Greetings From Sunny Chicago

[lawnrrd]

I arrived at O'Hare this evening, then went right to Wrigley Field for the Cubs game. The Cubs won, and I acted pleased because it seemed the polite thing to do.

After the game, I went to my hotel, the W Chicago City Center and fell in love with the place. It's beautiful and luxurious and someone else is paying for it, which I like. The room's a little small, and at heart it's really just a hotel room, but it's really beautiful in the cold, stark, super-hip—but yet still comfortable—way that I'm a sucker for.

As I got here, plugged in my laptop, and started catching up, I got hit by a complicated bunch of emotions that I'm still trying to untangle. It was a combination of my reaction to the hotel, which I found cool in several senses of the word, plus some thoughts about this entry, combined with the ongoing existential crisis.

I don't know how to make sense of it in words. It's something like putting pieces together: falling in love with a hotel because of its coldness; needing emotional distance from people; getting excited mostly over the immediate sensual pleasures of food, drink, and hot sex, or over the intellectual pleasure of solving some kind of puzzle; and feeling sometimes that I want to lose myself in work and in enjoyment of its rewards. And I wonder sometimes if the result isn't that I'll die broke, bitter, and alone, muttering to myself in a small studio in Inwood.

The things that I find myself wanting, that I long for, are the things people say are empty, meaningless, insubstantial. I've tried to want the other things, or to pretend to myself and others that I wanted them, but it doesn't work. Family, to me, means a twenty-five pound sandbag chained to my neck. I am realizing that my trouble with emotional depth is exactly why I don't make deep, lasting friendships.

But I also get lonely sometimes, too.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I don't know where I'm going to be going with this in the future. I just tonight needed to say it.

Comments

[bratbitch.livejournal.com]

Does anyone know anything about the future with any certainty?

Are you sure that it is *all* family which you regard as a useless weight, or simply the forms that you have experienced this far? Sometimes deep, lasting emotional bonds can send you flying, while others drown you.

The things that I find myself wanting, that I long for, are the things people say are empty, meaningless, insubstantial. I've tried to want the other things, or to pretend to myself and others that I wanted them, but it doesn't work.

Best, most honest advice. Fuck what someone else tells you that you should want. Be true to yourself.

[lawnrrd]

In a way it is all family, in that it's not a reaction to all family members, but to the idea of my family as such. While there are relatives who aren't really "useless weight," any particular interaction has a certain presumed-guilty-until-proven-innocent quality to it.

Consider my brother, the relative I am closest to. Generally he's a good guy and not dead weight. But he's also suing the rest of our family (there's a family business involved), and every time we talk, he gleefully talks about how he's sticking it to the other people involved. It's tiresome. His wife is a piece of work: she's the kind who keeps a scorecard to make sure you've kept up with the forms of your familial obligations to her and my brother, regardless of the substance. She's also very passive-aggressive about it.

And, yes, I ought to be true to myself, and I'm getting better about doing it. It's just that after thirty-some years of not being true to myself, it's hard to break that habit. It's also that I've made a certain kind of life based on that, and changing it is also hard.

[tacologic.livejournal.com]

::sings::

Go Cubs go! Go Cubs go! Hey Chicago, whaddaya say, Cubs are gonna win today!

[starkyld.livejournal.com]

and i think that it's very good that you did say it. we'll talk more whenever you have a break from your whirlwind travel schedule.