You can’t take it with you
This piece appears in my book A Creature Wanting Form.
I awoke early enough for the first time in recent memory to see the last of the sunrise spilling out over the roof of the house next door in its twee little pink mist and I thought to myself sure enough there is the sunrise. I don’t know if I was expecting a more profound thought than that but that was the size of it and before long it was gray and overcast again anyway and the old man next door was scurrying around fiddling with his truck getting it started and scraping the ice off of the windows.
Good morning he said.
Good morning I said.
He’s got a really thick French-Canadian accent but I don’t think that matters here. He’s also got an old man’s crush on my wife but he told us a couple times that his own personal wife had died many years ago and here he was still living despite that fact and so I thought it was basically acceptable. Let him have at least that.
I went to set my iced coffee down on the little table next to my chair on the porch and I chunked the entire thing over and I watched it happen from a remove in slow motion and I said fuck and then I had to deal with that. Everywhere else around the porch was covered in wet ice but you can’t have wet ice in this particular spot that is just how it works. Things belong in their place.
Earlier maybe an hour or so before that I remember being in bed and reaching over to make sure she was still there in the way I do and she was and then I remember reaching over again and she wasn’t there this time she was clattering around in the bathroom getting ready for work and I thought about how much effort it would take to go back to sleep again with my little videos of the ocean and the rain playing on the computer so I said fuck it and I figured I’d get up and have a nice coffee without expecting anything bad to happen to it.
A friend called that I haven’t spoken to since the early days of the pandemic back when you would call your friends or Facetime them and such and they’d go like what the fuck is going on ha ha ha and you’d go I don’t know ha ha ha back before millions of people died.
He’s sober and I told him that I had been trying not to drink lately with only a little bit of success.
I told him my problem is that when I do not drink I am constantly aware of the fact that I am going to die every second of the day and that someday best case scenario like thirty years from now although probably twenty at best at this rate for me I am going to get sick in a way that there’s no coming back from and she will be there when I get the phone call from some doctor I just met and I’ll cry and cry with self-pity over all the bad decisions I made that brought me to this point and she’ll try to console me but it won’t work because hugging doesn’t curtail oblivion.
I think the idea of all of this living is to accumulate enough loving and having been loved experience points that you can cash them in in one fell swoop at the end for an ameliorating effect on the descent but the prospect of that never brings me any comfort because it’s all erased on the other side of it anyway. A new ledger in which your balance isn’t zero it’s nothing. I guess there isn’t even a ledger anymore actually.
People say you can’t take your money with you when you die but you can’t take your love with you either.
They could wheel your deathbed out to the middle of a football stadium with the tubes and machines and nurses and everything on the 50-yard line and the stands could be full with everyone cheering and crying and you would still be down there thinking well I suppose it could be worse but what good is all this going to do me a couple hours from now?
If all this death of late has made nothing else clear to me it is the reality that you can get sick in such and such a way that there is nothing to be done about it even if you are under the care of a doctor that really or more likely mostly doesn’t want you to die. They are very busy these doctors.
I know that seems like an obvious thing to realize and I am sure I always already knew it but it’s not the type of thing you want to walk around being aware of all the time so when you do think of it again it hits afresh like a tossed punch.
If you want an idea of the future and also the past and the present picture a fist punching in a face but drain any sort of larger meaning from it. A fist without metaphor. Every day it’s just guys getting punched in the face. Queuing up like in a depression-era breadline at the face-punching factory.
You think most days that when something bad happens they’re going to marshal the heavens and earth for your benefit like you’re the governor or something but that’s awfully naive. It seems more likely at most they’ll give it a pretty good go. Like when your car won’t start you still try to turn it over a few times to be sure then maybe you check the oil and one other thing you know how to do and then are like well fuck I’m out of ideas here.
When I do drink I told my friend on the phone there if you remember him from before I said I still know that I’m going to die and that we’re all going to die but it just doesn’t seem like my problem for a little while and what comfort there is in that.
It’s probably somewhat better to be in a plane crash whacked out on sleeping pills than wide awake for it is what I mean. Despite the fact that the destination is ultimately the same. Everyone heading into the ground I said.
He laughed in a knowing way with that superpower of self-knowledge that people in recovery sometimes have and he probably said something wise or helpful but I forget what it was because I was too busy thinking about myself.
He said he had a new job and it was going pretty well and I said that’s good.
I may be repeating myself here with this I’m scared to die shit but what other story is there? Not just now at this point in time for me and you during the pandemic but for anyone at any time ever I mean.
“We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.”
There are supposed to be anywhere between three and seven types of basic conflicts in literature. The most common are man versus man and man versus nature and man versus self. Then you might throw in man versus society or man versus the supernatural and a few other variations if you want to be fancy about it.
The third one there is the thing.
Maybe I’m just thinking about it through that lens because I just watched an episode of Station Eleven last night that made it obvious that that fictional post-pandemic story has been an obvious allusion to Hamlet the whole time. I mostly came to understand that by all the explicit references in the show to the text of the famous play Hamlet.
Before that I read an essay about getting sober during the pandemic and one thing the woman wrote was this: “The truth is that most of my drinking and using had one primary purpose: to allow me to feel less. To be less aware.”
I thought ah come on that’s my bit but I suppose there aren’t too many variations on the theme when it comes to this shit.
Sometimes I’ll talk to other friends in recovery and I’ll be preemptively embarrassed by how cliché my whole thing probably sounds as if I’m describing the plot to a movie everyone in the world is already aware of. Like trying to surprise someone by telling them Darth Vader turns out to be Luke’s father and then they have to act gracious about receiving that information from you. Oh wow. And he jumped into what now? With his hand cut off? That’s fucked up!
Almost immediately after I spilled the coffee it had turned to near frozen slush in the cold air and I wondered again why we torture ourselves living through this four or five months a year. I keep having this daydream about moving to Florida our worst and most American state and while I am not under the illusion that everything that is bad still wouldn’t be bad and in many ways worse there at least my hands and feet would be filled with hot circulating blood all of the time.
The last time we went to Florida we drove up the Keys to Miami in a stupid rented convertible and I gawked at the ocean for hours like who could ever get enough of this but that’s stupid to think. I realize that after a while even the ocean disappears into the background when you live next to it for long enough.
I remember climbing up a narrow winding staircase inside of some lighthouse and becoming struck with a fear of the height to the point of paralysis. Not that the structure itself was going to collapse but that in order to stop the pressure compounding in my brain I would jump. If only to get the entire thing over with.
Do you ever lay there thinking about things you don’t want to think about and the harder you try not to the more inevitable it becomes?
“Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute,” Dostoevsky wrote.
That observation was extrapolated on by a psychologist in the 1980s in a famous experiment you’ve likely heard of where he asked subjects to not think of a white bear and to ring a bell every time that they did. You can probably guess what happened next.
The concept came to be known as ironic process theory as he explained it. I always thought when I said my brain was irony poisoned it meant something else.
In short the ironic tension here is the harder our brain tries not to think of something the more often it checks in to make sure we aren’t thinking of it thereby making us think of it.
Sometimes I’ll think to myself hoo boy doing a great job not drinking tonight and then a second later it’s like ahh fuck I shouldn’t have been aware of what was transpiring here.
No such problem when you’re drinking.
Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 in Boston and then he died forty years later in Baltimore drunk in the gutter as the story goes. Before that his father abandoned him and his mother died young from tuberculosis and so he was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Virginia the latter of whom died and then he married his uhh thirteen-year-old cousin who also died of tuberculosis.
Newspapers attributed Poe’s death to “congestion of the brain” or “cerebral inflammation” which I gather are euphemisms for alcoholism but also kind of funny sounding combinations of words you have to admit.
Congestion of the brain.
The point is this morning I came across a story of his called “The Imp of the Perverse” that I had forgotten about.
It starts out with this sort of rambling nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific jargon section about phrenology and God and what have you but then transitions into the confession of a murderer.
The thing is there was never any need for him to confess. He clearly could have gotten away with the murder in question but he was compelled against his own self-interest to do so.
The cause of the narrator’s undoing Poe writes is that he is among the many “uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse.”
The themes of confession to a crime and motiveless crime itself would carry on throughout Poe’s work as well as Dostoevsky’s rather famously. The general idea of this piece also comes into play in Freud’s concept of the death drive.
It’s weird by the way that you could just be some guy writing a story about some other guy you made up back then and accidentally invent a field of psychological study.
Poe’s character explains more. He says it’s like the compulsion you feel standing overlooking a great drop.
“And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it.”
There’s an important distinction in here. It’s not the Imp that inspires Poe’s narrator to commit the murder in the first place. That impulse is driven by his own normal human greed and cruelty. It’s the Imp rather that convinces him to destroy himself afterwards because he knows that he rightfully has it coming sooner or later.
We do these actions, he writes, “because we feel that we should not.”