The Rake Magazine

I'll be honest with you, I don't know what a dream is anymore. I got a lot of shit kicked out of me.

Have you somehow made your peace with this world? I'm curious: without getting all religious or flaky on me, can you tell me how you did that?

Once upon a time, lord, wasn't I sweet? A more mild-mannered, easy-going guy you couldn't find. We all know, though, that things change, and often enough we've no good idea why, or how. Not exactly, anyway. The goodness bleeds out of you. The world takes your trust through a series of thefts both large and small. One day you wake up and you no longer recognize your face in the mirror. The muttering voice in your head is as unfamiliar as the face.

Dreams are tough things, cruel schoolchildren, cheap balloons, faded flowers, broke down hot rods, blind dogs, etc. Time carves them all down to dim wishes and fragments of memory.

In my more chipper moments I like to imagine that all those old childhood dreams are still out there somewhere, drifting in the gloaming of another waning summer, waiting for their dead mothers to call them home. It's sort of lovely to think so.

Meanwhile, my daughter is a sad, pretty girl who is well on her way to becoming a woman every bit as miserable as her mother. At the age of fifteen she has no broader desire than to be a cheerleader --a cheerleader, period. The poor girl is so dim that she actually seems to believe that being a cheerleader is a realistic occupation for an adult in America.

I've tried to explain to her that cheerleading is an extracurricular activity for a very few, mostly unfortunate, high school and college students, and that paying jobs in the field are pretty much non-existent. She counters this argument with the claim that she sees cheerleaders on television all the time, performing in a clearly professional capacity.

At fifteen years of age she is apparently already calculating enough to recognize that professional cheerleading would offer her the best opportunity to meet, date, and eventually marry a professional athlete.

The fact that I don't feel this represents a very healthy or realistic goal for any young woman doesn't seem to carry much weight with her.

My own life, I'm willing to admit, hasn't exactly been a blockbuster success, and I'm also quite clearly no paragon of happiness. All the same, I try to explain to the poor girl --my daughter, I have to constantly remind myself-- how such dreams usually play out.

This pathetic little town, I tell her, is full of old cheerleaders. On any given Sunday the church pews are crowded with unhappy women who had variations of the same ridiculous dream my daughter harbors. Look around, I say to her. There are no professional athletes here, so chances are good you'll settle for a star on the high school football team, who will become in very short order --after he's knocked you up-- a miserable fuck in hog kill at the plant, or maybe an insurance salesman if he's really ambitious. He'll gain weight faster than you can pump out the infants, and drink like a fish, and there'll always be some other unhappy woman who remembers that he was once a local football hero and is still willing to sleep with him while you stay home and take care of the kids and watch television.

You'll see, I say. Just ask your mother.

I learned early that I'd never be the king of anything.

I can for damn sure live with that the short time

I have left. Nobody needs to tell me what I am, and

I don't have the time of day for a notion so foolish

as who. Leave that horseshit to the pansies.

I know only that I was born a small man and never had

much of an appetite, but I got by, even if I didn't do

diddly with what I had and never amounted to a hill of beans.

I guess you could say my old man was something of a

prophet on that count. All the same, I have no

use for a preacher trying to make something tidy of

my time in this disgraceful place. I got no use for

monkey business, period. But since you asked what I need,

I'll tell you: Give me five minutes of peace and quiet

and remember whatever the hell you want. And when time

washes its hands of me just let anybody who might be curious

know that I'm gone. Tell them that long ago I came to the

crossroads and chose the wrong damn fork. Happens all

the time. Tell them I never wanted much except to sleep

when I was tired. And tell them I was a goddamn liar.

Tell them I was the hungriest man who ever lived.

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels. We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

--Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

It's all just history now, that still incomprehensible day six years ago, history buried under history, with more awful history heaped on top of it. It gets buried deeper all the time. Rubble and ruin the central metaphor of the years since.

How, you wonder, could such a day possibly be eclipsed by something so inconsequential as the passing of time? And yet it has been eclipsed, reduced now to token, knee-jerk political justification for virtually any new outrage, and reduced as well to fodder for entertainment --sensationalized films and television movies and books. A real, jarring leviathan of a memory collectively transformed into something sordid, a lurid, almost mythological spectacle from recent history, something that happened to other people and continues to be used to explain away terrible things that continue to be visited upon other other people in elsewheres near and far.

All over the world the horrors of that day live on in brutal abstract and concrete concussion, a cruel cycle of visitations and revisitations and recrimination. But not, for the most part, here.

Americans are accomplished at nothing so much as rolling with the punches that are thrown at other people, at slowing down briefly to gawk and tsk-tsk at the wreckage before moving on. We move swiftly out from under things and right back under our own things.

Other people: the great shadow abstraction and peripheral nag of modern psychology.

We all, certainly, can find reasons to feel ashamed of ourselves. All sorts of reasons. There is really no end to our shame, and no end in sight.