State of the Union

It has recently come to my attention that a great number of my peers, during their senior year of high school, composed lengthy letters to their future selves as part of a class assignment. Some of them were to be sent out following their graduation from college. Others were saved for a certain birthday. Twenty-five. Thirty. They were assigned and, theoretically graded, though by what criteria I could not begin to guess. (Word count maybe? Proper use of the semi colon? ) I can identify the particular breed of high school English teacher psychology used to justify such a project—builds motivation and ambition, fosters forethought. But it’s impossible to ignore the implicit cruelty in forcing bitter twenty and thirty somethings to revisit the fatuous claims of their teenage selves and note just how much dignity they’ve willingly compromised in the intervening years. Now imagine the middle-aged, overworked, underpaid faculty member as he gleefully stuffs an envelope addressed to the asshole from seventh period, class of 1994, who earnestly believed he would hit number one on the billboard charts, buy a rocket ship, seduce Uma Thurman, and successfully perform a brain transplant using only a toothbrush and butter knife all by the time he turned thirty years old. (That guy, incidentally, is still slinging lattes and whining every night about his inability to earn the respect of his twenty-two-year-old manager. The teacher, at least, has health insurance. Revenge is sweet.)

Fortunately or unfortunately, I was never given such an opportunity. Prep schools shy away from forcing you to think too hard about your future. It’s generally accepted that you will be successful, if not by your own hard work, then through the generous bequests of your forefathers. At least successful enough to make a sizable contribution to the annual fund every year for the rest of eternity. The teachers don’t really mention that—it would probably be considered bad form—but the mercenary demands of the Alumni Association are as much an inevitability as the 10 million your classmate Prescott Tarkington Tarkington IV [1] will come into the month after graduation. And what’s the point of asking that guy to imagine his life ten years down the road? What would he have to say? “I’ll probably upgrading my jet” or “I hope to be investing in hedge funds” or “I’ll likely be residing at some posh Southern California facility recovering from a truly mind-blowing cocaine addiction” or “I’d like to have made some headway in negotiations to purchase the government of a small oil-rich country in the Middle East.” The only thing the school wants from you is your tacit promise that if you find yourself in possession of an extra 6 or 7 million dollars you might float it toward the construction of a new fitness center or dining hall. You know, for nostalgia's sake.

As for the rest of us, the realization that we lacked the advantagesof Tarkington Tarkington and his cohorts probably kept us from shooting too high. There’s a special kind of knowledge gained from living across the hall from an heiress at age sixteen. You may talk to her every day. You may have the same classes and creatively interpret the same dress code. You may even strike up a fond friendship, built on mutual acceptance and avoidance of the rules stated in the handbook. But once exams are over, all bets are off. She’ll be spending her summer sailing and riding horses while interning, by special arrangement, for the top magazine publisher in the world. You’ll be lucky if you can get a job filling water glasses at the Olive Garden. She’ll spend her nights at lawn parties with Kennedy scions. You’ll spend yours smoking cigarettes in the Waffle House parking lot, bewildered by your family’s insistence that tangible, meaningful success in America has nothing to do with the existence of a trust fund. You wonder if your high school only gave you such a generous financial aid package so you could call bullshit on the Protestant Ethic and go ahead and accept your place. You wonder if you’re better off knowing now, at age seventeen, that you will one day be slaving away in an airless cubicle at some regional branch of the multinational corporation owned by Tarkington Tarkington while he drag races Bentleys with an Arab prince in Dubai. You wonder if your friends from public school who haven’t even had the theoretical advantages you have aren’t luckier for the chance to imagine those extravagant idylls for themselves without having to acknowledge just how high the cards are stacked against them. Ignorance, they say, is bliss.[2]

***

If you had asked me at eighteen years old what I thought I would be doing in ten years, I would have fed you some insincere line about doing something meaningful. I wouldn’t have expanded on what that something meaningful was. If I liked you, I might have mentioned writing. If I really wanted you off my back, I would have said something about acting. But the fact of the matter was, when I was eighteen years old, I believed I was destined for failure. Not just disappointment. Not even Samuel Beckett style “Fail better” failure. I mean, full throttle, up shit’s creek with no paddle, sewer dwelling, Book of Job failure. It wasn’t an idle concern. It was, I believed, my destiny. I wasn’t sure how it would happen, or why. In some versions, I thought I might surrender to a narcotic addiction, or fall into some seedy sexual underworld. Sometimes, I thought my failure would be occasioned by some cataclysmic event—an apocalypse of some kind, or the rise of some fascist government. In my most romantic moments, I thought it might come out of involvement with some revolutionary political movement gone horribly awry. But always I believed it would only really initiate after a realization of my own guilt and weakness and subsequent renunciation of self. I would suffer as a nobody. And I would deserve it.

I spent most of my youth disguising my natural tendency toward underachievement under a thin (and honestly translucent) veneer of anti-authoritarianism. After all, it’s pretty easy, to justify not wanting to work for the Man. It’s a little harder justifying not wanting to work for anyone at all. I had the sort of resume that wouldn’t even make the first cut at Hippie Dan’s Espresso and Frozen Yogurt Kart. By the age of nineteen, I’d already started giving up the ghost of financial solvency. I’d hung out with enough amateur panhandlers to know that almost anyone could justify begging with the right combination of righteous anger and rhetoric. I read zines devoted to squatting and dumpster diving. I learned which cities had the mildest climates and the most tolerant attitudes toward panhandling. I convinced myself that I had all the right attributes—survival instinct, revolutionary spirit, authenticity, fashion sense, (somewhat punk rock and deconstructed by necessity) -- to be a great gutter poet. I could be a voice of the disenfranchised, composing hard, white knuckled prose on the sidewalks of the haunted, unforgiving metropolis[3].

If you were to read my journals from this period[4], you’d find a lot of reference to the need for paring down a life to the barest essentials. Becoming impervious to the harshness of life lived without material comforts. Toughening up. Depending on no one. Being wily and capable. I composed countless manifestos on the topic in the no-frills script style I deliberately cultivated, partially because it stood in stark contrast to the bubble-lettered cursive favored by the Old Alison, and partially because the angular, masculine quality of the block letters looked so much more commanding in the coffee stained pages of 99cent composition books I purchased for the purpose. If it seems petty to spend that much effort on revising your handwriting . . . well, then you pretty much get the point. And the handwriting is the most interesting part. The rest of it is some embarrassing muddle of ideas, derived from a hysterical and inchoate combination of freshman level philosophy, punk rock song lyrics, post-apocalyptic movies, and a used copy of “The Lives of the Saints”[5] I believed it to be deeply profound at the time, as much confirmation of my revolutionary sensibility as necessary tool for understanding my own ignoble, inevitable future. Ironically the very ideas I clung to in my youth as evidence of my own inherent radicalism in fact reveal nothing so much as a disquieting conservative streak. One obvious enough that even my nineteen year old self should have been able to identify it, had I been able to pull my head out of my ass for even a second

But let’s be honest. The implicit political orientation of my journal entries were infinitely less absurd than the context from which they were born. Namely: a reasonably priced, spacious, 1920’s era apartment, outfitted with eccentric cast offs from my grandmother’s antique store, on a polite tree-lined boulevard about two miles from campus. The campus where I was (theoretically) attending classes. On my mother’s nickel. The apartment to which I returned after a long, hard four hour shift cashiering at the independent video store. Or faking a British accent and serving tea in the showroom of a gentlemanly London-born importer at High Point Furniture Market. Or (wait for it) nannying for two precocious blonde pre-adolescents in a tract mansion in the suburbs. Was I really preparing myself for a life of hardship? Did I have the foggiest idea what it was like to ever really want for the basic essentials of life? Of course not. And, as I would have pointed out then, that was beside the point. The journey was about the fall, not what preceded it.

I never really told anyone about my worst-laid plans, which is unfortunate, as I probably deserved to be roundly ridiculed for being such an unforgivable twat. Society, rightly, has little tolerance for bored dilettantes who abdicate opportunity in order to treat abject poverty as a wild, Bohemian adventure. It wasn’t like I was going to do it for the greater good—I wasn’t going to run away from my life to feed the hungry or cure disease. I wasn’t following a vocation—spiritual or otherwise. In fact, about the only thing I can say about my abiding fascination with giving every up was that I never imagined myself becoming a better person, serving myself through the illusion of selflessness. It wasn’t about saving my soul or writing some smug college essay about what I learned about humanity by digging ditches[6]. It was about losing myself entirely. And if, as I was sometimes able to believe, my renunciation would temporarily tip the scales in someone else’s favor, then all the better. But even if it didn’t, so what?

Most self destructive people I know are failure fetishists. We prefer the riches to rags movies over their more optimistic counterparts. We prefer Eve to the Virgin Mary. Oscar Wilde to Charles Dickens. It’s sort of the old American love of the underdog, taken to its illogical extreme. You’d be surprised how easy it is to sympathize with the defeated, no matter how badly they needed to be defeated. (Or maybe you wouldn’t if you have ever spent any time at all in the South) Just as cynics are usually disillusioned idealists, self destructors are frustrated improvers . . . really frustrated. Whatever will we may have once had to positively change things has atrophied and turned against itself. The only thing we’re really good at is needlessly complicating and fucking up our lives

Comparatively speaking, I was sort of a mild example. I wasn’t a nihilist; I just admired them. My parents used to lament my inability to believe in anything. That wasn’t true. Most people who make plans to destroy themselves as conscientiously as I did know exactly what they’re doing, and believe in it wholeheartedly.

It wouldn’t have taken a genius to recognize that my attachment to failure was unhealthy, and, if left unchecked, would probably lead to some (literal or metaphorical) pit of despair at the end of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Boulevard. Fortunately for me I ended up bottoming out early on. Not in some post-modern approximation of a Dickens back alley, but alone in my car on Interstate 64, somewhere between Richmond and Charlottesville, VA. (A whole other story) I was twenty three years old, then. And it still took four more months before anyone realized there was something seriously wrong with me. (Chalk that up to most useful things I ever learned at prep school—evasion and denial) By that time I was a disaster and the glamour of survival against all odds had pretty much worn off entirely. I checked out. Moved home. And spent the next year working for my mother and sitting in psychiatrist’s offices swallowing what little remained of my pride.

***

Suffice it to say, things haven’t turned out exactly the way I expected

A decade and some change have passed since senior year of high school. I’m neither rich nor famous, neither feared nor adored on a massive scale. I haven’t managed to collect some catalog of exotic, preferably foreign lovers, but that’s probably to be expected. I’m not married. I don’t have kids. At eighteen, the idea was borderline repulsive, and even now I can’t quite imagine it. Like, does that sort of arrangement require wholesale sacrifice of all my free time? Would I be expected to domesticate and start doing someone else’s laundry? (Bear in mind, my definition of long-term committed relationship would be fulfilled with little more than regular sex and someone to get a beer with every now and then). I don’t own a house or a luxury car. And I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to do with a jet.

I arrive at the thirtieth anniversary of my birth in reasonably good health—physically and emotionally—and at a decent comfort level. I have good friends and a better relationship with my family than I ever believed possible. I make my living writing, even if it’s not the kind of writing I thought or even wanted to do and I work for myself. I get to spend a few hours a week behind the counter of a dusty record store talking about music to people who care about music. I live in an aging cottage on a tree-lined street in an improbably liberal small southern town with free public transportation. My twenties will not conclude with some triumph of hard work, perseverance, and pluck[7], but I’ll probably not spend my thirtieth birthday under an overpass with a cold can of beans and a dog named Pork Chop.

It’s not a bad life. I wouldn’t have known enough to want it at eighteen, which is probably a good thing, because I probably would have found some way to fuck it all up.

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[1] Names have been changed.

[2] Which I suppose explains the continued, popular appeal of the Republican Party.

[3] A place that looked less like the mean streets of New York and more like the charming, if decayed streets of Richmond, Virginia’s fan district, which was, in the mid 1990s, chock full of art students similarly pretending to be homeless.

[4] Hilarious. Really

[5] A favorite of my teenage years, for reasons I cannot begin to explain

[7] Not surprising as those two qualities have been nearly absent entirely from my young adult life.