What the Hell Was I Thinking?
4 September 2016, 1:56 p.m.
42° 26' 41.6" N, 87° 49' 32.5" W
In Halifax, I started blogging again.
Or, to be exact, it looks like I began to compose posts that I never published. I just realized, about an hour ago, that the three long pieces in the Online Drafts folder—the ones that have been sitting there for seven years—were actually written in Halifax, at the end of my journey. Just as I had forgotten about the nightmare in Strasbourg, I had completely forgotten about those two nights in Halifax (and that in-between day of both intellectual and sensual delights). And I had forgotten about my exhilaration: how I felt that my journey had come to a culmination, to its—yes, I actually said this in one of the drafts—to its climax.
In a way, it makes sense, that exhilaration: maybe it was the wild shifts of atmospheric pressure, or maybe it was just being back on my own continent, and certainly it had something to do with the woman I met in the hotel bar, but I felt a huge rush of energy there in Halifax—that place where I had never intended to go, and couldn’t have left if I had wanted to. I thought I had finally figured out something important. I really believed, that at last I knew how to tell the story, a story that was about so much more than me driving from Speyer to Canossa in a minivan—it was about the meaning of things that happened more than a thousand years ago, about the way they mean, about how they mean.
According to those posts, I had found the magical key to the past: I had discovered, you see, that history always happens in the present.
Of course when I write that now, it looks pretentious and pseudo-profound, kind of stupid, really, but at the time, there in that hotel, in that overcrowded way station with its touches of value-added luxury, it must have struck me with the force of a revelation: something that was true, not just for me, not just in April and May of 2009, but for everyone, all the time.
And, well, now that I’ve read those posts, it turns out that I can remember those nights (and that day) pretty clearly, especially the first conversation in the hotel bar. That’s when I met that woman and we bonded over our tangled tales of detours and delays and rerouted flights. When I started telling her about my own personal Way to Canossa, reluctantly during the first drink and then with growing energy, the stream of narrative finally made sense. What is history after all (I heard myself saying) but someone in the present telling a story about the past? With a passion that must have looked to my companion like a 13-year-old boy doing tricks on a skateboard, I began to argue that the telling, the thinking, the understanding—it always happens in someone’s present: the researcher in the archive, the writer at the keyboard, the reader looking up from the book, in a moment of recognition or insight.
But now, seven years later, as I read those excruciatingly pompous unpublished blog posts, it doesn’t seem like a new idea in the least. In fact, it all seems part of a very different narrative—the idea, those posts, even that scene in the bar now seem to me to be elements of a much simpler story. It’s a story that for me, now, has one overriding theme: it’s not the story of an almost-impossible journey, nor of a once-in-a-lifetime event; in fact, it’s nothing much to be proud of.
It is, to put it bluntly, the story of how I managed to run up $103,000 in credit card debt on a two-and-a-half-week trip to Europe in the spring of 2009. Two thousand-fucking-nine, for chrissake, when the economy of the world was collapsing all around me.
Yeah, I suppose it was worth it. Yeah, it was some vacation, an amazing few weeks, I still have to admit that. Yeah, I met some people in person whom I had previously encountered only in dry histories or in overwrought dramatizations. But did I really get to know them? No. Not really. It was more like I went on a timeshare vacation with a dysfunctional family—a family I was more than happy to part ways with... once we had reached our destination.
I want to believe it was worth it—that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing, trying to finish the story, trying to make sense of what happened. But it’s getting harder and harder. Two days ago, when I read through that furious efflorescence of blog posts at the beginning of the journey; and yesterday, as I struggled to reconstruct the details of what must have occurred after I stopped blogging; and today, now that I’ve discovered and read those last deluded posts from Halifax, the ones I must have written while my partner was doing yoga during our breaks from kinky sex, it was hard and it is hard to avoid a single overwhelming reaction:
What the hell was I thinking?
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