These Days Are Strange

Four months since my last entry. It’s strange to read my last posting only to find that I’ve drifted a million miles away from that author. When in truth, I calculated it, and it’s really only about 53,500.

A few minutes ago, I was cleaning off my desk at home when I came across something. It was a copy of Mark Spragg’s “An Unfinished Life.” I had forgotten about the book, buried deep beneath other books.

You have to understand, I keep all my books. People don’t get why I can’t borrow books, and only a few comprehend my need to possess them. Believing that association is everything, I think I read mostly because books are time capsules. So much of what you experience during a time in your life when you are reading a certain book gets tied in to those pages. I once heard that Cameron Crowe makes a CD once a month with a mix of songs he was listening to during those weeks, so that when he wanted to revisit any point in his past, he only had to pull out the CD from that month. It’s not an entirely novel idea, but brilliant nonetheless.

Books are the same. Hardbacks even more so, I’ve found, as was my copy of “An Unfinished Life.” My pops had given it to me a few months before I left to California. He said he liked it, and that I should read it.

I remember taking the book from him. The cover was interesting; one antler loosely tied with thin wire to another antler, over a worn aquamarine backdrop. I casually opened the book to find massive words filling the pages. It was a large print version, where a handful of sentences could actually fill a page.

“What the hell is this?” I asked him.

My pops explained to me that he discovered the large print version, and that he liked it since it was easier to read.

My heart fucking broke.

Pops had always been a tremendously young-at-heart guy, plus he looked it. No one could believe he was in his mid-sixties. But sitting there holding that book, it dawned on me that he was aging. Matter of fact, he’d been aging all my life.

I started reading the book, but I would read only a page at a time. As I explained to a few of my friends, the book represented my father, and that I was afraid to finish it because he had given it to me and its life was the clearest representation of his life. And just like the book would reach an end, so would he.

Some friends will remember me telling them this at a time when my father was vibrant and healthy and adventurous, with a new child in his life.

A few months ago I put down the book, having read only half. Then soon after, my father’s heart quietly stopped.

This morning, it’s hard to believe, I was above the clouds. I was above the clouds with my hand out in the air, reaching for them. It wasn’t a dream. They were around me, still and billowing and majestic. I was in a tiny helicopter in Central America gazing down at volcanoes. It was incredible seeing the steam rise. It was strange reaching my arm out the window and taking in air ten thousand feet above sea level. But I couldn’t help but look for my pops.

I do that a lot now. I try to find him whenever I’m not too busy with work.

Now I’m in my apartment in Los Angeles, and the sun is still out and the weather is still perfect.

These days are strange.

And Nicholson Baker is perverse. He is perverse and brilliant and wrote a bestseller called “Vox,” a novel that consisted entirely of a single phone sex conversation. That’s how a few of you may have heard of him.

I remember reading “Vox” while walking back and forth to my car when I worked at PBS in Virginia. It was my first year with the company and the parking lot was a good distance from the building. I remember what the air felt like during those hundred and some pages. I remember the confusion I had in my failing relationship. I remember how my hair felt and how uncomfortably hot my pants would get as I walked, even in the cool temperature.

Just a few weeks ago I was telling a friend about another one of his books. It was called “Fermata” and it was about a guy who could stop time. Cheeky premise, but the mind of Baker turned it into a masterpiece. The protagonist makes a profound decision not to stop time to help people, because if he is compelled to help one person, he would have to help more. But there were too many people; letting time resume would only harm them. Therein lies the grand paradox. If he was to protect people, then he should never let time move at all. So instead, he uses his ability in stopping time to remove women’s clothes.

I guess “The Unfinished Life” was my attempt at stopping time. It was my attempt to protect my father from harm; a shot at trying to control his mortality. Foolish, you may figure. But though it didn’t work out exactly as I would have hoped, I’ve discovered something wonderful.

In the pages of that book, I can find my pops. In fact, every book that I’d read before my pops died contains him in it, and now I’m glad as hell that I'd read a shit load of them.

So I don’t mean to evoke sympathy by saying that I search for my pops everywhere I go and in most things that I do. I don’t mind so much looking for him all over the place, because I find him everywhere. And god, it’s beautiful out there. If you just look.

Sometimes you have so many things you want to share that you get afraid to let any of it out, because you’re worried it won’t stop. And you can’t have that because you need it to stop, so you can do things like sleep and eat and pay rent and bathe. No one will want to share anything with you if you smell, so you need to bathe. But when will you bathe if you never stop?