I’ve spent a large portion of my life talking about the things I want to do, starting them, and never finishing them. I started being a football player, faced adversity, faded out. Twice. I’ve started more novels and stories than I can remember, finishing maybe a 1oth of what I started and leaving some of the really really good stuff undone. It all corresponds to the pattern of being able to say, “I can do this, but is it really worth the effort it is going to take if I already know that I can? Who am I doing this for anyhow? What is it truly worth?” All of this is accurate in terms of how I think, but there is also this line from Atlanta that resonates every single day. I don’t want to be, “someone everybody knew was smart, but ended being a know-it-all fuck up jay that just let shit happen to him.”
Yet here we are on the day of my twenty-five year high school reunion and I’m sitting in a dusty desert suburb likened to the worst parts of New Jersey with little to show for my life and even less to project for my future. Why? Because I haven’t done shit and I’ve let a lot of shit happen to me.
Yet in the driver’s seat what I want seems so simple and so present and so occluded by real life as to seem impossible to actually achieve. When I started teaching I was dumbfounded by the way professors used language and behaved. It wasn’t that they behaved badly but it felt as though they had no real understanding or attachment to the students and the real world those students came from. It was like being in a room full of doctors who refer to a leg in the specifics of the bones composing the leg but never see the leg and its holistic function and role as part of the body itself. Indeed, perhaps it requires new eyes or the ability to step back to see it.
What I want is to be able to spend several hours a day just being alone with my partner, a few hours with my kids and family, an hour on my own just gaming and listening to books, and two to four hours in the lab writing. That’s it.
Yet that is a huge amount to accomplish.