I’m a day late, according to an arbitrary schedule I came up with myself, but usually treat as absolute. Extremes are kind of my thing, and my tendency for the all-or-nothing has helped as much as harmed me.
Roughly three years ago, I was in Denver with Stove. I wrote a few weeks ago about the time my lungs filled up with blood clots, and subsequently grappling with mortality. I’ve alluded plenty of times to my capacity for impulsive decision making and masking anxiety with poor choices. This trip was an exception to this habit.
I’m not sure if it was due to the grounding effect one feels when traveling with someone they’re highly comfortable with (Stove is one of my best friends, and we had been playing in bands together for years at this point), but the trip had balance. I drank, but not too much. We went for hikes, but we had fun. We did touristy shit, but we also watched Clone High and laughed late into the night, and shared things we hadn’t told each other yet.
Details matter. One of my favorite memories is walking through River North, the artsy section of Denver, hunting a good cocktail and looking at murals. It was hot. This was in September, but the air was arid in Denver as it tends to be, and that high up, it felt like you could reach out and grab the sun. There were also very few trees, which often leaves a New Englander feeling lonely and hot without shade.
We ended up finding some hip place with craft cocktails and, despite my pretentiousness for pizza coming from Connecticut, admittedly decent slices. I drank a negroni and thought about Anthony Bourdain, and about how I wasn’t dead.
At the time, I thought a lot about the fact that I wasn’t dead. In fact, there was a mania that followed the whole lung debacle, fueled by the euphoria of almost dying but not quite. Read about it in that other blog post I linked before, if you want more on that.
Anyway, this is a roundabout way of communicating that balance isn’t typically my thing, and I opt instead for an all-or-nothing approach. This suited me in grad school, when I was working full time and writing hundreds of pages a year, drinking like a fish and sleeping very little. When I graduated and lost the artistic scaffolding of being in a grad program, this intensity morphed into a renewed commitment to music in the form of writing folk songs. It also led to me virtually abandoning fiction and not writing anything at all for months.
My personality is fairly consistent over time, as far as I’m aware– always the brooding, sardonic type. Changes come for me in the form of different elements of my personality taking over for periods of time, and then shrinking again into the background. What was once an era of me being the “grad school fiction writer” guy morphed into me being the singer-songwriter guy, as I’m sure any of you are aware by my frequent attempts at IG story self-promotion. But the grad school fiction guy and the songwriter guy are only shards, like individual colored glass pieces in a larger mosaic of the self. Diluted, bastardized slivers of the self.
Writing this blog is an attempt to marry a few different elements of this fractured self—music meets writing via subject matter, and is coupled by this public expression of the intimate self, which creates a sort of paradoxical tension that sometimes wins out in convincing me not to write. Yesterday is a prime example of this. Some things feel too interior to share, which is my choice, but the absolutist in me has set a weekly deadline that must be met but yesterday, I missed.
The absolutist in me was quietly expressing a wish to terminate the practice altogether, even. This week’s attempt at balance is coming in the form of writing and posting this a day late and not just giving up because I missed one “deadline.”
Pendulums have swung in other areas of life recently, too. I’ve been drinking much less. Much less. And by “much less,” I mean not at all for the last two weeks, with the exception of two days (a music festival for one, and a dinner with a long-unseen old friend of mine). This is not a problem—truly, I’m sleeping better, my thoughts are sharper, I think I’ve lost a pound or two. Sure, I approach the end of a workday and crave a beer most days, but it isn’t an unconquerable urge. It’s an easy longing to replace with something else, like a seltzer or a mug of hot chocolate or just time with a book, even. Paradoxically, this ability to enact strict control over my drinking at any arbitrary moment is what rationalizes my decision to drink again, since obviously it’s not a problem since I can just turn it off at any time, and given my penchant for extremes, you can imagine how my consumption fluctuates. I see the flaws in the logic.
But occasionally I’ll think back on that trip to Denver in relief, remembering an example of actual balance. It’s something I am capable of. It simply requires presence and effort, and a resistance to relying solely on routines. The mind is a powerful thing, and that’s what can turn routines from glorious to insidious—depending on the rut you’re in, you’re either enjoying the ride or headed for the ditch.
Right now, I think I’m enjoying the ride. I’m not without human problems, of course (I haven’t yet achieved Nirvana), but on the whole, personal things are fine, due in part to positive momentum.
The exact opposite seems true for the larger world out there. This reality makes it hard to write. Already it’s been about 900 words here, and this entry has done nothing to save the world. Yet again, why should it? It’s another extreme: my writing either needs to fix everything or it isn’t worth doing at all. At least, that’s how my mind seems to operate sometimes.
In East of Eden, Steinbeck writes “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” It’s the kind of thing that simultaneously tells the truth and sounds good– two things which don’t always coexist in any given statement. Its truth is obvious on its face, and yet it’s something that hasn’t fully lodged in my thick skull.
So, this entry fixes nothing. But I wrote it anyway. The hope, as always, is that you and I are both better off for it compared to if I never wrote it at all.
I’m seeing a friend play live music tonight. I’m sharing a meal with the woman I love. If a beer will add to that experience, I’ll order one. I’ll drink it and enjoy it, and move on. Then, we will go home and I will rest and I will wake up for work tomorrow with a clear conscience, well-rested enough to face the day. I will spend a little bit of time on Twitter, I’ll take in some of the world, but I won’t let it capsize me.
I don’t need to be perfect; I just need to be good.
matt nilsen 