The Colt 45 Chronicle #89

Last week I said these letters, what I have dubbed "The Colt 45 Chronicle" (after my favorite malt liquor to imbibe while pursuing epistolary endeavors), were drawing to a close. Well, there are still a few, more than a few, left. I'd say ten.

This week's offering is a letter to my father where I complain, sounding like a Goldwater Republican, about work and taxes. Then I quickly pivot to an articulation of a Gaia theory of Earth emulation in one's personal behavior -- "bear everything and keep moving." The letter concludes with a paragraph on Hegel, whose philosophy both my father and I admire. The letter opens with a shout-out to Van Morrison's Avalon Sunset (1989), a cassette copy of which my father had recently sent me.

Summer 1989

Dad! Thanks for the gifts. The Van Morrison is plenty good, especially "When Will I Ever Learn to Live in God." That's the question, ain't it? I haven't got a chance to listen to the other tape just yet but that's just around the corner. August has been full of visitors and very busy. Shea and Osha arrived the 1st of the month, and then we had my buddy Mark fresh from Spain and France, and now we're doing Kevin, who's enrolling in business school at Columbia. On top of all this, we expect Colin in about two weeks.

I'm working at a law firm on Wall Street; I'm a proofreader. The pay is poor, but the hours are flexible, and I can earn overtime if I desire. Ashley has just started her second year of classes. Right now she's finishing up her summer fellowship, a research paper on medical charts. I continue to let the ol' corpus go to pot: too many quarts of beer and too little exercise. Mea culpa.

New York City is New York City. After a year here, I'm starting to feel that I'm becoming part of the grand metropolitan process, Manhattan geography being embroidered on the surface of my mind's eye and my life being spent at work and for drink. It's the same old story, the story that everybody or just about everybody comes to learn at one point or another. I guess it's called "adult," being an adult, which is a polite way of saying that you're dead about fifty years before they carve your headstone and plant you in the soil.

The United States is a big country, and most everybody works; subsequently, the government makes a lot of money. I figure I go to work one day out of four solely for the government. I get over 25% of my pay withheld for taxes, which is about eighty dollars a week. Add that up and you get $320 a month, or $3,840 a year. Back in my early days in Berkeley, I came close to living on $3,840 a year. It's a racket, Pop. The whole stinking game of life is a cow's udder siphoned by a dairy farmer's machine.

I'll tell you something. While I was standing on the subway platform the other day waiting for the downtown 'A' train to come and take me to work I got to thinking. It appeared to me right then -- necktie suturing in Adam's apple, malt liquor from the night before bubbling under brow -- it appeared to me that the whole point was to become like the Earth, to bear everything and keep moving. You got to take everything on, or at least be open to the possibility of doing so; otherwise, what's the point of living with yourself, with a little anal weak piece of shit? Now, I know you can never get to the perfect place where you're doing it all, where you're accepting all burdens and radiating assurance in every direction. But I think you can keep the idea as an imperative and always respect it consciously; and when you get the chance you can and should put out the effort and be faithful and make it happen, no matter how piecemeal.

So the train came and the doors opened and I stepped in, saying to myself, "The point is to become like the Earth." Oh, well, another day at work.

The back gets curved and dreams are punched out. It's a big burden to deal with the fact that the past is gone. Hegel was an optimist; he thought you could deal with it. Sometimes I think he's right, but most other times I know he's wrong. I know I talked about this last time, about the importance of a healthy (-- now that's a big word) relationship to time, but I can't help but think that this is the issue, the big issue, in all things having to do with anything, namely, that time fades away. We've got to appreciate and take satisfaction in the past and at the same time find a way of moving on.