"HOW TO QUIT"

don't get me wrong: i'm not necessarily saying that i want to. at any rate, i think i've already missed my chance for meaningfully declaring any resolutions for the new year. but the party doesn't exactly stop exactly on january first, so it's possible, maybe, that i'd actually make my more meaningful resolutions now. but the party never really stops, does it? and one way or another we keep going. so resolved: to make whatever decisions are required of me with each slice of life that i'm served up -- one way or another.

i bought the current issue of n+1. i didn't buy it at the main-chicago newsstand, but that is where i first picked up a print copy and remembered having started to read "the intellectual situation" online (a different party). and i think that the magazine -- although i think that it will be happy as i continue to buy print copies -- would have me quit my fawning devotion to print. so be it. i can acknowledge the criticism. the slice of intellectual life served up by n+1 is almost always so delectably sympathetic. and maybe i should quit my fawning devotion to that...but, like i said, it's probably too late for that for now. so i'll keep going.

in the current issue of n+1 there's an essay by kristin dombek. it's called "how to quit." and that essay couches the author's ideas on her serial relationships with "drunks, drug addicts, sex addicts, compuslive gamblers, and/or people on or recovering from deep, life-threatening benders" within her experience of trying to hold on to bohemian williamsburg (and to one particular holdout building). "if the old building was real, this building is a steam-powered time machine. if the new neighborhood is real, this building is a dream, or a crypt. in other words, all this building makes me want to do is drink and fuck." ... "this building is a question about how you live after a tragic reversal, thrown back into history and wondering what can be recovered by returning to the scene." as for the author's compatriots, the people, "with a dead parent or two, bipolar or otherwise depressed people, musicians, writers, and/or pathological liars," she doesn't know when she meets them. "at some point, a week or two into the friendship or the affair, i find out, but by then i'm already hooked, because the things these people do to ensure they don't have to live in the straight world are wonderful." and the author and these people ride their time machines together.

or maybe it's the other way around, and the essay's picture of gentrification is meant to be its focus, and the author's interpersonal relationships are meant to frame or to highlight or to augur it. inasmuch as either could be the case i'm sympathetic. it's all, anyway, much larger than the specific slice of life. in fact, this particular slice of life turns out to be also about death, about letting things die.

this is one way to quit: wait until the bitter end, when you have done all you can to make the time machine keep working. you have learned its inner systems, improvised workarounds, carted in the water yourself, but it becomes harder to keep it alive than leave it. what they call hitting rock bottom. the final tragic reversal may be slow, boring, and horrible. the time machine has turned into a crypt, but it is not a crypt if you go inside with the body. if you must raise it from the dead again, know the power it has is your own: bend over it like a vampire, fire it up like dr. frankenstein. when you are able to stop, there will be a moment when you have to just walk out of the building. it's not that living will be the opposite of addiction now; there can be more life because you know how to stretch out time, more joy because you have practiced the art of reanimation. you are a professor of transformation; you just need new tools. there is no outside or inside to it, no opposition, no right way to go, just this new way of seeing.

at the head of the preceding paragraph: "it is important to know that there are things that end." when i thought to write this i thought that i was going to take it somewhere else. i was going to backward from that conclusion, quote dombek's description of the double bind of recovery and the addiction of the addict to the discussion of the double bind. then earlier: "in paradise lost, it's satan who thinks the mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heavan. he is, famously, the best character in the movie." then i thought i was going to go back to dombek's description of the ritual of her ministrations to her lovers. i would have given the entire long paragraph. "i do not say no, i do not say this is fucking ridiculous...don't die. stay with me. never leave." then i was going to bring in that sarah kane monologue from crave (to "tell you the truth when i really don't want to"). and the comparison, by nothing more than the juxtaposition of two paragraphs, would have been restrained but poignant. a silent augur. the capricious wild card chimera of love. but i think a different thought in the morning, in front of this much more boring table in this different light. i am resolved to stop here. it's important to know that there are things that end. so i won't go on -- with this -- even if the party does, one way or another, implicit. feet dragging an emboldened face into the new neighborhood. fire it up, dr. frankenstein! and cheers to the tail of the end, which is also the lingering trail of the beginning.