddamned excited to fill the coffers of our minds with something symphonic, we didn’t care that we’d have to sleep in the car afterward because no one would rent a motel room to children.
Side Note: We did get a room, once, at the Dreams Motel on Sunset (Proposed Slogan: “Because a Nightmare’s Still a Dream!”). I remember emerging from the bathroom to see him lying there naked, a look of resignation on his face. I had attempted to fuck him for years to no avail, because, in my mind, why wouldn’t you want to fuck the only person in your one-horse-fuck town who “got it”? Finally, it seemed, I had worn him down. We subsequently tried but failed to fuck and never spoke of it again. I wish I had lost my virginity to him, because when you lose your virginity to a virgin they can’t give you HPV.
We would stand around after the second show was over, hovering like creeps while the waitstaff began vacuuming the floor, waiting to talk to Jon Brion. He’d oblige us for hours because, well, we were children, and wouldn’t you be interested in talking to a child who had driven ten hours round trip to see you? The last time I mustered up the courage to speak to him was in the lobby of a Fran Lebowitz speaking engagement — he was sitting with his mother and I approached, gave him a paper with my contact information and said I would an interview, a desire he appeared kindly apathetic about fulfilling. The last words out of my mouth were “I’m not a crackpot.” Shortly thereafter I passed out on the sidewalk outside of the venue from abortion related blood loss. The novelty was over. I was no longer a child.
I don’t want to think about the fact that, without John, my miserable upbringing would have been well and truly intolerable. To know that there was someone else within driving distance who felt the same, thought the same, living in the same spirit ditch surrounded by dirt and weeds was spiriting.
I don’t want to think about the fact that John will read this, as John reads everything I write, as John loves and is proud of me, the only person from Hollister I can say to be the case (while my family does love me, they can give one iota of a fuck about my creative output or career achievements; the Christmas I came home after appearing on television for the first time, my grandmother was more impressed by the fact that my cousin had started breeding dogs in the trailer he lived in on his father’s land).
I am, by no means, a success by traditional arbiters but I made it out of Hollister and, y’know, former fellow Wasteland inhabitant Stephen Malkmus follows me on Twitter (I check to see if he still does with crushing regularity, terrified he’ll leave). John and I loved Jon Brion, sure, but he was a Yankee; we loved Pavement and Grandaddy in a different way, because they were proof that being born in the Wasteland, the “Congress Created Dust Bowl,” wasn’t a death sentence. We were gonna go see Grandaddy a few years back, but then the fucking bass player died out of nowhere.
We’d waste weeks, months, sometimes years, always operating under the assumption that when we spoke again it would be as though time had not passed, because, well, time didn’t matter — whenever we finally “circled back,” we immediately locked back in step. It seems bizarre to say someone you rarely speak to is one of your best friends, but that was, is, our relationship. When you spend so many fucking hours of your life around someone during the worst fucking years of your life, you get to a point where you no longer have to say anything.
And so I haven’t written anything for months, because I’ve wanted to write something about John, and I’ve wanted to do a really good job because — I don’t know — I suppose I feel like I owe it to him. I owe him something, something that makes him feel how much he matters to me, something worth spending a fraction of the handful of hours of the day he’s conscious reading. It’s a tremendous amount of self-imposed pressure, enough to render me impotent. What if it isn’t good enough? Interesting enough? Honorable enough?
Fear does not necessarily generate action — in my case, it’s often the opposite. Fight or flight is such a binary choice; there should be a third option, that being playing dead.
Side Note: I recently learned that the phenomenon of “Playing Possum” is a misnomer; possums, when confronted with potential conflict, don’t play dead, they pass out from fear.
I don’t want John to die, but I don’t know what to do to make him live. And so I do nothing.