The letter below is another one of these letters written to myself, possibly with the intention of reworking it and sending it off to my friends Mark and Niall in San Francisco.
I had recently returned to New York City after an extended stay with the two of them. I believe I arrived at LaGuardia Airport at the end of January or the beginning of February. And one cold Saturday night while the wife studied her medical school textbooks, I read my copy of Walter Kaufmann's The Portable Nietzsche (1954), specifically the letters (see scan below) Nietzsche wrote following his mental breakdown. (He witnessed a horse being flogged in the street and he rushed to protect it.)
These letters, while still numerous, are getting close to the end. Lately, because of the way they were packed inside the cardboard string-tied folder they are stored in, they have been drawn from the winter of 1989.
In December 1988 I had left my career-track position as an editorial associate at the Foundation Center and drove across the country during a bitterly cold winter. The idea was to return the Volkswagen bus -- that the wife and I had used to transport ourselves, our cat and our personal belongings to the East Coast the preceding summer -- back to my father in California. We were accumulating too many traffic tickets because of the city's alternate-side-of-the-street-parking rules.
That was the cover story, the ostensible reason provided to the wife. The reality was that I was homesick. I missed California and my buddies and my girlfriend Stacey. The Christmas trip extended well into the New Year as I ran out of money and ended up having to work as a laborer for a drywall crew in order to purchase a plane ticket. In the meantime, the VW bus was developing carburetor problems, which turned out to be fuel line problems, which ended up being an issue with the gas tank -- if my memory serves me.
The Christmas trip was eventful. Lots of drinking, a street fight, a night spent with Stacey who ended up with food poisoning from the Mexican restaurant where we had dined. A last hurrah of my years at the university.
The next time I would be back in the Bay Area, a year-and-a-half later, things were much changed. Niall was attending law school at Hastings. Mark was in Madrid teaching English. I happened by Stacey drinking coffee at the cafe where we had one of our first assignations. We made plans to go out to dinner, after which she pleaded with me to spend the night; and I, either in a display of great cruelty or Galahad-like fortitude, blew off her entreaties and walked, at 2 in the morning, from the Mission District to Panhandle Park, next to which was Niall's apartment.
But that was all to come after I finished the last of these letters and separated from my wife. The winter of 1989 I am settling in, having given up wholeheartedly on career-track employment, for a series of low-wage temporary clerical positions; my Bukowski period, which would last for several years.
During the summer of 1989 I made one last half-ass attempt to finish my honors thesis on the analytic a posteriori. My drinking was getting heavier. By the winter of 1990 I had landed a good-paying assignment as a proofreader and prover for Deloitte Touche located near the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I started saving cash, locking into place a plan I daydreamed into existence that summer one afternoon on the uptown 'A' train, a vision of myself in a simple Emerald City apartment sitting in front of a table on which was resting a bowl of oranges next to a bottle of bourbon and a manual typewriter; everything bathed in an amber glow.
A quart-century later I am still here.
Winter 1989
Really, a lot of times I get sick of looking at my own writing. The brain gets a feeling of being bruised and puffy. But I keep up the struggle. I keep searching for the "white logic," what boozing Jack London called the "white logic," that bright white path airy and invisible that leads anywhere you want to go.
Like Nietzsche's post-horse-flogging "Dionysus versus The Crucified" letters of January 1889 (a century plus two months ago):
[To Jacob Burckhardt] "In the end I would much rather be a Basel professor than God; but I have not dared push my private egoism so far as to desist for its sake from the creation of the world. You see, one must make sacrifices however and wherever one lives."
Wow! Now that's okay, a little insane, but I can see what he's driving at.
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