remote nyc blues

by lebris

Posted to Stories on 2003-11-10 12:19:00

I’m sort of, today, in a New York state of mind. I’ve been reading “The Queensboro Ballads” by Levi Asher, and I’m wearing a black turtleneck sweater. I haven’t shaved since yesterday morning. I have black boots on, below my way-cool low-slung jeans. I’m wearing my eyeglasses. I feel very Village today, even though I am very much not in the Village.

I envy people who can “put something together.” So as I read through “The Queensboro Ballads” I decide that I envy Mr. Asher for his constant constructions of meaningful and self-sustaining pieces of work. I want to be that guy, that guy who creates things that are meaningful. I’ve tried to do this, a few times, but I always end up getting distracted. I have little faith in what might exist of my own abilities. Perhaps if I were to see my finished potential products as a finish line of sorts, I would do better at arriving there. But I’m not good at dealing with abstraction. For me, the ends must justify the means and, in most cases, I need to have a concrete end for which to aim.

I miss New York City. It’s been several months since I’ve lived there and I miss it. I miss it because I feel like I’m more of a writer when I’m there. Although, certainly, I can’t really say that I’m any more or less productive as a writer anywhere else. But there’s just something about the place.

Where I am now, things get tired easily. People are tired in general here. Not sleepy tired but rather fucking boring tired. This is where the boring people come to die. And, if you haven’t realized, in spite of the cliche, dying of boredom takes a long time, apparently.

I have a clipping taped to my computer at work. It’s from “On The Road,” of course. My job is a tedious one. The clipping inspires me to not care about my job. My career is going nowhere. I used to be a good path. I used to be upwardly mobile. Now, even though it’s true that the only way is up, I feel much less mobile. On the one hand, this is just fine with me. I was never really happy doing what I was doing; I fell into my career path like an egg into a production chute. I was always aware that “it” wasn’t for me; the tiredness of it, the turmoil, the tedium, the repetition and the shallow banter. I hated it. But, on the other hand, it did offer some direction.

I have dreams. I always have had dreams, but I’ve treated them with some disdain. I’ve habitually ignored my dreams. My dreams are simple, from a logical standpoint. But, from a practical standpoint, they are perhaps slightly too specific to actually work. Or at least that’s what I’ve been telling myself for the past 30 years, or however many of my 33 that I’ve been conscious of my ability to overextend my imagination.

My mind tends to wander. Always has. Classrooms for me were settings for daydreams, merely. Attention to detail for me meant planning my dreams down to the instant that I walked out to the podium to accept my 10th-straight Grammy Award for Best Singer-Songwriter Ever In The History of Springsteen/Dylan/Jagger-Inspired Rock And Roll. Standing in my basement bedroom with a curtain rod that tripled as a Brian Setzer-type microphone and a Pete Townshend guitar, I wore out scores of tapes as I rewound and played back each verse again and again and again in order to correct my inflections as I belted out lines whose meanings I barely understood.

I never got to be a rock and roll star.

Living in New York lended a certain air of self-credibility to my dreams, such as they had become. While I wasn’t able to attach myself to a serious line of dream-oriented work, I was at least able to picture myself as someone whose dream was in progress. In reality, though, I was merely a snapshot of this person. I wasn’t really pursuing the dream. I was merely living as the person in pursuit of the dream, hoping never to age, so as to keep up appearances.

While I didn’t allow myself to be goal-focused on my dream, I had determined that something about it was to be a writer of independent mind. I focused on maintaining, then the persona of someone who, I had decided, was the perfect sort of person to be on his way towards achieving the misty sort of goals I had established for myself. I wrote regularly, though not consistently about anything in particular. I found great places to write my meandering tales or, more aptly put, the starts of my tales. I became (and still am) the master of the opening chapter. I can set the stage like a virtuoso storyteller but once that is accomplished, my mind wanders onto something else.

I worked on my novel for three years. It started with a great opener, of course, a stream-of-consciousness ramble that had rhythm, that had style. It was self-effacing and insightful, evoking dream-like images of forests and flora and violence and paranoia. I spent thirty minutes on it and it was beautiful.

At first I led it in one direction, a different one than I would finally take it. I spent a few weeks on that before realizing that it was fruitless. But once I pushed it down the right path, it rolled and rolled. I wrote sporadically but always seemed to be working on it. When I wasn’t writing I was thinking about it. I came up with its major themes as I walked to and from work on the New York City sidewalks I would eventually flee in fear. Often, during the crucial early struggle with finding meaning in my work that would keep me on it, I considered giving up. In a burst of genius, I realized that I could come up with my great themes by working backwards. Instead of deciding what themes my characters would follow, I decided what themes I believed in and then had several internal, classroom-like dialogues, in which I placed the actions of my characters into the ideas that I favored. It worked extremely well. Not surprisingly (now), I had to see the finish line in order to stay in the race.

When I wasn’t specifically writing it, I was writing short scenes or transcriptions of emotion or thought that would eventually end up in the book. I had become so immersed in my dream that it became a part of me without my knowing, and more importantly, without my intending to. For the first time, I was living without thinking. I was free.

I finished my book, my novel, my first novel, after a few rounds of revisions, three weeks prior to the attack on the World Trade Center. The city had changed for me, for everyone. I almost threw my book away. What use could it possibly have in this new world? I went from being on top of the world to full-blown despair. Not only was my psyche shattered, but what feeble condensation had come to exist from the mist of my dreams was blown away by a dark wind.

I think I’m getting back to my dreams as of late. I’ve started formulating the setting of my dream, which is a start. I’ve started the process of logically accepting the dreams that I have, that I am allowed to have them, that I can have them. That, I know, is the first start to accepting them emotionally, which is a much more difficult process, no matter how in touch you are with the logic of your thoughts. But I still realize that I need an endpoint in order to get started, and this is where I find my most dramatic flaw.

I envy those who can create consistently and I wonder how it’s done. It’s one thing to create and another to be a creator. The act of creation, a single act of creation, can be attributed to many things, not the least of which is blind luck. But to be a creator is different. I want to be a creator. I want to build lots of things. I have plans for an online journal. I’ve gotten so far as designing the pages and the concept of it. I have plans to write more novels. I’ve gotten so far as to write the beginnings of at least three more, one of which is at nearly 20,000 words. But I’ve done little more than stall on each of them.

I wonder sometimes why I get in a New York state of mind. It’s not just how I’m dressed today or what I happened to stumble upon during my lunch break at work. I think, perhaps, that all I really want in my life is to be that person in the snapshot, that I have some horrible fear of success that keeps me from allowing myself to create a finish line, that I’m so shallow as to simply need the superficial appearance of life in order to live my life. New York, though, was for me the moment at which I was able to generate an end-game based on my going through the motions. And maybe feeling those sidewalks of New York is simply a melancholy reminiscence of something that I’ll always only have as a fleeting memory, a one-time thing. An enjoyable high school dance, a ride in a convertible, a first kiss.

There are pleasures in life, even in the town where boring people come to die. There is my best friend; there are my children; there are bright fall days and very dark nights where I lay with my son on the ground and watch as a lunar eclipse inspires ideas for tomorrows which, if I’m lucky, we’ll all have. There is hope in the despair that is my career that my career is not my career. Past is prologue, and maybe I’m not quite done with some parts of my past yet.

The world isn’t as horrible as it looked in the days, weeks, months following the day that that the towers came down. Maybe there is still a place for a book about a boy and his mind, like there was 30, 50 years ago. I worry less about it now. What dreams may come, right?

My New York state of mind carries more baggage with it than I might have thought it would have 3 years ago. This is to be expected, but it still makes me sad.

I admire those who are able to create with some consistency. It isn’t easy, trusting your dreams enough to move on despite the fact that the finish line is invisible, in the mist. But I’m trying to learn. So I suppose what I need to do is try to force some inspiration instead of desparation from seeing the achievements of others. Basically, I have to stop being so damned selfish.

Damn, well, I was looking for the truth, I suppose. Now, on to tomorrow.