I am attempting to write a novel. It's about a guy in his mid-20's who has been having some medical problems and may or may not have cancer. His personal life is equally in disarray: he's still in love with an ex-girlfriend of his, he's dating a girl seven years his junior, he's a failed writer and teacher, and he's also in love unrequitedly with various other women. In the midst of all this, he takes a trip to Puerto Rico with his best friend from his youth. After a few nights of drinking in San Juan, where they meet some women, they decide to stake out on their own, ignoring their responsibilities (they are there on work). They spend the next week driving around the island, moving further and further from civiliation and comfort, and leading both of them to seriously contemplate where they are in their lives, where they want to go, and how we balance our lives in the face of certain loss and death.

As of now, I'm about 45 pages into the novel, although I don't write linearly so most of it is all over the place. These excerpts come from various portions of the book, but I like them and I think they give you a general idea about the theme and style of the book.
***

Coming from a writing background (I won’t call myself a writer because it would be a lie) tends to cloud my vision of life, its expectations and eventual realities. Those of us that write have a bad tendency to see everything for its narrative worth. We ask, how does this fit into the story? Or, what does it mean? The latter might be the worst. Everything is about finding meaning. If there’s none to be found (and who says this isn’t true of life in general?), we make meaning up. It fucks with your head, namely in the sense that it never lets you out of your head.

It also manifests itself in our expectations for the way things are supposed to happen. Life, like a good narrative, is supposed to be full of big moments of transcendence; moments where everything makes sense, where I see why Dana will never be with me again, or why I can’t ever finish writing a book, and where I accept that and move forward with my life, content and full of appreciation. Except that isn’t how life actually works. Those moments exist, certainly, but they’re not lasting. That’s the problem with life. Unlike a book, you can’t stop it at a certain, satisfying point. It keeps going. So while those transcendent moments do exist- I really was over Dana when I threw my cell phone (sans sim card) into the ocean- they’re just only permanent until something comes along to become more permanent. I was over Dana until I smelled a flower walking to piss in the jungle that smelled like the ones I gave her on our third anniversary. The scent of that flower was immediate. My cell phone drowning in the surf was not.

That, then, is the problem with seeing things like a writer does. Expectations. Or, precisely, the internalization of our life as compared to those literary expectations. Getting over the loss of someone isn’t about the big events, it’s ultimately about the smaller ones. Some afternoon you’re driving along, singing “American Woman” in the wrong key, not thinking a fucking thought, and without realizing it, you’ve moved on. Of course, like everything else in this world, this is impermanent and you’re susceptible to relapse. But as you get older, and lose more people, you accept these small technicalities as obstacles to be both navigated and embraced.

To me, this is how love and grief are so closely linked. Us writer types tend to view love and grief through a lens of the big moment: when one first falls in love, and conversely when one falls out of it; the inception of grief, and then its final, ultimate closure. Roth’s first novella ended with one such moment. I like Roth- hell, who doesn’t?- but the moment rang false. Love and grief, I think, are about the smaller stuff. Perhaps more to the point, you don’t realize when you’re not in love anymore, or when you’re finally over a loss until some mundane moment happens upon you and nothing happens. You’re across from your wife at dinner, and you’re bored out of your mind. You go to the supermarket and for the first time since your husband croaked, you’re not reminded of him when you pass the pomegranate juice. Life is all about these small continuities, how they take us out of our heads and allow us to experience without letting our thoughts clutter things up. Writing, of course, is about the transcendent. It’s about finding meaning. Life is much simpler. Or, now that I think about it, maybe it’s not.
****


There’s this idea that the only worthwhile life is one lived in poverty, not “selling out,” fighting the good fight for the transcendent quality of art and against the essential bankruptcy of any profession that isn’t fighting that fight. There’s this group back in Philly I sometimes meet with, a group of “underground“ writers that meets every Tuesday night for bourbon and wine and literature of the unpublished sort: experimental poetry, non-linear prose, oedipal epics set in the future, etc. It’s the type of crowd you might expect. It’s mostly male. Almost all of them wear tight pants and scarves and hipster, thick rimmed glasses worn entirely for fashion purposes (unlike my thin rimmed type that I, you know, actually need to see the world). A few are actually gay; most aren’t though you might suspect they were. All decry the corporate nepotism of the publishing industry, with good reason. And all of them would leave without so much as a good bye if that same industry were to come calling with a six figure offer for their phantasmagorical Freudian opus.

It would be, I admit, easy to classify most of them as pretentious assholes. Which of course they are. But still. I like almost all of them, even if we know one another mostly on an acquaintance level that rarely extends beyond a fascination with literature. I’m sort of the odd man out, too, having the most decidedly traditional tastes of the bunch (not to mention probably the least impressive knowledge of literature…what can I say, I have a life). While most nod in approval at the metaphorical underpinnings of some Cummings inspired poem, I just appreciate the slight bourbon buzz I have going, the artistry of the language, and the enjoyable spirit of a small group of men coming together to pour out their most intimate fears and longings dressed up as art without ever really feeling too threatened or challenged. If they knew all this, they might consider kicking me out of the group, but probably not because they have an all inclusive policy that I know for a fact irks every single one of us when some hack shows up with a short story he swears is Hemmingway-esque.

It’s a fun group for me, but most of them take it pretty seriously. I don’t blame them. For most of these guys, this is a matter of life or death, finding a way to hang onto what they view as pure and good and meaningful. I’ve never let myself take art quite this seriously. My moments of doubt and fear, and they usually come late at night when I can’t sleep, or- like now, for instance- when I’m thrown some place unexpected and faced with people battling far more serious problems than my own petty issues (really, what’s so bad about unrequited love when I have a nice apartment, good friends, a working neural system, two good legs, and parents who’ve never been anything but supportive and together?). And for me, it’s a question of selfishness. Why don’t I have it in me to say fuck it and give up my flat screen television (only 27 inches), my cell phone, and my meager bank account to jump on some terrifying prop jet plane from the 1950’s to go fight malaria in Congo or Sudan or Indonesia? Why don’t I have the philanthropist gene that allows some to spend their weekend building houses for habitat, or volunteering at a soup kitchen, while I get sloshed at a bar or sleep with my rich, under age pseudo girlfriend in the back seat of her father’s BMW? Seriously. What the fuck is my problem?

The good fight, in my mind, is not sticking up for the integrity of art against the corporatists. Really, all writers want the same thing: to be read, to have our egos stroked a bit, and perhaps to do a little bit of social good by motivating a few people to change their lives so that we don’t feel so selfish about our new found literary success. That’s nice, and believe me, I’d love a Pulitzer or a six figure book deal. I just feel like there’s something more selfless out there I would like to find. I guess that’s what I’m looking for, the chance to prove I care about more than just my own well being and comfort, and would willingly sacrifice all that to bust my ass, and perhaps die, to selflessly improve the lives of people I don’t know because it is the right thing to do. Except that I haven’t willingly done this, and the chance presents itself every damn day when I get out of bed. It’s a choice we all have, though we don’t usually contemplate it. We can give all this away and disappear into the African jungle with a medical kit and our journal. We just don’t.
****

Life is a strange thing. That’s a rather trite statement, I fear. I guess what I mean to say is that a lot of what happens to us in life is strange and entirely unexpected. At the very least, almost all of the good things that happen to us are strange and unexpected. The more I think about it, though, the more I can’t help but believe that all of what happens to us is strange and rather unexpected.

Two days before I left for San Juan, some time between the MRI and biopsy I was forced to endure, I was sitting on the back porch of my parent’s house smoking a cigarette I’d stolen from my father’s coat pocket. The table in the middle of our porch was cluttered with old newspapers and envelopes. Even in the dead of winter my father drank his morning coffee out here, and like me, usually smoked a cigarette before bed out here as well (some times accompanied by my mother and a joint, or glass of Cabernet).

I started to rummage through the pile of jettisoned envelopes and sports sections, looking for some momentary entertainment. It’s a habit I’ve had since I was old enough to read: needing something, anything, to occupy my brain in moments of physical idleness. Near the bottom of the heap, I found a letter folded in three parts, ripped around the top edge. I unfolded it, and an enclosed picture dropped into my lap. It was a panoramic view of the Grand Canyon with a group of people, all geared up in spandex and bicycle helmets, standing on the rim, grinning broadly like idiots. Looking closer, I recognized the one on the far right edge- a little chubby, his cheeks sun burned, his jaw already beginning to jowl- as my best friend from pre-school, a boy named Andrew Schlosbon. He’d moved after kindergarten to Indiana. My six year old heart was crushed, and for a year or two he and I even kept up a genuine little kid pen-pal friendship. Eventually, it tailed off to a letter once ever few months until finally we both stopped writing around fifth grade. It’s hard to remember now, but we had been best friends, and boys at the age of five can become fiercely loyal to one another. We watched “Star Wars” religiously and traded baseball cards.

I didn’t realize our families still exchanged Christmas cards. So, intrigued and with memories of Luke Skywalker and marathon lego sessions popping up for the first time in at least I decade, I read the one page typed letter. Andrew, it turns out, was married and had recently finished his MBA at Purdue. He worked for an investment company and, it was implied, was making an absurd amount of money which he would certainly parlay into a big suburban house, a good college education for his boys (probably a tier below Ivy League level, definitely involved in Greek life) and an all around solid American existence where he’d be proud to send out his own Christmas card in a few years recounting his own tales of success- vacations to Cabo and the Grand Canyon, promotions, straight A report cards, maybe an all state football selection for his oldest son. I found myself extraordinarily happy for Andrew, and wanted more than anything to sit down for a beer and a steak with him.

I finished my cigarette and sat for a while longer, bracing my arms against the biting wind. Slowly, my excitement over Andrew’s good fortune turned to something else. I searched the pile further, found a few more Christmas cards, and read the one’s I cared to read (they’re all the same, ultimately). I realized that this is what a majority of our relations boil down to over a life’s worth of time. A dolled up picture and a veritable checklist of life’s pit stops stared down, surmounted, and left behind. Eventually, that’s what best friends, old lovers (those left on amicable terms), first wives, distant cousins, co-workers and everyone else we leave something of a mark on during our time here on earth are pared down to.

There’s nothing strange in any of the lives in these cards. That’s what’s missing. Real life, life where you may have cancer and are in love with three women and leave it all temporarily on hold to cavort around Puerto Rico salsa dancing, drinking, and throwing your cell phone into the Caribbean is fucking strange. The people we love, and the habits that only we come to know, are strange. Dana is a strange fucking girl. She burps after sex and subconsciously makes this blustering noise where she buzzes her lips while she drives. Susannah is obsessed with Ghostbuster figurines and play dough and could tell you the cause of ever major plane crash of the last four decades. I met Kate because I tripped and accidentally broke her nose at a frat party. She liked me to tickle her big toe whenever I went down on her.

As for Andrew Schlosbon , he might now be giving podiatrists and professors advice on Roth IRA’s and the Nasdaq, but he once traded me a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card for a Mickey Morandi card because he’d seen Mickey play at the Vet and played second base in tee-ball. I ended up selling that card for thirty bucks in high school to buy my first real girlfriend a pair of earrings for Valentine’s day. We met after she moved to my town from Romania. Go figure.

Life is strange. The parts of it we tend to remember crop up without expectation or pretension. Not that you’d know this from our Christmas cards. This is true also of the bad things in life (also something you won’t learn from our Christmas cards). I had a cousin who died when, during a slow pitch softball game, a line drive hit him smack in the chest and stopped his heart. A friend from college died when he was out snowmobiling. He was idling his machine on the summit of a steep hill when his older brother throttled up over the hill, hoping to catch some hang time. The only thing he caught was his little brother’s head, which they found in a hollow beneath a fir tree, severed cleanly above his shoulders. Alex’s first crush was crushed by a falling elm when she was eleven. She was riding her bike home from soccer practice. I was on her team.

Of course, death- at least after the fact- isn’t such a bad thing, save for those still living. There is plenty of other unexpected strangeness, though, that certainly is not pleasurable. Most of it doesn’t even involve death. Dana broke up with me because of a receipt for tampons I left on top of the toilet. I’d argue I’m not with Kate right now because her brother won a hundred grand in the lottery and took the family to Europe for two weeks when we first started to see one another (and that’s when Dana came along). Of course, my blurb in this year’s Christmas letter read much like Andrew’s.

“Luke graduate last winter with his MFA from Temple. He is currently living in Philadelphia and has numerous writing projects ‘in progress.‘ He hopes to finish them soon. In the interim, he is substitute teaching and hopes to maybe become a full time English teacher. He’s newly single, and enjoying the opportunity to meet new people.“

Technically, it’s all true and wonderfully bland. Somewhere, there’s a good chance a distant cousin or long lost childhood friend is reading our letter and thinking, “Well good to know. It sounds like Luke is doing all right for himself.“
****


All of us have those moments of dread, where we realize what we’re really up against. There’s a nothingness we face, and it extends beyond the finite limits of death. It’s that vastness of what we face every day in life, what most of us spend our lives trying to avoid standing eye to eye with: those unanswerable queries that, in our loneliest hours, make one understand why suicide isn’t only a legitimate option, it’s the only option, if escaping this dread isn’t possible. Where did all this come from? Where does it go without us, the personal and plural? And, most pressing, lonely, and damning of all, why? Why why why?

Love, then, isn’t just the ability to know someone else more intimately than yourself, or to let them know you, or even to fuck them. Love is providing a buffer between yourself and the infinite omniscience of life. My biggest fear is that I’ll face this thing, this life, without someone to blunt and blur that fear. I need that illusion, that when the final reckoning comes, I won’t be facing it alone, looking back on a wasted, terrified existence. Even though I already know that we all face this reckoning alone. It’s all about the illusion, you see. That’s love. More importantly, maybe, it’s life.

Since the Dana disaster, this is what I’ve stared down. The possibility that I might be facing this void alone, and on my own. Now, this is not to say that I think Dana was the buffer for me, the one to stare down the meaning of life with. In fact, in more ways than most, she was probably ill suited to the task; or, at least, to that task with me, and I with her. It’s an interesting thing, realizing you are completely wrong for a person and then still standing by them. She’s a scientist, and a bad one at that. Her mind doesn’t really deal with anything other than black and white dualities. She was probably more suited to be a preacher than a scientist, but being born in the secular northeast, she may have missed her calling (being a woman didn’t help either). She struggled, mightily, to adapt to my own moral grey areas- the drug usage, the occasional other flirtation with a friend of hers. Above all, she never understood my own sense of dread and unease about life. Dana was never a deep thinker, and I doubt she’s ever thought, more than in passing, about the issues that have turned me into a virtual insomniac. It’s not her fault; questioning things just isn’t in her nature. To put it bluntly, our biggest problem was she never really intrigued me on an intellectual level. For some, that might not be a deal breaker. For me, it was everything. Love is an intellectual exercise in my life.

Despite it, I loved her mightily. Still do. And in some ways, that only ensured I’d stand by her more staunchly. She intrigued me spiritually, my own life being devoid of anything I’d call spiritual, and she was a fucking pistol, just brimming with life, and anger, and love, and ambition. Besides, I figured if I loved her this much despite us being wrong for one another, maybe, in some perverse way, it made things more legitimate and worthwhile. We fought for all the good memories and love, where as those people who stumble onto their soul mates just luck into all of it.