Aging and -Life Crises; and a Self-Image Paradox

[Soundtrack for this post: Neil Young’s Harvest]

[Beer for this post: Goose Island’s India Pale Ale]

You’ll likely notice that both of my topics in this post include quotations from David Foster Wallace. And you may have noticed that several, if not all, of my recent posts have quoted or talked about Wallace. It isn’t my intention to turn this into a David Foster Wallace blog, it’s just that I’m currently obsessed with him. I’ll write about it in my next post.

Old Man Look at My Life, I’m a Lot Like You Were

“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.”

The quotation above (which is not a “quote”) is something David Foster Wallace said in an interview in 1991 (which is discussed in a New Yorker article that can be found here). He killed himself when he was 46.

I had a -life crisis on my 19^th birthday, but, apparently being more optimistic than Mr. Wallace, I called it my “quarterlife crisis.” And that’s partly what the crisis was about: it occurred to me that my life was likely at least one-quarter over—I didn’t have just a foot in the grave, I had a whole leg in there.

I turned 19 a few months after I started college. I was living in a dorm room with my friend Brian, who I had known all through high school. My birthday was midweek, if I recall, and going home was not an option. I was out at a class, or something, when my dad’s good friend Garn, who lived about 10 miles away, dropped off a cake at my dad’s request. The cake was a lovely gesture, and in the end probably made things better for me that day, but my heart sank when I saw that thing. It was an object I associated with celebration and being with friends and family. That object, absent the celebration, friends, and family, was depressing.

So that was part of it, the whole being-alone-and-away-from-home at a time when I really wanted to be home. I imagine this is a typical moment for freshmen who have gone away for school. But there was more to it—the cake and the feelings of aloneness were just the start. It got me thinking, and that’s when I realized I was much closer to death than I wanted to be. I was a very young man, in most ways still a boy, but my life was a quarter done. This was not a happy realization.

Recognizing my rapidly impending demise, I got to thinking about the ages and approximate remaining life years of those close to me. After ruminating for a few hours, lying awake in the middle of the night, I resolved to have all the kids I was going to have by the time I was 30.

I had my first child at 31, am currently 33, and will likely have another kid. So obviously I failed my 19 year-old self. But I still think I was right in a way. My thinking was something like this: at 19 I still had three of my four grandparents, two of whom lived to see me graduate from college, and one of whom made it to see me enroll in law school nearly eight years after my little crisis. I thought that was a good thing, and I figured if I wanted my parents to be around to see my children go to college, and for my children to really get to know my parents, I couldn’t put it off too long.

As it stands now, my dad will need to live to 79 (or so) to see Carver start college, my mom will need to make it to 76 (or so). These days, that’s certainly possible, but it’s also quite possible that they won’t. And if I have another kid, the odds become even longer.

And given that I’ve experienced what I find to be the extremely common sensation that time moves faster and faster as we get older, those days will be here before I know it.

I don’t think I ever came to a happy resolution to my crisis—I just managed to stop thinking about it.

“Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” – S. Beckett

. . . I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

One night [David Foster] Wallace met the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose depression memoir, Prozac Nation, had recently been published. She thought he looked scruffy — jeans and the bandanna — and very smart. Another night, Wallace walked her home from a restaurant, sat with her in her lobby, spent some time trying to talk his way upstairs. It charmed Wurtzel: "You know, he might have had this enormous brain, but at the end of the day, he still was a guy."

Wallace and Wurtzel didn't really talk about the personal experience they had in common — depression, a substance history, consultations at McLean — but about their profession, about what to do with fame. Wallace, again, had set impossible standards for himself. "It really disturbed him, the possibility that success could taint you," she recalls. "He was very interested in purity, in the idea of authenticity — the way some people are into the idea of being cool. He had keeping it real down to a science."

When Wallace wrote her, he was still curling through the same topic. "I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I'm not one of the good ones. But then I countenance the fact that at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don't notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself. It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am — so where does that put me?"

That’s from The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace, published in Rolling Stone.

The last paragraph is what I’m interested in (I thought the rest was necessary and interesting context). I’ve been trying to decide how much more I want to say—part of me wants to just say “Yeah, what he said.” But I guess I’ll draw it out.

For as long as I’ve been aware enough to think about it, I’ve found that I possess what strikes me as a strange blend of superiority (perceived) and humility. More than one person has told me that I initially came across as kind of a smug, arrogant bastard, but over time it became clear that I am actually nothing of the sort.

This blend that I am is odd, and hard for me to wrap my head around. I have little doubt that I am more honest, trustworthy, sincere, caring, considerate, well-rounded, and others-centered than most other people (note that me having “little doubt” doesn’t mean it is true). [n.1] But I also recognize that I am so loaded with faults and failings that the mere idea of beginning to list them is exhausting, and in whatever way I may be superior, there are also many ways in which I am hideously weak. Nevertheless, like Wallace, I think points are in order for recognizing my failings and caring about them.

What is probably at work here is the combination of my hatred of pride with the extremely high expectations I have for myself. I hold myself to a very high standard, one that I rarely meet, and I do not forgive failure. When it comes to me, I am entirely unforgiving. I have a list of the things that I most regret, and I will not forgive myself for them. Many of them are things I did as a child, most of which would seem like minor childhood indiscretions to most people, but they matter to me. One of my girlfriends and I used to argue about this, about how it wasn’t good to not forgive yourself. Since then people I have paid to tell me what’s wrong with me have suggested the same thing. But I still won’t do it. If I forgive myself it would be like conceding that those things were OK, that I could go ahead and forget them. But they weren’t OK, and I don’t want to forget them. I need the shame and self-loathing to remember to try to be better. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. That’s worth something, right? [n.2]

Note 1: I also believe very strongly that pride is an ugly vice, if not a sin, and therefore I work at not being proud of anything. So when I note these things it is only that I see them as matters of fact. I am not boasting.

Note 2: You may have noticed that the heading to this part of the post doesn’t really make much sense. But so what?

Self-loathing, an Excerpt

[Soundtrack for this post: Red House Painters, Red House Painters (Rollercoaster)]

[Beer for this post: Goose Island’s Mild Winter]

There are a great many things I don’t like about me. Those of you who know me, which is all of you since I’m pretty sure my dad, my wife, and a handful of friends are the only people who read this thing, might find that hard to believe since you undoubtedly know how awesome I am. But it is true. For now, I want to focus on three things that I’ve been thinking about today.

(1) I will do almost anything to avoid doing what it is that I should be doing.

When I was in law school I would read just about anything other than what I was supposed to be reading. I’d pass the time reading briefs and listening to oral arguments in random cases that I had nothing to do with and had nothing to do with my studies. I’d read blogs and news about Indian law. I’d watch seven episodes of Law and Order back to back, telling myself that I was doing it to critique the evidentiary objections (or gross lack of them). What’s somewhat strange is I wouldn’t read fiction or something more overtly fun. I’d justify my extracurricular reading and viewing by telling myself that these things I was doing instead of what I should’ve been doing were actually good for me, legal education wise, and that was usually true to some extent. But it was rarely, in the grades-obsessed world of law school, as good for me as doing what I was supposed to be doing would’ve been.

The surest way to keep me from reading a brief or a book is to assign that reading to me or to otherwise make it known to me that what I am supposed to be doing is reading that brief or book. I am a great procrastinator, and this is part of the reason why.

I will not do what it is that I’m supposed to do until the last possible moment, often I will misjudge and I will start too late. One very recent example of this, and what made me think about this today, is this: I had a brief to write that had to be filed today. The person I was writing it for made the great mistake of telling me that she didn’t need it until the end of the business day. So that’s when she got it. I was up pretty much all night writing it and then got up and had to continue pounding it out all day today. This is incredibly annoying to me, and possibly to the people I was writing it for. I really wish I’d done it earlier. Why didn’t I? I have no idea.

When I was in college I developed the habit, after I realized I could get away with it, of not starting a paper until around 11pm the night before it was due. I figured out that I averaged about a page an hour—thus a seven-page paper would take me seven hours. Thankfully most of my college papers were in the five- to seven-page range (my thesis, of sorts, was the biggest exception—it was about 40 pages and took me way more than 40 hours to write). So I worked through many nights in college. Which leads me to the second thing I don’t like about me.

(2) I am a night person.

I used to think this was cool. Maybe I still do, in some respects. But I also really wish I were one of those worm-getting early birds. I have romantic ideas about the charm of getting up before the sun, being a farmer looking out my kitchen window surveying my fields while I cradle a cup of coffee, steeling myself to tackle my day. But I’m not. I’m a night person. The late night hours are when I am most productive, if I’m working, and are also when I feel most like me.

I did pretty much all of my college work after 10pm. I also did much of my law school work in the later hours. And even if I’m not working, night is when I want to be up. For a while I had to be at my first post-college job by 6am. Which meant I had to be out of my house by just after 5:30. Even then, I was often up until 2am, sometimes later, hanging out with my housemates or just with myself. I survived an extended, unnecessary period of getting three hours of sleep a night, all out of stubbornness.

My night-person-ness has been a cause of some strife in my romantic relationships. One of my girlfriends, who I lived with, made it clear that she thought it was important that we went to bed at the same time. But she went to bed at a regular person’s reasonable time, which is to say much earlier than I wanted to. My wife has not been as forceful in expressing this same desire, but I suspect that she’d appreciate it if we went to bed at the same time. The problem for me is that the night is when I want, almost desperately, to be up. In some powerful way, it is when I need to be awake to be me. Productivity aside, night is when I feel the most me, when I feel the most connected and in tune with my thoughts, emotions, and general self. Without that time, I’m scared I’d lose myself.

What bothers me about this is that I don’t understand why the time I spend alone, in the early morning hours, is when I am most comfortable being me, why I see that time as vital to maintaining myself. Why can’t I do it when I’m with my friends and loved ones? What does that say about me and my relationships? It makes me sad. But it is true. And I don’t know how to change it or even if I can change it.

(3) I have no idea what I want to do with my life.

Ever since I graduated from college I’ve felt that I’ve had the seemingly luxurious problem of having too many options. The problem has only gotten worse since I finished law school. I understand why many people would say it is a nice problem to have, but I think it is hard. Choosing, particularly when there is more at stake, is not an easy thing to do.

After I moved to Chicago and quit my job at my old law firm, I was both apathetic and torn about what I should do. The possibility of leaving the law suddenly seemed like something to consider. And, for lots of reasons I won’t get into, the decision would’ve provided a great deal of relief. I once told a friend, when I was first thinking about it, that as long as I thought I might want to stay in the law, my current situation would be agonizing, but if I just made the decision to do something else, to leave the law behind, I would be much happier and more free. But the problem was, and still is, that I’m not sure that’s what I really want, so the decision has lingered and has not become easier.

In a chapter from his unfinished novel, The Pale King, David Foster Wallace narrates the awakening of a college student named Chris Fogle (this excerpt is from an article in The New Yorker, I have no idea if the ellipses are the magazine’s or Wallace’s):

I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger and watching the CBS soap opera “As The World Turns” on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith. . . . There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid. . . . Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera . . . and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’ ” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. . . . It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’ ” . . . I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.

I find this to be exceptionally true.

I am convinced that my directional ambivalence has been the root cause of much of my psychic pain, my great angst. There are several things that I think I’d like to try but haven’t out of fear, the fear of it being the not-optimal decision. The flipside here, though, and a corresponding fear that helps bind me in my crushing ambivalence, is my fierce the-grass-is-always-greener nature, that if I make a choice I will be constantly haunted by what-ifs. Damn me and my gutlessness.

Dog-eared 2

I’ve decided to copy my wife’s “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Infinite Jest

From David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest:

“One of the troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.”

(A little extra, if you’re interested):

“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded engagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always like about J.O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”

Jolene and Suicide

[Soundtrack for this post: Ray LaMontagne’s Trouble]

I saw Ray LaMontagne perform last week. He was awesome, as usual. He mentioned how he was on Elvis Costello’s TV show Spectacle. He said that Elvis said Allison was a song that still resonates with people, and that Elvis suggested that Jolene was a song of Ray’s that might have the same qualities. Ray then played Jolene and I came close to tearing up.

Jolene

Jolene is almost certainly in my High Fidelity -like “top five songs of all time,” and it has a shot at being #1 with a bullet. I’m obsessed with lyrics, so most of what affects my opinion of a song is what the words say. I love many of Ray’s songs, but there’s something about the storytelling quality of Jolene that really does it for me. Take Shelter as an example in contrast: a great song, a song I love and is Anne’s and my “song,” so to speak, I love it, it is beautiful, but I don’t see anything when I hear it. Jolene is different.

With Jolene I can see the coatless man, smoking his cigarettes. I can see his pain. As with many songs, I insert myself in the role of the protagonist. I am Jolene’s man. I can see the picture of Jolene holding a picture of me, it’s cracked and faded from spending so much time in the pocket of my blue jeans—I can see it in my filthy, cracked, and shaking hands. I can see myself and feel the pain of the man who has woken in the ditch, with booze in his hair and blood on his lips. I know exactly what he means when he says a man needs a nine-pound hammer or a woman like Jolene. It’s a magnificent song about love and loss. I love it so much I easily forgive the mispronunciation of Spokane, which is saying something.

Maybe it’s the mention of eastern Washington, or the drug use and boozing of what I assume is a blue collar man, or the name Ray, but the song reminds me of Raymond Carver and his stories of working class love, drug use, and drinking.

Something about it makes me want to be the strung-out drunk who wakes up in a ditch with booze in his hair and blood on his lips—something about the pain on display that can’t be ignored, a pain that shows up in such an obvious and devastating way. It’s a physical manifestation of feeling, even if AA would say what he’s trying to do is not feel. [n.1]

But of course I can’t be the Jolene man now. I have a wife and a kid. I can’t be coked out and passing out in ditches, coatless. I now have responsibilities that affect others. But I’ve felt that way for the last dozen years.

My parents lost a child in 1997, one of my sisters, and it was undoubtedly the hardest thing either of them have ever had to deal with. I determined that they, my mom in particular, could never handle another blow like that. Which means that I have to do what I can to stay alive, for them, and now for Carver too.

Suicide

I have no problem with suicide. I used to. I used to think that it was a cop-out, a way for the weak to avoid struggle. But I don’t feel that way anymore.

I am not a religious man, and am pretty dubious when it comes to any sort of afterlife. So if someone’s life sucks and causes him nothing but pain, I don’t see why he should be chastised for calling it quits a little early. Maybe that’s hard on the people that get left behind, but that’s their problem. Staying alive for the sake of others is a strange idea in at least one way: if you hate life and want to die, why do they so want you to live to suffer more pain? Can their wants be anything other than selfish? [n.2]

Regardless of what I said in that last paragraph, I am one who will always do what I can to live for others. I want to live for me too, but I also want to live for my family. The idea of my son growing up without his father is something that I can’t even think about without nearly gagging with disgust. And I am not willing to take responsibility for my parents losing another child.

I had a discussion with a psychiatrist a few weeks ago about suicide. I had explained to her how I had basically led a rather charmed life, loaded with opportunities (relatively). She asked why I thought I might be so unhappy considering that I just said I was lucky in the life department, and I responded, I shit you not, by saying “Well, people are complicated.” As if she needed to be told. I then went on to talk about David Foster Wallace.

Dave Wallace was a writer of massive acclaim and much (relative) celebrity. He was also wicked smart, to the extent where I have no problem conceding that he was way, way, way smarter than me, which is not something I concede very often. He also had a history of depression. Dave Wallace was famous, brilliant, incredibly talented, had a rather large cult-like following that undoubtedly included beautiful groupies who would do his every bidding, had a very desirable teaching gig at a fancy liberal arts college that required little more than he be himself, et cetera, et cetera. And in September of 2008 he hanged himself with a belt from his back porch. [n.3]

The psychiatrist’s question, which was undoubtedly asked more to see how I would respond rather than in an attempt to be unpuzzled, applies to Dave Wallace at least as much as it does to me (almost certainly much more so). I don’t think I have a better answer than “People are complicated.” Depression is complicated too.

Note 1: Or so I’ve been told.

Note 2: This is true, if it is at all, only when the suicide is well considered; a teenager blowing his brains out because a girlfriend dumped him is a different matter.

Note 3: In David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest, there’s a scene where one of the students at the tennis academy where much of the story takes place confesses his obsession with having his picture show up in tennis magazines. The sweat-licking [n.3a] guru to whom he is confessing basically ruins his dream by telling him that people who get that fame do not really enjoy it, and in the end their horror becomes a fear of the day when they no longer show up in magazines. Some have speculated that Wallace was working hard to surpass Infinite Jest but that he recognized there was a real chance that he never would. Need I elaborate?

Note 3a: Literally.