Itinerary for the End of the World

Ladies & Gentlemen,

I give you a year in review 2011 and the itinerary for the End of the World.

Okay, firstly, 2011 didn't turn out the way I expected.  Not even close, bud.  But when does anything work out 100% exact.  I'd settle for a 50/50.  A clean break.  I think I'm living with a 30/70.  Maybe less.

As 2011 winds it's way out in the usual fashion, me struggling to come up with some sort of plan for where to be drunk at midnight on New Year's Eve, I'm thinking something unorthodox, something like beer, wine, whiskey, Warren Zevon and a little hot wasabi by the beach taking in the first sunrise of 2012.  Any takers?

I guess I could be pretty upset about a lot of things but it's probably better to reconcile any differences and work any lingering problems out for myself.  After all, they're my problems.  I made the mess and I'll clean it up.  I've learned a lot from everything that went wrong and I can only hope I'm wise enough to think twice next time before I lay it all on the line.

Now for the good stuff:  Welcome to 2012 the end of the world delight.

With guy's like Rick Perry and Herman Caine leading the pack for Republican presidential candidates it's easy to tip towards considering that we have, in fact, entered into the final days of the world as we once knew it.  Since the first GOP debate back in October I've been turning over a phrase from Vonnegut's novel Deadeye Dick, the last phrase to be exact.  So if you want to look it up it's easy, find the book, turn to the last page, and read on.  I won't spoil it for you.  Where's the fun in that?  And if you have the patience to read a whole novel, it's not half bad.

In the 2 1/2 years post-college I've been going through a new awakening.  I've been working steadily which has been a blessing in an country where most people are struggling to find work.  To which I must say that in all honesty, I've never seen so many "Help Wanted" signs in shop windows in all my years of job hunting.  Something tells me that people want a certain kind of job rather than just any job.  But, 9 times out of 10, any job is better than no job at all.

The certain kind of job everyone is looking for is something tolerable, a 9-5, Monday-Friday with paid vacations and benefits and a sweet 401K and some kind of job security so that when you start to suck at what you do you don't have to worry about some young buckaroo straight out of Beer State College to snake your job away from you.

Well, sometimes you've got to do what you don't want to do to get to do what you want.

Listen:  When I first graduated.  Many quarts of booze ago, many cigarettes ago, many long nights ago, when I was a younger man, I was revising and submitting my resume ad nausea.  I really wanted to be submitting manuscripts; poems and short stories to magazines that would notice my greatness and pay me for it.  But that's not how it works and I don't write as well as Cormac McCarthy and I don't think I'm Hemingway.  I have a few close friends to rely on to tell me if I'm any good and it's only been recently that I've started submitting something other than a resume and cover letter.  I've been writing cover letters for poems and short stories that I believe in and I accept my rejections from magazines as a badge of pride.  I'm trying.  I'm writing and that is something to dig about.

After I graduated I didn't immediately turn into Kurt Vonnegut.  I wanted to more than anything.  My dream of what I wanted to be didn't come flooding true and I do not live in NYC and have fancy parties out on the good Egg.  I don't have Dylan on speed dial.  I didn't even get my second best idea, working in publishing, not right away, I had to work before that.  I worked at a college bookstore in Boston, familiarizing myself with the city more so than I had in my life and it was through my working there and networking with friends and online to see what jobs were available and a little bit of luck and striking while an opportunity was hot and not letting it pass by that led me to put 2 years of experience under my belt working in the publishing industry.

Having a good attitude and good friends and strong relationships with people is what it's all about.  We're all in this thing together and we've got to stand by one another so we don't fall apart.  If we share our dream with the world the world will help give life to it.

When I look back on it now I see the makings of a sojourn.

I spent 8 years in the Scituate Public School system where every day I dreamed of being a writer and every day of high school day dreaming of taking off for California.

I then spent 5 years in college in New Hampshire first in Henniker then down the road in Keene with a one year hiatus in between traveling to Amsterdam and a cross-country trip from LA to Boston.  The whole while working on my writing trying to be like Kerouac and Ginsberg and then Salinger and Vonnegut and Hemingway.

I've spent 2 1/2 years since then commuting from Scituate and working in Boston.  I've been to California 3 times in those 2 1/2 years.  I'm still trying to be Vonnegut and Hemingway.

My goal in 2012 is to make it to San Diego by October.  I want to be published first, of course, something in a small magazine, something in print, a poem, a story, a Twitter that someone thought was good enough for their article in The Boston Globe.  I'd really like to be writing like Vonnegut, producing at a Steven King velocity though.

The thing to do, the thing that inspired me to vote in the last election was the ideal that if you work hard and stay dedicated that you will get the things you aspire to.  That things can change.

8 years of planning for California will pay off eventually and I know that when I get there I'll be ready for it because I want to be and because I work hard every day and I'm still writing and submitting and I can envision myself in California.

So what's my itinerary for 2012 and the End of the World?

It's to tell the weird space creatures that I'm sorry, but I'm not done, yet.  There's work to be done and I intend to see it through.  Don't let yourself get lazy. Sleep is a beautiful thing but take only what you need and leave the rest for the weary.

-Jesse

So Crates

     A wise man once said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."  I have always believed this, but I have also, always, misread this to mean what it doesn't mean.
     Hear me out.
     For a long time I thought that when you examined your life you would have to critique every minute instance that had led you to this absolute moment.  Somehow I have graduated college and landed a pretty good first job out of college.  Fair enough.  How I got here, well, it's a long story.  And if I was still misreading that quote then I would rattle off the story of how I went from A. to B. and tell you that life is a highway.
     That would be a mistake.
     It would be a good history.  Parts exaggerated.  Parts true.  A functional tall-tale.  A coming of age romp and it would be entertaining and informative and perhaps even inspirational.  But the truth is that it is not what is meant by, "unexamined life."
     Listen.
     Some people have visions of the world and they go out and they make those visions come true.  People who believe in the impossibility of following a dream, damn the consequences, damn the naysayers.
     "The unexamined life" is another way of saying, take a good hard look in the mirror and if what you see you can be proud of then you're fine, but if you disagree with what you see in your skinny reflection then you've got to set your mind to something that's going to set you free.
     You see, I've been thinking for all the wrong reasons that the thing to do is to move up in the world, believing in some half-cocked theory of mobility in the workplace, mobility in the social structure, thinking to myself, with my knees cramped into my chest somewhere over Wyoming, that I will, some day, fly first class; Thinking, someday I will have a corner office.
     But you see.  I don't need a corner office.  I don't want a corner office.
     I want something else.
     Which brings me to my examined life.
     All my life I've been obsessed with being creative.  As a kid, I'd spend hours putting together elaborate cowboy and Indian and pirate and Ninja Turtle scenes in my basement, I put on these plays in the backyard, a romp through Oz complete with a working, flying monkey, courtesy of a coat hanger and a little cray paper.  I would read and I would write and invent ghost stories and pretend because it was fun and I was good at it and as I got older I found myself doing more of the same thing, inventing stories, playing with words and inventing situations and acting in short films and drawing cartoons all over the damn place, so much so, that finally I've realized that what I want to do as a creative person is what I fear most.
     The old adage rears its evil head and says, "The Arts is no place to make a living."
     But, the truth is, because I'm creative it opens myself up to other creative people and the notion that I will have to be competitive.  But that was never my fear as a child.  If anything my greatest hope was for collaboration;  Someone to play with.  And an audience; Someone to watch me play.
     I look around the world and see that business rules everything.
     Want money?  Go into business.
     But business without product is zilch.  You have to have something to trade, something interesting, something new, something people will want to buy.
     Right now, people are obsessively in love with high-tech, hand-held, wi-fi capable, instant communication without really thinking of what the end result looks like.
     What will the future be?
     What's the next best thing?
     Does it download Movies?  Games?  Music?  Apps?  Does it make me sexy?
     Look.
     It doesn't matter.
     It will be something, but it's not going to just pop out of thin air.  It is going to come from someone, an idea will be born, something will happen, a need will be met.
     We will have flying cars and rockets to Neptune.  But if you don't have someone who can inspire it, then it won't happen.
     If you have nobody making history then why are you out selling old history books?
     In any case, in a recently examined life I've realized that I'm selling myself short and I'm not in the right place, but that I needed to be here to figure that out.
     But from here, I can examine my life I can look into the wobbled bulbously transparent-like, mirror-like, crystal-like, ball-like thing that is tomorrow and I can deduce what will make me better, by knowing what has made me bad and going onward.
     From here, I can go anywhere.
     As it stands, being weird is the only chance I have of succeeding in a life I can admit to loving.

After The Boys of Summer Have Gone

     What have I learned from living without power for 4 days?  Electricity is loud and a vital ingredient to hot showers, but I can't complain.  Our forefathers lived full lives without electricity.  More people have lived their entire lives without a smartphone or internet or an automobile or MTV and CNN and endless reruns of Yes, Dear than you can shake a stick at.  Literally.
     The things you tend to notice is how much of our lives is made up of answering one question, "What do you want to do?" which is another way of saying, "How can I be entertained and not bored because life is pretty empty sometimes?"  Which isn't a bad thing, because, after all, life itself is pretty tedious.  We fill it up with the events that make our lives worthwhile.  We surround ourselves with people who are fun and interesting.  We live in communities because we like having people around, because loneliness sucks.  So we look to each other for cheap entertainment, because we are pretty cheap creatures, always looking for the best deal, like allowing Eversave and Group-On to fill up our inbox with countless emails for deals on massages and golf trips because we desire to be entertained, to escape the dullness of life, even with electricity.
     For the most part life without electricity is pretty lame.  You wake up when the sun comes up and get pretty tired when the sun goes down.  Walking around Boston and thinking about how much of my life depends on electricity I started thinking, "what would my job be like without electricity, what purpose would I serve?"  The answer is pretty limited.  It would be different.  I could not work the way I work without the technology reliant on electricity, no emails, no computers period.  Telephones might get dicey.  So it inevitably begs the question, "What did we do before electricity?"  The answer is, we worked from sun up to sun down, getting food, because we get fucking hungry and we need to eat.  If we have oil lamps we light them in the dark to go to the bathroom.  If you are loaded you might have a lot of them working at once while you read a book, not a Kindle or Nook, a libro del papel.  Old school.  Escuela Abuelo.  Grandfather school.
     It's not a bad way to look at the world.  For the most part I felt like when I was going to work I was being ferried into a land of wonders because Boston still had electricity while going home it was like standing in some dark Dosteovskian epoch where all the action is done in the night.
     On my runs around town you could hear the whurr of the generators going from everyone's backyards, powering their refrigerators and maybe a lamp or TV if the generator was strong enough.  Restaurants that had power have had a bit of a surprise end-of-summer boom, while most people are usually exiting town for the Labor Day/ Back to School time, the town has relied heavily on the places who can cook them a meal.
     So the summer is over, but I'm fighting it in the usual way.  I'm taking a trip.  Because routine is dull and needs to be broken and an untraveled life is a wasted life.
     Oh and the cheap entertainment while living in the dark was playing cards with my father by a flashlight lantern.  It felt just like old times.

Heroes/Heroines & Metanarratives

The other day in my wanderings I happened to finally walk inside the Boston Public Library to which I was amazed at the amount of art in there. Really, if you have not been there you should go. From the staircase adorned with lion statues dedicated to Civil War veterans while along the walls is painted grand murals done by Puvis de Chavannes of Virgil, and Homeric characters that are absolutely staggering. There are many more rooms to explore and as you ascend higher you find on the second floor a room with a mediaeval hero narrative adorning the walls, "The Quest for the Holy Grail". It's a narrative told without words, only in pictures where the viewer can piece together the story in their own way, or by knowing the Arthurian narrative. Either way the telling of it in the zoetrope broken down into several thoughtfully illustrated scenes. Where this narrative and the entrance staircase narrative collides is on the third floor where there is the Judeo-Christian mural by John Singer Sargent where you are faced with what the other art pieces evoke, a crisis of western religious faith. In each there is a presence of some supernatural being, some phenomenon of death and life, where we are led to believe that our lives are worth living, that we lend ourselves to some greater narrative and are in part, separate pieces of a collective soul. That we can do so much with our lives if we dare to notice the world and it's problems and set ourselves to the task of bringing it into a larger context.

This idea matched with the kind of religious crisis in America, where people are either too fundamental or too apathetic we lose the sense of collectiveness that has existed for thousands of years throughout human history. We lose touch with a basic human trait, that we are a community and that we are all interesting in our own ways.

As I continued wandering around thinking about how beautiful the art was and how the story was engaging I came across a quote on written on the wall but unfortunately I do not remember who said it or it exactly, but it went along the lines of coming to the library to find the heroes and heroines of our collective consciousness, and I thought that it was a marvelous way to describe what a library is and what it's function is in a society which has grown to be come more individualistic and segregated. What we have maintained as a species, as an American race is our consensus of what a hero is from fictional characters like Huck Finn or John Henry to real life heroes of Amelia Earhart and Abe Lincoln. Their stories can be found in the library, collected for the good of culture, so that we might be inspired to do something worthwhile with our lives, which perhaps is the function of religion.

I found myself enthralled with an interview in The Atlantic with author Robert Bellah about his new book Religion in Human Evolution which seemed to raise an interesting perspective on the idea of how religion has evolved and how it continues to evolve. It reminded me of a conversation I once had back in 2004 and I was talking in a dorm room with a girl about 2008 and the election and how I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting to see a woman or an African-American run for president?" and then to see Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama in the race along with the media's favorite Alaskan. The talk was around the same time that the new Pope had been elected and how he was, supposedly going to be the last Pope in line with some prophecy. We are too consumed with prophecy and not enough on what we can do to help our fellow man. However, as time has passed since 2004 there's been a kind of new leniency with the Catholic Church, as though the were progressing with the world in a way that was in tune with the blinding fast speed of broadband internet, while other groups are working to revive some pre-Civil Rights America, some idea that going back is better than going forward.

We are not a lost generation. We can maintain some sense of what is morally right and morally wrong as a collective and perhaps if we believe that there is still some mystery left in the world, something undiscovered, some frontier that we can believe in something bigger than ourselves, which is what religion has always been, even if it is not overwhelmingly focused on an afterlife, which in no way does that even start to help us solve the problems in our world, like famine and war. Nothing is solved if all we ever thought about was where we'd go when we died. Because chances are our bodies will all end up lying somewhere without the ability to get up and dance or with eyes that cannot see the wonder of a sunrise.

As for what I took away from yesterday's lunch it was that I should be doing something good with my time and if it is by looking at some Winslow Homer illustrations that shows life in Boston at the turn of the century and how life is so similar to then as it is today if you look and notice it. That we are inhabiting this same space, working to preserve it and to innovate it with new ideas and then looking at a diorama of George Bellow's "Stag at Sharkey's" which is so primal and invigorating with pure brut and grit that it has inspired me to want to go to Cleveland, of all places, to stand near it. God, what world! And here I thought Boston was dead and it is just being born. Where Does Religion Come From? - The Atlantic

In Case of Sunburn Apply Watermelon

OK, so it’s mid-August and it’s that feeling of summer winding down.  Crank up your stereos to some Frank Sinatra because that Summer wind is blowin’ out again.  And my friends, if you come away with nothing gained from this summer let me drop some knowledge on you that befell me one fateful weekend on Milton 3 Ponds this summer.  In case of sunburn apply watermelon.  It works, especially when you’re suffering and purple and when shirts are your enemy and hugs are unbearable and aloe is nowhere in sight.  Although once I got home and regained my bearings on civilization and aloe came back into the picture, watermelon quickly went back to being just food.  And I’m okay with that.

The night is coming on again and it’s hot again.  My God, this has been a hot summer.  Unbearably buggy and unbearable humid, consistently.  If you don’t believe that the world is changing, that the oceans are warming up then you need look no further than the Russian side of the Sea of Japan where three people have lost limbs to great whites.  What’s so crazy about that?  Well, they don’t get much bigger than dogfish off the Russian coast in the Sea of Japan and the water is somehow warmer than is should be.  Wake up, kids, the sun’s a little brighter today.

To kind of play on the side of the skeptic I will say this, perhaps it is not a great white, after all they are not indigenous to that part of the world.  But I doubt a dogfish is ripping the arms and legs off of swimmers, if anything this is the work of the legendary chupacabra or Godzilla or dare I say, King Kong!  But isn’t it just the way of every generation to wish that they would come across something as strange and wildly exciting as a Godzilla or King Kong like the dragons of the Dark Ages.  Kurt Vonnegut once said that we are still living in the Dark Ages.  I can see that.  Not everyone is an Einstein, yet.

I don’t recall a summer where I’ve met so many interesting and joyful people.  Seriously, I’ve spent weekends with some wild brothafuckers and they are all legit in my book.  Things like meeting wildly inspiring and different people should come around more often.  All I can say is, “where were you guys 4 months ago?”  It is inevitable that we will have to walk through hard doors and meet hard times in our lives.  I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes and I’ve learned a lot about my compulsive and weird self.  I’ve learned about other people as well, that people walk different, think different, want different things.  People can be phony and flaky and people can be true to their cores and as genuine as apple trees.  It’s knowing the difference that helps.

Anyway the summer isn’t over yet despite the hype of an early fall.  I’ve got some plans left and some traveling to do and some friends to see.  Life parades on in it’s weird way like the funeral parade in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (youtube it).

Also, explore you’re world, your town, your bedroom.  There is much to see and do.  I’ve been going for these runs around town and it’s reminded me that there is much to do and be and that this town is full of such interesting corners that you can be shown the light if you look at it right.  Also, Audioslave makes for a prime running companion.

Cheers. 

Traveling Extensively in Scituate

I took one of those strange runs around town where the geography of the place becomes, somehow, more apparent.  There were hills and ditches and patches of trees and patches without trees that I’d almost forgotten about because I hadn’t been by in so long.  It’s hard to think that I’d actually left this place for years on end because that life feels so far away now.  It feels like another me.

Thoreau once said, “I have traveled extensively in Concord.”  I’d like to think that I’ve explored this little burg a bit myself, that I’ve been acquainted with its past as well as it’s present.  I saw someone putting up a new house from scratch on Tilden Rd today and thought to myself that it’s hard to believe that anything isn’t prefabricated today.  That things are still built from a mold that is used once and only once.

Kerouac said one of the keys to writing is to, “be in love with yr own life” I think that should transcend the writing game and should apply to everyone.  Sometimes I’ll look back at days gone by and me and want to go back and slap my younger self in the face or put up a road block but as metaphysical as it may sound God did not grant us erasers of past, although I suppose if we were more forgetful beasts I’m sure we’d all forget everything in time.  But I am of a poor disposition that tends to remember far too much of the minutiae of life and therefore when I take a walk a run a jaunt around this merry little burg then I am apt to find myself remembering strange remembrances which apply to this town.  My hometown.

Cue Mr Springsteen:  http://youtu.be/D6XH9R7kMwQ

Yes and this was not my first home nor will it be my last but it is home nonetheless.  I’ve had many places I’ve called home or felt home, either in the company of good people or in the presence of a good place.  I have felt in dreams the kind of solemnity which comes with a feeling of being home.  The smell of it and the taste of it’s cooking are undeniably familiar yet inevitably fabrications of reality, manipulations of some strangeness in the brain that signals the coming on of comfort.  Like even now as I remember a younger me cutting through the path behind the bleachers that leads from Cedarwood to the football field at the high school to play a pickup game of baseball in the quad when I was about 13 which in a funny way reminds me of the walks on the snowmobile trail in Keene to go to the “beach” and going past the A-Fields and now walking through the Public Gardens down Charles St to Cambridge St. to Staniford to the Boston Garden.  It all adds up.

The geography of a place settles on you.  When you are walking you notice the contours of the road, the smell of the neighborhoods and individual driveways.  You notice the sounds of birds and the sight of a woodpecker climbing a tree leading with its beak as you go by or the sounds of people mowing their lawns or talking to friends on front porches.  The conversations of strangers always seems so much more interesting and urgent than anything else in the world.

To go back to the whole Kerouacian point of loving yer own life to segue into another Kerouac quote, “No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge.”  Kids, this is the voice of experience.  You always know more than you think you know and you all talk so pretty some times it shatters me to my very core.  If I had a dime for every terrible decision, every impulsive action, every cuss and curr and clash and attack then I would not be the person I am today, the one trying to make tomorrow better than yesterday.  Without a corruptor there is no story.