Where to begin? (How about a cliché? (Oh God…))
I’m on my way home from Michigan now. In the air at the cruising altitude, YYZ to YVR, Seat 21A. (God, it was hellish. I beg of you, do not, under any circumstances, layover in Toronto these days.) There’s all the typical ambiance: a baby crying uncomfortably close, the muffled vrrrrring of our 747 or whatever’s engines, my double gin-and-tonic fizzing besides this little laptop.
I finished outlining my memoir today. For the most part. All I can say for sure is that it’s about moving, memory, and mental health. (Oh you know, like every other “woe is me” millennial memoirist, except mine is “Crying in Ramen-ya.” And there’s gonna be split infinitives. And parentheticals.)
I still need to pick and choose which pieces are going to stick. Which scenes I really want to keep, what’s out-of-scope… but at least I’m starting. That’s the hard part, right? I’ll only know what’s good after I actually regurgitate it all. I think I’ll set aside the time. I mean, this is in stark contrast to being stuck on the pandemic hedonist treadmill forever. My terminally online dopamine-IV-administered broken brain, doing its hamster-wheel spinning at all waking hours. That’s something.
The main thing that stands out: going back home is… really difficult for me now.
Before I booked the flights, I asked my parents “Hey, how about I just stay for a month or so? I’ll bring the work-from-home setup, we can just hang, I’ll do my training zooms from your place. Stay in the guest bedroom.” They were delighted. I can be honest: my work is stupid tech bullshit. I recommend everyone get a stupid tech bullshit job. But I also caution: if you’re good at it, it’s equal parts liberating and completely infuriating. I’m stunned and slack-jawed on a daily basis. But I digress.
It worked out alright; at least they’ve finally learned to value quality internet like I do. No issues during my Zoom calls, with my laptop-on-a-shoebox setup. My “WFH mullet” in full, Only-a-Mother-Could-Love fashion. And boy, did she love it.
Earlier this morning, at the tail-end of a hyper-frenetic 5 minute break in the training curriculum, I ran upstairs to kill the remaining coffee brewed a few hours earlier. They make it really weak at home, sadly. This somehow fits into a bigger mosaic of seeking quality in gastronomy, Boomer tastebuds, spices, and Americana. I drink like 32 oz of high milligram shit every day back in Vancouver. (I think I have a problem?) Needless to say, I needed my refill.
I splashed some Oat Milk creamer into the prior dregs, drained the pot into my mug, threw the mug into the microwave with a near topsy-turvy spill as it hit the glass plate. Thankfully, Mom’s put a half-square of paper towel in there just for catching these little accidents. How many accidents it catches and how often this pitiful little square is replenished, I’m not sure. If it’s some anxiety-driven contingency measure Mom has temporarily installed so my microwaving of anything goes as painlessly as possible, I’m not sure. So then I slammed the door, +30sec button, Start. I’m on a timer here: there’s seven Interventional Radiology Technologists and one manager in my Zoom downstairs, back at their workstations in just a minute or two.
Mom, approaching the commotion and admiring the cat I irresponsibly left to their care when I moved away to Washington (“Hey kitty Luna! Pretty kitty Luna!” in her unmistakable singsong), saw my attire and exclaimed “Oh my gosh Ada — ! Er, I mean Eric! You look so cute… Your little pajama shorts with that shirt and tie!”
“Um… Yeah”, I said. Am I too old to blush?
“Can I get a photo? Real quick! Really quick. Hey Pete? Pete! Where’s my phone? Have you seen my phone?”
The timer went off, 30 seconds were up. That cacophonous breep breep breep always going off mid-sentence. So I grabbed my cup, stood there in the kitchen, waiting for Mom’s slippershuffle back from the sunroom. It felt a little embarrassing and unnatural, like a school yearbook photo where you forgot to dress up (or really, your parents did). Mom returned with the phone, and did the whole boomer-vision routine, holding it too close to her eyes, then adjusting the tilt, so her eyesight peers through the +15 reading glasses to the screen, and frames the shot.
I looked away from the lens and tried to take a sip of the coffee for a nice candid pose, but somehow staging an image of Eric as Hospital Software Training Consultant in situ was impossible: I’m simultaneously wearing a Calvin Klein $40 tie and my no-iron Ryan Seacrest Macy’s Collection up top, and Amazon Basics athletic shorts below.
“Awwww!” she said. Then she asked me, “Do you want me to send it to you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Um.. just hang onto it. Sorry, I gotta get back to it.”
“Okay, okay, okay, go! Go! Go. Wait, do you need a snack? A croissant?”
“No, Mom.” I gave Luna one little meow through the banister columns as I retreated back into the basement.
I don’t know about you, and I don’t know if it’s an anxiety thing or what, but I’ve always been a filthy little eavesdropper. I just love it. I’ve tried to figure this out in the past… I think I have some hidden agenda to really get to the bottom of whether or not all humans are feigning the same happy-normalcy like I am, and eavesdropping seems to be one avenue to discovering the full, ice-cold truth.
Especially with my parents… When I was younger, there was some natural pull that brought my ear to doorknobs and drywall spaces in my childhood home. At Grandma’s, the insulation was poorer, so it was even easier, more enticing. It sucks when it sounds like the mwa-mwop-mwa of the parents from old Peanuts cartoons, no sibilants to help you discern anything. I’d squish my ear until the lobes hurt.
I guess I was thirsty to catch something salacious or lurid. Maybe I’d hear a bad word I hadn’t yet learned from the Internet. When Mom and Dad fought, it was like listening to Greek Gods argue, complete with lightning and thunder. It was a morbid curiosity, setting out to discover that, Holy Cow! Mom and Dad really do argue like how I’ve seen some couples fight on TV or in the movies. And it can be really addicting.
So I sat at my computer, put my headset on, and hovered my finger over the Unmute button. But I felt the pull again. So I pried off the right-channel earphone on my piece-of-shit headset thingamajig the consulting company provided for me and tried to catch a sound wave from above.
Right on queue, like I was little Eric again, there it was:
“Hey Sweet Pea… look. ….
This picture I just took of Eric … his Work From Home gear.”
…
“Heh.”
“Just look at him. My little baby…”
I’m clearly bald in this photograph.
Any of my punctual Zoom trainees returning from break (those who are techno-capable and giving a shit, i.e. paying attention to my Camera and Screenshare, Christ don’t get me started) would’ve seen me take a sip from my mug, a sudden swell, and my eyes tear up.
I think the coffee was scalding, I think… that might’ve been it. At least, that’s what I would’ve said. Actually I’m not sure I even tasted it.
Yes, honestly, straight up: moving away is difficult. As a younger man, I just didn’t have the complete faculties to understand the whole Family vs. Proximity vs. Memory vs. Yearning calculus that goes on years later. It seems sometimes I’m better at it than other times. I wasn’t really sure why my Dad was crying at the airport after I dropped him off at SeaTac all those years ago and drove north to Bellingham. I was on Cloud 9; I didn’t even have a job or a plan. I dispensed my 401k. I was in love with a girl, still am, and I was just happy to smoke legal weed and listen to old Animal Collective and LCD Soundsystem in peace!
I think going back home, seeing it all, all up close, has stirred and poked a lot of embers I didn’t know were dormant, but I catch them glowing time-to-time. However much I want to say it was relaxing, after a couple gin-and-tonics and some Lo-fi beats (to write and sob to), I’m not so sure.. It’s like turning over the oldest, heaviest stone in the garden: surely some bugs are going to come out. They’ve been there a while. Except the bugs are Mom and Dad, and somehow they’ve molted 100 times since you last really saw them. I mean really saw.
What I saw I’ll have to somehow capture and churn and spit back out to the reader. I saw myself in framed photos and grainy home movies, but also something else. I don’t think I’m unique or special in my observation. I feel a lot of Millennials who have moved somewhere someway, and entered their 30s the worldly kids of our lovely parents who had children at a responsible age, are seeing this kind of thing now.
It has something to do with time, and the past, and the inevitability of You Know What. I guess I mean for everyone, not just them; Yeah I know that’s simplistic. Oh! and digital-techno-weirdo-dystopia shit too (Okay sure, maybe that’s more suited for a different book. Actually, I’ve decided just now, my second book will be a novel about the End of the Internet). I know it sounds kinda glib, but I swear. There’s something going on… My personal prevailing theory is someone’s messing with the clocks. Maybe that’s why I’ve read Slaughterhouse 5 like six times this year.
I also saw my brother and a lot of old friends too. It was heavenly, to just touch and hug them, rub our wrinkly shirts together. We’ve been talking a lot, sure, but I felt their bodies. I smelled their hair and their beer breath; it was carnal. When you hug someone good, you know how long you’re supposed to hang on.
Some of them went way out of their way just for a few hours together. We stuck our toes in the sands of Lake Michigan, felt her cool waves, the undertow. Seems it’s always cool still in June. I don’t know where the moon was, but my hamstrings got a good workout just coming back to shore. Alone, I climbed her soft dunes, those towering mountains of white-golden grain under my feet. I want to gingerly scoop up everyone I love and care about in my hands like grains of sand, funnel and pack them somehow into an hourglass, turn it over and over and call that the World.
As much as I’m happy about having some good times with the boys, there’s the whole calculus thing, and my coping mechanism so far as a 32-year-old guy seems to amount to another old childhood reliable: put on my headphones in the backseat of Dad’s van, and stare out the window. Pressing my head up against the flimsy window shade’s accordion fold. Until my other lobe hurt. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but I think it’s passing by. I’m looking out the window again now from 21A.
I want to express what the math is like, but I’m afraid I can’t; or that I’ll be chasing some amorphous thing forever. It’s like conveying to someone your own deeply rooted déjà vu, but somehow untangling it so they’re déjà vu’d too.
Writing, for myself or for my friends and family or anyone, comes loaded with a sort of cruelty I inflict upon myself inherent in the process, and I know it doesn’t have to be that way. The basic therapy trade term is “perfectionist,” I’ve heard. In math terms, expressing it feels terrifyingly asymptotic, a curve that approaches a line forever, inching closer and closer, but never intersecting. Zoomed out, it looks like it’s there, they’re hugging. They’re so close it’s indistinguishable! But in actuality, the difference is infinity.
I’m fearful that in trying to make these lines in myself intersect, and show that intersection to the reader, I’ll never be happy with my output; in the process somehow I’ll end up doubly wounded. Unable to invoke a sense of “interiority,” as the field calls it. Everything I’ve written so far has a putrid smugness, a vanity I can’t shake. Mentally, I’ve been fizzing and bubbling over with scenery and dialogue I’m greedy to remember and somehow spit out verbatim, but without bugging my parents' house and car and whatnot, requesting all my schooling and health records, and so on. Because it’s hard to remember, I’m afraid it’ll all be eternally separate. Some weird ghostly barrier, like a photograph of a love letter.
Of course, Euclid learned a lot from his kind of math, the function of limits, infinity, and so on; and similarly ended up teaching the whole world a kind of geometry previously unrealized. Planes and surfaces, which led to trigonometry, which led to… calculus.
I guess some solace is that it’s just one geometry. There are a lot of ways you can digest the world, frame and measure things. The narrator is always some kind of observer, and I think the reader understands that. Some people reject geometries entirely. Maybe abstract maths and irrational numbers, with their unending digits like cool waves, do a better job of bottling the lightning of our universe, her vicissitudes and absurdity. Other people still just like to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
I’m not sure, but I think that’s what will keep me going.
So I guess I’ll pop down the tray table, pull out my laptop and write. Wait, Spotify just shuffled to a banger from back in the day. It goes like:
Now it’s day, I’ve been tryin’
to get that taste off my tongue
I was dreaming of just you,
now our cereal, it is warm
Attractive day in a rubble
of the night from before
Now I can’t walk in a vacuum,
I feel ugly, I feel my pores
It’s the trees of this day
that I do battle with for the light
Then I start to feel tragic, people greet me, I’m polite
“Whats the day? What’s you doin’?
How’s your mood? How’s that song?”
Man it passes right by me,
it’s behind me,
now it’s gone
And I can’t lift you up, my mind is tired
the family beaches that I desire
that sacred night, where we watched the fireworks
that frightened babies poo, they’ve got two
flashing eyes and they’re colored “why?”
It makes me feel
That I’m only all I see
sometimes
