Tired

5/18/96

TIRED
I'm tired of complacent, cowardly, academic bureaucrats. I'm tired of mental midgets. I'm tired of drunken bullies bashing heads in the Los Angeles Coliseum. I'm tired of Al Davis. I'm tired of Al Davis moving back and forth between here and Oakland. I'm tired of Al Davis's ugly white pants, his uglier face and hair, and his stupid sentiments. I'm tired of thinking how many yards Marcus Allen might have gained in Los Angeles if Al Davis had used him right.

I'm tired tired tired. I'm tired of writing this. I'm tired of using tired rhetorical tricks to advance my banal agendas. I'm tired of reading housewives' fatuous comedy columns in the paper. I'm tired of reading professional male chauvinist journalists' columns in the paper.

I'm tired of writing by positing a peeve and opposing another peeve to it. I'm tired of working out so hard I exhaust myself. I'm tired of women who work out very very hard and still don't have good bodies. I'm tired of the fantastically shapeless, sloppy physiques of middleaged men who somehow expect to score with young women with perfect bodies.

I've come to a sticking point here, and I admit it.

I'm tired of being chastened. I'm just plain tired. Writing like this doesn't energize me, it exhausts me. I'm tired of quietly building up to writing sessions which amount to shit. I'm tired of having breakthroughs which quickly become breakdowns. I'm tired of biting my tongue during my mother's outrageous antics. I'm tired of extending myself to her and getting my tentacles sawed off. I'm tired of the way she uses her own refusal to see as an excuse to rip apart the family. I'm tired of respecting behaviour which deserves no respect. I'm tired of having been given life by a woman who has spent the last 4 decades trying to bust my balls. I'm tired of spoiled bourgeois bitches who try to take out their frustrations on their men.

I'm tired of doctrinaire feminists. I'm tired of hearing Rush Limbaugh say "feminazi." I'm tired of hearing Rush Limbaugh say anything. I'm so tired I'm going to go lie down in darkness. I'm tired of remembering. I'm tired of remembering all the things in my life I did wrong. I'm tired of picturing myself going back and doing them right, and I'm tired of picturing myself going back and doing them wrong again. I'm tired of how wrong everything in my life has turned out to be. I'm tired, very tired, of snobs.

I'm tired of the miserable material conditions of my existence. But I'm grateful for the roof over my head. I'm tired of my emotional desert. I'm tired of paying $39 a month to a gym I almost never use. But I'm glad to have the option of going there. I'm worried that if I drop my membership in the Y, I'll decide, 2 weeks later, that I want to rejoin. I'm tired of paying all my bills with money I don't have. I'm tired of watching my credit card balances mount to the high heavens.

I'm tired of making minimum payments on my credit cards and wondering when I won't even be able to make those. I'm tired of not being a father, but if I were a father, that would exhaust me. I'm tired of being middleaged, and I'll be even more tired of being old. I never tired of being young, though youth often made me miserable.

I'm tired of hearing about lives more successful than mine. I'm tired of seeing beautiful movie stars who wouldn't think of dating me. I'm tired of being hustled by women with whom I don't want to be publicly identified. I'm tired of hustling women who don't want to be identified with me. I'm tired of dating women who are, at best, platonic friends. I'm tired of being a male escort.

I'm tired of not being Bobby Bonds, Jr., or Ken Griffey, Jr., or some other impossibly young, black, rich, sports superstar who has his pick of beautiful groupies. I'm tired of being horny and obscure and poor. I'm tired of imagining myself to be talented and unrewarded.

I'm tired of beholding the spectacle of the unworthy being rewarded by a society gone mad. I'm tired of contemplating, in biographies and documentaries, the tragically unrecognized and unrewarded lives of the greats of the past.

I'm tired of having receding hair and a thick waist. I'm tired of knowing that it's all downhill from here. I'm not tired of feeling as if I'm just beginning my life, but I'm tired of beginning my life from scratch every morning of every day. I'm tired of not creating momentum for myself with the previous day, or year, or decade. Why can't I be a body in motion which, once set in motion, continues along that path at a constant velocity? Why must I be slowed by friction and air resistance? And I'm tired of wondering if air resistance is friction, as well. Air resistance is not friction. Friction is friction and air resistance is air resistance. But air resistance can cause friction which can superheat objects moving through air at high velocities.

I'm tired of wondering if I'm broken forever. I'm tired of being tired. I'm tired of giving myself peptalks. I'm tired of self-flagellation. I'm tired of words. I'm tired of coming to a grinding halt. I'm tired of being undermined by those who claim to love me best.

Is there any chance I'll accelerate instead of slowing down? And is acceleration really any better than deceleration? I'm tired of remembering childhood fights I won, and I'm tired of remembering childhood fights I lost. I'm tired of trying to remember what went wrong with my life, and I'm tired of suspecting that nothing is wrong.

I'm tired of feeling tired. I'm too tired to be enraged by my fatigue. I'm tired of hearing about depression---mine or yours. I'm tired of hoping to go on to my reward. I'm tired of taxes.

I'm tired of flossing, tired of brushing, tired of going to the dentist. I'm tired of good health and of bad.

I'm tired of the North Woods. I'm tired of yearning for flow and timelessness in my life. I'm tired of these words right here. And I'm tired of this one, as well. I'm tired of rhetorical devices. I'm tired of being a raving rhetorician. I'm tired of writing well, and I'm tired of writing less than well, and I'm tired of writing badly. I'm tired of anticipating my readers' reactions to what I write. And I resent not having any readers.

I'm tired of making invidious comparisons between myself and Alexander Solzenitsyn. I'm tired of wishing that a whaling ship had been my Yale and my Harvard College. I'm tired of studying Greek declensions. I'm tired of the AIDS plague. I'm tired of wondering how senile Ron Reagan has become. I'm tired of imagining Nancy Reagan, ruling the nation with the aid of an astrologer.

I'm tired of high concept movies. I'm tired of lascivious biographies of dead movie stars and moguls. I'm tired of Hollywood's self-congratulation. I'm tired of wishing I were a bigshot movie director. I'm tired of wishing I had the perks of an art hero, any kind of art hero. I'm tired. I'm tired of saying I'm tired of being tired, and I'm tired of hearing myself say I'm tired of being tired.

I'm tired of having to fight my way toward my own truth, and I'm tired of hearing other people say the same about themselves. I'm tired of my own self-dramatizing histrionics. I'm tired of peevishness---my own and others'.

I'm tired of not being more broadminded. I'm tired of not being more narrowminded. I'm tired of yearning for the peace and quiet of Wayne, Nebraska, in the 1950's. I'm tired of remembering Wayne's beautiful little turn of the century brick library. I hope it's still there, still being used by kids.

I'm tired of remembering Wayne's municipal pool, and its roller rink, and I'm tired of the way the prairie stretched out endlessly beyond them. I'm tired of the way silos dotted the landscape. I'm tired of the bountiful earth. I'm tired of the sound of grasshoppers, hopping from leaf to leaf in summer cornfields.

I'm tired of remembering trout course through a Pennsylvania stream, and I'm tired of the beauty of the Cumberland Valley. I'm tired of what a successful kid I was, and I'm tired because my childhood was the highpoint of my life. I'm tired that I'm not a father myself, but I'd be even more tired if I were a father.

I'm tired of my own rhetoric, but I don't seem to be able to help myself. I'm tired of spouting rhetoric in spite of myself. I'm tired of a world in which there is no place for the joy of rhetoric. I'm tired of cutting myself off at the pass, and I'm tired of getting in my own way, and I'm tired of not being able to get out of my own way.

I'm tired of beautiful women, and they seem less than thrilled by me. I'm tired of wanting women I can't have. I'm tired of wishing I had someone to take care of me. I'm tired of feeling sorry for myself and I'm tired of denying that I do.

I'm tired of words, I'm tired of syntax, I'm tired of vocabulary. I'm tired of style and I'm tired of editing. I'm tired of having an overstocked inventory of mad essays. I wish that I could write like an avenging angel. I wish I could create worlds of the imagination which my readers could happily inhabit.

I'm tired of being a literary trickster. I'm tired of feeling like I'm at the bottom of the literary food chain and I'm tired, very tired, of writing like an avenging solipsist. But not as tired as I am of those who exhort me to get involved with the human race. I want to say: Solipsists of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your Narcissicism. But I'm too self-absorbed to take to the barricades.

I'm tired, very tired, of writing sentences with I in them. But I'm too self-absorbed to change now. I would very much like to write something that mattered to you, but I don't know you and I hesitate to speak to or for you. I'm too tired to reach out to you, but not too tired to evade you if you reach out for me. I'm sick of myself, tired to death of myself, all I know is myself, and I see myself through a glass darkly, through a glass wearily, through a glass filled with fatigue.

--FIN--