Upon describing my apartment to my mother during a phone conversation (rather recently, already months after I’d moved in), annotating from my punch list—paint, halogen, cabinet hardware, and so on—she succinctly restated my bloviating with the phrase, “you’re living in a before.” One of the constants in my life is asymmetry, and I find myself applying this imbalance I once disdained as a lens of optimism to separate the apex of my existence from, more or less where I am now, its midpoint, with an ambition to set a median greater than the mean. What that ambition comprises, however, I have yet to cohere into a uniform and quantifiable after.
In late September, I confronted the option of starting a new job closer to my ideal career (on the present web design trajectory) in the city that, from the south where I’d been raised, physically and metaphorically represented the north—San Francisco—with necessary salary and benefits accounted. And, though I lost some sleep to its consideration (and some leave to the interview process), it was an easier decision than I’d expected: I chose to stay here. Having recently taken occupation of an apartment on Capitol Hill and a niche at the office as the idealist who writes snarky memoranda, I’ve come to an understanding with this city—an understanding that includes a pay increase and support through graduate school including tuition reimbursement. Beyond these material benefits, however, I’ve also brought more weight to bear on this spring-board job—applying my zealotry to research projects and finishing what I started on House.gov—and, with a master’s degree likely added to that load, jacked up the elastic potential energy of my résumé. Furthermore, re-arriving at the terms of a permanent settlement is a process I have no desire to undertake, in spite of my fondness for the city itself—when I’m done here, I intend to be through with geographic monogamy.
And that seems to be the iconic story of the past year of my life: passing through airport security, re-examining and sometimes very nearly attaining what I love, and, in the wake of each round-trip flight, reducing my ambitions to mere “acceptable eventualities” and rendering past victories pyrrhic. What once appeared as solid ground years in every direction I find myself re-mapping as mediocrity’s quicksand, and as each day forth has been another step to avoid that weak terrain, I find myself on this long stride—25 hours till midnight (24 songs, 79:45)—reconsidering the circumstances (an absurdly prolonged and subsumed existential crisis, now at mid-life) that have lent the recent passage of time such a tenuous, deliberate pace.
The 24 songs here are vignettes from other playlists—a week of being a passenger in the rare left-hand driver on the A11, work music from sleepless weekends spent on the design of my portfolio site, songs that accompanied the constant re-arrangement of furniture in my new apartment, timely incidentals from jukeboxes and FM radios, and the late-summer North American travel spree—so there are obvious gaps and spared puns (previous drafts followed ‘Ooh La’ by the Kooks with ‘Ooh La La’ by the Faces, expanded from ‘California’ to ‘Look Inside America’ to ‘This Bitter Earth,’ and were bookended with ‘1234′ by Feist and ‘Hotel Yorba’ by the White Stripes with ‘1, 2, 3′ by Camille betwixt, for instance, and I resisted the temptation to arbitrarily include anything by Joy Division). Nevertheless, it has an arc, and at the ends of this final draft are direct references to two films (both with 1970s UCLA pedigree)—Harold and Maude and Killer of Sheep—that approximate the yang and yin, respectively, of my defining films of this past year (if Stray Dog closed with a pop song, that would occupy a place here for similar reasons; I must acknowledge Rushmore’s impact though the aforementioned theme was cut).
And though at the end of the arc, as at the end of this year, the past looks worse for wear and the future seems a museless exercise in sociopathy where my passions are reduced to hobbies, I still have to plant my advancing foot somewhere. And though I no longer have a destination in mind, my itinerary has a few broad parameters: to leverage my existing resources to enliven the journey and to take each step with relish. Some of it may manifest itself as a community of like-minded people with whom I would embark on my graduate studies (hopefully) or a series of occasions to distribute correspondence of increasingly exotic origin, some of it is just a matter of dimmer switches and potted plants and steps trod on sidewalks hither among the glamour of city girls in winter.
The sentiment from Geek Love (though I haven’t had sex with Siamese twins) seems appropriate here: “And I’d figured I’d come to the end of being amazed. Run out of it, like you’d run out of sugar. But when I saw you lovely girls I thought to myself, maybe there’s more to life yet.” However, unlike that hedonist singularity and the allegorical novella of the first part of this narrative, Every day is a song for a holiday, this shift to a more optimistic brand of fatalism is borne of a series of events, of seemingly unassociated verbs, nouns, and a mass of adjectives. But by giving them sequence and contexts, it is my hope that, for you as they have for me, from these passages might emerge a story, like a footpath on a field of grass between two buildings, a patchy and unsanctioned route of convenience through a verdant square, inaccessible to official cartographers and for that belonging more to its travelers.
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