What’s it going to be then, eh?
I used to make lists compulsively. I then made them obsessively, then occasionally, then infrequently. Now not so much at all.
I followed an impulse (often the thing to do) and the other day made a list of New York City bars I’ve been to. This list included not only the favorite Manhattan bars, but outerborough bars as well (included those in Queens, where I’ve now lived longer than I did in Manhattan. And more spaciously.)
This list was satisfying in several ways. I was proud of the list itself – three columns on landscape-held 8.5″ x 11″, folded in half once along the vertical axis of symmetry. The members of the list itself were numerous, I was up to about 75 or so before I had to pause to get on a subway so I could go to a concert (another list) and have a beer before going to another bar, already on the list.
75 is not a large number of bars, there are hundreds or more in New York, and I’ve experienced but a few. To me, a stranded islander, this list is a resume, a flashback, a connect-the-dots image of my memories of pounding the gridlines of New York. I was happy to note that with the exception of a pub crawl or three – which are glorious in their own right – this list was comprised without self-consciousness, which I’m suddenly realizing is my central problem — does the fear-induced paralysis cause the self-consciousness, or does the constant self-examination induce the shame that brings about the embarrassment from which stems the idea that thought is better than action?
This list was made with friends. Each name I scribbled down in mechanical pencil stirred a mixed drink of nostalgia, whiskey, ice and forced metaphor, and those letters formed a keyword, a heading under which rested all this other sensory information – dulled by drink – of my friends and their friends, and me, and stories and jukebox songs and the infrequent but daunted blackout – two on Second Avenue, one on Seventh. That I can remember.
I haven’t been pissing my life away nearly as much I thought I was. Or, I hadn’t been pissing it away. These reflective thoughts are those of a much older man, or at least a man who has somehow, in some sad way evolved past those iterations, or the world has turned and left me hearing echoes and catching snapshots of a time when life was in its dawning and everything was still possible. Just two years hence the infinite quantum probability of my life has started collapsing at an increasing rate. For better or worse, the future I imagine I see is clearer and clearer but since it’s not the one I want, I’m going to have to change my mind about some of these things.
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