Look Beyond the Day in Hand

So...that wasn't the best week of my life. Not with the Sarah thing and not with school either, as it turned out. I had fun with the kids at Diamond's birthday party last Thursday, but opted out of the Pittsburgh jaunt for the weekend. Sometimes a guy just needs to stay home. Plus, I'm always uptight around those kids, no matter how much fun we're having, and I wasn't in the mood for that at all.

A little bit of reflection then, which will hopefully help me file away my thoughts faster. "Can I talk to you about something dead serious?" is probably not the best way to turn the conversation. I compulsively apologize and try to assure people "it's okay" when I need to be told that more than anyone. Other things we all knew already, etc.

Needless to say, the Sarah thing made me...sad, for lack of a better word. Sad for myself and my own disappointment, of course, but also sad that she's been hit so hard by Noah's breakup with her, and though I care about her very much, there isn't a thing I can do. That kind of helplessness--the frustration and helplessness that come with not being able to make the ones you care about happy when they're not--puts a certain kind of distance between two people, a certain wasteland expanse that tries to convince you nobody ever really saved anyone else.

And in the case of Sarah and me, that distance is also, of course, time; after I talked to her about her breakup, I realized that what she was going through--being phone-dumped at 28 by a guy she'd dated long-distance for 3 years and was thinking about marrying--was more serious than anything a nomadic 21-year-old like me could come up with. Not to say I was just feeling some stupid college boy thing--I don't take these things lightly, I was serious, and if I've been "in love" (I've been over-cautious about using the word since 2006 or so) at all in the past two years, she was it (though I'm still not sure whether it's purely that, or if there's also some unconscious desire to be "taken care" of by someone I see as knowing more about what's up with life than I do); but still, I realized there was just no comparison. At points, I even asked myself what we could possibly do for each other, and couldn't come up with an answer.

Which leads back to my visions...some days the past few weeks I entertained the idea that this whole thing about applying to schools in the Boston area, and my obsession with MIT (the Computational and Systems Biology Program, birthplace of hacking...and Boston) in particular, was all coming from some unconscious, delusional impulse to trace Sarah's footsteps, as it were. To chase someone through time and try to close the seven-year gap that will never narrow...in case this creeps you out (yes, you, on the other side of the fourth wall), as well it should, I don't really take the idea seriously, though it would make an excellent premise for a surreal story. Guy embarks on a continental odyssey to trace his beloved's history on the eve of her marriage to another man. Or maybe she died. That's how people in my stories are, married or dead. Or on an odyssey. I kid. If only I still wrote prose...

Anyway, I suppose it's safe to assume that my visions of crystalline winter palaces and untarnished solitude in Boston will collapse soon, so no need to worry.

Talking about all this to Jess and Thom in Jess' kitchen last night. Jess said she'd expected me to be more distraught about the whole thing, and commented that I was so unselfish it was almost boring. I suppose I'll take that as a compliment (for now). Real sadness hardly ever manifests in outpourings with me, anyway (I'm more likely to disappear into communications blackout, except for certain people for a few days), but it's kind of true; every time I get to being sad about it--and I do, a lot--I'm just run over by the relative triviality of my recent issues in comparison to Sarah's. Ironically, the fact that I really do care about her prevents me from overlooking her situation and just demanding to be made happy; doing that would probably be a lot easier if this were some stupid college boy thing. Sounds catch-22 to me.

The downside is that I sometimes do feel like I'm not even here, and all that remains are my ideals. Over and over again I arrive back at the conclusion that I, or at least my present self, do not matter--plenty of other things matter, like Sarah, or even my future self (e.g. grad school applications), but I, myself, at this point in time, do not matter. It's hard to get off my ass when everything I do in the present seems to be for someone else, somewhere else, somewhen else. But I suppose I'll have to find a way.

Anyhow.

Last Wednesday, Halloween night, I was feeling particularly gloomy, and recorded a few chords on guitar. Those chords are now a song. It's true to my roots, Sad Boy Headphones Music. I may have to record a couple extra parts and rearrange it a little, but it's definitely shaping up to be a song. I ended up just improvising a series of chords and recording them; indulged in sentimentality for a change. It was the first time I really started writing something without thinking about it, just playing what felt right...it was a refreshing change. I hadn't connected music to any kind of emotional expression in a while, and it felt good. I decided to call it "Boy, Eat Dust." The title is a more or less direct reference to above-described events. The music itself is a little less direct.

I drove down to Fell's Point with Song yesterday to see Control at the new theater there. We stopped for burritos first, and while we sat on a bench and ate, Song threw a chip, which all of a sudden caused over a dozen birds--mostly pigeons, but also gulls--to flock around us in a genuinely terrifying Alfred Hitchcock moment. It seems that pigeons, more than any other birds, just have no respect for personal space, especially in tourist traps like Fell's Point.

Anyway, the film. Song and I are both huge Joy Division fanatics. I can't say at all what someone who wasn't into Joy Division would think about the film. It was definitely great as a style/mood piece, like Lost in Translation if Sofia Coppola had been bleak and proto-goth instead of New Wave. If Marie Antoinette had been monochrome instead of bubblegum pink.

However, having listened to my Joy Division albums probably a couple hundred times, I was already extremely familiar with the style and mood of Joy Division-- it's probably ingrained into my character somewhere--and was really hoping for what Joy Division, and Ian Curtis (since the film is mostly about Ian), were besides the mood and the myth, and I didn't really pick up any of that. From the first chronological scene one sees Ian brooding while walking instead of pausing to pick up a kid's soccer (foot) ball, not speaking to his family when coming home, smoking in bed and listening to Bowie, in that order. There wasn't a sense he was ever happy as a kid, or with Deborah--he reads her poetry, they flirt and hang out, they get married, he sits in a room writing lyrics and refuses to come out when she makes him tea. Having gone through an Ian Curtis obsession, all this was rather superfluous to me; I was hoping for Ian as a real human being, but the Ian on the screen was all legend.

The acting was good, and the times characters acted like actual human beings--Ian and Deborah after she confronts him about his affair, Ian just before he commits suicide, etc.--were powerful. There were just too few of these personal moments. One thing that was more believable than just about anything else was the romance between Ian and Annik; I read an interview with Sam Riley where he said those scenes were particularly easy for him to play, since he was falling in love with Alexandra Maria Lara (Annik's actress, who, if I may be excused for saying so, is gorgeous) in real life, and it shows. It's almost too sincere for the stylized atmosphere of the film. Sam Riley's singing did sound very close to Ian's actual voice most of the time, though it always sounded like he was pushing the limits of his voice to sound like Ian, whereas when I listen to Joy Division's recordings, whether studio or live, Ian's voice always sounds like it's endlessly welling up from an abyss at the bottom of his throat. Oh, and the guy who played Bernard Sumner couldn't play guitar for shite.

The greatest revelation I got from the film, though, was how much of an ass Ian Curtis actually was at times, at least according to the film's portrayal. Seeing as it was adopted from Deborah Curtis' biography, it's probably at least a little biased, but I'll assume for the moment that it's reasonably accurate. It struck me that from day one Ian was very into himself as a myth; he was always a poet, he was always going to be a rock star, even before anyone else came into his life. His bandmates didn't help, as far as the film was concerned; they were like the furniture in the room that he alone occupied, the couch pushed up against the door, the bars on the windows, blocking every exit. Giving him a band with which to further indulge his own image and then not being able to help him with the consequences--not even trying, for the most part, except for Barney. And Ian's fixation on himself cast him beyond the reach of those who loved and genuinely cared for him, Deborah and Annik. That was the real tragedy of the story: they couldn't bring him back. He hurt them both, though unintentionally, by being lost in his own sickness and guilt.

I must confess that, at least twice in my own life, I've hurt someone who cared about me by being fixated on my own abandonment and sadness. Maria still speaks to me. The other one...well, sometimes. I talked to Maria last week a bit about how a lot of the people I keep around here in Baltimore don't really make me that happy, and she said, "people love you." It's upsetting how often I live in ignorance of, or even in spite of, that fact.

Still, I've been on the other side of the divide, watching the people who cared about me, listening to them say they didn't know what to tell me, they didn't know what to do, they didn't know how to help, and realizing they couldn't bring me back in the end, that I had to bring myself back or not at all...and that's really the worst. It's why I don't like talking when I'm down. It's enough to make you think that nobody can save anybody else.

I think I've mentioned that before. I suppose these things must work themselves out in time.