Sunday, June 05, 2005
(9:36 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Being Blogging
Do you ever just want to be blogging (or commenting, as the case may be)? I have so much to say, so much that I could fill this space with -- it's an overwhelming excess that's at issue here, not a lack. Not boredom. No, there are too many things to do. Now I'm thinking of Nietzsche, the thing about Hamlet. I was reading on the train, on the Amtrak train, one summer, after I had totalled my car -- Robb was my roommate. (Robb Schuneman, of the hilarious shirts.) I was trying to live on my own that summer, failing miserably, not even getting by -- but reading a lot. So my parents had gotten me a new car with the insurance money from totalling the other one, and I had to go back to Michigan to get it. For some reason, they thought that taking Amtrak was a terrible, stupid idea. I thought it was brilliant, though, to get to read on that completely boring ride. I read a lot. I got a friend -- Jon Sommer -- to drive me to the Metra, then walked to Union Station, then got on the train. It turned out alright. I read Nietzsche on the train home -- The Genealogy of Morals, mainly.I was fired from my job the next day, because I called in sick, because I had lost my voice, because I smoked a cigar at Richard's place and accidentally inhaled. I found myself back in Bourbonnais, with no options, or so it seemed. They had assumed that my sick day was bullshit because I was in Michigan when I called, but I was really sick. I would have called in from Bourbonnais, too -- except that I wouldn't have. I couldn't afford to. I was desperate for money -- every time they put up the time sheet, I went to everyone to see if anyone had this really shitty shift that they couldn't believe he would even think of giving them and "Oh, you'd take that? Really?" The Go-To Guy. I had just gotten back from Oxford, where I had my first drink, then shortly thereafter I had a lot of other firsts as well -- I said at one point, during a kitchen shift at that pizza joint, "I was just at Oxford University, and what am I doing here?" They fired me because I was an idiot.
I'm watching TV -- I guess that's a solution.
The guy from Modest Mouse just said that -- that's last summer. So much music, living with Jesse and Justin. I went to Union Station a lot last summer, too, as opposed to just the one time, to get my car so I could get fired. Immediately after calling in sick, I went out back and mowed the lawn. Immediately. I was clearly suffering. I could not possibly have waited tables. But I had this dish soap that Hayley got -- super organic vegan dish soap not tested on animals -- and the scent took me by surprise. Just like her, exactly like her. Something like that can go one of two ways, viz.:
- I am overcome with nostalgia and realize that I have missed out on my last best chance for true love.
- Any remaining fake nostalgia for this relationship -- which ended, and not at random -- collapses under the burden of being so closely associated with washing dishes.
That summer. That was good stuff, the post-Oxford summer -- at least those few weeks when I was hanging out in Bourbonnais, before I decided to be a coward and run back home. There was a priest back then, who said two sentences that had a huge impact on me: "You have to sin for me to forgive you"; "Oh, poor you [sarcastically]." The latter -- no one has the nerve to talk to me like that. Maybe they'll say the words, but that precise tone in that precise kind of context was something different. So arrogant, and simultaneously so self-pitying. It changed my life to have someone talk to me like that. The whole summer -- when I was so completely stressed out about money, barely getting by, sitting outside in the grotto at Maternity BVM reading so many books, hanging out with my friends who were all equally poor -- changed my life. Sitting outside on my porch, I was thinking back to precisely that summer, to those mornings sitting in the grotto at Maternity BVM, only regretting that I didn't realize how good I had it -- regretting not going all the way, not having the will to look for another job, not realizing that a strategic retreat was not called for, not yet.
