It’s been a rough couple of weeks, which is why they’ve been quiet ones. When life starts to feel like a country song, I’m running for the metaphorical fallout shelter to chase my optimism and nurse my wounds. It’s a place I know well: The furniture sucks and there’s never any snacks, but it’s home.
I’ll be brief in my woes, to the relief of anyone who has had to hear them in person: An ongoing painful rib complaint combined with a dismissive doctor who rolled her eyes at my increasing difficulty breathing- not to mention the failing government and everything else that’s going wrong these days- has reduced me to a crunchy, grouchy troll. Add in a broken-down vehicle and a snake on hunger strike, and though they’re not a pickup or a dog, we’ve got our country song.
Like the lamest little caterpillar, I’m emerging as a major buzzkill.
And I’m not okay with that. Once in that mindset, it’s entirely too easy to get comfortably uncomfortable and stay. But whining isn’t productive nor is it particularly cathartic, especially for someone who prefers humor as armor.
So I’ve tried to reframe this time for myself, rather than dwelling on the things that one cannot do without a cooperative torso, which are many. I’ve tried to stay busy by going through some of those things that gather at the margins of active lives, especially after living in the same place for a while. There’s a lost forest’s worth of junk mail which respawns when I’m not looking. Mementos of other times, mostly good, though a few bad; photographs and trinkets and other memories given form but not necessarily space. Old band tees, old notebooks, old dreams. A container full of pushpins and little word magnets like you’d see spelling out limericks on the fridge of a college dorm spills across my desk and it feels metaphorical. That’s why I can never find my words- they’re all mixed up in a jar with prickly shit.
I haunted my bookshelves for a while, too, until I found a tattered old paperback in which I once found unlikely inspiration that has stuck with me ever since. I’ve needed some encouragement, though I’m too contrary to simply ask for it. The words always dissolve before they hit the air. I always dissolve before they hit the air.
This paperback, bought new, is the fiftieth anniversary edition of a book first published in the early 1950s, so both math and memory can confirm that it has been on my shelves for over twenty years. It’s full of bad decisions, earnest nonsense, and pain. It struck a chord with me as a teenager, and its reverberations have continued ever since.
The book is Junky by William S. Burroughs, and its subject is exactly what it sounds like. Better known for the fluid madness of Naked Lunch, Burroughs completes the Beat Generation triad alongside Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and Junky, his first novel, is an unapologetic autobiographical dive into the life of a queer drug addict in the 1940s. It’s visceral, it’s maddening, and it’s compelling.
The final chapter, omitted from several editions and reintroduced as an appendix, is a rambling essay which attempts to glorify heroin use with a backing of pseudoscience and false equivalence. Likely the section had been cut due to the shaky writing in which he was probably higher than a kite, but it could have also been the fact that he sounds like a pusher on a corner trying to lure you into testing his wares. Whatever the case, it wasn’t a convincing argument, and I almost closed the book right then and called it done. But then I found my affirmation.
In the middle of this monologue- hell, in the middle of a paragraph, not even granted the status of a full, fleshed-out thought- he casually dropped a sentence that hit like an epiphany with a mushroom cloud.
I remember that first read-through. It was one of those moments in which you know that something just changed. I had to put the book away because my high school chemistry class was starting and I listened long enough to decide that the type of moles being discussed were not the fuzzy woodland kind before going back to musing over my new worldview. Reading it again now, the argument is just as dumb but the sentence is just as beautiful. Here it is:
When you stop growing you start dying.
What a gloriously succinct line for a cynical optimist like me. The rest of the weird questionable paragraph then talks about giving drugs to earthworms, but forget about that and read just the sentence again, and then muse over it for an hour or so, and then a few decades or so.
I walked out of chemistry class a new person, and I still don’t understand moles.
When I went back to the book to find the line to quote, I had a hard time locating it at first because it wasn’t intended to be focal or grand. Burroughs seems to mean physical growth, but I read it as more of a philosophical thing: Be better than yesterday, but with more imperative. Ennui is a terminal affliction that must be crushed at first sight. Waste no time, learn everything, do everything- except heroin, that is. I’ll leave that to Burroughs. I’ve got enough troubles without courting that kind.
Generally that has seemed to work out well enough, but the danger comes when the endless activity has to halt. If I can’t let a day pass without it meaning something, how do I get through many?
That hit me particularly hard near the end of last week. Everything I tried to accomplish backfired, and by the end of it I was silently frantic, not to mention that I still haven’t said what’s most on my mind… And how many sub-basements do you think we can dig out under this fallout shelter, anyway?
Then, back at my desk, something caught my eye. I noticed a magnet that I’d missed when I scooped up the mess. It was a small one, only two letters, stuck to a metal piece on the frame.
be.
What a nice little Easter egg from the universe, instead of the usual practical jokes. I’ve left it there now, in case I need the reminder again. It’s another imperative out of context, but its importance- well, it’s imperative.
Growth is a process rather than an event, and one that is frustratingly non-linear. I desperately want to go charging forward, but while I’ve long since learned that unchecked momentum will land you on your face in a fight, I’ve ignored the fact that life likes to take the same advantage.
So, those two weeks? I survived them, and that’s accomplishment enough. I have no fun hiking or sparring to report, but I have a full stock of tomorrows still waiting on me. And I will be there for them.
Check on your friends.
Leave a comment