When I first started writing online five years ago, I came with a mission. My mission was to write about the complexity of things. How convenient this is, thought I, that I can actually do it in installments.... hash it around, revise it, change the order of things. Because, in my head at least, that is what Complexity is all about: the approach from many directions at once, an interwoven tapestry.
I was interested in complexity because in an odd reversal of events, my life had just become a lot simpler. My son had just gone off to college, 3000 miles away and I could not believe what it felt like to not be a 24-hour parent. I kept this to myself because it seemed like some kind of betrayal, if not to my son, then to all my parent-peers who kept pressing me about how bad I must feel that he was gone. Not so. It felt kind of Good.
About that time, though, I had an unfortunate event. An abandoned oil tank in my basement decided to leak. It had, in fact, been leaking for some time, and when it finally became enough of a hole that the spilling oil actually caused noticeable smells in my house, close to a hundred gallons of fuel oil had gone into the ground. I live in Massachusetts. We worry about stuff like that: global warming, the degradation of the environment, blah blah..... Massachusetts told me to just clean it up and stop complaining. That is when the clean-up contractor's bills started to arrive, about every other day, for amounts between $500 and $20,000. There was no telling when the end would come. Some would call that stress. So would I.
They say that all clouds have a silver lining. The silver lining to this cloud was in the form of a cluttered basement (25 years of accumulated and discarded Life down there) that had to be removed in order for the clean-up crew to do their state-mandated work. And in that process (the basement clean up, not the oil spill clean up), I saw the procession of my Life since graduate school march up the basement stairs and into a huge dumpster positioned conveniently in my driveway.
I say it was a Gift. To be able to let go of all those things, those books, those unfinished projects, those unused and unopened wedding gifts, those drawings, those broken pieces of furniture that refused to mend themselves, those scavenged artifacts which would not assemble themselves, those yard sale acquisitions, those sentimental toys of a baby boy who was now across the country having the time of his life and not really worrying about his childhood toys, those pieces of the house, disassembled from upstairs and held in the basement for their historical significance, those secret old love letters..... they all got reveiwed by me, then went into the dumpster (and then where?)... is this what Life amounts to?
It was about that time that I was reading the Sunday New York Times about a site for writers that also offered the ability for writers to talk to each other.....
I am not a writer. I got A's in freshman English and I still remember how to diagram a sentence from high school, and, most importantly, I know what an appositive is, but that is about the end of it. I am not even much of a reader. The book must have a lot of pictures to keep my interest. So to actually put something in print for the... the WORLD to see is a bit daunting, no? Actually, no. Not if nobody reads the piece, which, more often than not is the case with online publishing. And even if I do not read much, I DO have a good visual sense and just seeing my words up there in all their pre-formatted splendor was good enough for me, even if I took issue with the designer of the site on a number of unfortunate choices.
But to get back to complexity, my mission here was to re-assemble the lost parenting, the lost basement memorabilia, and interweave it with advancing age by reflecting non-wistfully on paths not taken and non-boastfully on ones that were. It would be an aggregate of denial of the environmental horror going on in my basement with the conjecture of relationships not-quite-formed, with the rationale of the cosmos and the absurdities of government and business. It would be a treatise on How I Spent My Time with the invitation to comment, but not really listen to critique. It would be a reflection on Girls, that topic which I mistakenly thought would diminish with aging. It would, in the language of the day, be a social network, and try to draw out just those elements of complexity from everybody I encountered here. Is that complex enough?
Actually, no. What i found is that I am not complex and neither is my writing. In fact, I strive for simplicity, for compartmentalizing. It is how I cope in a complex world.
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