Yesterday was my birthday. Ian made shrimp and grits, my all-time favorite brunch, with the culinary aplomb of someone who grew up eating it, rather than the enigmatic gift of someone who cobbled together recipes from Southern Living and a couple other reliable online sources mixed with his own Caribbean who-knows-what into the most wonderful incarnation of the dish I’ve yet eaten. How he does it, I will never understand. When I ask him to explain it, he gets the sly smile of a 19th-century magician and says something amusing, entirely unhelpful, or both.
Anyway, it was a fine day, though we didn’t “do” much as the kids define “doing.” I’ve underestimated the amount of decompression time I would need in my sudden shift from a hectic inhumane schedule to a reasonable one. Very long story short, I was over-scheduled at work from the moment I got here and to rectify the mistake, I’ve been, essentially, given the gift of time for my birthday: I’m not to return to work until October 24th.
Turns out, though? It’s not that much time. I’ve had a multitude of breakdowns, some ridiculous and some objectively necessary, over the piece I’m supposed to be working on for Advanced Fiction Workshop. I’ve decided every other hour that art doesn’t matter and art from trauma really doesn’t matter and it’s all too hard to be worth anything and who cares and I don’t care etc. Figures that the first essay of a new decade would be filled with adolescent complaints. Ironically, when I was a teenage writer I believed, in my Wildean way, that little mattered more than what art we could create out of our experiences.
I’ve been revisiting The Picture of Dorian Gray, my favorite book of all time, via the brilliant audio performance by the incomparable Simon Vance. It’s come to my decades-late attention that Dorian’s determination to detonate himself via pleasure and attention and erotic saturation and opium and opulence is entirely due to his own trauma: his mother was poor, his father was rich, their marriage was a scandal, his mother died early, and his grandfather — how did I not catch this before now — was abusive.
Stay young and remake your youth, over and over again. Of course he would sell his soul for that. Sibyl Vane and her incorruptible earnestness, her dedication to a life beyond artifice? Of course he would despise her for that. Plunging into various religions just to get as tripped out as possible in as many ways as he could? That tracks too.
A half-yellow leaf blew onto my desk through my office window and I’m wearing a sweatshirt and so, it is fall. I’ve always joked that the reason why I chose to be born on October 6th rather than the late-December birth I was scheduled for is because I wanted my first experience of existence to be that of autumn.
I don’t regret my choice.