BADGE OF LOST-NESS
On the proto-beat generation of the 21st century, fatherhood, selfishness, midlife crises, cyberwriting,
BADGE OF LOST-NESS
I am a father. Itās been a rough road. You get painfully acquainted with your shortcomings as a human being and a family man. As I put it in a poem, āThe me-bomb was set off by a triggering device I left on the coffee table for anybody to stumble across.ā In this case it was a piece of scrap paper upon which Iād written a bunch of words ending with āI had no idea how much work and family would exhaust me.ā My ex-wife found the piece of paper in the weeks before she kicked me out and threw it in my face. As a husband and father itās like youāre not allowed to admit being exhausted by the big things in your life.
Iāve sometimes envisioned myself as a man in the 60s, not young enough to be a hippie, a man from slightly before that upheaval who tried to be a square family man with a job and family, but who skitzed out under his own pressure and his own mind and dropped out of society to become someone or something beat. You know those elder countercultural people who were kind of lost souls before everybody became a lost soul under a program of lostness. I saw myself as an alcoholic who didnāt drink, a drug addict who didnāt do drugs, who evacuated himself from the world of normal people and who ran away to join a cult that was invisible and didnāt exist but for the separateness, the apart-ness that had hived off from American life.
This is romanticized bullshit, of course. Is there a new āBeat Generationā of the 21st century? And are 40-somethings allowed in? In San Francisco of the 40s and 50s there were like proto-beats, that came before the Ginsbergs and Kerouacs, older societal freaks who wrote and lived that life ā could I be like one of them? That shlubby balding guy with dirty glasses and stained t-shirt who is scribbling away, waiting for the next merry-go-round cycle of free love and drugs that wonāt arrive? Why analogize to the Beat Generation anyway? Isnāt it tired to seek antecedents in the 20th century? Arenāt the wave of cyberwriters we see toiling away now their own army of monsters? It seems like itād be draining the vitality out of the present to put it in a past-shaped box.
But yeah, I am a kind of dropout of the square life of Generation X sojourners with jobs and kids. Iām too old for the literary ferment on twitter which is a young personās game. Eris died at 29. The majority of the denizens of MLC are younger people and I do with some frequency get a twinge of guilt and self-suspicion that with my whitening beard I shouldnāt be hanging out with all these youngsters. But here I am. I donāt fully know where else I can go. Thereās so many strata to this writing game but I canāt quite see myself with the established writers closer to my own age, whether itās in the genre vineyards I was in for a while, where thereās a kind of hierarchy and an obeisance, or in the more ivory tower world of writers doing a ācareerā as a poet teaching students at a university, doing residencies, being on panels, on a kind of ātrackā as a professional writer. As usual, Iāve overthought all this and digging deeper into these groups I might find individuals who buck the system and are more like me, people who wear a badge of lost-ness and apart-ness, outsiders.
Back to fatherhood. I just took my kid off to college this week and it is a kind of preliminary temblor signaling a life earthquake yet to come. My social life, both in real life and among the writer-friends I run with online, on twitter, is skewed in some ways because most of them are childless or if they have kids they must be much younger. Theyāre new parents. And while everyone has their struggles and battles and weāre told not to assume anyone has it easy, I donāt see the haggard wounded faces of people whoāve had breakdowns and divorces like I have. More romanticization at work, Iām somewhat sure. Or, like I say, I donāt see people quite at my stage of life that I could relate to. People with college-age children who have to move into the next phase of uncertainty, loneliness, empty-nesters (not that I ever really had a nest, per se). I have often, perhaps like those proto-beats, wanted to cast myself into the role of the one who went on ahead, and I have āthe Wisdom,ā and Iāve come back to warn people who are just entering the pipeline of fatherhood about what is coming. I swear divorce is waiting like a reaper to claim some of your heads so I admonish you to watch out and make sure that doesnāt happen. How funny would it be if everybody escaped that fate, never stumbled, never made grievous errors and lost their marriages, and found the bliss of middle age and I alone was the fumbling demented idiot losing my grip on life, on sexiness, on confidence, on charisma and relatability (can you see me at one of your barbecues with a beer in my hand talking near the grill about dad shit with the other dads?) I fear with my daughter off at school I will slide further into oddness, into weirdness, no woman will touch me for the thicket of āred flagsā sticking up out of my body like an infection. The estrangement from square conformity continues. I may write other books and my immediate community may be further puzzled and concerned. Being a writer is like having a social disease in some circles. I have partially run away and pulled a geographic into the digital embrace of a kind of cult of sorts, on twitter lit indie writer land where thereās a new contest of popularity and self-promotion that is all too well known and yet as indecipherable to master as alien messages in the static coming from deep space.
My daughter starts college and I start into a new thing. My identity really only has the writing life to depend on. I wonder if I were another type of person if I would get into collecting guitars or model submarines, or collecting pop punk vinyl and wearing cargo shorts and trying to go to shows in Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, trying to look slick for the ladies who are perhaps locked into their own midlife crises, looks fading and divorces coalescing and calcifying even as they are shed. Maybe Iāll go to comic conventions and dress like a pirate or stormtrooper or wizard and join gamer clubs and get destroyed by teenagers at card games. Fuck that.
Notice how I keep bringing it back to fatherhood and then quickly spinning out into selfishness? MY identity, MY happiness, MY loneliness. My therapist might have a field day. I dread that my daughter, who has achieved so much, has had seeds of trauma and mental illness planted by my selfishness and inwardness and poverty which have not come to bloom yet. Something about being a certain type of father has been set, the father-frieze has been etched in the column by acid and canāt be altered now. We can only hope that the damage will be limited.
I can only write now. This seems to be the main way to affect the future. Tiny ripples of cause and effect, so minute as to evade open analysis, are set in motion āin swift reticulumā by my words. The body of water so affected by my writing may be only within me. Again back to the self. I am an ink-stained wretch. The majority of my income (not counting the dole) comes from my pen. Iām a writer. I always dreamed of being this since being a little kid although I had no idea of the terrors and rocky coasts that the artist must steer the boat past. Many have suffered worse than me. But the art life seems to have suffering attached to it; you seem to require suffering and that special echolocation and depth-plumbing of human experience to create art. And the suffering is seductive and you can grow to love it and even wish for it in sick ways. Dark pleasure of anti-pleasure.
I need to get out of this bedroom. I wish I could meet more of my writer friends. Maybe weād drink jugs of wine and howl at poetry readings. Maybe weād gather on rooftops in cities. Maybe weād talk for hours at parties until the sun rose. I donāt know. Maybe that is not quite the condition of this kind of writer in the 21st century. Maybe we lie alone in beds like Marcel Proust, who soaked up just enough of French society to recede for what, decades? and write about it at length. I donāt know if I need the society of my fellow writers. I think the society of writers is mainly through the screen now. Itās a warping and a perversion but you know, it need not be a negative thing necessarily. Itās a global phenomenon. Itās like a cultural revolution, like rock and roll spreading through the world on radio waves and record distribution. Itās technological and free. Weāre inside it so we have no idea what it will change and affect. Itās underground and of the hip intelligentsia as I have defined it elsewhere, in the Robert Williams Zap Comix sense. I donāt see it manifesting in the wider culture as it surfaces in squaresville. I like being a part of a literary culture thatās DIY and, perhaps, punk.
You make me think. I don't know where I fit sometimes, and this helps.