October 9, 2015

"All things considered, being shot is not as bad as I always thought it might be. As long as you can keep the fear from your mind. I guess you could say that about most anything in life. It's not so bad as long as you can keep the fear from your mind."

This bit of dime store wisdom comes to us courtesy of Special Agent Dale Cooper, protagonist of the classic David Lynch/Mark Frost TV series, Twin Peaks. I am more excited than the next guy at the prospect of its return on Showtime in 2017, presuming that the next guy is a man for whom the original mystery held only moderate interest and who didn't bother with the remainder of the ill-fated season two and who never caught the critically derided theatrical movie prequel, Fire Walk With Me. No, I watched all of those installments in the serial, and in fact, used the first story arc (from the pilot episode to the revelation of Laura Palmer's murderer) several times in my classroom as a high school English teacher.

The quote above derives from the immediate aftermath of Cooper's shooting by a mysterious assailant (who, apropos of exactly nothing, turned out to be Josie Packard, owner of Twin Peaks's major employer, the Packard sawmill, and secret lover of town sheriff, Harry S. Truman) in a plot element that echoed another pop culture moment (to be specific, "Who shot J.R.?") just as did the presence of the (Fugitive's) One-Armed Man in this ultimately self-referential piece of television art. Cooper's moment came to me this morning as I sat at the breakfast table and was suddenly seized by the chill awareness that I was not writing this week, that despite my best efforts in the form of rough drafts for two separate entries, I had come up empty and was looking at the prospect of being a week behind in creating the requisite backlog of entries before I actually began to publish these Notes.

But it would perhaps be more honest to say that what I felt was a more general sense of having squandered my prospects. At that moment it became clear to me that it didn't matter what I wrote or if I wrote for that matter, that in fact, nothing mattered because we were all going to die anyway, only some sooner than others. And buoyed by that cheery thought, I found myself with Dale Cooper, lying on the floor of the Great Northern Hotel, philosophizing about the need to keep the fear from my mind. Unlike Cooper, though, I had not been shot, and was suffering — if my condition can be dignified with such a word — from a more whiny, existential malaise made no easier to take by its self-awareness as such. The worst thing, and I mean the worst, is the feeling that I am violating the first commandment of the personal essay, "Thou Shalt Not Bore The Reader," and that no amount of winking or nodding in the direction of self-knowledge can help with that.

Yep, this is it: self-indulgent boomer memoir, anyone? I imagine I could follow Frost's dictum at this point,"No way out, but through," which would likely involve the recognition that these Notes are a different beast altogether than My Parkinson's Diary had been, more discursive & in their broader focus more prone to false starts and the Occasional Lull, but that doesn't help too awful much when I feel as though the only proper thing to do is to cry "Uncle!" then walk away with the hope of fighting another day. As such, I suppose that may be my way of keeping the fear from my mind.