A New Career in a New Town.

My first week here in Eureka was spent living in a hotel, maundering about town in despair, waiting for property management companies to phone me with some good news. I drank as much of the local beer as I could manage, and enjoyed locally-produced television commercials, the sort of which feature the proprietor and his family stacking presents in Christmas-elf regalia, or the staff of some retail store dressed as farm animals, or whatever. It feels a lot like my hometown of Peoria; much of the blue-collar social character is the same. There is a pronounced element of white trash here; abject, homely women with poor dentition and too many offspring, those who think it permissible to wear an insulated flannel beneath an oversized Raiders jacket, the type who sees no transgression in walking publicly with a pungent, half-smoked Marlboro Light tucked behind her ear. The architecture is much the same, though here there are many more Victorian homes, and a charming little downtown area. Only it’s, you know, on the ocean and nestled within the redwood forest. And I’m a complete stranger here.

And then there are the hippies: few things unnerve me more than persons who cling steadfastly to a manner of living or a system of ideas but cannot offer any argument of their philosophies beyond inanely-rhymed, platitudinous slogans. They fail to comprehend that their little gestures toward establishing individuality, whether in the fields of ideas or in fashion, do little else but overtly reinforce their absurd uniformity; I’m no zoologist, but they appear to look, think and act alike. When they are not begging for money or cigarettes on the sidewalks, they sit self-righteously on corners with cardboard signs that censure commuters for driving cars and eating meat. In my estimation, these worthless stabs at protest obviously constitute a colossal squandering of precious caloric intake that easily eclipses the sins of omnivorousness committed by ordinary, well-meaning car owners. I do not own a car, but they can fuck themselves all the same.

There are actual seasons here, and tonight it is freezing. In keeping with Local Ordinance #615-23, I have grown my beard to meet minimum length requirements. But I will risk the threat of a fine by refusing to comply with unjust legislation that requires me to smoke marijuana, engage in impromptu hacky-sack circles with strangers, and get my hair professionally dreadlocked by part-time glassblowers.

I barely made it to the end of Palahniuk’s Choke; some trusted friend ought to explain the value of nuance and shade to this man. Celebrated as he is, I view Chuck as the Jerry Bruckheimer of contemporary fiction; he locates little catch-phrases, clever little lists and twists and other trite devices, and repeats these techniques ad nauseum throughout the length of the text. At the risk of sounding pedantic: extreme hyperbole and exaggeration cease to be effective when they alone constitute the core of a given work; he’s like that annoying kid in the lunchroom, religiously driven to grossing out the others. Anyway, it is stenciled from precisely the same template that produced Fight Club, and should bore the shit out of anyone who can distinguish good writing from “a high-octane thrill ride”. Sorry Charlie.

I saw a large herd of elk, about twenty-five of them, grazing not too far from my house. I stood about eight feet away from one of the three bulls, and it was something special. I’m roughly twenty minutes from the National Park, and will probably spend many of my weekends up there, among the trees. The trees here are the largest and oldest living things on earth, comparable only to the sequoias in King’s Canyon to the southeast. To sit against a thing that has been metabolizing consistently for three thousand years, if fully considered, is a pretty dizzying thing. Before the living Christ and the living Buddha, this here critter was enjoying its adolescence. It appears stolid and inert, but yet it is not; the quick scale of our immediate perception is incapable of appreciating the long dynamic flux of this beast. Our apprehension of trees is essentially autistic. I am reminded of several passages from Whitman’s incomparable “Song of Myself”:

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much?

Have you reckon'd the earth much?

&

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

And I no more than anyone else. It is when I get out of the house, out among the trees that I remember the full effectiveness of nature, its indifferent ability to erase my trivial worries. You climb a hill in the morning and remember that you have a body, you lose your breath somewhere upstream and your pedestrian concerns are immediately supplanted by a sensation that does not translate easily into words. Awe is among its components, as is a kind of wordless, healthy anxiety. It’s that thing which good poetry works so tirelessly to approximate. But as Huxley noted, by way of Korzybski, even the finest of recipe books cannot compare to the worst of meals*.

I don’t know a single soul here, and find myself extremely lonely. That I can’t afford to come home (wherever that is) for Christmas only adds to this dullness. There are several good bookstores, and a nice little boardwalk that runs along Humboldt Bay; you can stroll in the wind and watch the little fishing vessels taxiing in and out of the marina. But these are rather poor substitutions for real human contact. Said another way, there’s nobody here to go drinking with. Whoever they are, they say that the act of drinking alone is a sure symptom of alcoholism. This little nugget of sagaciousness was probably the invention of some humorless, shit-brained Christian who likely has never enjoyed an original thought throughout the entirety of his dolorous little joke of a life. Some people are so foolishly concerned with health and wholeness and positivity, essentially with life-extension, that they neglect to perform the emotional leg-work required to understand why life is even worth living, to say nothing of extending it. These are difficult questions, and necessarily require the intercession of liquid courage; it loosens the tongue precisely because it first loosens the mind. As Kierkegaard so well understood, to be human is not a fact, but a task. And I feel somehow enriched, like something approaching truly human, when I expose myself to ruin.

The Extropian nerd-types will write excitedly about recent developmental horizons in life-extension technologies, but they must answer: why? What will you do with an additional two hundred years? Will you spend your bonus centuries sitting before a computer, salivating through an abstract fog of miniaturized devices and the poorly-feigned moans of amateur pornography?** Nonbeing may be less rich in content, but as a volitional selection it does at least not fall within the categorical parameters of pointlessness.

This particular place is for me a strange place to be; I am accustomed to warmth and friends, to a cacophony of strange dialects and clogged freeways. But then to be is a strange place to be. I wonder what I’m doing here, and then I temper that question with the larger: how and why is there a here for me to be in? What the fuck is the universe doing here? Or, if you prefer, what are the multiverses doing here? But this must all by now have the ring of familiarity. I sit out on my new porch, seized by insomnia and smoking cigarettes at three A.M. It is completely silent. I observe couples of stubborn, bumbling raccoons and the failed furtive attempts of my new neighbors to peep on me through little rents in their curtains, and I remember the old “Monsters are Due on Maple Street” episode of The Twilight Zone, a wonderful little meditation on collective paranoia. Their suspicions are probably right on the mark; I am searching and I am signaling. For what, I cannot yet guess.

Eureka

12/14/07

*paraphrased, as my books remain in boxes.

**on a related note, for a little foray into the dystopian horrors of life-extension, Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, while not his best, is certainly worth reading.