Hear the audiobook chapter free on YouTube: Night Vision
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I don’t know that he can explain the reason he goes out every night. He says “I need to work” when asked about watching a movie together or going to New York City for Thanksgiving. I guess he’s working a lot. I wish it were on the programming job he’s trying to create. At the moment, he’s asleep on the red chair in his bomber jacket and military boots. His hands are on the keyboard, so, perhaps this counts as working.
He’s mentioned molly again. Oh boy. Chemicals are not my family’s strong point. He’s playing around with drugs again. His bottle of antidepressants remains full on his bedside table in the bedroom he never uses. Yesterday, I had an unusual company meeting at 6:30 am. He was asleep on the more structured black recliner when I left. I was back for a few hours before I had to return for my shift. By the time I left he’d moved to the red chair. No computer.
“You can crash here all you want, buy you don’t live here anymore.”
– The Moth, Manchester Orchestra
What is he seeking when he leaves the house at 9 pm, just before I get home? The house is still lit up. His AC unit is purring in the garage. Shower still steamy and wet towels on the floor. I did call the other set of parents, got a “I had back surgery yesterday, I’ll call you back later.” Never called back. Par for their course. And so it goes. They both have their own health problems and a newly remodeled house that sounds like a nightmare project that will never end. The husband fiddling with the details until three different architects quit. I wonder how long the pool will take to finish. I’ll never see it, but my kids tell me.
Alone with the complexities. Okay. She got to be a single parent by design, I’m doing it now out of respect and the indifference of them both. Ah, family struggles.
I understand the chemicals and physical mechanics of staying up overnight. The cool calm of dead of night. I wouldn’t want to be hanging around a coffee shop, but that’s not my jam. He haunts an old area of town where he had a girlfriend with an apartment. She got tired of his bullshit. He haunted her neighborhood late at night. Not stalking, just walking around. All night. In semi-military gear. Today, it’s from REI. He’s an upper-middle-class militant with no mili in him. I can’t get him to watch a Vietnam movie with me. He carries loaded weapons while being afraid of the damage they would cause another human being.
I asked him about the use of deadly force the other day on the way to breakfast.
“If they were coming for you or Claire, I wouldn’t hesitate.”
“It would fuck you up for the rest of your life, killing someone.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“And you’d go to jail. Unless you kill them so they can’t prosecute.”
“Definitely got to kill them.”
“You understand how absurd that sounds, right?”
“What part?”
“You’re never going to shoot someone. More likely, the gun will be taken from you and used against you and your family.”
“That’s fucked up, dude.”
“I’m telling you what the stats say. You don’t have the killer instinct. You have some other “virus” of the mind.”
“Yeah. Something.”
“But, you are not under attack. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you know that killing someone else would fuck you up for life? In more ways than one.”
“I guess.”
“Yet you carry a loaded weapon?”
“Yeah.”
“That you’d be afraid to shoot at a human.”
“Sounds pretty messed up. It’s my PTSD.”
“No. It is a choice you are making. Like going out and staying up all night. Choices. Not OCD, not PTSD or any other acronym your mom and you have come up with.”
“This conversation is not helping.”
And so, he’s asleep from another night out. His hands are actually on the keyboard right now; a “coding” screen is up. He’s working while sleeping in an uncomfortable position. At least he is only 25. His physical body will recover. His mental state? In a steady state at the moment, but in a deteriorating spiral of bad decisions.
Often my own visions during a night binge have been profound. By the light of day, they are less so. Looking back on all the genius I generated on mushrooms or weed only one has stayed with me. God. A spiritual awakening. A mental break. Something. A mutual hallucination between me, my best friend and a cat. I’ve already given the scene, the moment pointed towards something called god-consciousness. The idea that we are all one. That god is indeed in control. And we are the warm swaddled babies here to make him smile.
The swaddling comes off when you’re sober. Every damn time. The epiphanies on drugs are not sacred, they are hallucinations. Now, through the ages, hallucinations have played a large part in religious experiences. Mysticism. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc. As our bodies reach a breaking point, physically or chemically induced or both, the mind jumps great heights. Touching god or the god particle in all of us. Is it an epiphany? Is it happiness? Can we figure out how to stay high? If this is high, and this is joy, and this one of the religious comforts of god, I’m in.
The antidepressant world is in a different class. I am not sure how the MDMA scientific research is going, but I’m hopeful they will break through for others, in the same way I began to break the bonds of this mundane life into someone extraordinary.
Where and when did I think I was invincible? As a Pee Wee football player blasting through the line and running the ball 4 – 5 yards a carry. I was a big kid. I’m less big now, and working to become even smaller. Was it in high school under the amazing stress of my dad’s death spiral and more drugs? Now gently receptive to the lord’s influence? I don’t call it Jesus. Perhaps Jesus holds the complexity of the human condition.
I can’t fathom Jesus in the same way God couldn’t fathom man without creating Jesus. I can’t fathom God, that’s clear. I can feel and experience god, and the god particle. Is there a difference? In my understanding, we humans can’t possibly comprehend the majesty and power of God, so we make up things like Christianity and other more humanly comprehensible stories. I’m not a Christian, but I’m a spiritual man who does believe in god. Perhaps I’m like Christ in the desert. I’m asking, “God is this all there is? Why are you killing me? Why the pain and suffering?”
I’m on a happy plateau that has lasted over five years. Some complications and struggles, but no depression. Sure, I’m going to be low when my front teeth fall out. I’m going to be low when my girlfriend moves back to California. Even this moment, liminal, between my harsh retail job and the future job, still beyond my reach. This is a hard moment. I am happy. I am thriving within the confines of debt struggle, son trouble, and personal doubt.
I am full of momentum. I claim inner joy rather than ultimate happiness. Perhaps this is as good as it gets. Being joyful at your life regardless of the circumstances. Perhaps this is my moment. And this. And now.
It is obvious I do not have the wheel, but I don’t think Jesus does either. I think it’s god. It’s a collective unconscious. It is the feeling I get looking at photos of my sister, my dad, my grandfather’s entire McElhenney family. I have a very small immediate family. And a 101-year-old uncle who’s still a bright spark who will talk your ear off at his Air Force experience piloting the flying fortress in the wars.
I learned at my last gathering of the cousins who are squatting on the grandparents’ multimillion-dollar lakefront property, that he also flew several missions in Vietnam. He’s an amazing historian, if you want to talk about aircraft or the failings of his wife’s brother and his wife. My mom and dad were the successful branch of the family. The sister is the one who married a military man. One is not like the other. Even before my dad died, his sister had moved onto the lake property and built a house with her husband. Still there. With two of his three kids occupying other dwellings on the family compound. It used to be our family. Now, I am only invited when it’s convenient.
I go to see history, historical places from my childhood. Hysterical too. To reflect on my past. The quick wealth of my grandfather and the lakehouse where I spent so many of my Falls, watching The Wizard of Oz each year on the new color television. We, the McElhenney kids, were in town so we got most of the airtime with the grandparents. When my father got divorced and lost his mind even further down the bottle, his mom was supportive but ineffective at giving her son any help. Her daughter moved in to take care of her. Built a house on the back forty. I’m a guest, not a resident. I don’t think they got the better part of the deal. There’s something Clampitt about the entire compound mentality.
I love them in the same way I love Jesus. I don’t understand a lot of their rationale, but I want to maintain the feeling of family. Now, it’s only my sister and me on our side. Four kids between us. A small crew. No Thanksgiving this year. My daughter is going to DC with her mom. It’s my birthday. My son couldn’t care less. Sort of, at this moment, I care less about all of it.
My aim is true. One point focus. Effort. Optimism. All the other players are going to do whatever they do. The stage is the world and I am the ony character in the play that I control. I didn’t write it. I’m trying to narrate my own version. That’s this, here, this book, writing, series. I don’t need to explain Daedalus and Icarus. In life we are all either or. Working hard to architect the perfect excape from life’s pain. Or, bursting out with energy and enthusiasm that bounces us off the satellite and bursts our wings into flames.
Build. Rise. And here is the turning point. Don’t stay on your hot and high trajectory. Learn what you can from the flights, take some wisdom home into your heart, into your life’s work. Stay the course with a bigger lens. See the long life still ahead and make choices that will improve that time ahead. You can delay your New York City trip. I don’t have the time off or the money to go to the coast for a weekend. I have a shift in an hour.
My son woke. We chuckled about the work he’d been doing beside me all morning. He went to his bedroom, technically the music room. I’m ready to reboot the music room. Hmm. I guess I can take over the dining room I refused to give to the chupacabra. I am defining myself in this moment. Not getting angry at the incompetence at work. I mean, fuck, they work at a grocery store. I must stay focused on my life, my agency, what I can change and what I cannot.
Forever and ever. Alone. With cats and god. Happiness is an inside job.
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