What else did you want to talk about?
“While we discussed my SPC class, you mean?”
Yes.
“After the second day of the class, Wednesday, I made the hourlong drive to San Marcos and met with a childhood friend I’d not seen in nearly 30 years.”
What was that like?
“Wonderful. Truly wonderful. I learned much about life and memory that night. It was reminiscent of a comical line in a Philip Roth novel about life knowing where it’s going every step of the way.”
What does that mean?
“That my buddy and I had learned a certain meritocracy, as bright kids in middle school, that shifted from underneath our generation. There he was with what I imagine are hundreds of hours of unrecorded music he’s written, and there I was with a dozen unpublished novels. We’ve had somewhat unrequited love affairs with our artforms. And are no worse for it.”
Go on.
“We haven’t succeeded, necessarily, the way we were supposed to. But we’ve both found our ways into forms of contentment. Lives rich with experience. What we took out of being smart kids in school was that life would work out for us some way or another. There’s an element of privilege there, of course, we’re from a fairly affluent Massachusetts suburb and attended outstanding public schools, but I think we’ve both, in different ways, spent some years sabotaging that privilege for the hell of it.”
What do mean?
“Probably a predecessor of imposter syndrome. When you go out into the world at a young age and things seem easier for you than others you wonder what might happen if everyone started from the same baseline. You suspect you’d’ve found a way, one way or the other, and you probably sabotage with a net, but you try to make things harder by distrusting things that are easy. It’s a form of character-building, which is a luxury, sure, but it’s still a thing.”
What did you learn about memory?
“That it’s a network or a lattice. Those metaphors neurology has given us recently are valid. All these nodes connected to other nodes. My buddy would say a name, and that would illuminate a memory, which would bring another name, which would illuminate another memory, and so forth. The mind excites at these connections. There’s a lowlevel euphoria, there, if you allow for it. An actual pleasure. You feel actual pleasure as your mind makes these connections.”
What did you learn about life?
“Our schoolteachers weren’t qualified to predict their students’ life paths. Good as they were at correcting papers and teaching times tables, they were wrong about what kids would become – with an actually stunning frequency.”
What showed you that?
“How wrong my buddy and I were about what we thought others would become. We were eight- or nine-year-olds, so most of what we believed was learned in school by adapting to what our teachers opined of our classmates. Average kids became millionaires. Gifted kids became helpdesk managers. Straight-A students became alcoholics. Artistic kids became mediocrities. A charismatic kid died alone in a weird and miserable way.”
What else?
“I wonder about my resistance to looking back. It’s longheld. It precedes by decades my fixation on being present. Wednesday was the first time I’ve sat across from a highschool classmate in 27 years. That seems excessive.”
What is wrong with excess?
“I’m not sure anything. Certainly nothing in the creative process. But I’m outside that now. I am priding myself on being void of compulsion, which –”
As you write an unplanned 1,000 words in blog posts this evening?
(Laughing) “Whatever, pal.”