I wrote this story years ago and posted it elsewhere. Upon reading MsCherylTerra's "Bookworm" I was reminded of myself and that time in my life when I was a young bookworm, shy, twice burned and totally lacking in self confidence. So I'm posting it here now and dedicating it to MsCherylTerra for reminding me of a beautiful woman I once knew.
Most of us have times when nothing goes right. During those times we couldn't hook up or find romance to save our lives. There aren't even decent excuses or good explanations for it. I was in a blue funk like that once. It lasted way longer than necessary.
*****
Linda, a cautionary and not particularly edifying tale.
When I was in my early thirties I had a quiet contemplative time of sober reflection, re-assessment and re-education. It was miserable. I was not yet thirty five and had two failed marriages behind me. As radical as my thinking might be the radical part didn't extend to marriage. Marriage was supposed to be forever and you were supposed to like each other. Mine didn't pan out that way. I was not yet forty and I had two divorces under my belt. I did place the blame squarely on my spouses, but I was the one who chose them and I was feeling pretty uncomfortable with what that said about my intelligence.
I was alone in a big old two story house with my two dogs and in a poor economy I was chronically short of money. That first winter I closed off all but three rooms to save heating that barn- the kitchen, bedroom and a big formal dining room were where I hunkered down to hibernate through the dark months of winter. I burned candles a lot, but not for lighting and not for brooding while listening to the somber music of the acoustically lovelorn. I had begun meditating again, and practicing yoga. A dimly lit room helped to clear my mind and suppress distractions- I wasn't doing transcendental or candle meditation, I was just trying to turn down the volume on the harsh light of that somewhat incandescent room of cheap panelling and crummy fiberboard ceiling tiles.
I lived in a small midwestern town and I worked by day in a brickyard so clearly these were activities I kept to myself. I had enough fucking problems without alerting people to the idea that I might have an intellectual or an emotional life. Some things just aren't done in certain locales, and I was in one of those locales.
I started re-reading the beats...Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg- and I studied the writers they referenced too, like Spengler, Spinoza and Kant. I read Baudelaire and Verlaine and Rimbaud and I felt better educated...but not exactly better. There's a reason beatnik women dressed in drab black and brown and grey and ironed their long black hair- they were fucking depressed from reading the stuff written by the men they were fucking. There's light that shines through Kerouac, especially in little books like "Tristessa" and "Visions of Gerard". Those two are his best books but not his most acclaimed. What makes them stand out is the love he kept in himself for those two characters, and that he was so eloquent in sharing it with the reader. But Kerouac is also morose and there is a grieving that runs as a constant theme through all his writing. Ginsberg too is giving voice to a lament, and Burroughs of course is one sardonically blunt son-of-a-bitch. He called it like he saw it and he saw a riotous decay into chaos wherever he looked.
So these were the perfect literary companions for me at that time, bound to help me wallow in my isolation and alienation. I had enough sense of self not to style myself as a brooding poet or writer though. Low as I might feel, I couldn't indulge my self-absorption that much.
