May 06, 2007

On May 26, it will have been one year since I pedaled away from Yorktown, Virginia and into the unknown. Just for kicks, allow me to list the events of my life during the past almost-year:

-Ended nine-year relationship
-Sold house
-Threw all worldly possessions in storage, became deliberately homeless, traveled mostly alone for four months and 2,000 miles in a state almost, but not quite, entirely like madness
-Quit drinking (mostly)
-Arrived in Santa Barbara, spent three months as a zombie-like basket case
-Started a writer's group
-Acquired new job and new apartment in the space of a week
-Made mad dash to New York to reacquire worldly possessions, drove back to California in 3 1/2 days of further madness
-Attempted to start another relationship towards the very end of my headlong plunge down a mental cliff

Those are, I think, the highlights. At 5:45AM on May 1, in the shower, no less, I ended my headlong plunge by crashing hard at the bottom of that cliff, a place of such abject despair, mourning, and pain that I'm not even going to bother wasting more words attempting to describe it. Some of you have been there in your own lives, and you'll know what I mean. Everyone else gets to theorize about the total lack of fun and brightly colored balloons that might be found in such a place.

I've never been there before. But while I was there, I recognized it for what it was, and saw how it was qualitatively different from the many similar places in which I have found myself in the past. I saw, with clarity, the long trajectory of my life: I was in that place not as a result of quite recent events, or the events of the past year, or even the past nine years. I have been falling towards that place because of events, processes, and behaviors that have been accumulating over the entirety of my life. On Tuesday morning, I finally arrived at my destination.

The uplifting thing about hitting bottom--really hitting bottom, and knowing it--is that there truly is nowhere else to go but up the cliff wall and out of the abyss. This morning, as I smoked my dawn cigarette and paced up the street, I watched bees flit around the deeply red, bottle brush blossoms of a tree I haven't yet been able to name. I became overwhelmed by a sense of space in my life, space that, until now, I think I had mistaken for isolation and emptiness. This heavy-chested perception changed from that of looking out into a vast, trackless desert into one of welcoming potential, accompanied by the realization of what it means to not have space in one's life, and how terribly overwhelming that must be. As far as walks for a smoke go, this one had a much larger portion of sudden understanding than usual.

There's been some recent discussion among friends about the purpose of blogs that the authors use as journals, revealing deeply personal content. Astonished Head has had a few iterations over the past five years: would-be political pundit blog, humor blog, web comic blog, always interspersed with bits and pieces of my own life. The site stats certainly tell the tale about what gets the most readership--when I had 1,500 readers a day, I was writing about politics and the incipient Iraq war. The more I wrote about me, the more the readership declined, which I don't mind so much. Politics is tiring, and I don't have the passion or the brainpower to keep it up.

Oscar said, "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." Yes: I am just arrogant enough to believe that there are a few people out there who are interested in watching the mental circus of a 35-year old writer as he struggles to wrangle his neurotransmitters into something that vaguely resembles a palatable soup. I am also well aware that there is a much larger portion of the web-going public who will read this as the self-indulgent ramblings of an unbalanced and not particularly inspired nitwit.

So be it. In recent years, memoirs have become fashionable best-sellers, and the grittier, the more devastating the details, the better they sold. I put posts like this, and the ones last week, squarely into that category. This is memoir on the fly, lacking polish or the overarching theme that can only be made visible through hindsight and editing. There are things that don't reach these pages, which I leave to the reader's imagination. At the same time--again, with hubris--I'm confident enough in my own ability to believe that, for a few readers at least, how I arrange the words here is reason enough to read.

There will probably be fewer posts like this in the coming weeks, as I'm working on plugging in to my new town, meeting new people, and having different experiences. But, as this is my house, there will always be room for the personal and the embarrassingly sincere. I will never disown anything I write here. I might say I was wrong, or insane when I wrote it, or possibly drunk. I have no problem with discounting my own foolish words, but I will never claim that such discounting means that I wasn't foolish. A Sartrean definition of bad faith is pretending that you were "someone else" when confronted with a past stupidity or misdeed.

I will always try, to the best of my ability, to write here in good faith.

Whether that's interesting or not is a separate issue entirely.