Early Reports from Minneapolis

Note: Having gotten the job mentioned in the below, I'm striking out for Minnesota soon; I wrote these fragments late last month, on a visit.

1.

I'm sitting in the extraordinarily comfortable and serene Hennepin County Library, Northeast Branch, after having spent the last half hour or so of the morning rambling around the neighborhood, feeling as alert and at large in the world as a ghost just returned after a dark hiatus of unknown duration. I walked down little streets with little workingman's frame houses crowding up to the sidewalk, very like a neighborhood adjacent to the one I grew up in and would walk through on my way to poke around a massive blackberry thicket I'd found and treasured. Silent houses, nearly empty streets, a space for large sunlight and blessed ghosts.

I climbed up a railway embankment: someone had gone to much trouble, perhaps recently, to carve stairsteps into the dirt slope, but by the time I reached the top I could tell it was nothing official. I stood on a small and obsolete trestle hemmed by stone railings in the classical style, the rail bed entirely overgrown. It could have been a good place to sit for a long time, but the air was brisk and nearby I spied a seeming shelter built from bungee cords and deadwood. I heard no one rustling, but I erred on the side of not disturbing someone's Saturday morning.

When I'd climbed back down, the train cars on the adjacent trestle began to stir and pull away. This was a great surprise—such unexpected animacy in the stilled world. It would, I thought, have been easy to have tucked myself into a nook on the end of one of those cars. Ten or twelve years ago I might've run back up and done it; the train still hadn't taken on much speed by the time I turned my back.

If I am returned to the sunny earth, to this anonymous body, from where am I returned? Myself, I guess, but from some strange and artificially lit room I never inhabit quite by choice. This is a way of saying I have been interviewing for jobs. It looks like I'll get one of them, if nothing goes wrong, and I am truly pleased about it. But it has been taxing to live so close to the surface of myself for so many weeks, holding my thoughts and motions gingerly, packaging and repackaging the product of myself. I've never felt it sounds right when I talk about myself. (Or: I've never felt it sounds right when I talk.) I become so bored and disappointed with my subject matter it takes a great hoisting of the will to not stop midsentence.

In these weeks it has been hard to get out of bed. Harder than usual, I mean. Anxiety drapes itself over me, its fur prickling, its weight immobilizing. This is of a different species from dread, because it also pulses with a hope it daren't express with any larger gesture.

It lifts. But there are so many ways to be slowed down. Even joy can do it, even the feeling that overtook me this morning on the empty streets: the impulse to stop and stand and let the moment gather itself around you. To see how big it will become, how many things might be collected by its gravity into its blessed orbit. In fact I did stop two or three times. Among the things gathered in the glow were three tranquil dogs; a building for a construction company called LaMere that was muraled with cherub-cheeked construction men and trucks as plump as loaves of bread; some kind of factory built a long time ago from mostly windows; and, waking me a bit, a line of cars whose wheels played the segmented concrete road in washboard rhythm.  

So much sun makes me drowsy. Although I've been lingering in bed mornings, daylight's also been shaking me free of sleep vigorously and early, whether I've slept enough or not. (I never have.) Then, afternoons, it catches up with me and I'm flushed of all vitality for hours. Before then, therefore: time to quit my sojourn in the library and head back into the day.

2.

A little Baptist church has placed a motto on its sign: "Just Believe!" It keeps me laughing all the way up the hill to Windom Park.

Today I am of a mood to delight in all the ways we lumbering magpies have chosen to decorate our homes.

One house I pass has—built from plaster, I guess—what looks like an altar or creche greeting visitors beside the door. Inside there is a tableau comprising two gape-mouthed Elmo dolls. One is riding a horse from an entirely different toy universe.

At the next house the yard is decorated with football-size stones, which someone has swabbed with purple paint and glitter like Easter eggs.

At the next someone has made an abstract sculpture of a tree by paring away all the living parts of a tree. Its remaining limbs reach heavenward, in an attitude less beseeching than vengeful.

And so on.

Now I am sitting at the crest of a sunny hill on a bench that, simply to please anyone who passes through, has been hung on short chains so as to rock back and forth. Within my view lies a toppled snowman on bare grass; his carrot nose is perfect. His many-fingered arms stretch out as if he has accomplished some pyrrhic victory; he will melt away exulting.

I won't hear an unkind word about a world like this, not today.

Some Words on Failure

Right now I am reading Judith Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, after a long wait for it from the library. It is an okay read; I am skimming more than I should. I think this is a case where the underlying idea seems so inevitable that, once it has finally been expressed, the expression itself can come off as rather dull, almost trivial. (It may also be that Halberstam's writing moves with not much more grace than most academic prose, piquant subject matter aside.) But then I check this reaction a little, remembering that I am probably more disposed toward failure than most people, more likely to find it natural and self-evidently important.

By which I don't mean that it's more likely to be my destiny (though, sure, that too). But the art and the stories and the modes of life that keep my interest tend to come with some negativity built in. The records that buoyed me through the gray late winter were the Mountain Goats' Tallahassee and of Montreal's Paralytic Stalks, two narratives of flamboyant despair that anthemically proclaim "I hope you die, I hope we both die" and "I made the one I love start crying tonight / And it felt good." The kind of music I put on and thoughtlessly hum along to until whoever else is with me suddenly tunes in and stops and stares with concern. Until this point it has seemed that I am, if not nice, at least well-behaved and appropriately invested in maintaining a positive attitude. Now something has been called into question. 

I tend to forget that my particular brand of deep-seated skepticism is not necessarily the human condition. This startles me again and again. During college, noticing the mellowing of my personality and convictions, I began to assume that I would be pretty well aligned with the mainstream once I graduated from my mountain cloister and rejoined it. This assumption thudded to the beer-slicked sidewalk the first time I walked down Clark Street on the night of a Cubs game, having just arrived in Chicago. Taken a few at a time, they would have been a perfectly digestible part of the greater world I expected was somewhere outside my door, but the sheer numbers of these blonde and ball-capped persons having the time of their lives in a noisy hell forced me to revisit my status as the alienated weirdo I had always been.  

In the business of being an alienated weirdo, I have often come up against lives that are more strongly guided by the capitalistic imperative of growth and progress (if only implicitly; one senses that their owners half-observe its quiet motions as they do the streetlights turning on every evening, only ever registering that something must have happened). Reactions to these collisions have ranged from incomprehension to offense. There have been, of course, the teachers aggravated by the fact that the specter of bad grades could not convince me, young Bartleby, to do an assignment I found fundamentally flawed. The people, often for some reason in the self-evidently virtuous field of medicine, who are frankly annoyed by the apparent uselessness of my pursuits, which in addition to not making much money do not even seem fun.

Or there are the genially mystified ones like my father, upon whom, after a dozen conversations on the matter, I have still not been able to impress that my band is not nor is especially intended to be a moneymaking concern. Along the same lines, although I enjoy and am doing well at my current job, you couldn't especially count me among the ranks of those who "care about their careers." I live with an economic level of comfort that is probably par for the course of my age and level of education, but it still continually astonishes me. When someone asks whether I'm worried about losing my job I say no not because I don't believe it can't happen, but because there's some small muscle within me whose only purpose is to stay ready for resuming life as a waitress or temp and calculating the price of every bean-soup dinner.

I'm not entirely sure how I got this way. For a while as a kid it seemed I was supposed to be the successful one. There is this relevant thought, from an excellent essay by Alexandra Kimball: "Poverty doesn’t allow you to develop a linear career trajectory or a coherent professional identity, because when cash is hard to come by, you do whatever job will bring you more of it." Being an artsy kid in an economically unstable family, I got the worst of both worlds: none of the drive toward professional identity, and also none of the drive toward money. 

My mom has also located the focus of her life outside of her low-paying, dead-end job. I think she spins that as a sort of living-in-the-moment thing these days, and means it. But behind the spunky middle-aged optimism is the history of a woman who was first-chair violinist in her high school orchestra, who dreamed of being a veterinarian but had to leave college in her first semester due to depression and lack of money, who grew up with a mother who—as I learned only in the last five years, and second-hand—apparently thinks so little of women's capabilities that she believes they should not hold political office. (My grandmother, whom I love as much as I do anyone, surely soaked up this belief along with an upbringing's worth of other messages telling her that she was dumb and fat and unattractive and duty-bound to meet the whims of men; I can forgive her this, while also recognizing the subtle toxicity it must have introduced into her family.)

So there has been all that, and then also an early religious infatuation that presented being a nun or monk as an ideal way to live—another form of opting out of the drive to succeed. My brand of Christianity was never the delayed-gratification school of stockpiling one's treasure in heaven. There is a line in Simone Weil that I cannot now find, about gladly running to sit in the pit of hell for a thousand years if God ordered her to do so. I was no longer religious by the time I read that, but I immediately understood. Spiritual "success," if the term is meaningful, can surely not be so neatly allegorical; if this world truly does not matter, it cannot just be an off-brand version of the one to come. 

Philosophy and its extensions into anarchism probably took care of the rest by the time I was a teenager. Looking down into the roots of things is itself discouraged by the requirement to keep climbing and acquiring; it is so much time lost, and will not change anything except yourself once you come out the end of it. I always bristled when anyone characterized punk rock or anarchism as nihilistic — I aligned myself with these movements not because I hated the world as a whole, but because I dearly loved it and wanted to create structures that would let me spend more time there, appreciating things, rather than racing ahead somewhere profitable. (It is, of course, the voice of capitalism that insists that anarchism is nihilism, seeing no other alternative to itself but death.) Having examined the matter, I have determined that I am not here to make money or have babies to carry on the family name (or, probably, to carry out grand political projects either, as I eventually realized).

Not going in for an afterlife, I also know I have only a little time here or anywhere else. Weirdly, this results in laziness as much as it does activity. The inefficient machine of my creativity runs on vast quantities of indolence; I have just now been spurred toward the keyboard after several straight hours of reading while lying sprawled across the loveseat. I fail constantly at small talk and social life and family obligations, and happily, this leaves more time to lie around and read, walk around and look at things. There is, of course, one sense in which my ambition is foolishly, desperately huge, its goal to add beauty and resonance to the world through art. The thought of this success hangs always suspended before me, cushioned and protected by the pockets of failure I have positioned all around.

Borderlands: Lakeview/Ravenswood 1 - Moving In

Real summer air came down over the course of about a single afternoon and evening a few weeks ago, and now it's worked its way in. Humid and densely nourishing if a little over-rich, heavy with the scent of lilacs and lawnmower fumes. It's just past the time of year when I'd normally be staring down my collection of flattened boxes and refusing to clean or put anything away since I'll just have to clean it all and pack it all by the end of the month.

I'm staying put for once, not that I've been immune to the flirtations of the For Rent signs. But this weather makes me think of the real work of moving -- after the giddy thrill of selecting the new, empty apartment and before the comfort of having burrowed one's way into the neighborhood. The work of being unsettled, trying to build new patterns of living and hoping that they aren't the wrong ones.

I feel like I've written incessantly about my first few months in the city, but that isn't exactly true. It's mostly just that my antennae were turned up as high as they could go; I seemed to feel everything three or four times over. (And it's true that I did narrate much of it over the phone, long calls to California that were the sole venue for a relationship for a while.) Later I transferred much of the mood of that time into an ambitious work of fiction I'm not ready to say I'll never finish. But it's still not done with me. In beginning to write this here, I realize that it will be a multipart affair; a density of delicate threads occupied those short seasons.

I would have been ready to take the first apartment I looked at in Chicago. My mother and her urbanophobic boyfriend were driving me around getting lost and hating everything while I became increasingly belligerent in the sincere hope that they'd kick me out of the car and drive away. The first place was at the corner of North and Kedzie and probably really was a worse apartment than the one I ended up with: small, dingy, with matted gray carpet on the floor and a bathrobed older woman wandering the linoleum corridor outside. $525 with heat, however; fair enough. The landlord seemed nice; my family hated it. As we drove north and east into Lakeview my mom was relieved by the increasing number of restaurants and coffee shops where, she noted, it'd be easier for me to find work.

She had a point. The place on Ashland had several dismaying features, but it was technically just within the officially desirable neighborhood of Lakeview, and close to two trains. So I could ignore the fact that the tub, in lieu of a showerhead, had a sprayer attached to the faucet; that something in the rental agent's demeanor suggested that the place had been sitting vacant for many months; that the '70s-era stove was not hooked up to the wall. It was a lot of space for a studio and for my barely-existent collection of furnishings -- good windows, a whole separate kitchen with space for a table, walk-in closet standing between it and the bathroom. I knew almost nothing about renting apartments and was a little surprised and annoyed that the landlords wouldn't let me move in that very day. It would have been so easy: all my things from college were packed into and strapped on top of the car (including the newish, shiny orange bike I'd bought myself, whose naive cable lock would be neatly clipped the first night I moved in).

So we all went home to Grand Rapids three hours away and packed it all up again the next weekend. My mother and grandmother somehow found some empty corners of the car to stuff with household necessities. "They have dish soap in Chicago, you know," I grumbled in embarrassment.

I suppose I had an idea about making it on my own, starting from scratch. As if some silverware and cleaning supplies would corrupt that vision. Everyone -- and not just my family but also the man at the bank who set up my new account and the parade of tradesmen who would pass through my apartment trying to make it livable -- was already extremely dismayed that I was staking my claim in a town where I had no job and no prospects, with only two or three acquaintances, a liberal arts degree from a tiny anachronism of a college, and $3,000 of summer-job money to my name.

It took three anxious, humid weeks to find a full-time job. I did manage to get taken on by a temp agency right away. They sent me on a handful of $10/hour jobs across the city, the first being a convention where my task was to sit at a table and request that French doctors sign in as they entered the conference hall. The French doctors fell into two camps: those who resented my presence deeply and those who were delighted by the terrible French I served up to them. (All had horrible handwriting, which we later were tasked with decoding into names to be typed into a spreadsheet; many of the words we ended up with clearly could not have been the names of actual French people, but no one we asked seemed to care whether the spreadsheet had any particular connection with reality.) The caustic Frenchwoman in charge of the temps clearly sympathized with the former camp; she'd spent a lot of time fussing with our appearance (I'd bought new clothes for the job, which I still own and still dislike) and nearly sent another girl home for wearing what were essentially fancy sneakers.

"It is not that you must wear heels to look nice!" she spat. "Look at her! Those are flats! Still appropriate!" The heels of my shoes were not flat, just covered by my too-long pants, but I took in the extremely mild praise anyway, feeling that I'd passed a test while shrugging sympathetically at the sneakered girl.

I have mostly not been very good at the various low-wage jobs I've taken, such that I can still recall nearly every tidbit of praise I've received while doing them. At the movie theater I was appalled and flattered and then appalled at being flattered when the manager who'd hired me confided to a small group of us that she "only hired attractive people." ("What about Ashton?" "I didn't hire Ashton.") There and at a couple of my restaurant jobs I served the occasional customer who caught me in a rare moment of efficiency and said, "Boy, you're really good at what you do." Part of me yearned to let them know that this was false -- yes, in the obvious way that I was actually an cringing klutz 90% of the time, but more than that I wanted to say, resoundingly: "This is not 'what I do.'"

When I finally got a full-time job it was at a Persian restaurant about two miles away, and when I finally lied that I'd gotten another, better job in order to quit as quickly and neatly as possible, the manager, Saad, said he was not surprised because, in his words: "You are very great person." I was surprised and incredibly touched by this. It was true that he'd been one of the nicest people I'd worked with there -- sad-eyed, seeming a little too smart and refined for the work he had to do, a man who insisted on trying to fix the watch whose back I'd removed and been unable to replace before very gamely admitting it couldn't be done -- but still: I had been a terrible waitress. I'd dropped a full glass of wine onto a man's chest and then desperately, idiotically offered to bring soda water to help shrink the ocean of purple soaking his shirt; I'd sent an entire tray of heavy, expensive lamb dinners crashing to the floor and then, when the replacement order came out, slipped in precisely the same spot and done it all over again; I'd brought customers dishes they had no intention of ordering through cultural-linguistic misunderstandings.

Saad seemed to understand that this was not "what I did." And though, as my boss, he certainly had the right to disapprove of me because of it, instead he accepted my chaotic presence in the restaurant and liked me well enough anyhow. He believed in my fabricated future.

This was valuable to me because "what I did" was very unclear at the time. I went long stretches between in-person contact with anyone who knew anything about the kind of person I was and the kind of goals I had. You have to make small talk with a lot of people when you first move somewhere: repairmen, utility workers, landlords. In response to their reasonable questions about what I was doing with my life, I had nothing to say. I was just here, taking up space in Chicago. Even after I got the waitressing job, I couldn't quite say: "I'm a waitress." It wasn't a career. "I wait tables," I'd tell them flatly, daring them to press onward. And I vacillated between being comfortable moving through the world as a cipher and aching for someone to intuit what it was I really stood for.

Maybe that's part of what made my first months in Chicago feel so hyperreal --  that no one around me knew who I was. I was the only one in charge of perpetuating that entity; I couldn't pawn off parts of the task on the job I had and the routines I'd established and the friends I interacted with. There was no shorthand yet for processing my day-to-day existence, that series of constant collisions with a place that didn't know I'd become a part of it. 

This is much of the work of travel, too, I suspect. Such work is exhausting, but exciting -- all that room for reinvention. I'd do it the same way again.

Pedway ghost

The elevators at work sometimes make me feel like a ghost. They fail to recognize me fully or at all. I stick my arm into the closing maw of one, which shoves my elbow aside before reconsidering my claims to reality at the last instant. The pair of sales reps inside don't pause their conversation.

Other times I press the button for my floor and its little orange halo will not light, which I may not notice at first. Instead I whoosh through two dozen stories of atmosphere in my dim capsule until someone else summons the car, entirely at the mercy of anywhere anyone else wants to go.

There are of course some forces at work here, mechanical quirks and human errors (how many times have I blindly walked onto an up elevator intending to go down?), and sometimes I solve the mystery to some extent, realizing for instance that some Charon of the system requires that I scan my key card as his fare. Often, however, I don't sort it out in time to avoid an embarrassing trip in the wrong direction, wincing goodbye to the departing members of the car as I remain and wait to go back up.

In general as I move through the office and the pedway below I feel ghostly, flickering into and out of visibility at the most inopportune times and through no desire of my own. Here I am, hungry and attracting no attention at the sandwich counter. And here I manifest myself as someone I vaguely know walks by and either waves or does not wave, but certainly notices the panicked half-smile on my face when I try to figure out which it was and what I should do when I catch her eye accidentally and too late. And then, my god, there are the system of pedway doors that demarcate the boundaries of the skyscrapers perched above. At what distance must one hold open the door for someone approaching from behind? Should one hang back or speed up if someone else threatens to undertake such an act of chivalry? (In the elevators, some men silently insist that women get off first, though I -- in a shapeless, puddle-splashed jacket, clutching a bike helmet and dabbing at my cheeks to sop up or at least spread around the tears the wind has produced -- am clearly not the specimen of womanhood these rules were built for.) My own girlfriend has walked by me in the pedway before and I have not seen her, too intent on making it through this minefield to get my lunch.

Down here, among the busily chatting and expensively shod, I feel as I often have when wandering at dusk through well-off, gold-windowed neighborhoods: inherently suspect and with the feeling that I should want to steal something. But are the ghosts in stories ever thieves? They take maybe a token from the living, something of sentimental value, nothing more. What use would they have for anything else?