What luck looks like . . .

Maybe my re-introduction to cannabis began this, though that wouldn’t account for the countless times, when sober, my mind drifted back to the films. I considered that I might be able to teach one, and indeed I was making references to these movies in my class alongside literature that explored the same human themes: death, love, the furious insistence of memory, loneliness.

I began where, I suppose, an American film consumer is supposed to: 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Actually, it wasn’t my reintroduction to cannabis.

It was a red haired boy in my Intro to Creative Writing, a freshman boy with a Viking’s name who told me his new favorite word was “monolithic.” Later that day, scrolling the news, I saw an article about the “Utah Monolith” — the structure that appeared then disappeared in the Utah desert.

“Just like the one in 2001,” a man in the article said. Another cultural reference, begotten by this film, that I wasn’t fully grasping. I kind of knew about H.A.L. The steely smooth voiced robot who rebuffs his human colleague, “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.” Suddenly, the AI has its own agenda that stands in conflict with the agenda of its creators.

THEME! I tell my AP students in our forty minute classes. THEME ALERT! I just give them the themes. In the Old World, when our classes were in-person, eighty-five minutes long, I would wait until they found the theme themselves, nudge them toward the theme, the motif, with a series of small questions . . . We don’t have time for that now:

THEME! I say to my students and to myself while watching 2001.

I think of Shelley’s Frankenstein. You know, the monster gets away from his creator, wants to be, wants to have purpose and friends . . . You know this story even if you’ve never read the book. (But if you’ve never read the book, you might be under the false impression that the monster itself is named “Frankenstein” . . . )

So I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey in 2020, as the pandemic clicked up toward its peak like a car on a rollercoaster that long ago should have been put out of commission. The click-click-click to the top is part of the ride, too. This is not merely a mechanism. The click-click-click builds the fear (or anticipation, depending on your approach to rollercoasters — never liked ’em, myself) that makes the relief of falling all the sweeter.

Maybe the pandemic will be like that. So horrifying. So oppressive. So painfully slow. And then suddenly, maybe, we’ll drop.

I digress.

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey in three parts, over the course of three nights, on my laptop in bed in our new home in Tucson. Sometimes I had taken one of my “bedtime” gummies; sometimes not. Seemed to make little difference. Maybe I’m too old and cynical to believe what I used to about cannabis: that it makes me/us see things we can’t with the unaltered mind.

I don’t believe that. I believe the mind under the influence of cannabis is not a better or enhanced mind, but the same mind with a few switches clicked off — cannabis turns off the switches that jam the signal from Planet Creativity. Your creative thoughts (whether artistic or philosophical) are no “better” when you’re high than they are when you’re sober: the only difference is that when you’re high, you’re more likely to entertain the freer creative thoughts. Sometimes, as adults, in states of meditation, of relaxation, we are able to do this, too.

The ape part of 2001 stayed the longest with me. That and the furniture. But the ape part (maybe it’s that I’m partial to apes, which I am) lingered. I thought of the sun. I thought of how frightened the apes were when the sun went down. I thought of the book I’m currently teaching, Mrs. Dalloway, and Clarissa’s encounter with the Shakespeare lines “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun . . .” I thought about dependence. I thought about parents and children, educators and students. I thought about “seeing” — with the human eye, the all-knowing eye, the eye that we’ve created in technology that looks unnervingly back at us . . .

Maybe Kubrick and Clarke were thinking of these, too.

People tell me I should read the book that came out after the film.

I don’t think I want to do this. I think I am happy with the uncertainty of the meaning.

If I don’t read the book, I feel the film will become like a poem I can return to and take something new each time.

I am so tired, this year of all, of prescriptions.

That which is given unto me.

That which is prescribed.

After I finished 2001, I watched the 1972 Russian film, Solaris. I loved this. After viewing 2001, which leaves so much open for interpretation, which puts so much work on the viewer, Solaris was just what I needed: it gave just enough. I felt I was able to solidly grasp at least one narrative thread without being patronized or beat about the head and shoulders with a club of meaning. Again, another sci-fi film with a major theme of memory and the agonizing insistence, aching ubiquity of memory. And how memory defines us . . .

Same with Moon, which I viewed in one gulp last night before bed. Memory. How memory shapes identity. How memory makes us and how memory destroys us.

I am drawn to these films now because I feel I live more often in memory. We all do. No one wants to be here, on this planet, on this continent right now.

No one. Do you?

Setting up my kitchen in our new home yesterday, I collapsed into sobbing. I’ve moved to Tucson without much fanfare — there could be no “goodbye” parties, no hugs, no “one last trip to x,y,z bar or restaurant.” My wife and I simply drove away. And Tucson, while full of things to do, like most American cities is shuttered. (Just the other day, I bemoaned the fact that I was now living in Tucson, but couldn’t get a margarita . . .) On Thanksgiving, I Zoomed with family in Chicago. We were still in Flagstaff. I sat on a mattress — all that was left of our bed — amid boxes and bare walls. Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday. Not this year.

What the fuck is a holiday this year? Buying shit? I’m not buying anything nor do I want anyone to buy me anything. Fuck this lie that spending money will fill the slobbering void of all our losses. If the “holidays” are anything this year, let them be a day or two where the grief is dulled for a moment.

Our new home, an adobe built in the 40s, with red concrete floors, is a space station.

I recognize the objects that float around me, but not the structure.

Every object is a memory. Even my tattered, marked-up copy of Mrs. Dalloway on the card table that is functioning as my “desk” in what I’m slowly making my writing studio, is a memory. A memory of classrooms and the sound of adolescents and teens. The smell of them, too, sometimes. A memory of a past that is never coming back — or at least, never as it was.

I told my wife the other night that I feel such grief over the loss of “the way my job was.” She told me I should feel lucky that I ever felt this way about a “job.” I don’t know if I agree. This year — what with the cancer diagnosis, the inability to see my sister or my parents, the inability to touch my friends — I don’t know that I needed to feel the pain of losing a type of “work” that I loved so profoundly. I don’t feel so lucky.

Because it’s not like when I think about my grandmother, who died a little over a year ago, before the pandemic. When I think about my grandmother, I think that I was lucky — lucky she was my grandmother, lucky that she lived so long and so well, lucky that I was in my forties and still had a grandmother I could carry on a conversation with, could laugh with. And when she was gone, of natural causes, I felt grief, but the grief was dampened by the feeling of being lucky to have known her.

The loss of my classroom? Well. If we really break it down, it’s not the fault of natural causes so much the fault of human arrogance, greed, self-interest. Long before COVID, I told my students I hated the expression “You do you.” What it implies is that no one else matters — you are the center of your own universe, and I am the center of my own universe, but this is simply not true. We are caught together in a web. Every move you make sends a shiver down my thread . . . We are connected whether we like it or not. Has this virus shown us nothing if not that?

And the fault? The fault of our loss, as Americans? Humans. (Principally white, male.) Humans who are so wealthy they don’t have to worry about anything during this pandemic. They don’t need fucking Instacart. They don’t need to “run to Target for a sec.” They don’t need to call their insurance companies and fight and fight over whether or not they can have that drug to treat their cancer. They don’t have to worry about a long hospital stay — shit, they get treated for COVID when they’re still asymptomatic because they have access to a test EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

Do you? I know I don’t. Shit, I don’t even know where to get a test in my new city.

COVID, depending on how you wear your tinfoil hat, may be “natural causes” (I think it probably is — don’t put much stock in conspiracy theories of any stripe), but the unwillingness of those with the means to help to actually help in any fucking way? THAT is why we are where we are right now. Because Donald fucking Trump? He gets tested for COVID every day. He lives in a mansion where he could have surgery — and not “hacksaw-and-sewing-needles” surgery, but better surgery than you and I have probably ever had. He is not going to die of COVID. He’s going to get treated before he sneezes for the first time (and he did). Elon Musk? You think that fucker needs to worry? He, too, is probably getting tested every day. He goes through those things like paper towels. Worse. You think he’s worried? You think he cares?

You do you, Elon Musk.

What a convenient little expression. “You do you.” How lovely. How charitable. How humane.

Well, here we are.

I’m writing from a card table in Tucson. I still have stage iv cancer. There still is no cure for that. I’m still teaching at the same school. Everything is still on the internet. My wife and I worry about what will happen to us, and specifically me, if she loses her job (and therefore our health insurance). My health has been fragile these last two months (better every day, but not 100%) and I worry, increasingly, about what would happen to me if I contracted COVID. I don’t get a test every day. I’ve never had a test.

You do you.

That’s what got us here, you know? That’s why the grief.

Don’t wanna wear a mask?

You do you!

Don’t wanna stay out of your favorite bar?

You do you!

Wanna go to church?

You do you!

School?

You do you!

Wanna fly on an airplane so these CEOs don’t have to give up one of their nine yachts?

You do you!

And here we are. And yesterday, I was sobbing in the kitchen while I put a box of dryer sheets in the pantry. I should be excited that I have a pantry — and I am. I am blessed in so many ways others aren’t, and I am thankful. Sarah and I have it pretty good right now.

It’s just the fucking loneliness. The isolation. The sense that you’re just floating in space. The sense that your sense of self is slipping. And then you’re setting up your new kitchen, which you used to really enjoy doing, and a potholder made by your grandmother who died in the Olden Days, when her children could be with her until her last breath, and when I could fly (and I did) on a whim to Iowa, hug my cousins and aunts and uncles and parents, cry together . . .

Now? In October, when I and my wife thought it was entirely possible that I was actually dying (we did not advertise this), my own mother had to think and think carefully about whether or not to fly to Arizona to see me. I felt like I was dying, but I didn’t want her to get COVID. So I said, I’m fine. I’m fine.

I wanted my mother.

Lots of people this year have actually died wanting mothers or friends or lovers or spouses who could not come. Instead they get doctors and nurses (who are basically strangers) in masks holding iPads. Fuck.

I’m not pushing daisies yet.

I watch space movies in bed.

I have enough food to eat.

I guess, in 2020, in America, this is what luck looks like.