The Colt 45 Chronicle #42

Tomorrow the Seattle Seahawks are back at the place where last season ended, the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. It was January 13. The Falcons dominated the first half. The Seahawks came roaring back in the second half. But Matt Ryan was able to engineer a drive in the final seconds that put Matt Bryant in range for the game-winning field goal.

I was so agitated at halftime of that playoff game -- so infused with a feeling of powerlessness and anxiety -- that for some reason, probably because in the back of mind I had been meaning to do it for a long time, I fished a collection of old letters out of storage.

The letters date to the first two years I spent in New York City. I was a newlywed then. My live-in girlfriend and I decided to tie the knot and have our bond officially acknowledged by the state because we wanted to have access to Columbia University's married student housing. We had lived together on and off -- mostly on -- while we attended the University of California. These letters were a celebration of breaking free of the academy while at the same time a way of coming to terms with the horror of the rat race. The daily ironing of pants, riding a train, wearing a tie, coping with the pettiness of menopausal coworkers -- all of this was new to me. Drinking malt liquor and typing letters on a word processor helped me deal with living in a megalopolis and working a series of dead-end jobs.

Nothing at the university prepares one for the repetition of the rat race. Watching professional football with its detailed schedule and clear record of winners and losers is not what worklife is like. Work is a dreary game of survival divided not into 15-minute quarters but five decades of regret and stress. Marriages founder; livers are damaged. Charles Manson said it most succinctly in his jailhouse poem, "Paycheck Whore":

Paycheck whore
Wears a dollar bill gown
To the funeral of hope.

(I always try to recite that to my young coworkers at each new job I end up at. )

When I was young I didn't realize that the rat race is marked by an "Eternal Return" of five decades. If I had, I would have been more canny about how I paced myself. I would have been more methodical and less prone to the cataclysmic -- the alcohol, the fights, the Romantic version of creativity. I would have been less trusting of women and buddies and more disciplined about solitude.

The Seahawks if they win tomorrow could clear a big psychological hurdle on their path to the Super Bowl. For me, this is the 42nd letter I've posted since the home team lost in Atlanta. And I must say it has helped me come to terms with my own personal historical impediments, some of which are on display in the letter below to my best friend Mark. The sense of self and its accompanying sententiousness are inflated and infantile.

Autumn 1989 

Hate loves life and a dog dies. I'm writing this is as a lesson. I don't want to forget some of the times we spent together beck in '86 and '87, and I know the only way to do this is to write 'em down, write it down. But why waste the time? Well, I'll tell ya. The older I get, and the more I waste my life working lousy jobs, the more I'm convinced that what we did at that time was truly historical, in terms of the american grain, which is the grain of James Dean and Jim Morrison and Brett Easton Ellis, the grain of selfish youth living life fully, happily, unconsciously. Also, writing is about thinking and thinking is about living and living is about doing and doing is about remembering. So I might as well remember back to the time when we lived on the horizon, when we were out there in the face of the sun, without a shit of concern for 1990 or subways or Madrid. Let's go!