Passion is a suspect word for me. I equate it with ‘obsession,’ which is a characteristic I possess, or that possesses me, and has caused me huge problems in the past, and, I’m afraid, will cause me more problems in the future.
When I hooked up with Joom I felt very ‘passionate’ about her -- I willingly volunteered to give her a third of my monthly salary for her truck payments. Of course, she drove me around, but still -- that was a lot of money and I had to go without some of the things that would have made my stay in Thailand much easier. For instance, I could have been paying more on my child support and so been able to get my passport renewed when it expired. I could have traveled more and probably met a nicer Thai woman, a Church member maybe, who would have worked with me in actually getting married instead of just wanting to live together so she could be free to move on when my money ran out. There were times when I was with Joom that I felt very strongly that she was all wrong for me, that I needed to ‘escape’ from her and reclaim my own life -- but then she’d go down to the beach to dig up clams to grill on a cheap little Hibachi for us and afterwards spend the evening cuddled up with me while we watched some incomprehensible Thai soap operas on TV -- and I’d forget all about her bad temper and drinking and parasitic family that always wanted money from me. When she was kind and affectionate my passion for her flamed like a rocket engine -- but it never lasted; she’d get moody and demanding, and even refuse to give me any more rides in her truck because, she said, I was too fat and wore out the tires too quick. In some sick way I actually enjoyed her abuse -- it seemed better than the total void I had lived in without anyone to love emotionally and physically.
That’s what comes to mind when I read your email about ‘passion.’
I believe I am actually very passionate about making money with my postcards and writing. I often daydream that Trump will tweet about the postcards he gets from me and suddenly all my postcards will become collector’s items -- people will start paying thousands of dollars for them. I also daydream that some bigtime editor at the NYT will beg me to start writing a daily poem for them and offer to pay me beau coup bucks. Then I’ll move into a two-bedroom condo down in St George, with an indoor swimming pool, and have the grandkids down every weekend for pool parties with scads of delivery pizza.
Because it chafes me to have so much ambition and activity that isn’t making me any income, I choose to pretend that I don’t care, that I’m disinterested about making money -- I am just ‘following my bliss’ for purely artistic reasons. But sometimes the frustration bubbles over. Life is very sour and bitter during those moments. But it always ends with me beginning to chuckle about the whole setup -- an old clown like me being treated like a literary somebody by reporters and friends. Pulling the wool over their eyes! I just string words together like beads from a hobby kit.
Ridi, Pagliaccio!
I’m writing this email in dribs and drabs, as I watch Star Trek The Next Generation on Netflix. I’ll watch ten minutes of an episode, then pause it, then write a paragraph here, and then unpause the episode for another ten minutes, etc. It’s a good way to kill the evening, until I feel tired enough to go take a shower and read myself to sleep.
I should just shut off the boob tube and read all evening. I have a good travel book on my Kindle, written back in the 1930’s, by a snooty Englishman riding a horse through Persia and Afghanistan, plus I have the whole Lord of the Rings on my Kindle. Maybe when I finish this overlong email to you I’ll kill Netflix and rejoin Frodo and Gandalf.
Endlessly walking. There are so many of the older residents who wander the halls, haunt the sidewalks out front. I can see them through my patio window. Hear them at night in the halls. Endlessly walking. Endlessly stoically crawling like slugs, waiting for something, anything, to happen. A rainbow, maybe. A meteor out of the sky. A squirrel climbing down from a tree branch. A mushroom in the front lawn. The sun to set. The mountains to float away. The carpet to unravel. Death to playfully tap them on the shoulder. Or just a good belch. Everyone here has given up fighting their fate, including me. We are all waiting in our tiny boxes, walking in shoddy slippers down shoddy halls trying to understand how our shoddy lives brought us here.
I’ll feel better in the morning, after I have a bowel movement.
