cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Speak of The Dead A man in my state cannot sleep when he should. That is only natural. To close my eyes in the darkness and make a serious attempt could only make everything so much worse. I lay awake in bed and thought alternately of my own death and then desperately of ways to avoid it. I rose, crept down the stairs and slid the tiny volume of James Joyce's 'The Dead' from its alphabetized place in my library. I did this not forty minutes ago and I lay on my stomach on the carpet of my office reading it from beginning to end. I thought of Tom Ringr0se and his magnificent Christmas parties and the more intimate New Year's Day dinners. Tom, dead these last five years or so. Tom who married us in his white robe in a summer field eleven years ago. You were in the club if you got the invitation to the Christmas party. Anyone who was anyone was there. The champagne fountain and the Faberge eggs on display that his wife's family had spirited out of Russia when the revolution came and her distant royal line was rendered moot. It was a wonderful thing to be invited to an event like that on one's own merits, which I was as a precocious teenager who mucked about in politics and journalism. Still greater to be invited to the coveted New Year's Day dinner with my parents and siblings in tow. My parents, fully cognizant of the fact that they were only there as relatives of the twin wunderkinds that my brother and I were at the time. I sat with Congressmen and former governors and world famous gold players and record producers. I remember well my Congressman's daughter. A year younger than me and very pretty. We talked all evening. I had thought of pursuing her but I was dating Trish at the time and it never went anywhere. Tom is dead now. A great soul. The Congressman is now a happy ex-Congressman; his wife is still pretty enough to lust after and I haven't seen the daughter in years. I am now 32 and teetering on the edge of suicide. I suppose that Isis still has the Faberge eggs in spite of her stroke a few years ago and perhaps the champagne fountain still comes out for special occasions. Trish lays sleeping beside me. She has never once asked why I can no longer sleep. I suppose that she would do all right without me. She has her family to help out, mostly very nearby. Probably she and the kids would move in with her parents. She'd certainly get a job, now that Harry is almost old enough for Kindergarten. I've been asked to speak at a political event in a few weeks. I have accepted, although I don't know that I'll still be alive to give the address. But that's always the way, eh? We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Maybe one is hit by a Mack truck while crossing the street. People die. Possible futures die. Sometimes all at once and sometimes little by little until one looks at the dark circles under one's eyes and realizes that one is totally trapped and doomed. Alternately, between consideration of the ideal means of an early departure, I have thought about what to say when giving this speech. Appropriate, having just read 'The Dead,' yes? It is a left wing political group and of course I spent a decade heavily involved in causes near to their hearts so they will greet me as a friend. Given their interests and the topic that I have been asked to speak about, I think that I will/would start with an overview of the conservative political system that criminalized hunting for food by ordinary people in Europe and in the UK. Of the body of law that hung Irish men as poachers when they tried to feed their families on 'the King's game' during the potato famine. And how one of the miracles that met immigrants to the rural US was the fact that a man, when faced with starvation, could have the right to possess arms and to take those arms into the woods and fields and kill what he could to feed his family. And I will speak of this great, transformative thing as as the progressive, liberal advance that it was. And I will mean it, because my own family would have had to choose many times between heat in the dead of winter and food to eat if I hadn't killed deer and other wild things to eat. But in the end, it clearly wasn't enough. I can't shoot a wild health insurance policy to get us through the month. I can't kill a tank full of gas or a car repair to allow me to get to work. I've gone about as far as I can go. Food just isn't enough. There are more ways to fail than just to starve. Would I dare to *really* tell them what its like to be a modern subsistence hunter? Would I dare to explain how ruthless and tainted I really am? How utterly unfit I am to stand in civilized company after sitting in the freezing cold for days and lusting after the act of the kill with a Pavlovian desperation to put food on the table? I am reminded of the song by Joy Division. 'Isolation.' "I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through / I'm ashamed of the person I am." I'm no good for anything else now. I don't fit properly into this culture or this time any more, or in any culture. What I have experienced and what I have to say and what I have to offer are not anything that anyone really wants. Even my fans have no idea. Its all a big fad to them. They have no idea what sort of poverty I have been through, let alone how these experiences have ruined me. Even the sublime moments. The literal miracle that I experienced, when Simon was suddenly and miraculously healed of paralysis at the moment I shot that deer in the spine. That wasn't a blessing. It turned out to be a curse. You know what happens when you go around telling everyone that you have received a miracle from God? Nothing good comes of it. Nobody wants to hear about it except for idiots. In the long run, an experience like that serves to distance you from the rest of humanity, to confuse you in terms of what the universe is really all about, and to ultimately cast a sad shadow of failure across everything that one does. Because lets face it, whatever you do after that experience can never hope to live up to the great promise of positive transformation that is initially promised. Yes, I received an honest-to-God miracle. And I never knew what the fuck to do with it afterward. It sent me on a long and wild goose chase (sometimes literally) that resulted in turning my life completely inside out and now here I am, on the cusp of killing myself. Its 1999. I am wearing a tuxedo and having photographs taken with my groom's men outside, along a split rail fence. It late summer in the Virginia countryside. I am to be married in about 40 minutes. Tom is waiting in the meadow with his crucifix and candles and Trish is in a cottage putting on her dress with her bridesmaids. I feel nothing. A decision was made previously, I committed to it, and so I followed through. I feel no regret, no anticipation, no fear, no joy. Only a sense of duty and a certain satisfaction in fulfilling that duty even in the face of many who had doubted my ability or willingness to do so. Its 1996. I am leaving in the morning to drive the 10 hours to begin my studies at Hampsh1re College. It is late summer. I suddenly realize that I must start packing. A decision was made, many months previously, which I had committed to. All summer I felt no anticipation, no fear, no joy and gave the matter no thought whatsoever. I had simply settled on Hampshire and made the arrangements and let the days until the appointed hour fall away. Its 2010. I made the decision to leave my desk job, which hadn't managed to pay the bills for the last few years. I made the decision in the space of an hour or two, had a discussion with my father and employer about it, and that was that. The days until my last hour at that desk fell away like any others and then things simply changed. Now -- right now -- it is 2011. And I cannot bear this any longer. A decision has to be made soon. Once a decision is made then I can be tranquil again. Marking the minutes or hours until the appointed moment of transformation in the calm, resigned way that I do. 3:57 a.m. - 2011-04-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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