Twenty Five East

the point here was to type, which might have turned into some On The Road shit, so, barely edited. allez allez allez.

Two minds have pulled at me as of late. I have not been able to escape the scratchy feeling that I’m tired of writing “about myself.” Or whatever it is we’re calling creative non-fiction or personal essay or the prosody that threads through live lit that is rooted in the self. I know why, I don’t know why. And on the other hand I’ve also wanted to send out a newsletter. I suppose they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. But this newsletter is not exactly drafts of short fiction (which, yeeeeesh) or poems (that are also things I seemingly daydream about) or however else we’re doing words as art these days. There are a lot of ways, I suppose, because I get a lot of emails and newsletters and digests of places for writing, and the forms they all take are either inspiring or wholly able to shut me down, and sometimes both!

Octobers are not my favorite, or at least they haven’t been for the past ten years. Eleven, I guess, because my grandma passed in 2013, and then my cat, and Google sends me reminder photos of pictures I took from emptying out the house and the shedding magnolia out front and my estranged uncle’s wife’s duck, and I think, oh right, that happened. This year has been a lot of time giving me the safety and space to think: oh, that did happen. Some of that has been sobering and helpful, and others have resulted in what I call the I’ve lived with an anxiety disorder so I know the panic attack only feels like cardiac arrest version of acute anxiety, which was, I suppose, informative. It feels like some sort of power to notice or at least note things.

I suppose I could take comfort in the notion that if we are writing, we are allowed some identity of examining time and looking back at it, and that would make me feel less stuck or unable to let go or nostalgic or sentimental. It is hard to escape anniversaries, though. What a weird way to live: we are lauded and encouraged to find a token for each year we make it through some sort of commitment - I’m of course talking about marriage or whatever approximation we may have, although the celebrations in workplaces of tenure which are bizarre and often depressing count, and I guess birthdays. To give anything like space to the memory of something awful is cause for concern, distaste, even.

But what is there to do? I have a notion to have a more regular publishing schedule this month, for no other reason than I feel like I need to embody some seriousness of this thing that consumes me. No, not a fucking newsletter. The writing. And also because Octobers have felt charged like this for ten years now, and it is weird to say, because certainly I have written about it, being institutionalized, having a total breakdown, passively trying to kill myself, whatever, but I never quite want to or can get it write. I can’t get over this phrase I heard earlier this year from someone who mines their trauma because honestly, balanced with whatever need I have to write about things that have happened to me is a deep loathing of it, too. To be clear: this is my own thing. I think there’s a lot of great writing about the awful and incredible human experience out there. I just don’t trust my own very much.

The fact that this anniversary is also just so tied to sensation and stimuli is not always easy either. The way the weather is and the transition from light to dark, the tie to Halloween and All Saints, and the entrance to my least favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. My other cat that died. Whatever. You live enough in the world and things are just going to repeat themselves, because life is not all that novel, generally. If I am going to keep living in the Midwest (which, another essay, yikes), the weather is going to be like it was in 2014, and the equinox is going to happen, and and and.

However, what was not on my bingo card was the hard to describe feeling of getting a job in the same building where I got my first job out of college effectively fifteen years ago this time of year, in 2009. I know it because I remember being very excited to drink beer from the startup’s Halloween keg party before shift ended (10 PM) and I made my way to Bucktown for a house party. I didn’t really start biking to work until February or March of the next year, an extension of bored and broke riding and the realization that I could just do it, if I wanted to.

I wrote about it in an essay that’s in the book, called “The Nightmare of Being a Virtual Assistant” (I didn’t choose the headline.) It was a legal startup that provided leads and virtual assistance and god knows what else they were working on to consumer attorneys across the country, and I got the job after what I thought would be one of the most exhausting job searches of my life graduating into the 2009 economy.

This weird living twice phenomena hadn’t really kicked in until recently, when I got my bike commute (mostly) dialed in. Because for the majority of the two and a half years I worked there, I went in with my bike through the freight entrance, and now that’s what I’m doing again. Unless I was smoking, and mostly I wasn’t doing that during the workday because I hated taking breaks to meet my quotas and also, I guess I was trying to quit, all the time. Or I had quit. Some version therein. Until it got really bad, and that also went out the window.

I swing into the alley and push up the ramp and go down into the basement, then back up into the office, and I recall so deeply liking that span of time I would not have to run into anyone except construction workers or cleaning crew, and nobody made chit chat. I still like this. Except fifteen years ago when I would bust out of the alley onto Washington, there were no bike lanes, and it was pell mell through traffic. Someone posted something the other day about what the West Loop used to be, and I thought about nights where you just sped through warehouses and smells and dim lights to cut through to West Town and Wicker and Logan and it was dark. It was respite for getting out of downtown. Now they have added drops of water to the Sterling Day sponges that approximate what a city is like cut out of the brain of a suburban marketing manager/sales guy/UX developer/I don’t know what people do in the West Loop/and up it has sprung. I know because I threw a party for my job where the bottom floor was a WeWork and the roof was an enclosed basketball court.

Those years are another life, which is of course true, because twenty three is barely hatched out of an egg, and I needed so much less sleep and you could get into concerts without LiveNation and the Happy Village was still open and my body could still digest High Life. They feel discrete and separate from 2014. Like I can locate exactly the filmstrip frames that would separate out the things that did happen. Except of course each time the warm those were the days headshakes I might employ to current coworkers who say, really, you worked here? might happen now is that it’s October and I am finally able, with a little bit of the stability of depression, of time, of saying no, of living in one place with pots and pans and a record player, I am able to cautiously look at things. Not quite sure on cautiously writing, but maybe. Those were the days I guess, but.

Still, I wandered through the Pedway a couple weeks ago and the Macy’s bar has been literally bricked over, where at one point people were getting drunk at 3 PM (my shift finally moved to 10 AM - 6 PM). The bike room is a lot nicer. Oasis is still there, thank God, but I haven’t been in yet. My team’s row was in the building’s corner at the L’s eye level, and some mornings I still catch myself looking in to see who made it to work.

I certainly don’t feel the same sense of urgency about anything, and some of that is the comfort of low-grade depression that I have more to say about, and some of it is being older and seeing what the years that spooled out turned into. I didn’t really know what I wanted then, but I think I thought whatever adult life I’d stumbled into would result in nice or less fraught things. I am absolved of that notion, now, but I am comforted in all of what I have seen since, and the compassion I believe that is still in me knowing what is hard in the world, and that there is so much more in common with making a go at it anyway. I don’t think I could’ve seen the past ten years in 2009, not at all. Not for myself and where I have gone and ended up, not for the West Loop, for this country that is so craven and greedy and brutal, but there are many things I have been happy to see. The art my friends and mentors and acquaintances have made, the children and families and kin expanded, the people who survived.

So here we go around again (Anne Carson: “which, like the chain of Parmenides’ well-rounded Truth you can follow/around in a circle and always end up where you began for/ “it is all one to me where I start-I arrive there again soon enough”) and here’s hoping my own digressions on October, this dumb personal myth I make myself a Narcissus or Sisyphus or Atlas of, do not become too tiresome. God knows it is all tiring enough as it is.

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Postscript: I got word this week of some very kind sentiments from someone about this newsletter, and thank you. It’s been one year since all of this horror we’ve aided and abetted, and if you have been changed in the ways that might be like mine, I am sending you kindness, and again, again, again, ceasefire now. No music for this one, I started mainlining What Comes After The Blues by Jason Molina/Magnolia Electric Co., so, yeah. 2000 words on “Leave The City” may be forthcoming.