Back on the Road

I spent much of the plane ride staring at a mustache in the window seat. (I’m an aisle man, man.) It glinted and bristled. Clutching my dormant cell phone, I fell in and out of strange sleep, only to awaken, again and again, with my eyes magnetically held on that salt-and-peppery, yet deeply unappetizing, cluster of hairs … behind which the vast misty Earth unfolded, 35,000 feet away, blue and gold tendrils of a dawning, atmospheric Monday. Good God, man, I thought, what sort of person wears a mustache like that? It was an unholy visitation, the price of some bad bargain. He did not seem to be evil, otherwise; but his mustache spoke hirsute malice.

The evening before, I had consummated a solemn rite. With passionate resolve, I determined, in a two hour period, to straighten all in my life that was unstraightened, and then to fall into saintly slumber. Best laid plans. The straightening process left a tremendous rubble in its wake. Eventually the arteries of my apartment, always narrow, became harrowing; they required bypass surgeries that they would not get. Climbing my way between Piles of Music Past and Piles of Music Yet to Come, between J Crew catalogs and long-lost paystubs, mired in expired to-do lists, I was attempting to incarnate in my suitcase some sort of condensed, intense microcosm of my next trip’s state of mind, an ur-wardrobe which would land in Detroit without incident and set the stage for .. who knows? I ransacked my worldly possessions for these perfect items. It appeared as though I was burgling my own apartment. After a time, only the suitcase was clean, pristine, contained, zippable; while every other square inch of the space descended into chaos. Somewhere in there, I discovered something that I should have known for a long long time.

I was trying to pack up my phone when I realized it.

My cell phone charger and my laptop charger had slowly, over the last months, become inseparable. They were locked below my kitchen table, I noticed, in a desperate embrace, intertwined black and white ivy, surging with 120 volts. I made a desultory stab at separating them. But they were whorled, gnarled, a spectacular, Escher-esque accumulation of spirals receding into what passes for infinity in the Greystone Hotel. Due to the hazards of living in my proximity, they were both sprinkled liberally with coffee grounds, and the caffeinated residue seemed only to bring them closer, to unite them in squalor. A hushed conference over my kitchen table ensued: me, my chargers. How could I break asunder what God had brought together? In chaos I had found love. I decided to do the right thing. We had a Commitment Ceremony. Some Bach was played. I read them some short passages from Emerson about Love and Friendship, and some bleak poems of Montale (for perspective, realism, pragmatism) and then, after a moment of silence, they were united in perpetuity. I cried a few bitter tears. Chargers grow up, they’re around for a while, but eventually, if you love them, you have to let them go…

Even the man at the security line the next day seemed to acknowledge the ineffable power of love. He pulled out my computer charger to run through the machine again. He only wanted the one, but the other clung desperately, following its mate out of the bag and onto the belt. He tugged briefly, looked at them, looked at me, he held the seeming mass of spaghetti out at arm’s length. I am sure, at that point, he saw the pain on my face, and, sighing, he ran them through the machine together. Even in X-ray vision their passion was magnificent, full-blooded, corporeal.

While all this emotional stuff was taking place, I was often on the phone with friend L. Other desperate situations had presented themselves. For instance, another friend had texted the following:

Con lovin’d knuc gluawt

What could it possibly mean? L and I debated at length. Its author was unavailable for comment. “Lovin” was clearly the only comprehensible segment, but perhaps it was a red herring? Anyway the apostrophe-d somewhat confused the grammatical sense. (Meanwhile: love was in the air, my newlyweds were happily consummating in the privacy of my bag what they had been too shy to express out in the open.) What was “gluawt”? I felt this was the key. But our various theories failed to pan out…

This text seemed the final, devastating enigma of the last two months, which I had spent more or less at home, in an attempt to have a “routine.” Many peculiar things had happened—odd changes and unexpected events—but there were frequent visits from the unwanted familiar. What did I discover in this routine but a self-limiting circle? I had spent a spectacular amount of time with my piano, and now we eyed each other warily. We too had our commitment ceremony, each day. Most importantly: yet another significant period of my life had elapsed in which the list of things I had intended to do bore little resemblance to the things actually done. My relationship with the organized agenda was still contentious, seemed fraught, perhaps, with “glauwt.” I asked L in desperation, throwing socks and receipts into scattered piles, “What’s to become of us, what are we to do with our lives?”

“Whatever it is,” she said wryly, “we’re already doing it.”