An update. -- This is letter number 20 taken from a collection of letters written from the end of summer 1988 to the spring of 1990, my first two years in New York City. The idea going in was that by posting these letters something might be revealed about pre-Internet communication (all the letters were keypunched on an AT&T PC using WordPerfect, printed on an Epson dot-matrix, stuffed in a legal-size envelope and then mailed via the United States Postal Service) and how my marriage came to an end (this blog is after all "Burdens of a Bachelor"). So far there's been a lot of repetition: tales of intoxication and the agony of being a sports fan alongside the horror of work punctuated by an occasional bar brawl. The common and cruel story of youth.
But onward we go. I'm taking letters off the top as they come. They're not in any chronological order, and they don't appear to be organized by theme. I've only skipped two so far, both purely perfunctory: a "thank you" note to my wife's aunt for allowing us to stay with her for a brief vacation at her home in Vermont; and some sort of inscrutable, brief "sorry I missed you" missive to my friend Jeff. Otherwise, the letters are exactly as found when I yanked them out of storage during halftime of January's Seahawks playoff loss to the Falcons.
In the letter below, addressed to my friend Mark, I engage in some drunken holiday The Sorrows of Young Werther-grade pessimism regarding our perception of time.
Christmas 1989
I want to say Merry Christmas now and send it off right away for fear that if I waited any longer there'd be no way that it'd get to you on time. I don't know what your plans are, whether you're coming back to the U.S. or not, but I figure you're gonna stay in Spain for the holiday season. If it's any consolation, I'm spending Christmas alone as well. Ashley is going to her mom's in Ashland, and I'm staying here in New York to work and take care of the cat, and also because there's really nothing for me in Ashland, nothing to jeopardize my job over (you see, steady work since July and I'm already thinking like a stiff). I'll sure miss Ashley, but I'm hoping I'll be able to get a few things done, like writing my mom a letter and finishing that story that I started for you.
Colum's back from Guatemala. I saw him today and the first thing he said to me was that I looked like a long-haired school girl. I knocked on the door, and he opened it up, and that's what he said -- that I looked like a long-haired school girl. I chuckled; shit, he was definitely on to something. I didn't trouble myself with it for much longer because he invited me in and we started talking about something else.
I don't know, I don't if it's the New York winter (it makes everything seem miles away, like you're in a forest) or if it's the dread whip of going to work every subway morning; but whatever it is, it's changing me. The heart of things isn't golden and holy; it's tear stained and bow backed; that's what I've come to expect. Time is the only certainty. And don't get me wrong. Time is a great thing; I think time is the most powerful thing in the world. My complaint with it is an entirely selfish one, namely, there's always something to look back on and feel bad about: you can look back on something and feel proud about it -- something like how good looking you once were -- but then you'll just feel bad about it because it's past, past tense, and that's not what you look like now (same thing with writing -- I'll read something I wrote years ago, say when I was 21, and I'll say to myself, "There's no way I can touch that now"). And let's not forget that there's always something to look back on with guilty pain, like how you fucked up: how you cheated someone, how you were covetous and cowardly, how you whined like a bitch and tortured your fellow man who in the end is just another starving dog like yourself. So time is the world, and time is sadness. So the world is sadness. Everybody knows it anyway; that's the sad thing: everybody knows the heart of the world; we just blind ourselves with illusions of satiety, which are just nickel-&-dime gags: whoopee cushions and featherless chickens made of rubber.
Bah! I'm drunk on malt liquor and full of gloom. Toss this out with the bath water. I'll write you soon.
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