Giving Up (3 page)

real
friends, the people who have, like me, devoted themselves to some open-ended, laudable, and, in most cases, artistic goal, and who, unlike me, in almost every instance have enjoyed some measure of success (although for some this is only moderate success, whereas others have achieved extremely immoderate success), we sometimes talk about the lives of our friends who
don't
live for the sake of their work but instead live for the weekend, or vacation, or their next big purchase, or simply for the health and contentment of their families – or at least this is what we imagine they live for. We talk about their lives and compare them to our own and the tone of our conversation vacillates between condescension and envy, respect and contempt, confusion and disdain, affection and apathy. It's impossible for us to make up our minds on what we think it means to live a life without any animating goal or
purpose
, so as soon as one of us says, ‘I wish that I could forget about my work and just kick back and have a good time the way they do,' someone else will say, ‘But they seem really unhappy to me. They're always talking about their fucking car or their house or their kids as if they don't know what else to say to people, which is what happens when all you do is relax all day.' Or if someone says, ‘I just can't imagine what it would be like to face down every fucking day knowing that they're never going to change, just one day after the other without anything to really hold them together. You know what I mean?' then someone will say something along the lines of, ‘I know what you mean, but I don't think it's like that for them. I think that they like their job and they like their wife or husband or whatever, and their kids or their pets, and they live in a good neighbourhood and they have some close friends that they like to hang out with and I don't think it's anymore complicated than that. I don't think they see their life as just one damn thing after another, to them it's just all about being as comfortable and safe as possible and that is what holds everything together for them.' One of us may try to argue by saying something like, ‘Yeah, but what if you're not comfortable? Then it must feel like everything you do is pointless?' but it's such a lame comeback that it's easy to defend against, all you have to do is point out that ‘This isn't really any different from what we do. Some are able to pull it off, but there's loads of us out there who are miserable. For whatever reason we aren't able to succeed and it's always the same result, we end badly. And it's the same thing with them, if they can pull it off then they're happy, but if things don't go their way then they're sad and bitter and all that crap. It doesn't matter whether you devote your life to your work or just devote your life to having a good time, if things don't go your way then you're going to wish you had done things differently. The only difference between us and them is that when it works out for them they're happy, but even when it works out for us most of us are still miserable. All the joy in the world will never make us happy.' But since this particular friend of mine, the one who makes this argument, is the only one in our little group who has enjoyed the sort of success that the rest of us literally dream about, it's hard for us to listen to what he says without thinking he's being disingenuous, and that he is only making this argument because he has been so successful that he makes a big show of not valuing success at all, and attributing the good fortune of others to luck, rather than skill, in order to trivialize his own accomplishments, which of course only makes things worse. So, in an attempt to divert our attention away from the now-awkward fixation we all have on our friend's so-called success and our lack thereof, one of us will say something like, ‘For me, it's not about being happy or sad or super-successful or super-depressed. You can't slice things up like that. Like, I'm a pretty miserable guy, but I can say without a doubt that I'm the happiest miserable fuck out there. Wouldn't you agree that I'm the happiest miserable guy you've ever met? You can't really say for certain that some people somehow pull it off and then live happily ever after, or that they don't pull it off so the rest of their days are a living hell. To me, what it's about is being there, you know what I mean? Like, to me, I don't care whether I pull it off or not, I just like doing it.' And it's at this point in the discussion that I'll speak up and say, ‘Exactly. And that's the problem with these regular people, they are always just killing time. When they're at work they're killing time. Before they go on vacation they kill time, and even when they're on vacation they're killing time. It's like those prisoners in movies that count down the days, scratch them on the wall or X out the day on a calendar. It's like they're living their lives the way someone lives in prison. The present doesn't matter. Only what comes next matters,' I say, unsure whether I actually believe what I'm saying. Because if I stop and consider how I live my life, and think about how I spend my days, it should be immediately obvious that when I say that the problem with people is that they aren't ‘living in the present,' I am actually talking about myself. I am the greatest time-killer of them all. Every waking moment of my life is murdered, by me. I strangle the life out of time. I poison it. I smother time. I beat time to a misshapen and bloody pulp. I plot against time, and then carry out my plot with ruthless cunning. In fact, whenever I am killing time I am simultaneously plotting against it. I take up a position and wait patiently for the right moment and then I make my move. Instead of cherishing each day of my life and getting the most out of every waking moment, which is what I had intended for myself, I have systematically done away with my time. I have tried to wipe it out completely. Initially I couldn't understand why I was so compelled to kill all my time, but it suddenly came to me while I was watching a family eat dinner at one of the countless restaurants that I go to when I tell Mary that I need to go out and do something related to my life's work. If you tallied up all the hours I've spent on these so-called breaks, I'd be willing to bet that at least half have been spent at fast food restaurants – I'm not proud of this, and I don't really want to think about why I find these places so comforting, even though they are ultimately very depressing places as well. Essentially, at some point during my time-killing session in the basement, I convince myself that I might actually be able to get some work done if I went out and ate whatever I wanted. I conclude that if I indulge my perverse appetite for fast food then I'll be so satisfied that there will be nothing left to preoccupy my thoughts, since one of the reasons I find it difficult to ever get down to any serious work is because I'm always distracted by thoughts of what I would rather be doing, namely eating fast food. So it was on one of these occasions that I had just sat down to enjoy my fast food when a family took the table next to me. I could tell right away that this was going to be a noisy family, that they weren't going to just quietly go about their dinner, and I was annoyed that they'd chosen the table next to me when there were plenty of empty ones on the other side of the restaurant. It was obvious that their kids had been poorly brought up. I could see it in their frantic, unblinking faces. And it was just as obvious that the parents had relinquished all but the most basic responsibility and affection for these little kids, and that short of causing physical damage to the tables and/or chairs or injuring one of the patrons in the restaurant, they weren't going to try to control them. As the family sat down at the table next to me the boys were already in tears. From what I could make out they were upset because they didn't want to eat the dinner that their parents had purchased for them. It seemed that despite the parents' unquestionable lack of interest in their children's well-being, they hadn't succumbed to absolute depravity, because even though those almost feral young boys insisted that they didn't want burgers for dinner and wanted ice cream instead, their parents refused to oblige them. And when they went from crying to the first stages of throwing a tantrum, their mom said that if they didn't stop acting like a bunch of babies and eat their goddamn food that there wouldn't be any ice cream for dessert. Without a word of protest, the boys started to eat their food, but they did it quickly and joylessly. I sat there with my own food growing colder on the tray as I watched these two kids joylessly consume food that I considered to be delicious, even if it was in many ways revolting, just so they could get to the food that they really wanted to be eating, which didn't appeal to me at all. (I don't have much of a sweet tooth.) The reason that I went to that particular fast food restaurant was because I liked to eat the burgers they served. You could say that my goal for my break was to eat burgers at that restaurant. The boys wanted ice cream, not burgers. Ice cream was their goal. So when they were forced to eat burgers in order to get ice cream they bolted the burgers into their mouths and chewed and swallowed, more or less racing through their meal, killing it basically. It occurred to me that this is how I approached my life's work in the basement. I was just like those greedy boys in the restaurant – instead of savouring the time I spent in the basement I approached each night of work with the same resentment as they did when they choked down their burgers. My goal was to finish my life's work, not to spend my life working on my life's work. In fact, I saw the time I had to spend in the basement as an obstacle to successfully completing my life's work, which, of course, doesn't make any sense at all. Every time I make the trip down into the basement, I always try to think of an alternative that might save me from having to work, something that is equally integral to my goal, but that will keep me upstairs for the night. I was thrilled whenever some bureaucratic task came along – whether it was filling out a form or placing a phone call – and I treated these bureaucratic chores as though they were as important as the work I was doing in the basement, while I treated the basement work as if it were an annoying and time-wasting bureaucratic task. The amount of care and effort that I put into filling out a more or less insignificant form, or the level of thought and consideration that would go into even the most prosaic phone call, was much much greater than what I was willing to commit when it came to the basement work. And this is for me perhaps the most shameful of the many shameful secrets I keep from Mary. She repeatedly insists that she doesn't mind how much time I spend down in the basement working away on something that simply doesn't exist for her. She insists that it makes no difference to her whether I succeed or fail, and if it weren't for the fact that she was finding it increasingly difficult to be the primary breadwinner and housekeeper in our apartment (my real job didn't pay well) while I wasted my time doing something that – from her perspective – I didn't even appear to enjoy, then she would have
no problem
with whatever I wanted to do with my
free time
. ‘What I want to know,' she often says, as a preamble to a question that to me is entirely irrelevant, ‘is whether you even like doing what you're doing?' And even though I think that whether I enjoy the basement work is beside the point, I can't help but feel ashamed when I tell her that I do enjoy my life's work, because the truth is that I don't, which is why I look forward to taking a break, because not only do I finally allow myself something that I really want, but I also allow myself to stop doing something that I really don't want to be doing. Tonight, when it was finally time for me to take my break, I found myself paralyzed with indecision. Once my break was over I was going to have to return to the basement and resume my work, and since I had vowed to myself that I wouldn't waste any more time reviewing/ruining the work that I had already accomplished and would start in on new work, I was particularly anxious that I would spend my break doing something especially enjoyable and satisfying. But the pressure to choose an activity that could meet these requirements made it impossible to decide on anything at all. Mary and I still hadn't made up over our fight after she got home from work, so when I came up from the basement and saw the glow from the computer, I walked past without saying anything to her, and since she didn't say anything to me I left without telling her where I was going, and I found myself wandering the streets in a state of aimless despair. ‘Not only am I wasting my time trying to achieve something that is simply not within me to achieve,' I said to myself, ‘but I even waste the time I set aside without any other goal than to enjoy myself.' I live in what can only be described as a
lively neighbourhood
, and even though it wasn't very late and the weather was mild – the ideal weather for an evening stroll – the streets surrounding my home were surprisingly deserted. Even though literally thousands of people live in my neighbourhood, not one of them was out for a stroll, or an errand, or even just to stand on their front step or patio or balcony and stare at the clear night sky and enjoy what I considered to be unseasonably warm weather. I felt as though the neighbourhood had evacuated and that I was the only person left because I'd been too busy at my life's work to notice this mass flight. This may be why, when I saw a man standing on the corner just ahead of me, I didn't turn around or cross the street to avoid him, which is what I normally would have done. Instead, when he turned to see me coming and raised a hand in greeting, I raised my hand in response and headed directly for him. Under any other circumstances, I would've been overcome with dread at the prospect of encountering a stranger, not out of fear for my safety but because, in my experience, the only reason a stranger ever wants to introduce himself is because they want something from you, and since I had no desire to give away what little time and money I had, I shouldn't even have acknowledged him. It was a waste of time for the both of us. Our encounter would surely end in disappointment, but I was in a desperate state, and at the sight of this guy on the corner I decided to ignore all my prejudices against strangers and to go see what he wanted. I was immediately impressed by his good looks. It's altogether rare that a stranger who approaches someone on the street is anything other than decidedly unattractive, at the very least, and usually kind of scary. I'll admit that the stranger's good looks temporarily confused me. Even as he was calling out to me in a hoarse and strained voice and coming towards me at a near sprint, obviously worried that I might drop eye contact and revert to the blank pedestrian stare, I was too absorbed in scrutinizing his remarkable features to notice just how fucked up this guy actually was, but by the time we were facing each other and he asked me if I could do him a