On ruts, birthdays, and the shortness of life
I.
“Wait. A rut? I don’t know that word.”
“It’s like…” I pause for a moment to gather my thoughts, and my hands begin to answer before I do. They stand up vertically, facing one another.
“It’s like when a wagon uses a dirt road,” I say. “Over time, it’s wheels make a rut in the dirt.”
When I say rut, I cast my fingers forward, my hands carving an imaginary pathway in the air. And though it’s something neither of us can see, it’s got all the power to keep a thing in place, without variation, day after day.
“Ah yes, yes,” he says, nodding vigorously. “I see.”
[conversation with Dario, of the Italian couple, a few weeks back]
II.
I’m turning 31 in a few days. In fact, by the time I post this, the deed will most surely be done.
For someone who can’t escape the feeling that he will always just be an immature child, back when I turned 30 was an odd thing. But I can assure you that turning 31 is even odder. I’m not just 30 anymore. Now I’m officially in my 30s.
And despite what anyone might try to tell me about age being just a number, I still can’t help but take that number and hold it like a billiard ball in my hands, a very physical thing that I toss back and forth and spin around, feel out its heft.
That number in my hand, smooth and round and just heavy enough, tells me all I need to know about the thing we can’t do a damn thing to escape.
I breathe in, in absolute wonder that this is something I won’t always get to do.
III.
Hard Boiled sat pathetically askew, its back two tires sunk into a deep layer of rocks. Rocks that called to mind flattened, gray eggs.
I’d already tried driving forward. I’d already tried reversing. And no matter which way I tried to go, the spinning back tires only dug themselves deeper into the moist dirt beneath the rocks.
So I started digging. With my bare hands. Clawing at the dirt around and beneath the back wheels, tossing stones aside, desperately trying to make a space for any tiny bit of traction.
I see myself there, knelt down among stones, alone to the world and back turned to the lake, so focused on the task at hand that I can’t even swat away the damned sandflies that keep attacking my hands.
And I think, some ruts just take no time at all to fall into.
IV.
Zack, how many times do you think you and I have talked about why we write — or, more accurately, why we so badly want to write? Ever concerned that it’s just an elaborate way to stroke our own egos, to say to the world, Look at me, I’m here!
But I’ll tell you why we write.
It isn’t about being a somebody. It isn’t about the number of Facebook likes or Medium stats or positive reviews and book jacket blurbs. It isn’t even about the self-satisfaction of seeing a thing complete, something we’ve done with our bare fingers (as it were).
What it’s about is that slow bubble that forms on the surface of soapy water, rising wobbly up, from two dimensionality to three, before it breaks free and floats away on the wind, to be chased by a toddling child or captured forever in a snap of the camera — or to simply disappear with a pop and faint sphere-shaped spray of glistening droplets.
Because the thing is, we live in a world of finitude. Just so many square miles of earth surface and so many tons of earth matter. Just so many calories of food produced by just so many hectares of arable land per year. Just so many heartbeats and eye blinks and hands held before our last. All things, if not counted, at least countable.
But then we put pen to paper or fingers to keys and, momentarily, we jump axes, x and y abandoned in favor of z. We come unbound to discover before us, in this slew of arbitrary symbols we’ve thrown down in a fit, a world that isn’t the one we thought was holding us to the ground. We balloon outward into expanses that know no limits.
That’s why we write, Zacko.
Don’t you think?
[addressed to my older brother and acclaimed (at least by me) science fiction author, Zachary Jernigan]
V.
The beginnings of a novel? Maybe.
1.
He regretted not seeing his baby sister.
Even as he packed his bag — a 40-liter travel backpack, room for just enough — he knew he wouldn’t make it home. And so he wouldn’t see her. Not this time anyway. He’d see her again. Probably. Maybe. But he wouldn’t see her now, not in the next couple days. And he regretted that.
As he folded his underwear, first in half, then in thirds, (no one folded their underwear like this), he fully intended to make it home. That’s where he was going. That’s why he was packing.
But he would never make it. In a world free of conviction, this one thing he was convinced of.
If you were to ask him, if any of his three roommates were to ask him, “How the hell can you know such a thing?” he’d shake his head and touch the skin on his forearm. Something in the way the breeze coming through the window plays in the hairs on my arm is what he’d manage not to say.
He zipped up the bag where it sat on his bed. He pushed it over a few inches and sat down beside it. He imagined the cars and the planes rushing across this great country, everyone trying to get home. Getting home.
He watched the reddened leaves of the elm outside his window dance. He watched them for a long time. Took a mental picture, something he thought for some reason he’d have to come back to.
And he was probably right.
2.
I’m not his baby sister. He beat me by a few years out of the womb and I haven’t been a baby since 1985 when I turn four years old. That’s by my estimation of what it is to be a baby anyway.
My name is Anya. Which to me sounds like half of “hello” in Korean. Which makes sense given the fact that my mom is a Korea-phile. Which is a word I just made up.
Riley is my older brother. I remember him as all sorts of things, things that if I were to tell you and you were to try to picture them all in one person, it’d just make no sense at all. This is a thing that stresses me about description. About sharing anything really. You don’t know him, so whatever I tell you is all that he’ll be. So how do I tell you about him in the right proportions so your picture isn’t so skewed as to be completely unrecognizable?
The same goes for me. These words is all you’ll have. But I don’t care about how you see me. And I shouldn’t care about how you see Riley. I shouldn’t give a damn about how anyone sees him. But I always have cared. For the past 20 years, I’ve found myself defending his image in all sorts of ways that, in the end, probably amount to painting a picture of him that isn’t accurate, that isn’t true. Which makes me wonder who all this defending is for.
If I were to be honest, I’d have to say that Riley is a tremendous disappointment. So much potential seemingly extinguished in the blink of an eye. So much lost that I wish I could gather up again and squeeze and never let go.
That’s what I’d have to say about Riley to be accurate, in any sense of the word, to who he is in the life of those he loves.
That’s what I’d have to say. But I can never say that. I can never believe that.
For the past 20 years, I’ve taken the course of believing that there’s a reason, and it’s a damn good one, for why Riley became who he is, and that if we could only see it — if me, Mom, and Dad could just rub the dust from our eyes and see it accurately — disappointment would be the last word we would ever use to describe him.
I just worry that I’ll die or he’ll die without me ever having figured it out. I can’t imagine our existence snuffing out like that without the picture becoming clear. And I’ll keep pressing tracking, like we’re a wavy VHS in a VCR, until it does.
VI.
I’m hard pressed to say we’re in anything other than a pretty huge rut. As humans, I mean. As a species.
The vast majority of us spend the vast majority of our waking hours —and for the vast majority of our very lives — punching the clock in jobs that make us bored and irritated at best and desperately miserable at worst, all to produce goods or experiences that are slowly, sometimes very rapidly, destroying our planet, our communities, our independent thought, and our meaningful social interactions. And when we get home from work, we’re so spent that the best we can do with our remaining energy is find ways to decompress — if we’re really motivated maybe go to a gym where our physical energy simply vanishes into the air, but much more likely just find a way to spend our miserably-earned income consuming something, anything, from food to media to intoxicating substances. Each of us so scared of not having enough savings for that major medical catastrophe or for that retirement that few of us ever question if it’s actually worth living miserably just to avoid dying miserably.
Meanwhile an increasingly small percentage of folks at the top get enormously and grotesquely wealthy off of our labor. Off of the best hours and years of our lives. Off of that potentially creative energy we’ve got buried down in us, somewhere.
So when I tell people that I get a pit in my stomach at the thought of going back to live in the US, it’s not really the country or the place or the people that I’m reacting against — it’s just my still too fresh memory of a rut.
Spinning and spinning, searching for traction, while the energy that should propel me forward only digs me deeper and deeper.
And to think, I’ve only got another 60 years or so, if I’m lucky.
If I’m lucky?
VII.
FRASIER: Russell, we’re just about at the end of our hour. Let me see if I can cut to the chase by using myself as an example. Six months ago, I was living in Boston. My wife had left me, which was very painful. Then she came back to me, which was excruciating. On top of that, my practice had grown stagnant, and my social life consisted of… hanging around a bar night after night. You see, I was clinging to a life that wasn’t working anymore, and I knew I had to do something, anything. So, I ended the marriage once and for all, packed up my things, and moved back here to my hometown of Seattle. Go Seahawks! [laughs] I took action, Russell. And you can, too. Move, change, do something; if it’s a mistake, do something else. Will you do that, Russell? Will you?
[from “The Good Son,” Episode 1, Season 1, of the popular 1990s sitcom Frasier]
VIII.
I eventually dug myself out. Not the first time, nor the second. But eventually I did clear enough stones and loose dirt to leave shallow depressions my back tires could fall into and grip. Sitting back in the cockpit, I pulled the gear shifter down and right, into reverse, then started the engine and hit the gas. I waited for the lurch backward before I gunned it and rolled Hard Boiled backward up and out onto solid ground.
I stopped for a moment before returning to the road, where I would search out a less treacherous spot to stop for the night. My hands and fingers were a dull gray-brown and sandfly-bitten, dirt caked beneath my nails. Evening was approaching. I still had to find a campsite and make dinner before dark, and I was tired.
But I was proud somehow. That I hadn’t called in roadside assistance. That I hadn’t bothered the nearby campervan already settled in for the night to ask for help. That I’d made it out so I could continue on.
As my sister Ashly commented in our WhatsApp group when I told my family: “Way to go, Bren! Who knew you could be so manly?”
Whether manly is the proper adjective, I have no idea. But me neither, Ashly Bird, me neither.
Things to look at…
In Place explores what it’s like to be in this place, Aotearoa New Zealand — and what it means to be in place more generally, what it means to belong. For more posts, visit https://medium.com/in-place.
