Letters to the Editor
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December 5, 1989 (Age 27-1/2) -- Dear Diary (Part I)
[Note to Upstaged: This and the following three posts were intended for the 4/21/08 advice seeker, but that discussion is closed. It is horrible to upstage somebody else’s advice party, especially when the advice being sought is on how to stop being upstaged. I apologize. Maybe you could think of my rudeness this way: I am homeless (though not at this moment), you mentioned a desire to help those in my position, and now you have by giving my letter a home. Just skip it the moment it becomes boring.]
Brett Landgraf
5267 University Way NE, #224
Seattle, WA 98105
April 22 - 23, 2008
Wrapped and Confused
c/o Since You Asked...
Salon.com
Dear Wrapped and Confused,
I have been homeless for over ten years now as a consequence of acting on the career advice Cary Tennis just gave you (“You’re mad as hell, and you’re not going to take it anymore!”, 4/21/08). 3-1/2 of those years have been semi-honorable (sleeping in a broken-down car, tents, and finally a modified doghouse), 1/2 have been a piece of cake (housesitting), 3 have been morally reprehensible (in the bed of my unrequited [ex-]girlfriend), and 3 have been lamer than a cripple in the loving hands of the American church (back and forth between the attic of one relative and the basement of another). Three weeks ago, providing temporary relief from this nightmare, I started a 16 week housesitting job. The job has many wonderful advantages. Privacy and temporary solvency are my favorites, while two more are relevant to your letter. First, I have been able to move all my possessions into the customer’s living room and garage, saving $400 on the next three months’ storage rent, and second, I have e-mail access! So it was that after reading your letter and thinking it sounded awfully familiar, I was able to root through my boxes looking for the diaries I kept from 1987 to 1992, which I haven’t laid eyes on in 16 years, and post the following semi-random entry from them. It is the kind of hugely embarrassing stuff that only someone who has gone on to write “War and Peace” or discover a cure to AIDS could laugh off, not to mention, what in gods’ names is the next Human Resources Exploitation Manager to google my resume going to think? But you know what they say: freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, and I thought it might be amusing to add a certain raw perspective to your problems.
“[Paragraph] I’m not frightened so much as really fucking depressed. The Japanese have become my favorite external source of anxiety, and the past week or so they have turned into virtual ogres. The economy spits on my talents, I am deep in debt, and there are the industrious Japanese, driving the trade deficit towards fiscal infinity, laughing about the decadent Americans. The world is never a closed system. All these years I have been able to laugh at the Russians, because their system was obviously so much inferior to ours. And now come the Japanese with their gadgets and industry, which, as far as I can tell, are so much superior to ours. And yet their system, their society appals me. (Of course, I have never been to Japan, and I know next to nothing about Japanese culture). To what ends does a human being exist? I truly don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here on this planet with this limited intelligence. My wants are relatively few and unfulfilled (I have an uncomfortable feeling that that’s a horrible lie), and beyond that I am immensely puzzled. I would like to get laid and I can’t, because I’m afraid and the majority of women (like the majority of men) are stupid. I would like to live off fiction. Some nasty Romantic prejudice whispers that if a person is for real, he lives FOR fiction. Fine. I would like to be one of those people who lives FOR fiction. Another thing I want is to discover a theory. It doesn’t matter of what, just of something. I want to be great, somebody who makes things, who has his hand on the fundamental structure of the cosmos. Do I really want all this? I haven’t the faintest idea. How should I know? I’m just rambling. I guess I’d like to be in love, and I’d like to go skiing this winter. Those are a couple more things I’d like. [Paragraph] But fundamentally, what’s the point? What’s the point? I might as well go jump off a bridge, why not? Disregarding the fact that I can’t because I can’t. I get up there on the high bridges, and my legs just keep walking. So it seems that suicide isn’t a real option. Oh, but assuming it was, what on earth is there to prevent me from saying it’s not a better option than fucking away my life in this crappy joint? What kind of a life would von Neuman have led if he hadn’t been so intelligent, if instead of a God of Mathematics he’d been just a priest, or if he hadn’t been any good in mathematics at all, for that matter? What would he have done then? Would he have been a drinker? A solid citizen? A world class violin virtuoso? One of those watery sorts of people who flows towards greatness no matter which direction it lies in? How about Socrates? What would he have been like if he hadn’t been Socrates? And what if you can’t be any other person than the person you are, and so you’re caught, doomed by your uniqueness to be just another weak and horribly defenseless member of the pack? [Continued in Part II]
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December 5, 1989 (Age 27-1/2) -- Dear Diary (Part II)
[Continued from Part I] [Paragraph] All these questions. Ok, suppose I were to give up all my literary ambitions and go back to school, to become an engineer of something. Say I was to learn to maintain high tech printing presses, and I got a job where I was supposed to think up better ways to make them run and to make them, period. Only, the Japanese have already been there, you see. So what do I do, then, content myself with living the rest of my life in the second tier of the world order of things? Become a technician while all the superior people are designing and discovering the things it’s my job to maintain? Why not? Wouldn’t it be poetic justice for all those snobbish smirks I’ve rained down on the clerks and laborers of the world since I was 5 years old? Repayment for trying to get out of all these problems the easy way 7-1/2 years ago when I leapt from the top of a cedar tree? It might be. It might just be the way the world works. Sorry, Brett, you’ve drawn the lot of Great Failure, now get on with it because you can’t kill yourself and there’s no woman out there whose breasts you can appropriate to cry out all your woes on. No big tits on paradisical hills of female flesh to get me out of my predicament. I’m a man. It’s my mission in life to be macho. If I’m not macho, if I’ve had the bad luck to end up on the wrong slope of Bell’s implacable curve (which does look somewhat like a breast, come to think of it), well, that’s the way it is. I’m just one of those unlucky mistakes of nature, the duet of balls that didn’t make it to the lap of life. No cunt for you, Mr. Psycho Eunuch. Oh, fates, couldn’t you have been less cruel? [Paragraph] Ok, ok, so a system of sorts is emerging, only I decry systems. I prefer to mourn, to not be challenged by microchips and topology and ugly differential equations. Why do homework? To what end? Again, to what end? Suppose you live your life magnificently, discover more new theorems than anybody in history ever, and then you die. Who cares? You’ve just left that much more shit that future generations have to puzzle over in order to get on with their lives. Extroverts would say that you’ve left that much more shit that future generations GET to puzzle over. The system always wins in the end. You can make your part in it as big and important as you please, but in the end you’re not going to understand it, you’re going to just die. For a lot of people that seems to be ok. But this, my life, is not ok to me. I suffer. I question the goals I have and the means that have been allotted me to achieve them. Do I want to bequeath to future generations this sort of struggle, this terrible neverending doubt, suspicion, and fear? (As if it were mine to bequeath anything at all, but let’s just assume so for the sake of my unhinged perambulations). Is this the shape of the world to come? I always thought the future was my friend (that’s why I haven’t killed myself, I suppose) but it could very possibly be my bitter enemy. What am I to do? What am I to tell all those women I’d like to fuck, who want to have fun (or whatever it is they want)? Sorry, baby, I’m allergic to fun. I haven’t the slightest idea about anything. You still want to dance? Hell no, they aren’t going to want to dance. Pretty bleak picture, eh? [Paragraph] Ok, I think I’m nihilized out for the night. I was reading through some of my stuff in earlier diaries (all of it after 1986, since on some bleak November night of that year I burned everything I possessed up to that point -- I regret this now, and I think this regret will increase as I get older, even if so much of that early stuff was bad and circular), and quite a lot, most of it, runs in the same vein. I’ve done about all I can do with the despairing mode. That’s not to say I’ve given it up -- are you kidding? -- but for tonight, enough. Of course, I just thought of all the people I’ve heard laughing the last couple days, and that’s enough to send me back off in the deep end. Imagine, though, if this mass of negative energy were more consistently and systematically directed somewhere else, imagine the work that would get done, the wonders that might be unveiled! God!”
Oh, God, is right. I can barely think with all the blood rushing from my brain to my cheeks after retyping that. Several in the peanut gallery -- most humorously KatKav -- have pointed out the absurdity of a depressive, post-suicidal, generally anxious person prone to panic attacks taking a SALES job, and a SHADY one at that. Good grief! I, too, found this funny, because the one time in my life I actually stepped into suicide’s abyss (rather than just walking up to it, wringing my brain cells at what a failure I am because I can’t even properly kill myself, and going back home to bed) was because of a job I took in the summer of 1982 selling one volume encyclopedias door-to-door in a sweltering little town called Chickasha, Oklahoma, on the down slope of the oil boom. [Continued in Part III]