Myself In Everything Else

I have been down. This is not a new or remarkable development. A few Mondays ago I walked out on a long pier in the early evening to see the city curving brightly against the shore and thought — this wasn’t the plan when I started walking — about drowning myself. And then I walked inland, pissed in the quiet of the bird sanctuary, went home, and had a normal week. Applied for some jobs, wrote about basketball, felt an anguish both burning and sedative at two a.m., like I had to make up for the rest of the day, pay for it in currency I didn’t have.

There’s a moment in Berlin Alexanderplatz where Alfred Döblin dramatically pauses the story. It feels like he needs to tell you everything about the universe, at this particular point in time and every one that’s preceded it, before he goes any further. “A bee, a wasp, some buzzy thing is circling high up under the ceiling by the stovepipe.” And sunlight is streaming into the bar where our hero sits. “It has traveled x miles to be here, zipped past star y… divided in two by a tin sign, ‘Löwenbräu Patzenhofer.’” Nebuchadnezzar is invoked, Adam and Eve, the ichthyosaur. Two men who fought together in a war are in the middle of a barroom argument, “two large mammals, two fully clothed males, Franz Biberkopf and Georg Dreske,” arms in “cylindrical sleeves.” Each of them “thinks, notices and feels something, though not what the other feels, notices and thinks.” It’s a mid-scene reset. The camera goes illegibly tight, then bleary and wide, and when it refocuses on its subjects you see them somehow more clearly than before.

They’re arguing because Franz, fresh out of prison, has picked up a day job flogging Nazi newspapers. This is Weimar Germany. Franz isn’t a devoted Nazi himself, but he is an asshole, a rapist, a murderer, and a pimp. Döblin doesn’t tell you this just now, in the bar. It’s elsewhere in the book. Pretty much everywhere else, actually. His storytelling is recursive, in ways that are sometimes playful and other times harrowing. Franz fails, is going to fail, is regularly visited by past failures. Maybe this is tragic and maybe it isn’t. The guy has no problem selling Hitler’s propaganda. But it hurts, being who he is and doing what he’s done. Georg Dreske departs and Franz returns to his beer, helps the barkeep move his pet goldfinch’s cage a little closer to the window, where the sunlight is strongest.

Döblin’s pause lasts one longish paragraph, not even two full pages. It feels infinitely more substantial than that, a complete history compacted down to the size of a marble. “Good luck to you, Franz, on your new chosen path,” Dreske says on the way out the door. If we’re at a crossroads, or have recently veered off main street, we feel at once the great distance we’ve traveled to get there.

I think about Döblin’s concision when I’m overwhelmed by the interconnectedness of things, my inability to explain any single aspect of whatever it is I’m trying to write about: my life, the Denver Nuggets, why I would Very Much Like To Join The Team At Company X. When nothing feels simple. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a novel about a man who gets mixed up in a treacherous criminal enterprise, loses an arm, and eventually enters a metaphysical realm in which Death and The Whore of Babylon are competing over his soul. It’s also about a state and its people’s descent into madness. But I return most frequently to the passage in which two men who fought together in a war are now on opposite sides, their disputed territory bisected by a column of sunlight, a solitary bee or wasp buzzing above them. Its lean enormity will live in my brain forever.

There was a summer, the last summer I spent in my hometown, when I was working a janitorial job at a college, stripping and waxing floors in the business school and the library, taking hour-long shits and reading rap blogs on my phone. The hum of fluorescent lights and the smell of Lysol penetrated my dreams. I was sleeping with my friend’s ex-girlfriend, drunk driving country roads a couple nights a week. I was sort of enjoying being terrible. I was so angry and bored and upset. That summer lasted another two years. It still visits.

I had been reading Moving On, Larry McMurtry’s big fat rumination on adulthood. Back when the book came out in 1970, John Leonard wrote in his review that “it’s a little like turning on the radio, and leaving it on for years. It seems not to matter very much when you turn if off.” In agreement with the Times critic, I turned it off at page 363, not because it was bad but because I’d had enough of Patsy Carpenter, its capricious and judgmental protagonist. She cries a lot, which McMurtry worried about while he was writing the book, but some people cry a lot, and if you’re writing a thousand-page novel, and there is not some amount of crying, you are basically writing superhero fiction.

The problem with Patsy is not her easy tears, nor is it her sudden anger or the fact that she seems to find comfort in making her husband feel like shit. The problem is that she’s not worth writing a book about. She’s just some lady: well-read and confused and (McMurtry notes on every fifth page) good-looking in ways that enrich and complicate her life. She goes to parties and gets in arguments and frets about sex. She falls frivolously in love with men who embody some ideal she covets but can’t quite articulate. She thanks god that she isn’t fat like her friend Emma. She achieves universality: “I’m probably not very stable. There are times when I just get scared. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next in my life.”

I have gotten the sense, reading some non-professional reviews of the book, that most readers dislike her. I actually like her quite a bit, and there are many good novels about ordinary people doing ordinary things. But Patsy Carpenter, for reasons that elude me and perhaps McMurtry too, doesn’t have gravity. Even with his superior powers of observation and melancholy cowboy sentences that taste like cold beer in the summer, McMurtry can’t make me care about Patsy enough to read all thousand-plus pages of her story. I stopped reading after she describes her sister smoking pot and participating in orgies as if it were the material of a fantastically depraved and empty existence. She says this to her husband, whom she only sometimes likes, while pregnant with a baby she seems to be having because she has chosen the most obvious way to thrust herself into a new stage of her life. I assume more stages follow just as frictionlessly. I know Patsy has an affair at one point, and that her husband, who has the kind of money that makes all his choices pointless, gives up on academia to take a job at IBM.

This would be a fine time to tell you I’ve been working on a novel off and on for the past five years. I thought let’s dispense with the illusion here and named its main character Colin McGowan. He spends most of his time worrying about what he hasn’t done, what he fears he won’t be able to. And he would hurt people, if he mattered enough to hurt them. In the story’s final third, one woman condemns the cursed architecture of his mind, another leaves the two-person cult their relationship has become, and the book stops paying attention to its inert hero, because even I know the world contains greater wonders than a man who cannot get over himself, or out of his own way.

The Inland Sea is a work of staggering arrogance. Donald Richie, who had lived in Tokyo for twenty-five years at the time he wrote the thing, traveled across a peculiar part of Japan in the mid-60s, a collection of islands relatively untouched by the then-modern world. His mission statement, which manages to be both condescending and naive: “I want to go to the font of that humanity, to this still and backward place where people live better than anywhere else because they live according to their own natures.”

If you truly wanted to do this, or get anything out of it besides some false secret knowledge you can lord over your city friends, you wouldn’t write about it. But the book itself is quite good. Richie’s got a director’s eye for faces and landscapes and his gloss on Japanese history, both actual and folkloric, imbues the land he describes with rich meaning. You see an atoll, and you see the ghosts that populate it: the horny and generous gods, generations of fishermen. The vividness of this stuff is incentive to trudge through passages thick with generalizations about nations and people and The Way Things Are, implicit insistences from the author that he’s the only man on earth who understands what life should be.

Richie reminds me of Bill Hicks, another not untalented expat who rejected America and replaced the vacuum it left in his heart with even more of himself. To enjoy the work of either man, you have to forgive their narcissism and squickish self-regard, the sort of thing that’s present in all art but in certain works seems to be almost the entire point. Look at how smart I am, what fine taste I have, the blaring correctness in me that the world does not appreciate enough. This is at least honest, in its shamelessness. It’s also pretty tough to take, if the artist isn’t half as sharp as they think they are.

There are two people in the world who love me. It might only be one. There are maybe fifteen others who like me, and nostalgia is doing the heavy lifting in half those cases. Every so often I get a kind email about my basketball writing, invariably from one type of man, statureless extras of my milieu who own some Pynchon and don’t understand their purpose, even if they think so. Sometimes they’re 21 and sometimes they’re 35. Thank you for doing what you do. I’ll steal this from a writer I’ve told similarly kind things to, who’s probably disappointed or doesn’t care that I like his stuff: “if I don’t speak for white guys… who have some trouble living in the moment, who will? Where is our parade, other than, like, everywhere?” It is also in my inbox. Not at a constant clip, the sort of phenomenon that would make me believe I could set up a newsletter and pay the rent with it. Just enough to remind me who my audience is, the people I speak to and occasionally impress. It’s marginally less impressive versions of me.

I was telling my girlfriend the other day that I’ve discovered something very depressing. (I am always telling her things; they are frequently depressing.) Everyone I’ve ever admired has a certain charisma and poise about them that I lack. They have a way — through their handsomeness or curiosity, lucidity, intelligence, their mode of speaking or what they look like when they speak, the content of their message, their mannerisms, the depth of their knowledge, the words they choose, the peculiar energies they transmit — of commanding attention. And I don’t. I’d like to claim the one thing I communicate clearly is my own self-hatred but really it’s less than that. I am an accumulation of wasted time and minor traumas, a mind that is printing retractions at the same speed as the initial copy, a face like diminishing fog. I stammer when I talk, speed annoyed and rageful and scared into conversational cul de sacs, say things I don’t mean that are cruel or boring or don’t make sense. I think about these things for years afterward, the blank and pained expressions that receive them. People don’t remember my name.

Writing, then, is my best chance to matter. I’ve applied for a bunch of staff jobs at publications about sports and video games and food and politics, and not gotten so much as an interview. The book agent who reached out to me nearly a decade ago has since left the business. You see where I’m publishing this, how I put the most energy into work I can’t sell and that few people will read, and understand the depth of my failure. I have to keep going on long walks and reading and noticing things and thinking about myself, turning it into prose. It’s a compulsion, the single thing that I’m good at, if I’m good at anything. There’s a strong possibility, the evidence continues to mount, that…

I go out to the lake and feel like I see myself, like I’m an inevitable expanse full of life and unseen currents that even the horizon can’t contain. And then I go home and I write and at the end of the day — at the beginning of many of them — I can’t fill a shot glass with what I have left to feel.