Day Won

This will be very funny next week when this all falls apart

There’s a small, two-lane bridge that crosses from New York to Pennsylvania somewhere along the Delaware River. I’m sitting there now. It finished raining about an hour ago and the sun is out. The rocks have just dried, and I’m wearing a straw hat in an attempt to protect my ghostly, Victorian-era skin.

Serenity.

I am supposed to be experiencing serenity. 

This is not the place for a MacBook Pro.

And maybe that’s the problem. My need for connection via technology is invasive. And it has, without making too big a deal about it, ruined my life.

I think it’s hard to remember that “mindfulness” is a practice, not something that is granted by entering a magical space where you can suddenly connect to something deeper and more profound. It’s a kind of muscle that is exercised, like the other muscles of mine that languish and degrade with time.

This week I’ve eaten probably a sleeve’s worth of Oreos, six or seven chocolate chip cookies, three Klondike bars, a Hershey bar, a box of Sno Caps at the movies, and a few marshmallows. I’ve had one half of a poorly mixed salad. I am attempting to kill myself in a less obvious and alarming way that even my own conscious mind does not detect.

Indulgence.

Food, sex, and technology are my drugs of choice. I am trying to get away from that.

I frequently romanticize the idea of getting away. It is a common day dream for many people in modern society. 

Let me sell all my belongings and hit the road. 

What if we bought a place out in the middle of nowhere. You could do art and I could write.

I swear I’m going to buy a one-way ticket and just figure it out.

This is the new fantasy. Hemingway was right when he wrote that unfortunately, you can’t escape yourself by traveling around. And as much as the lamentations of the modern person are a reflection of the times themselves, I think a less explored aspect is the inner life of all of us that leads us to the desire to run for the fucking hills.

Because right next to you and I, there are people who actually are fine exactly where we are.

And it’s important to remember that, for whatever Hemingway had of his own self-awareness, he ended his journey with a shotgun in his mouth. 

I find writers fascinating. People who call themselves writers, at least, because who the fuck is a writer. I am trying to be less sexist and myopic in my own consumption of writers. I’m currently reading All About Love by Bell Hooks. I won’t tell you my critiques as I’m reading it. That feels almost worse than telling you I’m reading that. 

Ok I’ll give you one critique, since you asked. 

It’s just a little dated. She’s great, she’s insightful. But it feels more useful if I had been a 30-something year old man in the 90s, not 2024. The landscape has changed. And I get it, she’s foundational. People stand on her shoulders. It’s just like watching Battleship Potemkin instead of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And gender is so much weirder now. Ok, that’s all. I promise I don’t think I know better than anyone, I’m a fucking idiot.

Anyway, 

Hemingway is funny because good god, what a diva. Some of his pithy little quotes sound like an angsty teen in 2006. But he really crushed it a few times. The Sun Also Rises is one of the greatest things I’ve ever read. But clearly, he couldn’t get out from under all the stuff that fucked him up.

Murakami comments on Hemingway in his book Novelist as a Vocation. He says there’s a tendency in writers to romanticize the tortured artist. I think this is true. It’s refreshing to hear a successful writer just talk about being a normal guy who likes to go jogging. Who had a life that was pretty good and not too difficult. That he pulls from something else, a creative desire. Hemingway seemed to suffer from the tendency to pull from pain, which is not a limitless well. It also might lead one into self-destructive behaviors.

Now that is some shit I can get behind, baby. Just kidding.

Today is my Day 1 of admitting my brain isn’t a perfect, beautiful brain. 

Admitting that my metric for wellness is predicated upon thinking I’m more stable than the extremely mentally unhealthy people I grew up around, or the seriously mentally ill people I used to represent in court (and not that there’s anything wrong with mental illness, just that it’s probably not the best metric to measure your own wellness by saying “Well, I didn’t tell the judge I am secretly working undercover for the Mayor and that’s why I robbed the Duane Reade).

That my access to serenity and mindfulness will be an uphill climb.

And that I’ll have to climb it one day at a time, one foot in front of the other.

The beautiful thing about starting over is you can do it at any time, hypothetically.

Feel free to start with me.

“Day Won,” the addicts like to say.

Let’s make something beautiful out of it.