No future

One day not long ago, Left Hook and I were discussing her career conundrum on the telephone. Lefty agonized, and I attempted to reassure her. I told her that she was brilliant and talented and thoroughly delightful (and how!), and that I was positive she would figure it out.

She sighed, unconvinced. “What about you? Do you worry about this stuff?”

“Uh, what stuff?”

“What you’re doing with your life.”

Silence.

Silence on the phone.

Silence in my brain.

I sat up in bed. Yes, Reader: it was a Wednesday afternoon, and I was in bed. But mostly for the purposes of talking on the phone!

“The weird thing is, not really? Or, like, at all?”

This has been haunting me ever since. It’s like I put my fingers on my wrist and… nothing. No pulse. Just still flesh.

Have I no ambition?

I guess I have some goals. But goals aren’t the same thing as ambition. Some of my goals are big, and vague. For example, I would like to make the whole world love me! For now, I am mostly focusing on the subset of bartenders. Which dovetails nicely with another of my goals, which is smaller and more concrete: I would like to drink for free. Reader, it’s going pretty well.

Other goals I have already fulfilled. An apartment with outdoor space: check. Enough lamps: as of two weeks ago, yep. Awesome muscles: in fact I actually had to vow to stop doing shoulder presses before I start bursting out of my clothes.

But, sigh, I’m not sure I can think of anything I really want to devote my life to.

It wasn’t always like this. Before the accident, I was throbbing with ambition. I was hungry! I wanted to conquer the world, and be famous, and touch lives, like Jesus. I wanted people to throw flowers at me, and make papier mache models of me for their carnivale floats, and name their children after me. Etc.

But then I had this brush with death, and it was pretty goddamn harrowing. It put things in perspective, and the funny thing about that—the thing no one ever tells you about perspective—is that having it is not always entirely good. Or productive. Sometimes it’s just paralyzing, because it reminds you in a horribly visceral way that you are as significant and as powerful as a mote of dust, that you could be ended at any instant and with no warning and definitely for no reason, and that even if you live a long and fruitful life, probably nothing you do will endure, because nothing much does. And even if it does, what does it matter? You’ll be dead. Fuck it.

Oops, downer alert!

Anyhow, another thing that became piercingly obvious to me was the particular insignificance of my chosen vocation: knitting.

I mean, knitting? I actually imagined that something as antiquated and irrelevant and pointless as knitting was important?

What can I say? I was a moron.

And yet, plenty of people still devote their lives to knitting. They plug away, needles a-clicking. They don’t let the fact that no one cares bother them. Which is either incredibly sad, or noble. Or both. Or neither. Oh, who knows!

I noticed something, though, as I convalesced: I noticed that nothing had the power to move me like knitting did. Other people’s knitting, I’m talking about—and the textile arts in general.

That made me think about revisiting some of my old unfinished projects. This certain scarf, for example, that I started four years ago. After I got off the hard drugs, I picked it up. I added a couple of wishy washy rows, and set it back down again. What was the point? Then, after awhile, I picked it up again. And repeat: for almost a year, I did that.

I finally decided that I needed to take a class, despite the fact that I swore I would never ever ever do that again. Because, is there anything worse than a knitting class? A roomful of narcissistic hacks, empty praise, and bad advice… no thanks. But I thought deadlines and an audience would help me. So I called my old teacher Mr. Creepy-but-Sometimes-Helpful and signed myself up.

Turns out I was right. The class is as annoying—perhaps even worse!—than I remember such classes to be. But I have been hauling ass on that scarf.

On Wednesday afternoon, I looked up from my work and it dawned on me: fuck knitting class! I hadn’t paid Creepy yet. Why not drop out and save five hundred bucks?! I mean, jeez, I was knitting again, furiously.

I called Left Hook, and I called Firecracker, and I called my shrink, and they all said the same thing: why don’t you just try going to one more class?

UGH! BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT TO! Because I’m definitely going to finish this thing now, and hence what do I need them for? To tell me that maybe this is too complicated of a scarf and maybe I should think of turning it into a sweater? Blargh.

Then I went, grudgingly.

When I emerged from the train, that wild thunderstorm had begun. Of course I had no umbrella. I practically drowned dashing across the street to buy one at Duane Reade. Then I had to walk, forever. Class is in just about the most inconvenient place possible.

But the thing is, I felt really, really happy. I felt like the universe was forcing me to make a choice: like, are you willing to really commit yourself to knitting? Are you willing to walk a million miles through the rain, and get completely soaked, and accidentally step in a bunch of nasty puddles with your seersucker wedges on, because that’s how much you want to be a knitter? And guess what? I was.

Negative ions really get me, I guess. They were working on everybody else, too, because every dude I walked past was in love with me. It was crazy: RPOI city. Or maybe it wasn’t so much love, as dudes being pervy, and liking the shape of a really wet girl.

I didn’t mind. I loved them all back. I loved the whole goddamn world.

By the time I reached class, I was practically in New Jersey, and the rain had stopped. My exhilaration had faded, and when I saw myself reflected in the window outside, I couldn’t believe any man had coveted such a pitiful creature. I looked like a wet rat.

Upstairs, Creepy asked us all to do an exercise. He wanted us to envision where we’d be in five years, knitting-wise and life-wise. Creepy is touchy-feely that way. Ick.

One girl talked about wanting to wake up every day in her beach house and go surfing and then knit for three hours and then do charity work and then fuck her perfect husband. Actually I’m adding the fucking part; she was too much of a wuss to say that. She said something like, “We’ll have dinner, sip a Cab redolent of oak and cherries, and go to bed.” Also, she’ll have a dog and it’ll love her and she’ll buy it its own little dog surfboard, blahblahblah.

Another girl talked about her dreamboard. Apparently a dreamboard is a bulletin board where you tack up pictures you cut out of magazines—like maybe people who are thinner than you, and nice apartments. Then you add little reminders like, “You’re awesome!!!” and “Remember to stay hydrated!!!” Apparently this girl took a whole class about how to make a dreamboard. I wonder if it was perhaps taught by a 12-year-old?

I had to sit very still to prevent vomit from oozing out of my every pore.

I am such a phenomenal bitch, because everyone in class is totally sweet to me, and when I showed them a piece of my scarf, they all acted like they wanted to see the rest.

I can’t get into hopes and dreams. Almost everybody in class talked about wanting to be happy in five years. As if happiness were a state of grace. When actually it’s more like weather! Like how in the space of fifteen minutes, I went from queen of the world to wet rat. I imagine that in five years, if I’m still breathing (one never knows!), it’ll be pretty much the same thing.

But, as I told the class, it’d be nice to finish a sweater by then. We’ll see.

Before I went home, I handed Creepy his envelope of cash.

by Pistol Whip | 13 July 2007 | narcissism, hopes and dreams, boring | Comments