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Rings, Descansos & Don Carpenter
Mar. 6th, 2005 09:39 amI'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 I suppose it might have some small value fifty years from now as a historical document; it's a complete record, if nothing else.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.
