I have all of life’s necessities at hand: Jeremiah Sweet Tea & lemonade (with crushed mint from my garden), my Blackberry, my ipod cranking out Pearl Jam, exterior lights hanging from the umbrella over my head, a cushy blanket under my ass, Raid Yard Guard to annihilate unsuspecting mosquitoes, citronella candles on the table, a citronella plant under the table, (and would you believe those little fuckers are still sucking my blood?!), and beautiful flowers in every direction. Oh, and my job gives me two ENTIRE months off, so I don’t have to work tomorrow morning, or the next morning, or even 20 mornings after that.
So why is it that while I sit here in my secret garden, my minds wanders off to how things could be better? I’m convinced that not being satisfied is some sort of (as yet unnamed) mental illness. For example, my situation could be better if I were surrounded by intellectuals who would engage me in scandalous and intriguing dialogue. Or if David Beckham (or some other ridiculously hot man) was massaging my shoulders while I type. Or if the ocean was about 50 feet away soothing me. Or if I had a hot tub to chill in and a personal secretary to transcribe every fascinating thought I have (editing out the nonsense, of course).
Is this asking too much?
I have to try NOT to look at my house if I’m trying to be Utopian, because otherwise all I see is peeling paint, shoddy windows, the gloves my husband used a month ago to clean the gutters and then couldn’t be bothered to put away, the rotten portions of the deck, the dozens of carpenter ants parading around like they own the place. No, in order to put on the happy, Stepford-Wife face, I have to consciously tell myself how lucky I am not to be under fire in a cave in Afghanistan or having my hut set on fire in a Sudanese village. I DO have it better than most people in the world. It’s that top 10% of the wealthy that I envy (a deadly sin, I know), because I want what I want when I want it. (Bruce, I can’t believe you’ve summed up my life in such a ridiculously childish and apt phrase.)
I’m just not sure how I ended up in the suburbs. When I applied to college (I’ve been over the fact that I was a jackass in high school and probably didn’t deserve to go anywhere good), I sent my ACT scores to four schools: UNO, UNK, UCLA, and the U of HI in Manoa. I went to UN Kearney as a freshman. What the fuck? I blame hormones (my boyfriend went there) and blatant stupidity. There is nothing in central Nebraska, thus there is no reason to go there purposefully, unless you are traveling to another location. Why didn’t I throw caution to the wind and go to the island nation of Hawai’i? Because I was a coward.
So, now here I am, sitting in my Papillion backyard, wondering why I’m not a professor at Berkeley, or a famous writer collecting royalties from my dozens of novels, or a prolific essayist who publishes in the New Yorker (or even the New York Times). I blame my own laziness. I would rather drink the Jeremiah Weed than focus on a real novel. How did all the famous literary drunks do it??!! Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson… It’s impressive that these people even got out of bed in the morning, let alone writing the classics of American literature. I think that part of it was that these people told themselves from the beginning that they were WRITERS (yes, the caps are necessary, because they DEFINE, which is how we define ourselves - it tells us who we are). If I decided to be a WRITER, quit my day job, and just wrote all day then maybe I’d be on to something … like welfare.
No comments:
Post a Comment