The End of the Tour
What it was, was a 28-year-old person who had really exhausted a couple of other ways to live, had really taken them to their conclusion. Which for me was a pink room with a drain in the center of the floor, which is where they put me for an entire day when they thought that I was gonna kill myself. Where I got nothin on. I got someone observing me through a slot in the wall. And when that happens to you, you become tremendously, just unprecedentedly willing to examine some other alternatives for how to live.
I was just thinking, um... it wasn't a chemical imbalance and it wasn't drugs and alcohol. I think, um... It was much more that I had lived an incredibly American life. This idea that if I could just achieve X and Y and Z, that everything would be okay. There is a thing in the book about how when somebody leaps from a burning skyscraper, it's not they're not afraid of falling anymore. It's that the alternative is so awful . And so then you're invited to consider what could be so awful that leaping to your death would seem like an escape from it. I don't know if you have any experience with this kind of thing. But it's worse than any kind of physical injury. It may be in the old days what was known as a spiritual crisis... Feeling as though every axiom in your life turned out to be false and there was actually nothing.And that you were nothing. And that it's all a delusion and you're so much better than everybody cause you can see how this is just a delusion, and you're so much worse because you can't fucking function. It's really horrible . I don't think we have ever change. I'm sure that I still have those same parts of me. Guess I'm trying really hard to find a way not to let them drive.
How lonely and desperate.
Uh, dog stuff. Throw toys. Chew toys. Crap stains on carpet. Uh, fireplace. American flag. Shark doll on bookcase. Alanis poster. Uh, soda cans. Lots of them. There's Pepsi. There's Mountain Dew. Um, looks like a frat. A kind of bookish frat. Uh, there's a Botticelli calendar…Birth of Venus. Uh, wooden chess set. Postcard of Updike. Um, brain comparison…Male, Female, dog. Cartoon. In the bathroom, there's a Barney towel used as a curtain. There's a tennis ball. There's a dental floss on top of books. There's a photo college of his family, the kind kids put in their dorm rooms. His sister is kind of pretty. She looks like a female version of him. There is, uh, stuff everywhere. Clothes everywhere. Sneakers on the floor. Clothes draped over stuff. Uh, blue toilet-seat cover, looks like a rug. Postcards. Clintons, um,baboons. A saint Ignatius quote. "Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve you as you deserve. To give and not to count the cost. To toil and not to seek for rest. To labor and not to ask for reward...save that of knowing that I do your will."
Listing and recording wholeheartedly with seriousness and care as if he created a special bond with him.
When I think of this trip, I see David and me in the front seat of his car. We are both so young. He wants something better than he has. I want precisely what he has already. Neither of us knows where our lives are going to go. It smells like chewing tobacco, soda and smoke. And the conversation is the best one I ever had. David thought book existed to stop you from feeling lonely. If I could, I'd say to David that living those days with him reminded me of what life is like, instead of being a relief from it. And I'd tell him it made me feel much less alone.
If only he danced so joyfully that he could escape from everything he has experienced.
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