2004-04-03
There are innumerable dents in the landscape of my life from the eventual dropping of second shoes. But I am stuck with this anxiety-shredding notion that there�s been one shoe dropped somewhere along my twisted path and its twin is dangling by a string lace. In regard to what and to what effect are the questions that I�m sure are why I often wake myself up literally screaming. What am I screaming? Nothing. Just �ahhhhh!� What am I screaming about? I have no idea. I can never retain the preceding sleep-conscious memory.
I just woke up from an insomniac�s dollop of sleep, not screaming, but disturbed from a weird dream, having chest pains left over from the frozen nightmare. It was winter in my home town of Nahant, Massachusetts. I was with a friend. At the beginning of the dream, it switched from one actual friend to another, such as dreams will do. But mostly it was some guy I don�t know, and come to think of it, didn�t have any color in his eyes. We were on the corner of the peninsula town where the one main road makes its angular turn and changes names, at the top of Forty Steps Beach, named so for the 40 steep wooden steps you climbed down from the street onto the sand. On either side of the stairs the hill, more of a cliff, is covered in tangled weeds and a few small trees that struggle against the angle to reach for noon. The beach itself is rather small, only taking a minute or so to walk from one end to the other at a mild pace, and it�s enclosed. There are rock formations bookending it. On the left a cliff with some menacing jagged rocks and little tide pools at the bottom. On the right three big rocks, one coming right from the weedy hill, popping up out of the sand, and sticking half in the water, the next one, touching it at the water level, pushing more out to sea, and the third, Castle Rock, also touching, but barely, curving inward some toward the opposite end of the beach, creating a tiny bay. It was a cold, quiet day. There was spotty snow covering everything, and everything else looked grey from a long lack of warmth. The water at Forty Steps Beach looked mostly frozen over in that oceany ice way, all uneven and blue-white. There was a steady wind blowing from the Atlantic up the hill. We had brought with us a big, brown and white, inflatable raft. This was my idea, and a brilliant one it seemed. We backed up a few steps, ran up to the edge of the hill, and jumped into the raft. The thought was that we would catch a pretty awesome ride down that frozen hill on that raft, and maybe because of the wind, even get some air time toward the top. Off we went hurling down toward the beach, adrenaline rushing through the air. It didn�t look like we would touch the hill until the bottom, and just before that happened, a bigger gust of wind pushed up under the raft and sailed us right over the beach, up a bit more, and then blam, splootch � we flopped right down onto the not-so-frozen-after-all-but-slushy middle of the bay water, not ten feet from Castle Rock. The wind was maintaining strength, immediately threatening to flip the raft. In a panic I made a quick lurch toward the front from where we had both landed in the back and at just that moment the raft bucked in a gust like an angry horse and threw me right off, into the air, down, past the slush, into the freezing water. The guy instinctively stood up and dove in after me, popping and sinking the raft with his push. He pulled me up to the air, and dragged me, both of us gasping wildly, toward Castle Rock. Just as we reached it and I had one hand on something solid, he let go of me and disappeared under the slush. With my hand still grasping the rock, I lowered myself until my head was under water, saw him floating away just under the slush, and was able to grab his hand, pulling both of us onto the safety of the lower shelf of the rock. We were both in some amount of shock. The guy was shivering violently. I held him, trying to combine our body heat, in a spooning position. And despite the terrifying circumstances, I remember thinking that it was nice to be holding someone. Then I woke up.
Perhaps this big shoe I�m talking about is THE big shoe. The one that kills you. I do spend a good deal of time consumed by that fear, the fear of death. It is, what seems to me, a blatantly obvious thing to be completely horrified about. Yet, most people I know, when I�ve brought it up with them, seem to not share this concern. I can�t understand it at all. Then again, I�m also nearly equally afraid of life. This is one of my most major problems, I think: I am afraid of just about everything and its opposite. Afraid of living and of dying. Afraid of failure and of success. Afraid of being alone and of meeting people. Afraid of strong emotions on either end of the scale. It�s a washout. It all turns a stale shade of off-white in attempts to reach a direction.
I�m reading a Tom Robbins book where he quotes Albert Camus as having said that the only important question is whether or not to kill yourself. Robbins then self-importantly quotes himself as having said that the only important question is whether time has a beginning and an end. He changes his mind and says that the only important question is how to make love stay.
This is how I think: Man is an animal, just like any other on this planet of biological things. But man has grown a brain that�s intellect has outgrown its capacity to deal with its emotions. And knowledge of mortality has created deities and demons, industrial pollution and wars. Man has intellectually outgrown its biology, yet emotionally we are selfish apes pounding on our nuclear chests. Maybe the real only important question is how to make our intellects fit into our biological mechanisms, and endure living out a human life.
There are not many things I believe in. I do believe in love. I do believe in pleasure. And I would gladly trade off many facets of pleasure for the warm, glowing confusion of love.
Talk to you later.
