I made an error in posting the last installment of these 25-year-old letters. The header identified it as #74 when it was actually #73. I have corrected it, making today's post the true seventy-fourth epistle.
The letter below was written to friends Phil and Maura who were living in D.C.
Maura and I had carried on a brief affair (she informed me, when she visited this past spring, that the tryst lasted no longer than a month; it seemed longer to me). I was writing to them on a Sunday evening because I felt the need to deconstruct our identities as post-collegiate career-track young adults.
I include the YouTube of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968) because though ostensibly a concept album celebrating English rural life, I have found, listening to it recently, that it actually captures the good cheer and rich tribalism that young adults enjoy in cultivating their extensive social networks. As one ages, the big investment in friends becomes too costly. Work wears a person down. What free time you have left after work, chores and exercise is minuscule. Friends cannot be actively maintained.
Winter 1989
It's Sunday night, and Ashley and I are sitting around, and I am having a few beers. And this in spite of the fact -- in fact, in direct contradiction to the fact -- that it is Sunday, and a Sunday evening: 10:01 PM. Sunday, and Sunday evenings in particular, taste too much like puke and reek too much like death -- dead dogs and fish and cats. I just feel too full of shit and worry to drink. So I usually don't drink, or listen to music or do anything life avowing. But my general mood these days is very morose and downtrodden, basically one deserving of a little indulgence.
I was in an upper West Side bar (105th and Amsterdam, I think) on Friday night, much too high and drunk, and there was this mirror behind the bar, a real big one, and the deal is, I couldn't stop looking at myself, and this even though I was really embarrassed about it, and this even though people were carrying on -- or trying to carry on -- a conversation with me; but the reason why I couldn't stop looking in the mirror (and I know Maura has seen me drunk do this before) was because I appeared totally different to myself; I looked like a young man, a young€ dude, for the first time. I had on an old throw-away brown corduroy sports coat, underneath which was one of Ashley's grandma's hand-knitted acrylic sweaters, green with different colors on the arms, a lot of gold buttons. My hair was short and spread this way and that according to how I slept the night before; I had cigar in mouth and stubble on face. So anyway, all this didn't add up to an appearance that I thought was especially cool or bitchin' or whatever; it was just different: embarrassing, macho, alienating. And that honest to goodness what struck me first and foremost: "Who the fuck do I think I am? Some fuckin' young tough I guess, and one who is unconsciously gravitating to a poor and punk Mickey Rourke-esque thing."
Oh, well, that's the diagnosis, which is probably not very promising, but at least in my own eyes I have made it to young man-ness, something I hadn't done before. What I can say or feel is something close to the neighborhood of this (collecting all my collegeboy philosophical twaddle to succinct and falsely axiomatic fruition): I, myself, am my own biggest myth -- that's the bottom line; and it's because of this, this realization, that I am morose. But the problem is that this mythologizing is the truth of the world.
How do you keep your soul from dying? Now's the time for guys like us to cash ours in. Give up the soul for work -- work/marriage, work/kids -- buried, dead and blue beneath a haystack of car, insurance, home, supermarket, cocktail parties, slaps on the ass and soft buddy hugs around the shoulders. All that Thirtysomething crap is just one big brilliant and beautiful butt-fucked rationalization for all our hog-washed, dead before the tombstone lily livers. I watched last Tuesday's episode, Where Elliot and Michael deal with the dissolution of their small but heartfelt business between flashbacks to the not-so-distant past ( -- the Yupp scene is young, parvenu; it doesn't start later than the early 1980s). And shit, I'm not an asshole, I'll admit it was good. I enjoyed it, even through the overtly material and shallow and mechanistic romanticism of people who aren't really people: people who don't leave skid marks on their underwear; people who don't have heated, relationship-rocking arguments about who has done the most dishes recently; basically, people who can't be petty (even Elliot's sometime pettiness is cast in an overblown Shakespearean robust foolhardiness which pays lip service to the everyday jack-off human spirit but does not do it justice). And Phil, you might say that such exacting truthfulness can't be expected of a primetime TV show, and I would wholeheartedly agree with you; the problem is that the attraction of a Thirtysomething, at least for me, is the frankness displayed, is a faithfulness to the quotidian muck which is us (like the argument between Michael and Elliot at the end of that episode when Michael is spitting all over his upper lip and there is a little bit of violence between the two of them). It's just that the writers and directors give you just enough -- which is very little -- to identify with and then they fuck you with this 1980s Ozzie and Harriet preciousness and pseudo-soul, that, in the end, is designed only to peddle wine and tampons and automobiles to such stupid un-selfed cocksucking poltroons like the three of us.
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