It’s the Time of Year
It’s getting to be that time of year again.
I’ve really been craving a cigarette the past week or two. It always happens this time of year. The air turns cool and crisp, which makes it perfect weather to stand outside and suck long drags of hot, molten tar down deep into my lungs. Of course, I won’t. It seems morally incorrect to increase my chances of cancer again after M.D. Anderson worked so hard to keep me alive, but, oh, I do so want to just sit with strong coffee and smoke cigarette after cigarette, one after another. I don’t know what it is, really, besides the time of year and the change in weather. Perhaps there’s something that’s making me miss a time long since past, before I moved to Houston, before I was married. Another Fall, in another place, when I was another person.
It may surprise my readers to know that I am a bit of a romantic. I suspect that my co-workers would especially be surprised, since I tend to maintain a somewhat cynic mode of conversation in the office. I think, perhaps, most of my friends from church would be surprised, too. There, oddly enough, most people see me as a wise-cracking joker, I think. But, a tired, world-weary, old romantic is what I am most nights, especially in the Fall.
The holidays are approaching quickly. Too quickly, it seems to me sometimes. And, with the holidays come memories. Memories of old dreams that died young. Memories of old betrayal, old pain, that nags at me like a bad knee in damp weather. The holidays are a hard time for me these days. Alone again, after thinking I’d never be alone again. My family is all in another state, two thousand miles away. Even home isn’t home any more, another place that’s changed too much and a time that will never return. This season, which includes my birthday, always reminds me of all the things I regret, all the ways my twisty life has gone in circles no one could predict. Even my old ally, words upon words, fail me, leave me stranded. What words can describe the hollow feeling this season evokes in me? Not sadness, not really true regret, but an emptiness so full that it sucks all feeling out of me like a vacuum.
I’ve been watching an old movie. The Yakuza, starring Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura. Mitchum plays a former service-man who, along with a number of friends, was part of the Occupation after World War II. One of those old friends, played by Brian Kieth, has gotten into trouble and asks Mitchum’s character to help him out. The trouble, of course, involves the yakuza. I think it may have been my first exposure to any sort of yakuza movie. It’s hard to find, but Netflix had it. Maybe this, too, reminds me of all the ways life has surprised me. And, naturally, it’s filled with smoking, which makes me crave that cigarette even more. But, I have to watch it, twice, back to back. It’s as if I’m looking for an answer to my own past in the way the characters deal with theirs. I always find myself stuck in no-win situations with people I care about. Someone to whom I can’t express my deep affection without causing hard feelings with someone else to whom I owe a debt. There’s a line in the movie, one character talking to another about the part played by Ken Takakura. “Yes, he is insufferable at times. Honorable men often are.” I sympathize with that, identify with it. Once, when describing a complicated social situation I found myself in to a friend in Japan, he told me I was “more Japanese than Japanese”, which is quite a compliment, actually. I’ve always admired yakuza films, the Japanese film noir.
And, that’s the thing, maybe. On the inside, my life feels like film noir, but on the outside it plays like a Doris Day comedy. God, not even a Cary Grant comedy. I could take that. Who doesn’t want to be Cary Grant? Even Cary Grant would’ve liked to have been Cary Grant. But, my problem is I’m always trying to be Robert Mitchum or, yes, even Ken Takakura, “the man who never smiles”, except I can’t keep a straight face. It’s hard to be a tough guy if you can’t keep a straight face.
They say every comedian is crying on the inside, and maybe that’s me. Maybe that’s why I’m always joking, to hide the fact that my life seems a little tragic to me. And, yes, if it seems tragic to me, how must it seem to anyone looking at it from the outside? Almost forty and alone. My friends seem to think I’m undatable, or incapable of picking someone appropriate to date. I’m not so sure they’re wrong. If I drank hard anymore, I’d start drinking myself to sleep every night, but even that’s not really a viable option to me anymore, thanks to my doctors. I told someone not too long ago that I’d done all my crying and that’s why I joked so much now. Because it was a choice I’d made between laughing and crying and I’d cried myself dry. So bad jokes are all that’s left. No smokes, no women, maybe a little booze, if it’s the good stuff, but all that’s left really are bad jokes and brooding self-recrimination.
I suppose if I were smart, I’d take all this ennui, this overgrown teen angst just returned from French boarding school, and channel it into a moody mystery novel or a vampire story or something. But, I’m not, so instead, I just blog. And you read. Thanks.
Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"That old law 'an eye for an eye' leaves everybody blind."
--Martin Luther King
