“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
Good Morning and Happy New Year!
New Year’s day is also my wife Niki’s birthday, so I want to thank you all for counting down the seconds alongside me each and every year to celebrate her. I know saying “Happy New Year” 11 days after the 1st is a bit delayed, but can’t we all just pretend I had one of these written and ready on the 5th? I mean, you all are able to suspend disbelief enough to go along with even half of what I’ve written so you should be well skilled in this practice. In reality, I haven’t written or sent one of these since we last had a bearded president. (It’s only been a few weeks but I realized we haven’t had a president with a beard since Taft and wanted to shoehorn that fun fact in here however I could). I can’t even claim I was busy. It was the holiday season for goodness sake. Sure we traveled a lot, but it was a whole lot of sitting around and hanging out. I made a serious dent in a 1,000 page book my brother-in-law got me. I downloaded, played until I was bored, and deleted a phone game. I had time to write and just didn’t.
I couldn’t really think of much to write about. I thought, foolishly it now seems, that with all my free time not only would I find time to write, but I could probably write a few issues to use as fillers in weeks where I’m either too busy or can’t think of something worth saying. This absolutely didn’t happen. However, it didn’t mean I didn’t stumble upon some inspiration. (*Note to the reader, I will not be going on a played out New Year’s resolution rant so fear not). Niki and I watched the movie The Holdovers in the theater and it is one of my favorite movies I’ve seen in a long time. Without giving too much away, the movie is about a boys private boarding school. Over the Christmas season, not every student is able to travel back home and must remain on campus. These kids are referred to as “holdovers”. Each year, a member of the faculty is assigned to stay back and chaperone the students. The movie is essentially about the relationship and character growth of two of the characters that must hold over. It is beautifully written, uniquely shot, and deeply moving. If you’re the kind of person with an underdeveloped movie palate who needs Marvel to spoon feed you flashing lights and big explosions to keep your attention, this probably isn’t the movie for you. That said, if that’s you, you’re probably not reading these excessively long newsletters so you’re probably good.
This movie not only inspired me by its theme of seeing more in people than meets the eye, but also in how much life is lived in moments that are seen as “in between”. It was only when forced to examine themselves as there was literally nothing else to do that our characters finally saw what was valuable about them, and what they wanted to be true about themselves. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s book 2312 he notes how malleable we are at these times and how desperate we are to throw ourselves into a fresh rut or routine. When you impose this disruption of habit and familiarity on yourself, for medicinal purposes, it’s called a vacation: you feel more alert and aware of the world, more alive. When it’s inflicted upon you by circumstance (or your own ineptitude), it’s more like a purgative trial. You feel too alive for comfort. It’s like the difference between riding a rollercoaster and falling off a cliff. The word chaos, in ancient Greek, means an abyss, a chasm.
These times without structure or certitude are a glimpse of life as it really is, so terrifying you can’t stand it for long, like looking at Earth from space. That is why even on our self imposed vacations we look for little habits and routines. I recall a week-long trip I took with my family to Charleston, SC one winter when I was in college. On the second or third day we were there, I woke up early and, ever restless, wandered out into the streets to find something to do. A couple blocks away I found a little coffee shop. There was nothing special or unique about the coffee shop. It was good but not great. However, from that day through the end of our trip, I would wake up early every morning, put some headphones on, and go to that coffee shop. It was freezing and I had no reason to go out into the cold, but I’d rather freeze with a routine than stay wrapped in warmth without one apparently. Our cherished habits act as a kind of incantation against the frightening blank of merely existing.
Having a home and routine, a sense of belonging and place, has always been central to my emotional health and creative life. I require a cozy place to rest, boringly regular habits, a core of good friends, a lot of coffee and, ideally, a good dog. In my final semester of college, and the year that followed, at least one of these things was missing. Long time readers will recall that period as the time I tried to put my life into Excel and measurably improve as a person. One of my most cherished anchor points was reflecting on my scorecard and the data every Sunday evening.
Link to Issue: https://dailydispatchweekly.com/issue-8-your-life-as-an-excel-spreadsheet/
Recently, we all went through a mini version of an “in-between” time in those precious few days between Christmas and going back to work. More honestly, most of the world went through a multi-year long version of this with covid, though many still had work and some sort of routine. I have written and talked a lot about an in-between time when I was without work. The timing couldn’t have been much worse. I lost my job early in 2020. I had a job lined up to start in March of 2020. The world shut down and the job offer went away with it. Then came 7 months without a job. I, ever the optimist, dubbed this time my “mini retirement” where I would start each day driving to a cheap driving range and hitting a few golf balls. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Both an ode to my retirement and a fulfillment of my craving for a routine. I, wisely, decided to propose during this time and try to convince a loving set of parents that I could take care of their daughter. To my in-laws’ credit, they were unendingly supportive.
The “in-between” is so nerve-wracking not only because of its uncertainty but its unwelcome freedom. Each of these transitional periods sends me reeling back to Square One, affording me the opportunity to second-guess all my most fundamental decisions, face to face again with all the Big Questions I’d hoped I’d already answered: What do you want to be when you grow up? Where are you going to live? Who are you outside of what you do? In that year after college I found myself entertaining implausible scenarios like moving to a small town and becoming the guy who owns the bookstore, spend my life working in a gas station just to see what kind of people are up at each hour of the night, or even just going down to Costa Rica with a new name and no plan – indulging fantasies that it’s not too late to become a different person. It’s easier to keep your head down and your eyes forward, burrowing ahead even on a course you’re no longer certain of, than to have to look up from your life and contemplate the alternatives, the same way staying in even a hated job, crappy apartment, or bad relationship is still preferable to the terrible chore of undertaking another job search or apartment hunt or date. I hear from time to time about the “Sunday Scaries”, the creeping unease that comes over people when they are briefly unburdened of obligations, unable to ignore their actual lives. I remember a story my friend Christian once told me about moving and having to get rid of his guinea pig. He opened the cage, and faced for the first time with freedom, the guinea pig just sat there, unable to do anything else. I’ll let Christian tell you the rest of the story…
Even those periods we look back on as idylls of stability exist mostly in retrospect: when we’re in the middle of them they feel as blind and confusing as any other interval of our lives. In 2312 Robinson references a tense in French that Gérard Genette called the “pseudo-iterative,” whereby a detailed description of a single event stands in for whole periods of one’s life. We do this in memory all the time, where one day becomes the cover image for an entire potion of our lives. I recall my first job where I lived in a cozy one bedroom apartment, drove my beloved first car to work, put in a disciplined ten-hour day, and met my friend Jonas nearly every Wednesday for $2 beers — even though, in reality, that apartment often had cockroaches, the AC would go out in that car dutifully every summer, and I was often so lonely it hurt. The truth is, it’s all in-between time.
I’m still in the “in-between”. I’m never fully satisfied and always looking for the next milestone. Niki and I want to have kids. I reevaluate whether I’m in the right career, if I should start a side gig, if there is a skill or hobby I should take up or what vacation I want to take Niki on next. If this house, this job, this current period of my life is one milestone, it means I am somewhere between it and the next milestone.
There was a day in the summer between high school and starting college. I remember that day so clearly. My best friend Brenden called me and told me he was breaking up with his longtime girlfriend. They had been together from midway through our eighth grade year through our very recent freshman orientation for college. They were our flagship of what a real relationship was, so it was like he was breaking up with a whole group’s idea of love. A weighty decision indeed. We had been discussing the possibility of going to his grandparents’ cabin in North Carolina all summer. So, when he called to say it was officially over, with all the heartbreak a highschooler has ever felt in his voice, I suggested we pack up our stuff and immediately go to the cabin for a few days of R&R. I still envy the freedom and lack of responsibility that allowed us to make that trip and many others he and I made on a whim.
Brenden was in between. He was between his first love and a short year or so later meeting his one true love. We were both between the weightless life of high school and the seemingly much weightier choices of college and building foundations and all that mess. He seemed to give those choices more thought than I did at the time which has always been a strength of his. We drove the 6 hour route that brought us through many scenic views. We drove alongside the Ocoee river for a good portion of each pilgrimage we took to the cabin in the years that followed. I, to this day, associate that river with trips to the cabin with Brenden and all the memories embellished by time that accompany those trips. It had been a misty morning, but most of the moisture had burned off by then except for a dense fog bank that followed the contours of the river. As we drove out onto a certain portion of road it was like flying into a cloud; we were completely enveloped in dewy gray blankness. Out in the middle of that section we could see neither the windy road behind us nor the bend ahead, only the road itself, stretched across nothingness, vanishing into obscurity in both directions. The radio was playing the Eagles song “Take It Easy,” which might be my favorite song in the world. We couldn’t see where we’d come from or where we were going but I was in the car with my best friend listening to a song we both loved and, inside that moment, everything was all right.
