You Are Here.
Slower on my feet, but stronger, I suppose. A few of those pounds, at least, got added to my lats and chest. Started going to the gym with Agent Coulson that first year in San Francisco, and just never stopped.
It’s hard, trying to be in my body. But staying out of my head is urgent. Everyday, I’m frantically reaching for podcasts, old episodes of TV shows I’ve rewatched a dozen times, any noise to sooth the gnawing in my brain.
Often, I get melancholy on the walk along the lake to WeWork downtown. I don’t really know why. It bothers me, trying to figure out why sadness and anger keep bubbling up.
The light reflects off the surface of Lake Merritt, gulls and pelicans gather on the shore, Oaklanders of all ages run past. It’s about a 35-minute walk to the office space I pay to use, pay to get out of the house, pay to force myself to get dressed.
We’ve lost a lot. In my first entry in this blog after 10 years, I trembled at the shadows that have closed in. Afraid the darkness cloaks monsters closer than anyone understood.
My latest hot take is that every legacy sequel Hollywood makes is a 9/11 movie. Force Awakens, Tron Legacy, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Star Trek: Picard, Blade Runner 2049, The Matrix Resurrections… They all find our heroes – in the time since the big victory that seemingly ended the franchise in the 80s or 90s – crushed by a resurgence of evil …or just the march of time. Cruel entropy.
Jaded, bitter, and wearing the defeat of the last decades in their faces, our heroes once again refuse the call. Reluctantly, they wipe the dust off their [lightsabers/comm badges/fedoras and whip/black latex trench coats], and creakily rouse themselves to beat back entropy once again.
Entropy always wins. Time never ends. Things fall apart.
I grew up in an age of eschatology. Whether it was Francis Fukuyama or Jesus set to return on his white horse, the End of History felt so near in the Nineties. We had done it. Forrest Gump, Field of Dreams, American Beauty are all stories, in some way or another, of an empire at rest. I was a Star Trek fan, and the 90s saw the beige-colored Federation sleepily spreading enlightenment across the galaxy.
I don’t need to name the monsters for you, that have besieged the [Federation/Galactic Republic/Matrix/Game Grid/baseball diamond cut from the corn/Annette Benning’s sofa] from the not-so-far reaches of space. You don’t want me to. Climate apocalypse… the hateful maw of social media… viral pandemic... MAGA rage… I’ll stop. I’ll stop.
Lol, I can’t make this up. As I sit typing this, a headline popped up on my newsfeed: Millennials, Gen Z, Should Thank Boomers, Stop Complaining About Economy. That’s real. That just happened!
We’re not choosing misery because it’s fashionable, guys. Count me, along with my peers, unconvinced. Progress is marching backwards. Entropy is winning. Entropy had a great year.
“Are you sure this isn’t about turning forty?” my therapist asks, on our semiannual phone call.
Is it in my mind? In my bones? Is that where I feel entropy’s tidal ebb sharpest, rather than out there in the world? Here’s another movie reference for you: The Never Ending Story. We grew up with Atreyu fighting back the Emptiness. The Nothing.
The lesson of middle age seems to be that it is possible to lose, a lot, and keep living. For things to fall apart and yet never end.
It feels absurd, in such a universe, to try and gather things together. To get married, have babies, as many of my friends are, build careers, try to make the world better.
But the universe is a strange place. So much weirder than Star Trek or Tron or Forrest Gump imagine. Yes, the sun, which has given us light and life for four billion years, is slowly dying. Dimming and growing colder. Yes, things are literally falling apart. (As in, all the stuff in the universe is rushing away, receding into the unknowable dark at 160,000 miles per hour). But…
But in the middle of the darkness, cold and quiet eons ago… life appeared. Things came together? Clumps of grease, essentially, coiled together in roiling seas of primordial muck, and here we are. Nina Simone and Johann Sebastian Bach, blue jeans and bombs, the Sistine Chapel and Angkor Wat, empanadas and sweet potato pie. Kerstin and me, planning a wedding party to celebrate our lives, our families, coming together beneath a canopy of eucalyptus and lifting fog.
I started writing this post under the header “You Are Here,” and I ended up back at Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Here I am, in love, in the cold, on this rock, carried away from the rest of the universe at 160,000 miles per hour.
