Dear Mum
Birthday dinner at Seaworthy in New Orleans.
It’s 9:04am. I’m in the lobby of the Ace Hotel, per usual, in New Orleans sipping on Earl Grey tea and eating overnight oats with a blend of pretentious sounding superfoods. I still don’t know what a superfood is. I’ve been off the meat diet only because it’s a bit tough to do while traveling but I miss it dearly…except for the dehydration and constipation that seems to come along with it.
I’m wearing the tight grey pants that show off a bit of package and even more ankle. Seeing as that my readership is limited to my mother, I probably should remove sentences like that. In either case, the temperature is 72 degrees, partly cloudy, with 75% humidity. I’m listening to Fox by Otto Totland through my Bluetooth earbuds. The lobby here is full of local art, most of which is plain awful, lamps made of cork and shells with Edison bulbs, a weathered piano adorned with folk art figures, pillar candles, dried herbs and chili peppers. There’s a sort of voodoo/mid-century modern atmosphere to this place despite “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind playing on the sound system and occasional ping from someone’s Slack app that can still somehow and regrettably penetrate the music I’ve got going through my earbuds.
At another table, a Zoom call. And yet another, a contemptible hipster type like myself who probably also has artistic ambitions that are leading nowhere but to pure misery and self-loathing. She has nice legs though.
I’ve done all the things I’ve wanted to do for the day and I’ve only been doing them for the past two hours. Just what do people do with their free time? I was talking to a friend, texting really, about the yin and yang symbol, probably something I haven’t thought about since I was sixteen while stinking of patchouli and reading books like the Tao Te Ching. I was becoming one with the universe and attempting to live a life of balance and moderation, something that I was already finding difficult.
Had I not been introduced to alcohol, marijuana, and psychedelics at such a young age, perhaps things like school and reading would have felt worthwhile. But none of the important developmental stuff was happening for me. I went from innocently playing video games and street hockey to an all out hippie fest full of drugs and debauchery. Somewhere in there I read a Vonnegut book or two and squeezed in guitar lessons—the compulsory instrument for peace-loving, Dylan wannabe’s.
Thankfully, and I rarely think of it this way, I had a dozen seizures. Not all at once or anything but over the next decade, which to this day are controlled by medication. Waking up in the hospital with family and friends staring down at you with concern and pity causes more distress than any neurological electric disturbance can. Sort of. Seizures, and me mum, are largely responsible for this deplorable desire to write.
At the time, my mother worked at a bookstore. Post-seizure, she gave me The Tao of Pooh, Surfing the Himalayas, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, spiritual classics I suppose and books that are absolutely responsible for my days in Asia, living at the Zen monastery and reading the likes of Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, Eckhart Tolle, and Philip Kapleau. And yet, I remain one of the more tortured and anxious people I’ve ever met.
Had she given me Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, or The Grapes of Wrath (I still feel like Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker in the Social Network should have gotten with Steinbeck and told him to “drop ‘The’…it’s cleaner”), all books I loved as an adult, I probably would have stuck to the singular desire to write and I would suffer only for the need to “write a sentence as clean as a bone” as James Baldwin says (certainly not true of this sentence).
A budding spiritualist has had far too few experiences to know what the vinegar actually tastes like. As I’ve aged, I’m more inclined to agree with the depiction of Buddha who, after tasting the vinegar, reacts with a bitter expression conveying his belief that life is only suffering, caused by our desires. Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, said "If I could choose, I would rather be happy than write,” a devastating quote to come across when you aspire to write.
But there are moments, few…yes, that come along that make it worthwhile. This morning, I woke to an email from an old friend that said: “I’ve discovered your blog, it’s amazing. Please don’t stop writing. Ever.” The vinegar at the moment tastes just fine…until I attempt to write again.
