grace the tragicomedy

"They have painted a bright blue, a little lighter than Grace and it is delightful. I can't wait to poop." This came to me in an e-mail message from my friend Melissa this morning. (I hope you don’t mind my sharing.) [Editor’s note: Grace is my car’s name. She is a striking bright blue.]

I can’t wait to poop will be my new key phrase. A motto, if you will. Not be overused lest I dull it into nothingness.

Back in the nearly six-year-ago day when I moved to Iowa City, I brought with me the gumption to drive a new motto: Go ahead and be happy, submotto: Just say yes. There was good reason for this.

Some of this bon raison I’ve written about before here. Before I moved to Iowa City, I was stuffed, crammed, needled, strung so tight anything could bounce off me. Much of my time was consumed by translating Greek and Latin, and by other things for other frames, and then exhaustively reviewing what I’d translated during week days and nights because I had no faith that I could reassemble the translation in class. The four walls of a classroom have always rearranged the furniture in my upstairs and then slowed time to the point just before it stops in a long-during four-part poem, so that every syllable thought or spoken broke down into a scatter of pixels, making big-picture coherence grossly impossible. Free time, I eventually began filling my body with intoxicants, but I even organized that around translation and around reading & writing enough to feel adequate in some neurotic kitchen-tile standard I’d set for myself.

When that path forked and shot me out its lubed center into Iowa City, my psyche and every muscle needed a massage. The stuffed animals in my blood needed the duct tape ripped off each of their furry pores. I moved to a new place with new people. No longer did I have framework. Go ahead and be happy, I decided. I said yes to most everything that crossed my new path, boundless. Not a very wisely ancient Greek path; i.e., there was no balance, just compulsion, answer drawn before the question.

I had reversed courses. Where before I denied and refused, now I accepted and accepted and accepted, which often had me bleary in a bar, bleary at a party, bleary at home, bleary in the sidewalks in between. Qualities and behaviors I didn’t know I had in me came out. I didn’t like some of them. I didn’t know this person. This was gold. I was a vessel manipulated and swum through by something other. I let it happen. Like being hit by a truck, I’m grateful for it.

This all, I think, is just one scene in the larger Greek drama achieving Apollonian-Bacchanalian balance and eventual full catharsis. I swear the River Styx flooded me in my sleep one night. A black cat crawled in through the bedroom window. A dream within a dream petrified my nervous system and roused soiled children from nearly too deep a well.

Go ahead and be happy climaxed and crashed and smoked a lot of foul cigarettes in the post-coital plummet. When I moved from Iowa City I knew it was to a recovery spa no matter where it was. Unfortunately, my army has retreated further than I care for. My rambunctious phalanx and I, we’ve got to shake it up, take it to the bridge, rock out with our cocks out, and also cough up the muck for the gander.

Then sit as quiet buddhas orange in living room lamplight. Balance the consume and purge, but weight neither more than the other. Unwind the wound. As yet my quest for arms perpendicular to the ground, one foot in front of the other on a narrow beam, at steady ease, has brought me to migraine and occasional social catatonia, frenetic fire-starting. Kitchens will never be the same.

Oh, right. Perfection is not an option, narcissisma.

It's beautiful like decadence, implying both consumption and purging, the full cycle exhilaratingly, unwindingly--Some old clinging waste, I can’t wait to poop.

And then begin the next act.