Resolutions to Keep

I’m up at close to 3 a.m., again. It’s December 31^st, and I’ve got a resolution to keep: I want to fly out of California and meet the woman of my dreams. I haven't accomplished either goal yet, there’s twenty-one hours to go, and this time I’m not holding back. I’m getting on an early morning plane bound for New York City. I’ve got enough cash to buy a one-way ticket, take a cab to Manhattan from JFK airport, eat, drink myself stupid, ride the subway to Times Square, find her, my soulmate, there, and kiss her as the ball drops.

I get out of bed. My septuagenarian mother, Irene, is soundly asleep in her room downstairs. Three previous attempts at a New York escapade have ended with me spilling my guts to Irene and me then calling the online travel agency to ask for airline and hotel refunds. When asked why I won’t be travelling, I give “mental health concern” as the reason. The travel agents are always understanding and apologetic. “We’re sorry to hear that, mister Gaspers,” they say, invariably in accented English, “please consider us for your travel needs whenever your health allows.” 

I was reading Morris James’ poetry last night—brimming with death and promise, the promise of a welcome death, and while I get dressed, I remember a sequence in the dream that woke me at 2:57: an old, Benjamin Buttonish black baby maliciously shat all over my right arm. Disgusted, I tried to clean the shit off with a left hand full of coins.   

I guess I’m nearing another mental crisis. Who surreptitiously leaves home in Orange County, California, before dawn intent on spending New Year’s Eve in the big apple, the city that never sleeps and expecting to find the last love of his life at midnight? I want my therapist to help me interpret my dream, so I call her. 

It’s now 3:15 in the morning. The first flights to New York leave what was formerly called John Wayne Airport in the city of Santa Ana, at about 7:00 a.m. John Wayne isn’t politically correct enough for many left-leaning, woke Californians. As I dial and hear the repeated monotone of the line ringing, I wonder if Black Lives Matter will ever try to have the statue of The Duke that greets travelers at the airport removed, or if they will deface the statue when efforts to eradicate this morsel of white history fails. My musing is interrupted by my therapist answering her phone.

Groggily, she says, “Foley, it’s not daylight yet. Are you alright?”

“I had a dream, Hannah,” I say.

“Foley, if this isn’t an emergency, it can wait until one of our regularly scheduled meetings.”

“It might be an emergency.”

“Okay, what’s going on?”

“I dreamt an old, black baby shat on my arm. I tried to clean it with coins. What does it mean?”

“What do you think it means?” It’s a minimal form of therapeutic support, but sometimes this question is all I need from Hannah to get my interpretive gears churning.

“Everyone knows money can’t clean shit. According to Freudians, money is shit, right? That’s why my brother tore in half the one-hundred bill he received from my mother on Christmas. He says it was not intentional, but it was his subliminal way of saying, ‘I don’t want this crap, why can’t you give me a meaningful gift?’”

Hannah says, “Yes, we discussed that Christmas event, and money is, more often than not, dirty figuratively and literally, but shit can also signify a gift. What associations do you make between the feces and a present?”   

“Maybe the feces on the right arm represents the old black baby giving me carte blanche to act on behalf of righteousness, right handedness signifying action and propriety in contrast to the passivity and impropriety of left-handedness—sinistra being the Italian word for ‘left’ and clearly etymologically related to the English ‘sinister.’” 

“That explains why the coins were in your left hand,” says Hannah. “For someone as concerned as you are with selling yourself short, or selling out by trying to make a middle-class living as a writer and poet, using money to wash away the chance to become a man of action is a sinister betrayal of principles.”

Poets I admire such as Rimbaud, Ginsberg, and Morris were anything but sellouts. They were proficient at making eloquent art from broken hearts, but one of the last things they were concerned with was being commercial successes, or disconnecting their lives from their artistic endeavors. They were as much artists of affect, or pursuers of turbulent emotional experiences, as they were craftsmen of words. Without those passionate lived experiences, their written phrases would have amounted to shit. Escaping to New York this morning falls in line with this particular artistic ethos, to live life as if its next moment is not a given. 

My reflections on the role of affect in art is interrupted by my therapist on the other end of the line, “Now that I’ve helped you with your dream, I want to know what your emergency is, Foley.”

“I’m thinking of doing something rash, of fulfilling my New Year’s resolutions at the last minute,” I say.

“You think you can leave California and meet the woman of your dreams now?” she takes a fraction of a second to look at the time on her phone, “At twenty minutes past three A.M. on the morning before New Year’s?” 

“That’s exactly what I intend to do,” I reply.

“You know better than to act on impulse, Foley,” she says. “Experience says your impulsive actions have given you thrills, but they’ve gotten you into difficult situations: trouble with the police, with your family, with your girlfriend. Can you even buy an airline ticket last minute? Do you have a place to stay? Do you have clothing appropriate for winter in New York? They’re having terrible weather on the East Coast at the moment.” 

Although I’ve made no accommodations for lodging and haven’t purchased a ticket yet, I have clothing that’ll keep me warm enough until I figure out where to stay later on tonight. Hearing Hannah try to coax me into a more reasonable state of mind begins to chisel away at my resolve to go to the airport, so I thank her and tell her, “I have to go now, it was nice knowing you,” then disconnect from the call.

I turn off my phone, grab my backpack and my car key, descend the stairs quietly so as not to awaken my mother from what has hopefully been a night of restful sleep, unlike mine was, and leave the house. It’s raining and when I turn on the radio, a song by Morris James is, auspiciously enough, playing:

I hear life’s traffic seethe like the ocean

I hear life’s traffic seethe like the ocean

I want a change of scene but I cannot get in motion

I want a change of scene but I cannot get in motion

I press the button to the ignition, put the car in drive and begin my trek to the airport with New York City as my final destination. New York City, where I hope to find whatever poetic destiny my soul has been impelling me toward. A destiny that, if Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence is right, I’ve lived countless times before, a destiny that will be repeated, with all its weal and woe, ad infinitum.  I desperately need a change of scenery and I'm now in irreversible motion.