The Further Adventures of Lady Drain

Everyone is susceptible to biases and prejudices

One of the strangest things about life is the fact that it ends.

For some, it ends unexpectedly. For some, accidentally. For some, long and slow and unpleasant. But it ends for everyone. It ends for the guy who has seen Paris and Athens and Lisbon and Tokyo and it ends for the guy who never left Long Island.

Of those two types, we can not assume which one had the richer life. The person who stood in line for three hours at the Louvre to then spend fifteen seconds looking at the Mona Lisa might just as well pass into eternity having felt far less than the person who never left their hometown but spent three months with their grandmother as she suffered and cried through hospice care.

We all grow up with this fallacy that travelling is where people find the richness in life. Then, if we’re lucky, little by little, we find that it exists in the workaday world much more honestly than, say for instance, a balcony in Santorini.

This is not to say that a balcony in Santorini isn’t beautiful or transformative. It certainly is. I just happen to think that our most important moments usually happen right there at home, cooking and eating with our loved ones, racking our brains to figure out how to make the bills on time and falling asleep together watching Disney movies.

When we truly love and are finally loved back with the same intensity, we can see the universe in that person’s eyes. Especially when we bring them coffee in bed. Those moments, for me at least, have been far more consequential than going through the security line at JFK.

Writing novels, I have found, is one of the most wonderful ways to discover what really lives inside of us. This practice, when done properly, requires the discipline to wake up every day and get moving (whether we have any ideas or not) and then months and, sometimes years, turning a halfway decent idea into something that will make others feel and think.

Introspection becomes a much more fluid process in this activity. Writers tend to put their characters through situations that are borne from memories and past traumas. As we build these events and watch them play out in our stories, much of the time we are allowing ourselves to relive certain events the way we wished we would’ve the first time they happened to us. Sort of like when we finally think of that great comeback ten minutes after some ninny says something insensitive and shitty to us.

Most people, and I include myself here, get too caught up in the mire of trying to process our hurt feelings to fashion a great insult the way Little Joe used to draw his six shooter on Bonanza. That’s okay, though. Writing is that one exercise where we can make up for those shortcomings.

The last article I wrote drew the ire of my exes high school friend. This person, since I met them, has always assumed that their opinion held a unique importance that most other people’s opinions simply don’t possess. I work with a guy like this, too. In fact, there is no shortage of people who labor under this misconception. But it simply is not true.

Everyone is susceptible to biases and prejudices. I know this because when I think about my relationship with my girl’s mother, I sometimes can not believe how different each of us views the way things went down. And I am sure she feels just as resolute about her perception as I feel about my own.

The one major difference is that I have finally found the person who loves me the way I have always fantasized I’d be loved. A teammate, a mirror, a lover and a friend who finds nothing strange about helping to even re-parent me the way I should’ve been parented a long time ago.

She has told me, on occasion, that I, too, have managed to address her hurts from childhood and, without realizing it, have offered her the safety and security to be herself that she’s longed for all her life.

It is here, at this desk, on Sunday mornings where I have the opportunity to slow down, to write about it, to realize it and appreciate it.

And I can honestly say that I understand more about life in these moments than I ever did on a water taxi in Venice.

Although, if you get the opportunity to go to Venice, I’d jump on it.

It is quite magnificent.