Today has been okay

He didn’t think his particular brand of loneliness was special in any way. He thought of it as something that was just a part of the human condition like waking up in the morning and having to pee. And yet, even knowing this, as he walked along the river listening to a dog bark somewhere, he couldn’t tell how far away in the dark, he found it hard to not consider his loneliness to not just be an essential part of the human condition but to be instead a particular type of loneliness that only he could experience. A thought pattern which made him lonelier still by confirming his original belief, that loneliness was both an essentially banal and unique condition at the same time, that feeling bad about it would be like feeling bad about having a nose, it was just a thing everyone dealt with, and yet, this reality did nothing to diminish the feeling itself, or so he thought. 

He wandered by a koi pond, stopping to buy a few grains of fish food, or whatever it was and dropping it in, watching the yellow and blue and red backed monsters glide along beneath the surface of the green water. He disliked the feeling of the grains between his fingers and he regretted having bought the fish food at all. He would now spend the day smelling like an animal trough. What if he came across a beautiful woman? Perhaps he’d tell her he was a horse trainer. He scanned the area but only noticed a couple of women pushing strollers, families standing at the edge of the pond with a relative in a wheel chair. No one to impress. He threw the last few grains of fish food into the pond in a heap, and, just as he was to turn and go a monstrous golden koi surfaced, brushing the other fish aside as if he were a locomotive and they, mere rail cars, snapping up the food. He could see that the fish was probably metaphorical. But he could not see or hear what Melville had said about water, about it calming the soul. He was finding no peace in staring at the green looking bilge water. Melville obviously meant open water, something free. The fish and the open water were metaphors for the taking, of that he could be sure. He stood up, knees cracking, and walked away from the metaphors and towards a street lined with office buildings. 

For how could a person, he thought, possibly hold all of the people he encountered in such contempt, without beginning to hold himself in contempt. He didn’t know if it was  uniquely human trait, or whether it was biological, though, come to think of it, he didn’t know if he thought of humans as mere biological manifestations of Darwin’s laws come to light, as cosmic dust from a very small point exploding infinitely, or as something special, essential. It sort of depended on the day. He’d had a Catholic upbringing, which had not helped him to figure things out at all. 

He was taken back to the problem of America. Bits of trash, gum wrappers, fractured bottles glittered in the street, stars in a smoldering grey sky. The wind seemed to be from the Northwest, though it might have been Northeast, he was never quite clear on his cardinal directions. Either way, it was now intensely cold down by the forgotten water. He’d left the girls down by the water after taking a drink or two straight off the bottle and reflecting on the kindness of strangers. And it was this reflection that had led him back inside himself. It was precisely this phenomenon. 

Whenever he found himself experiencing an intense gut level dislike of people in general, he had to remind himself that, in truth, he liked individuals, it was people he hated. This seemingly strange conjecture was really just another aspect of a self-attribution bias. A person, even a person with base views about the need for state militias and the demagogue of free enterprise, by virtue of knowing him instantly became more likable, more like himself he supposed, as he circumscribed them, painted a picture in his mind of what they were like, and decided on where to hang it in the gallery of his mind. And this mere act was enough to make him actually begin to like most individuals he met. Certainly there were a few, here and there that he felt he could do without, but, in general, he liked individuals, but gather them together in a group  and he instantly began to dislike them. It was a kind of weakness, he knew, this inability to separate himself from his perception of the world at large, but the supposed it was the sort of thing that everyone went through, and that only people like Gandhi managed to escape, though he, Gandhi, spent nights sleeping naked next to his attractive cousin, and, regardless of the point he was trying to prove, in truth, he was still sleeping next to a good looking woman naked, which was one step up from not doing so if truth be told. 

A part of him wanted to blame the whole problem on a Judeo Christian ethic. The us vs. them quality of the old Testament in which the Canaanites are slaughtered so that the Israelites might lay claim to their land. And yet, he knew, that despite Christianities thinning hold over his thoughts and consequently, the risk that he might turn virulently against it, that people had always, upon finding someone different than themselves, shot arrows, or stole, or thrown up a flag to signify peace, or an attempt at peace, because it was well known that people who were different were different for a reason and that reason was probably bad. 

Either way it was still as present as oxygen or thin cirrus clouds somewhere on the horizon. It had been a part of his childhood, the last vestiges of the Cold War, they’d hid under their desks from earthquakes, not from the Soviets, by then it was clear that the wall was crumbling, but it wasn’t down yet, and they watched in his first grade classroom as the Challenger exploded, a monument of the folly of competition, or so it seemed to him now, though he’d concede that perhaps it was something else. 

When he walked in the evening he was often overwhelmed with a sense of loneliness, of not being known by anyone. He thought of himself as a little boy standing before an ocean wave, and being enveloped, all alone, covered completely by the water, bathed in the sound, alone, forever. And so when he took these walks at night he took them as a puppy or a very friendly dog would, in search of someone to unburden his soul to, if soul’s existed, or whether they were just constructions of the mind. He deemed the answer unimportant, because he felt that he had something that needed to be shared. 

It was commonplace, he knew, to live in the depths of a city and feel completely anonymous. 

The street was lined by empty cars and old blue gum trees that had been planted some forty years before.  

It struck him that the understanding of our place within the universe was either radically important or deeply uninteresting. On the one hand it seemed fundamentally important whether a person believed that the universe was created and sustained by an all powerful being who’s true aim, problems aside was the redemption of some portion of humanity. Or whether you thought that the world was a mere accident in a myriad of accidents, or some sort of cosmic inevitability that was ultimately meaningless, just a collection of matter that had a tendency to form organisms, who in turn, formed more complex organisms. In short, whether human history was directed towards some goal, or whether human existence was just a monumental accident. This, it seemed to him, should be the essential sort of question that every human being should come to terms with before deciding how to live their life, whether things like ethics and morals etc. were even relevant, seemed somewhat contingent on this conclusion. And yet, people, himself included, tended to give more sustained thought to whether they’d prefer Chinese food or pizza for dinner than on the nature or direction of their existence. Why was this? Did everybody secretly already know in their gut whether they believed in anything beyond themselves as cosmic jokes or not? Or were these questions so difficult to answer that they just functioned in the background of everyone’s mind, like a computer running some endless processing function. 

The real problem was that, from a societal standpoint, at least in the technocratic western world where he’d been weaned, the answer to the question was a non-sequiter. What does the creation of the universe or your place in it have to do with rent, with a spreadsheet, with staying in shape? You’d hear, and heard a couple in his church going days, a sermon or two that said that it made all the difference, but he often wondered if that was true. People who professed to believe in the direction of God in the world always seemed hopelessly naïve, or so like their non-believing cohorts that the belief didn’t seem to matter. It was too hard to walk a reasonable middle ground. And either way, it didn’t seem, with the way society was made, to matter at all. We were no longer sacrificing cows or other human beings to deities for rain. It had become a thing that a person could consider in the privacy of their own home, like whether to have cable or not. In short, religion was on the fringe. He wasn’t even sure that that was a problem, or whether it was just a natural result of being a citizen in any developed nation. 

He left the office and walked out into the cold night. He was wearing a grey scarf and thinking about a woman he’d seen on the bus that morning. She had been no more than eighteen, dark-haired and pretty. She’d sat next to him, smelled of peach blossoms. Was he insane to have waited his entire day to think about a girl that he sat next to on the bus that morning? What other thoughts should have been occupying his mind? The street was lined by a row of conifers and shrouded by junipers that had been dragged in from lord only knows where. The chances were that he would never see the girl in the bus again. In fact, given their relative proximity, he was fairly certain that the girl on the bus had never actually seen him. And yet, here he was, thinking about the girl on the bus after the actual interaction, or non-interactions, and there she was taking up mental space in his brain, a person with whom he had no personal connection. Maybe the mystery of celebrity was not mystery at all? Maybe it made perfect sense to imagine the lives and legs of strangers. 

It was reasonable to ask what it said about community, the obsession with other lives. What about the lives right in front of us? What about his neighbors. My god, did he have any clue what his neighbor’s names were? He didn’t know if there was something fundamentally wrong with the current iteration of society, the distance between people that was supposedly lessened by being able to contact 300 of your best friends at any time and let them know what you were doing. Perhaps it was better in the old days, when a person went over and told his neighbor, or better yet, didn’t tell his neighbor anything, just had dinner with people he called friends and didn’t talk about his problems at all, or only talked about them as they related to his friends, perhaps they talked about the weather, how the cold had lasted longer than usual in April, and then he went home not having thought about how miserable he was, not giving himself the luxury of being unhappy, taking the crutch away. Well, the crutch was always there now, and it had turned out that people were just as interested in themselves as everyone had always suspected. The flattening of the world had only revealed the flatness of the people who inhabited it. 

He didn’t believe all of this. In fact, the thought that the doomsday folks were remembering, as usual, a time in America that had never existed, when one used to go over to his neighbor’s house for dinner and then drink themselves into oblivion, or when women or blacks were marginalized or unhappy. There was really no better time to be alive than now in terms of things like social justice and equality for the sexes. And yet, everyone he knew seemed to be mildly unhappy, unmoored in the world. Thinking about life as though it were a problem that was capable of being solved was probably the wrong tack. You were not, he concluded, sailing alone. Others had traversed these same streets and hallways, loved the same strands of hair, and perhaps he would look for his comfort there, in the minds of others. 

He spent that summer studying in Paris at an American University. That particular night he was sitting near the Eiffel tower drinking a bottle of wine, studying the glittering tower above him, the women walking by, the clip of their heels on pavement, and the image of them burned on his retina like smoke drifting slowly at out of a room. It’s bad business to fall in love in Paris as most people know. Truth be told, it’s bad business to fall in love anywhere, but it’s particularly bad to do so in Paris. This is because the Parisians are notoriously rude to outsiders, and there is no one who is more of an outsider than a person in love. They take very little interest in anyone besides themselves, which, of course, makes lovers the worst sort of Parisians to be around. In short, it’s bad news to be around lovers for they tend to focus inwardly. 

Paris had existed in his mind long before the plane had touched down at De Gaulle, and he’d spent an hour waiting for the train in the small grey depot below. Before he landed Paris had been an idea of faded grandeur, an expression of what it would be like to be in New York when Tokyo had reached its final ascension. Only better, because the Parisians were so damn proud where New Yorkers were just pushy and mean, and so as he walked the grand Boulevards of Van Haussman, that old rascal clearing out the mud and filth and charm of a Paris even older than the one in his mind, a Paris of winding streets and whores with consumption, he thought how the boulevards could just as easily have been used for ships, how he, as a child, had flooded the lawn by turning on the hose all afternoon to float his army men across the heavy clumps of grass, and how if one were to turn on a spigot in Paris, the liners would have no problem sailing down the streets with passengers plucking flowers from window boxes. 

Everyone he knew in American had a fine and upstanding belief in the power of their own opinion. It’s just an opinion, the weaker of them would say, but opinions, he’d learned, had an odd tendency of resembling fact. And yet, he knew that opinions sometimes changed. That Christians sometimes became atheists, and atheists Christians, that sometimes people swore up and down that they’d never own a dog, or get married, and then, you’d see them on facebook three years later with their arm around a woman and a Boston Terrier, and go on to read their numerous blog entries about the trials and travails of being the owner of a Terrier, and you’d wonder if anyone sticks to their convictions. The fact of the matter was that people rarely changed their minds about things he was interested in like cinema and literature. And he’d as of yet found no more compelling argument than proclaiming his antagonists vapidity as a means of convincing them that a three hour movie about depressing people digging through messed up lives was somehow more meaningful than things that showed to a larger audience, more real. 

He slept with three women during his stint in Paris. The first woman was named Regan, and she was younger than he was, and pretty. At first, he’d thought she was a literature student like himself, and he’d recommended some modern authors that she might like to read, and she’d told him that really, if she could do two things, she’d like to be a development worker, which is what she was in school for, and also a writer, but she worried that she didn’t have time for the latter, that it would just live at the edge of her conscious mind, a thing unrealized. And, though he reassured her, he was also certain that everyone in the world as their first or second job probably wanted to be a writer. It was a pretty common thing to desire. And so, in talking with her they found a middle ground discussing the history of Western Art, which was a requisite class for everybody abroad that semester. 

And, in these conversations, he delivered disquisitions on the caves at Lascaux and of the cave drawings, dated to incredibly distant times that they’d found in remote parts of the Appalachia in America. She found him interesting, liked knowledge of the sort that the displayed. He had this habit of not really making eye contact when he talked, as if he was nervous. He was relatively attractive, and the thought that she made him nervous, secretly pleased her, made her feel a bit of the control that was always absent in these sorts of interactions. It was always dependent, or nearly always dependent on the male of the species to begin the conversation, and, while this always seemingly gave the woman a modicum of control, really, what it did, was placed her in a position only to receive advances rather than capture them for herself. And so, only if she had one hundred hands could she count that the number of conversations that had not gone this easily with men, she was sure, even at her young age, would have liked to have slept with her, or at least gone out on a date with her, and it was a delicate, a difficult thing, to balance their expectations, set them straight, without being conceived of as a bitch or vapid or somehow manipulative, which she wasn’t. She was just a woman who had to manage expectations. 

And this young man, who was quietly telling her how the cave paintings at Lascaux weren’t really art at all, but religious signs, was worth listening to. “That’s the crux of art,” he told her, putting his glass at an angle and spinning it deftly as if it were a top. “All art or at least all good art is religious, or fine, if we’re uncomfortable with that term, spiritual. It seeks a connection with someone or something beyond ourselves. When art becomes self-referential, baroque, it starts to lose its meaning. Art cannot exist for art’s sake. What are the things you’ve read? Apologies, it’s more my field of expertise, look at Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, their texts are more or less spiritual guides to life. The amazing part is that they provide so many characters struggling with the reality of being a human being wrapped in the mystery of spirituality. The two seem inseparable, threaded together in the fabric of our beings.”  

She was not a strict atheist, but she had never really believed in any type of organized religion. It seemed silly, in the way that an older relative with dementia might at a large party. It was not worth attending to because it couldn’t possibly matter what they were saying. To give it more attention as some of these famous atheists, whose books she’d only glanced through, was to give it more credence than it deserved. “The struggle,” she said, wetting her lips with a bit of water, “is not spiritual. It’s carnal. The thing human beings spend most of their time thinking about is where their next meal is going to come from, its shape and flavors, or where the nearest bathroom is. It’s an illusion that literature, from what little I’ve read,” she demurred, “tries to play with, the delusion or illusion that we spend the majority of our lives on a different plane of being than we actually do. We spend the majority of our time worrying about food, water, toilets and sex. It’s a wonder we find time to think about anything else. And, any writers, even those old greats, who spend so much time describing the spiritual are being disingenuous, painting pictures as they’d like them to be rather than as they are.”

He concluded that if a person was to account for all the problems in the world, even just those of living, like, what should one do, that it would require a person to devote their entire lifetime just to unraveling each of the ethical knots that a person would be routinely tied in if those sorts of problems weren’t routinely pushed down to the subconscious level, or, better yet, never really rising the conscious level because people weren’t aware that driving a car was problematic on ten sorts of way, but so was eating fast food, and was it right to give a letter of recommendation to a person who you didn’t think that much of as a worker but liked personally? These sorts of things. Anyhow, one can picture the man who’d spend his entire life just figuring out how to live, brown coat, brown hat, a mutterer. He’d live alone, or maybe with a cat, and spend long hours walking by the river in his brown hat and coat, the wind whipping up near his face, trying to figure out whether it was okay to own a dog, or whether one should take all that money and love that it takes to keep a dog healthy and happy and give it to his local Catholic Church. But then, he thinks, what if I did the latter, but I gave it all to an organization that doesn’t believe in birth control or our current understanding of the universe. If he was a modern atheist, why, giving money to the church would be an abomination greater than owning a puppy. Alternatively, if the church was right, and he walked on ruminating about these things in just such a way, making it apparent to us all how King Saul just suggested that they cut the baby in half and was thus declared wise. 

It would probably take a lifetime of walking over cobble stones, across uneven ground, contemplating the scattering of light coming off the frozen river from weak winter sun, watching the geese fly in V’s overhead, scanning the strata of clouds for the appearance of an airplane that would never be boarded or thought of again. That would be the only way. If a person wasn’t to take the word of a man born and died two thousand years ago, or four thousand, or a man dictating from his hat, or a man from Athens wandering the streets to give advice, if a person was to cast all these aside and deeply study and engage with the world around them, create their own set of standards, not all those standards that go unmentioned, buying electronics that have been assembled with nearly cheap labor, discarding a phone that will be sifted through by children in Asia, whether to hold the door open for all five people, or just one, what is the import of the self? Asking all of these questions and making an attempt, hell, answering them, answering them all, so that on his death bed the man with the brown hat would look out the square window in his house onto the street covered in rain and the caterpillar like blossoms of oaks piled up in the gutters and know exactly how a person was to expire.

This project would create its own problem to be solved though, as if a person was to add infinity to one. The next person would have to consider why exactly a person must spend their whole life thinking about whether to swat a mosquito that is feasting on your blood if it is one of God’s creatures, a malaria carrier, or just plain annoying. And, this in and of itself is a problem, another question to answer. And, if that question has been unanswered, then the searcher would be forced to reconsider all of the considerations of the old man in the brown hat, examine them for their voracity, and in so doing, they’d pass away their life as well, this time selecting and old rocking chair and a stone hearth, occasionally lit with birch and dry leaves, and perhaps a dog for company, considering those same questions, and perhaps coming to different answers about what it means to live in a universe that will eventually be torn apart. And that was life.