"HOW LIFE WEIRD IS"
SAINTS & INFINITY AT EAUX CLAIRE. . .
— 1 .
I LOST MY PHONE LAST WEEK, —
. . . and instead of getting a new one, I didn’t: I lived the whole week phoneless: it felt absurdly remarkable to suddenly BE in-the-world, all the time, without the relief of a screen (how fucking BORING walking gets without a podcast!), — shucking off repeated allegations of performing phonelessness for my substack,
“Martín felt magically isolated from the cruel reality of the outside world, as happens in the theater during the space of time we are living in the world shown onstage, while outside the painful sharp edges of the everyday universe await, the things that will inevitably strike us with brute force the moment the footlights go out & the spell is broken.”
— making plans & having to rely, seriously, on other people showing up, otherwise they will leave me paddleless, sinking in lost time. . .
. . . and it didn’t start to feel reckless until I had to go away for the weekend, to the Eaux Claire Musical Festival in Wisconsin, to do some readings & a live pod; I went to the library to print out all the shit I needed, to stuff in a prim schoolgirl folder, and I accidentally sat in a seat this woman who looked exactly like a witch had apparently cleaned like a maniac: she stormed over, wagged a vociferous & bruxal finger in my face, and cursed me, while a homeless guy on the other side of the room cackled hysterically.
I was feeling like it meant I was gonna die in Wisconsin.
— 2 .
PHONELESS, SOMETIMES, U DO FEEL SUPERIOR, —
. . . especially when the flight landed safely, & I got to haughtily watch the mouthbreathers surrounding me clickspazz: compulsively checking every available app to lap up every last drip of dopamine. I can sympathize with social media addiction. What I cannot begin to understand : why so many people play those fucking jewel-smash games.
How is there so much utter scorn for performative reading; but no widespread contempt for the people relinquishing chunks of their life to play a slot machine for NO REWARD but a pointless chime?,
“even though we (our consciousness, our feelings, our cruel experience) keep changing down through the years, even though our skin and our wrinkles become proof & testimony to this passage, there is something in us, deep within us, there in very dark regions, clinging tooth & nail to childhood, to the past. . . that seems to resist this tragic process: memory, the mysterious memory of ourselves, of what we are and what we were. . .”
— Sean & I rented a car at the Minneapolis airport; I drove us to Eau Claire, WI. We had time to SPARE. It was a 90 minute drive. Halfway thru, famished, we stopped at A&W. We each got a double Papa Burger.
Sean ordered a coffee and asked for some cream; the bewildered teenager manning the drive thru said, “what. . . ? I guess I can give U a cup of milk on the side. . . ?”
He said, “you know what, let me just have a large Root Beer float.” I said, “now you’re thinking, Conroe, make that two!”
It was a tremendous mistake. We pulled in to the parking lot to eat. But soon, an A&W-banquet induced torpor subsumed us: we fell asleep. When we woke up, it was crunch time. Sean had a panel at 5:00PM.
I drove like a witch hadn’t cursed me. We made it to Eau Claire in the nick of time.
— 3 .
HOW MEDIATED IS UR EXPERIENCE OF REALITY? —
. . . we pulled up to the venue, and I realized I didn’t print out the parking pass; the parking attendant came up to the window of the car; he had tattoos on his face, including a big number 7 on his cheek which we thought auspicious. He asked for our parking pass; I handed him what was functionally a blank piece of paper. He said, “this doesn’t say anything.”
Sean said, “try this one,” and handed him an identical paper. He said, “this doesn’t say anything either.” Sean said, “we’re performing in the festival, we’re late.”
The attendant’s partner, who was wearing a shiesty, came over and said, “let me see some ID.”
7 said, “ahhhhh he’s just joking, do Ur thing, guys.”
They let us thru & immediately started having a pushup competition on the concrete.
The festival was in Carson Park. Which is a complex of athletic fields cut into a forest; the music stages were on the football & baseball fields; but if U walked to the other side of the park, there was a little log village, full of museums, which housed the reading events.
Sean was on a panel, with a few writers, moderated by Amanda Petrusich about the influence of music in their writing. It was in held in the Paul Bunyan museum. The room was packed out. The guy sitting next to me was hunched over playing an anti-brainrot game on his phone.
Sean, who on the drive over extemporized brilliantly on Kodak Black, read a brief part from Fuccboi about SoundCloud rap; then balked, put on a different mask, and wonderfully appeased gathered-whitey praising Adrianne Lenker & Sun Kil Moon. . .
Everybody loved the panel; & the room turned over for the next event: a reading by me, Sean, & Sheila Heti. We were in the literary headlining spot, which unfortunately meant competing with Bon Iver’s set.
They were about 20 people in the room, — scattered. I read from Humpty Dumpty for about 10 minutes; as I read the lines, “stuck his balls on his face” a little girl walked in the room with her mom; her mom said, “cover your ears!” I said, “oh god. . .” everybody laughed; I got sheepish, wrapped it early.
Sean read, to enrapturement, from The Walk Book. But Sheila stole the show.
She read from her essay in Granta “Good Medicine” and she gave me & Sean dialogue parts, and we performed a little play. I read my lines from her boyfriend Luc’s phone. Sheila is a natural comic; Sean & I played our bit parts perfectly; the 20 people in the room were lucky to witness.
— I had been thinking, so much all week, while I was reading On Heroes & Tombs by Ernesto Sabato (an amazing book, an immediate favorite) about what the purpose of my whole artistic project even is. . . in Sheila’s essay, she’s on ketamine, talking to her therapist, and she tells him she’s been obsessed with finding out the “TRUTH ABOUT LIFE” and her therapist tells her, “maybe U just have to find out the truth about Ur own life. . .”
The TRUTH ABT UR OWN LIFE. . . how do U find that?,
“we always understand the persons closest to us when it is too late and just as we are beginning to master this difficult business of living, it is time for us to die, and more important still, those who would’ve benefited most from our applying our wisdom are already dead & buried.”
— 4 .
THAT NIGHT, THE MOON WAS IN COMPLETE SICKO MODE, —
. . . we had eaten dinner in what was the extraordinary triumph of the whole weekend: the VIP zone, where we had rights to free lunch & dinner & unlimited Hamm’s beer; and on the first night, they didn’t have the draconian buffet enforcer, who, the next day, would track me like an elite free safety as I beelined to the steak, meeting me right at the line, cutting me off with a ruefully curt,
“You’ve already had a few plates, why don’t U let someone else eat?”
To be fair to me: I skipped lunch. And I didn’t know there was a one plate rule or I would’ve heaped an everestian first plate. And my second plate only had one piece of chicken due to a kitchen that couldn’t keep up with my voracity.
But to be fair to her, I only had one piece of chicken because on my second plate, I cut a dude in line right before he got to the protein and took the last two pieces of chicken. He looked at me like I had committed a serious crime.
I bashfully put one piece of chicken back, but the damage was done: me & the chicken were dead to him. . .
It turned out, lamentably, it was headliner Dijon’s chicken I stole. . .
— We were sitting in the back row of the stadium bleachers, listening to Bon Dylan in the distance (which, despite how many times Sean said it, I didn’t realize until the next day was Bon Iver covering Bob Dylan songs, I kept going, “what the fuck is this? who the hell is Bon Dylan?”), smoking a spliff.
The moon looked like a gigantic yellow egg. It was looming over the goal post like a Humptian omen. I wanted to take a picture, but I just had to look at it with my eyes. . .
A girl came and sat down in front of us; obviously chat-eager, she kept looking around, until she finally turned, said, “can I have a hit of that?” We said sure. Her name was Clarice; she was from Eau Claire; she was here with her mom, but she needed a break. She was sad,
“that miserable dual being who moves & lives between the earth of the animals and the heaven of his gods, that being who has lost the earthly paradise of his innocence and not yet reached the heavenly paradise of his redemption. That pain-racked, sick-spirited being who will ponder, for the first time, the reason for his existence.”
Her birthday was tomorrow: she felt immensely old: she was turning 25. She was a mechanic. Her boyfriend was going thru chemo; but she was holding it down.
“U ever wanna leave Eau Claire?” I asked her.
“Yeah, one day. Definitely one day.”
She took three deep & focused hits, looked at us, holding the joint, the moon gleaming magnificently behind her, and said,
“Ain’t it crazy how life weird is?”
It was such a brilliant spoonerism, we canonized her immediately: Saint Clarice.
— 5 .
WE WERE FUCKED UP, —
. . . a day’s worth of getting pounded by Hamm’s tall cans & intermittent marijuana was not conducive to driving a rental car back to the hotel at midnight thru dark unfamiliar Wisconsin highways, — even though the Steubenville in me wanted to give it a whirl. . .
Also, nobody could tell us if we could park in the lot overnight. And being towed would’ve been as convenient as a shank to the groin. But, watched over by our own Pallas Athena: festival organizer Adam Voith: we felt like we could do anything.
We grabbed some road cans, got on one of the random buses that were leaving. We didn’t know where it was going, but we figured it would get us closer to the hotel. It was going perfectly, we were on the highway, going the right direction, when suddenly, the bus turned into a random parking lot.
And now we realized this supposed “parking lot” we heard everyone saying the bus was going to was exactly THIS LOT! and not our hotel! Worse news: Sean’s phone was dying: he’d forgotten his charger in the car. He harriedly tried to figure out the general direction of the hotel if we had to walk: 4 miles, vaguely that way: and then his phone died.
We were phoneless. Ur phone shrinks the world so effectively, soon, U become immured to the vastness. The google maps 10-minute easy drive was now an exquisitely perilous trek we weren’t sure we could complete.
I stuck my thumb out and started trying to hitchhike. I saw people drive by literally laughing, like they thought it was a joke, — of course, the Hamm’s in my hand didn’t evince dire straits.
We started walking. Gave it one last chance, back into the parking lot. There were two cars left, idling. Sean went up to the first one: a young lady alone. As soon as she saw Sean creeping up to the driver’s side door, she booked it, burning rubber. Fuck. One more chance.
It was a dude who was alone, steeling himself for a long drive home. One man, alone, seemed propitious for our salvation,
“And thus, in a sense dreaming for everyone, these vulnerable beings contrive to rise above their individual unhappiness and become interpreters and even (suffering) redeemers of the collective destiny.”
He rolled down the window when we approached the car. We explained our situation to slowly fading skepticism. “U guys really performed at the festival?” “Yeah, we’re novelists.”
“Novelists? . . . Ok, get in.”
His name was Ralph. He lived in Illinois, but his friend gave him tickets to the festival this morning. He had a two hour drive back home. His son was in school at the University of Wisconsin. His daughter was 19 but she still lived at home. “She’s special needs,” he said, “but she’s the best. She’s like my best buddy.”
Ralph, the Buddy of the Year, took us right to the door of the hotel and wouldn’t accept a cent of our money. He saved our asses: Saint Ralph!
— 6 .
SATURDAY WAS OUR LIVE POD, —
. . . I won’t share every detail of the rest of that night: the mad-dash to the Kwik Trip for cigarettes, our sleeping arrangements: sharing a bed so enormous that dutifully tucked into our respective slots like soldiers, I couldn’t even see Sean,
or about how during the day on Saturday, I did these weird one-on-one readings where I read Humpty Dumpty to individual people, so intimately; or about how that night, in the ultimate headliner spot, Dijon was absolutely transcendent,
I won’t waste time; I journaled about every detail I could remember for 2 hours this morning before I sat down to write this stack, and still, already, so much is lost; but, —
and this came up in our pod, which we did outside, on the porch of a one room school-house, and because the reach of the speakers was immense, we might’ve had as many as 100 people listening at any one time,
and the first 15 minutes, in the heat, with flies on us as if we were grazing cattle, we were both fixated on Sean’s watch as if it was truly the mausoleum of all hope & desire, how the fuck are we gonna do this for an hour, but we found the rhythm, Sheila ran up the stairs & grabbed a mic to ask a question, started a wonderful precedent,
& we were talking about new archetypes, if Odysseus is an archetype, what are the archetypes, — me & Sean specifically, they wanted to know, — we’re making in literature now;
and all I could think about afterwards was what the whole point of an archetype even is, and now it occurs to me, — literature is about capturing the feeling of infinity, an archetype places infinity into a sensible model. . . —
because we only get glimpses: like Ralph or Clarice, who will go off, away from me FOREVER, to their infinitely complex, sufferant & joyous lives, — but how do we capture everything they are in a moment?
and this is why phones are so antithetical to literature, maybe I’m being trite, but the phone is a mask, and the purpose of a mask is NOT to hide, it’s to make Urself INTELLIGIBLE. . .
but literature is about capturing the ineffability of experience, making it feel EFFABLE, like the ridiculous moon that night, watching us like an EYE, gesturing constantly, marvelously, to its unseen otherside. . . the ungraspable darkness. . .
like what the older lady said when she went up to Sean later that night, “I listened to U guys talk, boy, I couldn’t understand JACK SHIT! but I loved it!” and real literature doesn’t SOLVE anything, it won’t FIX U, but it makes the infinite mystery of our suffering more comfortable,
turns it into something like joy;
— or like Sheila & Luc, who me & Sean played cornhole against after our podcast, playing to 21, one point for getting it on the board, three for getting it in the hole, we were neck-and-neck until the end, when me & Sean started to make a run, we hit 21, it was 21-19, and we gave Sheila a chance to win the game, all she had to do was make it, she hadn’t made it all game;
but of course, she swished right in, for the win, but Luc missed the moment, because some teenagers behind him hit him with a beanbag, so he picked the beanbag up, turned around, launched it like Randy Johnson at the back of one of the teenagers, hitting him simultaneously as Sheila’s shot went in, as we cheered & all the doofy teenager’s friends laughed boisterously, —
and then Sheila, with victor’s aplomb, bought us all popsicles; and what is it to sit in the grass & eat a popsicle, with the memory of the cornhole game fading, with the memory becoming a story of a memory, trying to capture the infinity of all the lives we come across before everything vanishes and there is nothing left. . .
— what is that, but literature ?
COMMENT IF U THINK THEY SHOULDA GAVE ME MORE FOOD!
abolish the buffet police
Genuinely jealous u saw bon dylan (and I saw the actual Bob Dylan last week)