Rings, Descansos & Don Carpenter
Mar. 6th, 2005 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI've been keeping a journal since I was 12 years old – forty years of me-me-me-me! It's a curse in a way, and I've always wondered whether my compulsive need to braindump has kept me from the serious pursuit of other forms of writing, as though some part of my subconscious is saying, "This is your life's work." I suppose it might have some small value fifty years from now as a historical document; it's a complete record, if nothing else. But I've always assumed that the majority of what I write is mind-numbingly dull to everyone else. I mean I'm a middle-aged woman with a struggling business and a middlingly sordid past living in the place where Republican dinosaurs stagger to catch a few more rounds of golf before they expire. How is that interesting?
All of which is a long way of saying that I really don't care if my private entries in LiveJournal go public. I generally hide them as a courtesy: who wants to read about my problems? Not you! Your problems are more interesting. So while I've never gone near Frienditto – Jesus! why would you archive something on someone else's server? don't you have a hard drive for that? – I don't really care if anyone on my LJ friends list has.
Another spectacularly shitty week on this end though business is definitely picking up. Here's an example of an uninteresting life crisis: I lost my emerald ring. Staggered home after eight hours at Bartelby Inc. and another five hours unloading inventory at the store in the most braindead state imaginable. Took my jewelry off and evidently stashed the ring somewhere without thinking about it. I have absolutely no memory of taking it off. That's the scary part – a four hour gap in the memory tape. Was I abducted by aliens? Did I access that theoretical dimension defined by the Schrodinger equation wherein the ring suddenly transformed itself into the empty spaces of its spinning electron orbits? Is it stuck in some crack of my dresser?
This particular ring had huge talismanic significance for me and so I spent most of this week horribly depressed. If only I hadn't had my crisis of faith a couple of years ago, I could have recast it as a Life Lesson: God is teaching me about the transience of all material things. Then the Universe and I could have shared a hearty chuckle over a glass of bourbon. Har-har-har.
Sadly, I no longer believe in an organizing principle in any of its anthropomorphized forms. Nothing happens for a reason. It's all just random flux. There is no storyline.
But humans have a deep-seated psychological need to process senseless loss. I drove a lot last week and through my car windows at sixty miles an hour I found myself noticing those roadside altars, called descansos (literally "resting places") by the Hispanics who originated the custom in these parts. Evidently in California there's a huge legal battle brewing – Caltrans doesn't appreciate it when public land is thus transformed into private sacred space. I love the plastic flowers and crude wooden crosses on the old King's Highway, feel more ambivalent the piles of teddy bears, carnations and Hallmark greeting cards that commemorate shoot-outs in the Walmart parking lots, but they're both manifestations of the same impulse, a communal longing for some sort of meaning to entropy.
Also found myself thinking a lot about the novelist Don Carpenter who, like Hunter Thompson, blasted himself with a gun. This was back in 1995 and he'd never worked for Jann Wenner. Consequently though while I would argue Carpenter was a much, much better writer than Thompson and the details of his life every bit as interesting, he is a virtual unknown today and I can't even find his books in the public library though I'm obsessed with rereading them.
All of which is a long way of saying that I really don't care if my private entries in LiveJournal go public. I generally hide them as a courtesy: who wants to read about my problems? Not you! Your problems are more interesting. So while I've never gone near Frienditto – Jesus! why would you archive something on someone else's server? don't you have a hard drive for that? – I don't really care if anyone on my LJ friends list has.
Another spectacularly shitty week on this end though business is definitely picking up. Here's an example of an uninteresting life crisis: I lost my emerald ring. Staggered home after eight hours at Bartelby Inc. and another five hours unloading inventory at the store in the most braindead state imaginable. Took my jewelry off and evidently stashed the ring somewhere without thinking about it. I have absolutely no memory of taking it off. That's the scary part – a four hour gap in the memory tape. Was I abducted by aliens? Did I access that theoretical dimension defined by the Schrodinger equation wherein the ring suddenly transformed itself into the empty spaces of its spinning electron orbits? Is it stuck in some crack of my dresser?
This particular ring had huge talismanic significance for me and so I spent most of this week horribly depressed. If only I hadn't had my crisis of faith a couple of years ago, I could have recast it as a Life Lesson: God is teaching me about the transience of all material things. Then the Universe and I could have shared a hearty chuckle over a glass of bourbon. Har-har-har.
Sadly, I no longer believe in an organizing principle in any of its anthropomorphized forms. Nothing happens for a reason. It's all just random flux. There is no storyline.
But humans have a deep-seated psychological need to process senseless loss. I drove a lot last week and through my car windows at sixty miles an hour I found myself noticing those roadside altars, called descansos (literally "resting places") by the Hispanics who originated the custom in these parts. Evidently in California there's a huge legal battle brewing – Caltrans doesn't appreciate it when public land is thus transformed into private sacred space. I love the plastic flowers and crude wooden crosses on the old King's Highway, feel more ambivalent the piles of teddy bears, carnations and Hallmark greeting cards that commemorate shoot-outs in the Walmart parking lots, but they're both manifestations of the same impulse, a communal longing for some sort of meaning to entropy.
Also found myself thinking a lot about the novelist Don Carpenter who, like Hunter Thompson, blasted himself with a gun. This was back in 1995 and he'd never worked for Jann Wenner. Consequently though while I would argue Carpenter was a much, much better writer than Thompson and the details of his life every bit as interesting, he is a virtual unknown today and I can't even find his books in the public library though I'm obsessed with rereading them.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-03-06 07:18 pm (UTC)Lately it's been a challenge to crawl out of bed -- some long-lingering feelings of hopelessness brought on by a number of things: politics, getting older and creakier, thompson, the unending overcast skies. Your journal entry was the first place I read about Thompson's death. The only thing of his I'd read was about half of Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail, but there was something else. I guess part of it was hearing that interview with him from 2003 where he's talking about our government becoming like Nazis and the fact that he's not around anymore to rage against it. One less voice to speak out against the current insanity. Why does it always seem like the biggest idiotic loud mouths win? Whether it's the boss or manager who acts like he knows everything but can't even spell or the president who can't form a complete sentence, it's exasperating.
Well, I'm just rambling and not forming complete sentences myself. Anyway, I agree completely with your thoughts:
Sadly, I no longer believe in an organizing principle in any of its anthropomorphized forms. Nothing happens for a reason. It's all just random flux. There is no storyline.
That's not an easy place to be and it takes a lot of courage to live with that. No little door prize when you check out. I'm interested in this Don Carpenter guy, but I'll have to wait until I'm in a better place to deal with what I'll find.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-06 09:27 pm (UTC)The word grace has many definitions. My current mantra is the Hemingway variant: "grace under pressure." I must repeat that to myself twenty times a day. It would be easier, of course, to be graceful if there was a film crew following my every move or some certainty of God's own videocam but I dunno: maybe grace in the earthly dimension translates into spiritual grace at some point, a ray of light penetrating the unending overcast sky to seek us out. I understand exactly what you're feeling. I wish I could help you feel better.
As I recall, you stumbled across my LJ because we share an interest in the writer Chas Willeford. Carpenter is nothing like Willeford stylistically, but they write about the same world -- empty pool halls on rainy days. I remember stumbling across his novels in a library where I was supposed to be studying for a physics exam. I read all of them in a week and flunked the exam. Haven't read any of them for years though I do recall the ping that went through my heart ten years ago when I read about his suicide on page 13 of the newspaper. "I'll reread him!" I vowed. But then I forgot.
Feel better, my friend.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-07 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-07 10:23 pm (UTC)What are you planning to with your journals? Do you have any kind of request/bequest? I am having a problem there as well..........
no subject
Date: 2005-03-08 02:48 am (UTC)One of the downloads on the page brought up when you do a search for "roadside memorials" on this page --
http://www.dot.ca.gov/
-- addresses that.
I don't have a clue what to do with my journals? Burn them? They'd be an utter embarrassment to my children, I'm sure.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-09 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-10 04:15 pm (UTC)Thank you very much for writing this. In a sense -- because you're European and the overlap between our two cultures, however excellent your English, can never be complete -- it's the most meaningful compliment I could ever receive about my writing.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-10 09:30 pm (UTC)