Trip Diary - Interlude: With Hindsight, On Coincidence, Spirituality, And The Interconnectedness Of Things
"Memory fuses and shatters like glass, mercurial future, forget the past. It's you, it's what I feel."
There's been a lot going on in my life recently, and the periods both before and after my trip to the US were filled with news and revelations from quite a few different directions, most of them concerning people close to me. The reason I've decided to get into that now, as a part of this particular story, is because I have a feeling it belongs. Jennifer, America, my various obsessions, my writing, my family, any idea of destiny or fate I might have; these things are inseparable in my mind. That, in a way, is why I have a surety about Jenn that I don't recall experiencing before. In the past, the person I was and the person I am has always seemed distinct from the relationships I've been in. There's been a distance, a sense that analysing my partner doesn't necessarily include analysing myself.
Just over a year ago, I wrote a novel called Scenes From An Unexamined Life. It wasn't a great novel, and I sincerely doubt it'll ever be published. What it was, I think, was a way for me to write out my feelings and insecurities. It was sloppy because it was personal, because it was a letter to myself. Here's where you're at, this is what life's given you, it seems to say, now what? The last five words of that novel are 'and so it goes on', which it did. Thing is, nothing really happened between finishing that novel and meeting Jenn. I had and have ideas, but all that seems to come out when I put fingertip to keyboard is short stories and journal entries and the occasional political essay. I have a novel in my head, in my notes, in cryptic messages on my phone, but it isn't ready to come out yet. The longer I leave it, the further I seem to drift from what inspired those ideas in the first place. Maybe that's for the best. I couldn't tell you. I just go where the ideas take me and write what I can't live with not writing. Ask me in ten years and I'll tell you how well that instinct has served me. Till then, I guess I'm just muddling along like everyone else.
I'm still twenty-five, and the reason I started this blog is still because I haven't been able to find what turning twenty-five means to me. What do I value? What have I learned? Where am I going? I don't know, I truly don't. I'm lost. But there's...there's something...
I just got through watching All The President's Men. I've been wanting to see it for maybe five years, but not so desperately as to pursue the matter with any zeal. It finally turned up on TV the other night, so I taped it. Good film, if a little short. I felt it pulled up right at the point where I was starting to get drawn in. Yeah, those familiar names (McCord and Liddy and Hunt, then Mitchell, Colson, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kalmbach, and Dean. Then, of course, Richard Nixon) started striking those familiar chords in my mind. The film was reaching its conclusion, but my brain was just getting started.
I've got a thing for that era (1960 - 1976) and that place (America) that started with Hunter S. Thompson and is starting to become something of an obsession, an itch I can never quite scratch. That something about who I am and what I'm doing is inextricably linked to my writing, and every time I wax textual about politics, I come back to those presidents and historical figures and this certainty I have that something important died when Nixon resigned in disgrace less than two years after winning one of the most resounding victories in American political history. I come back to that, I dwell on it, and one day I'm going to write something about it. Whatever that novel is (and it is a novel), it won't be about politics at all. It'll be about people and time and how that saying about the butterfly flapping its wings can apply to more than just meteorology.
If the Watergate hotel had never been robbed on June 17th 1972, I wouldn't have been on a plane to Los Angeles almost thirty-two years later. A ridiculous statement to make, but no less true for being so. If it hadn't happened, Hunter Thompson couldn't have captivated me by writing about it and my obsessions would have gone in a very different direction that probably wouldn't have included American politics. My novel wouldn't have had those ideas in it, ideas that inspired me to share thoughts and writings with the internet community, which in turn inspired the blog, which in turn found me surfing Blogger's listings and ending up on Jenn's page. Which, by the way, initially attracted me because it was about...wait for it...American politics.
Where am I going with this? Nowhere, yet.
So yesterday I was driving to Peterborough with my older sister. We were chatting away in the car and she started going into detail about her recent spiritual conversion. Now, I knew that she'd been reading on the subject and that a lot of her more recent thinking had been motivated by what she'd found, but I didn't realise the extent to which she'd embraced some of those ideas. In fact, I was actually shocked when she started talking about getting back what you put into life and the idea that there was some kind of spiritual energy that held it all together.
"Like a higher power?" I asked, dreading the response.
She refused to be drawn on that, stating that she still didn't believe in any idea of God, but that she felt there was...something.
In a way, I'd seen it coming. She's been calling me a lot lately, talking about how she's been unhappy and how this has been one of the most depressing years of her life. In more recent weeks, she's been upbeat. She's been pursuing an interest in singing and songwriting that's been dormant for quite a few years now. She's taken a greater interest in her health and general well-being, turning to alternative theories and medicines that appear to have helped her a lot through what's been a hard time. I've a feeling she and I will be debating the subject for several years to come, because I'm never going to accept the idea that there's some kind of energy or lifeforce that connects us. Neither do I believe in any idea of Karma, or whatever you want to call it. Cath didn't like it when I dropped that word into the conversation, but that's what she was talking about. You get what you pay for, spritually speaking. She feels that by 'doing the right thing' (and I still don't know how she meant that phrase, because she said she wasn't talking about morals), her life will improve. I don't buy that, but if it makes her happy, then the bottom line is a good one.
It was that conversation that got me thinking about The Butterfly Effect, coincidences, and self-fulfilling prophecies. Between Jennifer and I, there really have been an awful lot of spooky coincidences and strange connections. You only have to look at the fact that I wrote a 'letter to myself' that referenced Thompson's work on the death of the American Dream and Richard Nixon as a connection to my own thoughts on various works of fiction and the current cultural climate, only to end up, a year later, going to meet a girl who lives in the city where Nixon was buried on a trip that involved us retracing the route travelled by Thompson in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas to see that. Sure, a lot of that is self-fulfilling prophecy. I'd always wanted to do Vegas, partly because of Thompson, so it's only natural that I'd try to take the opportunity while I was in the general vicinity. But it's not like that was on my mind when I first wrote to Jennifer. Hell, going to America was nowhere near my thoughts when I first penned that letter. I was just writing to a girl I found interesting and thought I might like to get to know a little better.
"There was only one road back to LA. US Interstate 15, just a flat-out high speed burn through Baker and Barstow and Berdoo, then on to the Hollywood Freeway straight into frantic oblivion; safety, obscurity, just another freak in the Freak Kingdom. We'd gone in search of the American Dream. It had been a lame fuck-around, a waste of time. There was no point in looking back. Fuck no, not today, thank you kindly. My heart was filled with joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger. A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident."
That's from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, in case you're not familiar with Thompson's work. And while my next diary entry will be about Las Vegas, what it'll really be about is the way I felt when driving down US Interstate 15 with a girl I'm falling for that lives in the city where Dick Nixon is buried. Karma? No. A series of compelling coincidences? No doubt. Self-fulfilling prophecy? To an extent. When you get right down to it, I guess I can't explain how I got there and how utterly right it felt. It wasn't God, though. It wasn't some higher power or energy. It was simply the place my dreams and desires took me, and the first time in my life that they all seemed connected. I was in the right place at the right time with the right person. It all made sense.
I left England at the time of a family crisis that's still ongoing. For those that are interested in the sordid details, check this out. Julie is my stepsister, Susan my stepdad's first wife. The article the link leads to was on the front page of the local newspaper the week I was in California. Obviously, this had something of an impact on my immediate family and raised all kinds of other scandals from the dead. I don't honestly want to get into it, but let's just say that in the past two weeks I've found myself caught up in a web of madness that would shame any soap opera. My stepsister is pregnant by the guy she was living with. He's going to jail. Then he's getting deported. Both she and my stepdad's ex also stand a good chance of being locked up for at least eighteen months. Meanwhile, my stepbrother is on both crack and heroin, some of which was supplied by the jail-bound, soon-to-be-deported boyfriend. He may or may not currently be in rehab. It's somewhat difficult to keep track of his movements. On the other side of the family, my real father's side, I got a phone call the night before I left informing me that my half-brother has cancer. From what I know, they caught it before it got too serious, but it's in a very unusual place (the inside of his right forearm), and at least one person has raised the possibility of amputating his arm if chemo and radiotherapy prove ineffectual. Of course, the sudden re-appearance of the big 'C' in my family bothers me more than a little. Those that know me or have been reading for a while will know that it was cancer that killed my father. That it's shown up in my half-brother is evidence of it being something genetic in the male side of the O'Mahony family. If you were scrolling down that particular list, the next name you'd find after my half-brother's would be mine. Dumb speculation, especially at this stage of the game, but I can tell you for a fact that such ghoulish thoughts tend to sneak up on a guy when he's typing to beat the devil at four in the morning.
All of this makes me think a lot. I could do pages and pages of analysis, I really could. What it comes down to, though, is the feeling about relationships and insecurities and balances of power I articulated in the last diary post. What it comes down to is the difference between feeling so fucking high out on Interstate 15 and feeling so fucking low as I sit here and type this. Like anybody, I have a lot of dreams and desires and wishes I want to come true. Times like these make me realise that they all come down to very simple, childish thoughts and impulses.
Like get me out of here.
Like save me.
I think a lot of us feel that way. Not every minute of every day, no. But now and again. Enough to make us chase possibility. My sister finds that possibility in a new outlook on the world around her and a decision to go back and pick up things she dropped without really knowing why. Me, I think of being in a car with a certain girl, driving a certain road with a certain song on the stereo. That butterfly flaps its wings in my mind and the world is a different place. I tried to talk about that in my sister's car yesterday, somewhere in the midst of our debate about spirituality. She accused me of running away, and because I value her opinion, I took the time to consider that thought. Just before I wrote this, I stopped considering it. I was lying on my bed, watching the final scene of All The President's Men, watching Nixon take his second oath of office on a screen within a screen, and a thought leapt unbidden into my mind.
Not running away, it said, and the simplicity of the two words that followed those three was a testament to their truth...
Running to.
There's been a lot going on in my life recently, and the periods both before and after my trip to the US were filled with news and revelations from quite a few different directions, most of them concerning people close to me. The reason I've decided to get into that now, as a part of this particular story, is because I have a feeling it belongs. Jennifer, America, my various obsessions, my writing, my family, any idea of destiny or fate I might have; these things are inseparable in my mind. That, in a way, is why I have a surety about Jenn that I don't recall experiencing before. In the past, the person I was and the person I am has always seemed distinct from the relationships I've been in. There's been a distance, a sense that analysing my partner doesn't necessarily include analysing myself.
Just over a year ago, I wrote a novel called Scenes From An Unexamined Life. It wasn't a great novel, and I sincerely doubt it'll ever be published. What it was, I think, was a way for me to write out my feelings and insecurities. It was sloppy because it was personal, because it was a letter to myself. Here's where you're at, this is what life's given you, it seems to say, now what? The last five words of that novel are 'and so it goes on', which it did. Thing is, nothing really happened between finishing that novel and meeting Jenn. I had and have ideas, but all that seems to come out when I put fingertip to keyboard is short stories and journal entries and the occasional political essay. I have a novel in my head, in my notes, in cryptic messages on my phone, but it isn't ready to come out yet. The longer I leave it, the further I seem to drift from what inspired those ideas in the first place. Maybe that's for the best. I couldn't tell you. I just go where the ideas take me and write what I can't live with not writing. Ask me in ten years and I'll tell you how well that instinct has served me. Till then, I guess I'm just muddling along like everyone else.
I'm still twenty-five, and the reason I started this blog is still because I haven't been able to find what turning twenty-five means to me. What do I value? What have I learned? Where am I going? I don't know, I truly don't. I'm lost. But there's...there's something...
I just got through watching All The President's Men. I've been wanting to see it for maybe five years, but not so desperately as to pursue the matter with any zeal. It finally turned up on TV the other night, so I taped it. Good film, if a little short. I felt it pulled up right at the point where I was starting to get drawn in. Yeah, those familiar names (McCord and Liddy and Hunt, then Mitchell, Colson, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kalmbach, and Dean. Then, of course, Richard Nixon) started striking those familiar chords in my mind. The film was reaching its conclusion, but my brain was just getting started.
I've got a thing for that era (1960 - 1976) and that place (America) that started with Hunter S. Thompson and is starting to become something of an obsession, an itch I can never quite scratch. That something about who I am and what I'm doing is inextricably linked to my writing, and every time I wax textual about politics, I come back to those presidents and historical figures and this certainty I have that something important died when Nixon resigned in disgrace less than two years after winning one of the most resounding victories in American political history. I come back to that, I dwell on it, and one day I'm going to write something about it. Whatever that novel is (and it is a novel), it won't be about politics at all. It'll be about people and time and how that saying about the butterfly flapping its wings can apply to more than just meteorology.
If the Watergate hotel had never been robbed on June 17th 1972, I wouldn't have been on a plane to Los Angeles almost thirty-two years later. A ridiculous statement to make, but no less true for being so. If it hadn't happened, Hunter Thompson couldn't have captivated me by writing about it and my obsessions would have gone in a very different direction that probably wouldn't have included American politics. My novel wouldn't have had those ideas in it, ideas that inspired me to share thoughts and writings with the internet community, which in turn inspired the blog, which in turn found me surfing Blogger's listings and ending up on Jenn's page. Which, by the way, initially attracted me because it was about...wait for it...American politics.
Where am I going with this? Nowhere, yet.
So yesterday I was driving to Peterborough with my older sister. We were chatting away in the car and she started going into detail about her recent spiritual conversion. Now, I knew that she'd been reading on the subject and that a lot of her more recent thinking had been motivated by what she'd found, but I didn't realise the extent to which she'd embraced some of those ideas. In fact, I was actually shocked when she started talking about getting back what you put into life and the idea that there was some kind of spiritual energy that held it all together.
"Like a higher power?" I asked, dreading the response.
She refused to be drawn on that, stating that she still didn't believe in any idea of God, but that she felt there was...something.
In a way, I'd seen it coming. She's been calling me a lot lately, talking about how she's been unhappy and how this has been one of the most depressing years of her life. In more recent weeks, she's been upbeat. She's been pursuing an interest in singing and songwriting that's been dormant for quite a few years now. She's taken a greater interest in her health and general well-being, turning to alternative theories and medicines that appear to have helped her a lot through what's been a hard time. I've a feeling she and I will be debating the subject for several years to come, because I'm never going to accept the idea that there's some kind of energy or lifeforce that connects us. Neither do I believe in any idea of Karma, or whatever you want to call it. Cath didn't like it when I dropped that word into the conversation, but that's what she was talking about. You get what you pay for, spritually speaking. She feels that by 'doing the right thing' (and I still don't know how she meant that phrase, because she said she wasn't talking about morals), her life will improve. I don't buy that, but if it makes her happy, then the bottom line is a good one.
It was that conversation that got me thinking about The Butterfly Effect, coincidences, and self-fulfilling prophecies. Between Jennifer and I, there really have been an awful lot of spooky coincidences and strange connections. You only have to look at the fact that I wrote a 'letter to myself' that referenced Thompson's work on the death of the American Dream and Richard Nixon as a connection to my own thoughts on various works of fiction and the current cultural climate, only to end up, a year later, going to meet a girl who lives in the city where Nixon was buried on a trip that involved us retracing the route travelled by Thompson in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas to see that. Sure, a lot of that is self-fulfilling prophecy. I'd always wanted to do Vegas, partly because of Thompson, so it's only natural that I'd try to take the opportunity while I was in the general vicinity. But it's not like that was on my mind when I first wrote to Jennifer. Hell, going to America was nowhere near my thoughts when I first penned that letter. I was just writing to a girl I found interesting and thought I might like to get to know a little better.
"There was only one road back to LA. US Interstate 15, just a flat-out high speed burn through Baker and Barstow and Berdoo, then on to the Hollywood Freeway straight into frantic oblivion; safety, obscurity, just another freak in the Freak Kingdom. We'd gone in search of the American Dream. It had been a lame fuck-around, a waste of time. There was no point in looking back. Fuck no, not today, thank you kindly. My heart was filled with joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger. A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident."
That's from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, in case you're not familiar with Thompson's work. And while my next diary entry will be about Las Vegas, what it'll really be about is the way I felt when driving down US Interstate 15 with a girl I'm falling for that lives in the city where Dick Nixon is buried. Karma? No. A series of compelling coincidences? No doubt. Self-fulfilling prophecy? To an extent. When you get right down to it, I guess I can't explain how I got there and how utterly right it felt. It wasn't God, though. It wasn't some higher power or energy. It was simply the place my dreams and desires took me, and the first time in my life that they all seemed connected. I was in the right place at the right time with the right person. It all made sense.
I left England at the time of a family crisis that's still ongoing. For those that are interested in the sordid details, check this out. Julie is my stepsister, Susan my stepdad's first wife. The article the link leads to was on the front page of the local newspaper the week I was in California. Obviously, this had something of an impact on my immediate family and raised all kinds of other scandals from the dead. I don't honestly want to get into it, but let's just say that in the past two weeks I've found myself caught up in a web of madness that would shame any soap opera. My stepsister is pregnant by the guy she was living with. He's going to jail. Then he's getting deported. Both she and my stepdad's ex also stand a good chance of being locked up for at least eighteen months. Meanwhile, my stepbrother is on both crack and heroin, some of which was supplied by the jail-bound, soon-to-be-deported boyfriend. He may or may not currently be in rehab. It's somewhat difficult to keep track of his movements. On the other side of the family, my real father's side, I got a phone call the night before I left informing me that my half-brother has cancer. From what I know, they caught it before it got too serious, but it's in a very unusual place (the inside of his right forearm), and at least one person has raised the possibility of amputating his arm if chemo and radiotherapy prove ineffectual. Of course, the sudden re-appearance of the big 'C' in my family bothers me more than a little. Those that know me or have been reading for a while will know that it was cancer that killed my father. That it's shown up in my half-brother is evidence of it being something genetic in the male side of the O'Mahony family. If you were scrolling down that particular list, the next name you'd find after my half-brother's would be mine. Dumb speculation, especially at this stage of the game, but I can tell you for a fact that such ghoulish thoughts tend to sneak up on a guy when he's typing to beat the devil at four in the morning.
All of this makes me think a lot. I could do pages and pages of analysis, I really could. What it comes down to, though, is the feeling about relationships and insecurities and balances of power I articulated in the last diary post. What it comes down to is the difference between feeling so fucking high out on Interstate 15 and feeling so fucking low as I sit here and type this. Like anybody, I have a lot of dreams and desires and wishes I want to come true. Times like these make me realise that they all come down to very simple, childish thoughts and impulses.
Like get me out of here.
Like save me.
I think a lot of us feel that way. Not every minute of every day, no. But now and again. Enough to make us chase possibility. My sister finds that possibility in a new outlook on the world around her and a decision to go back and pick up things she dropped without really knowing why. Me, I think of being in a car with a certain girl, driving a certain road with a certain song on the stereo. That butterfly flaps its wings in my mind and the world is a different place. I tried to talk about that in my sister's car yesterday, somewhere in the midst of our debate about spirituality. She accused me of running away, and because I value her opinion, I took the time to consider that thought. Just before I wrote this, I stopped considering it. I was lying on my bed, watching the final scene of All The President's Men, watching Nixon take his second oath of office on a screen within a screen, and a thought leapt unbidden into my mind.
Not running away, it said, and the simplicity of the two words that followed those three was a testament to their truth...
Running to.
posted by Michael at 9:08 PM
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