From the moment I wake up, I’m telling myself stories about this. This. Living this particular life, as this particular person, at this particular coordinate on the axes of space and time.
Biographer 1 (Day Chronicler)
It wasn’t until he was much older that Dustin achieved some recognition for the work he was doing at 28. Days for him then proceeded with the kind of quietness and anonymity that most of us know before our lives blossom. He woke up, broke his fast, caffeinated, worked, and broke for lunch. He enjoyed longer-than-normal lunch breaks.
Afternoons were more variable; he sometimes worked more, beleaguered by the afternoon, which doesn’t have to do anything other than reach 3 p.m. to have a beleaguering effect on diurnal adherents. He sometimes stepped out. If you were a new parent leaving the Maritime Aquarium with infants in strollers, you might have seen him reading Gravity’s Rainbow by the Norwalk River, hair like a lion who just got an abortive perm.
If you were a fruit fly in his succulent, you might have seen him debating whether to take himself out for a drink, weighing the numerous pros and cons: the financial cost vs. the euphoria, the possibility of developing a habit vs. tasting new slices of life, the pain of being seen and judged vs. the pleasure of seeing and judging. You would have watched with a bemused pity as he dressed himself to go out, applied pomade to his unruly mane, then upon seeing that it was raining, or that his favorite bar had mysteriously closed, gone back to his apartment and reopened Gravity’s Rainbow amid the couch’s creature comfort.
Nephew (Unborn)
My uncle is kind of a strange guy. From what I can tell, he’s always been that way — he’s lived a very solitary life, despite clearly enjoying being with people. I think he really believes that there’s something better about being alone, or necessary. I really like him, but I feel like if I spent much more time with him the oddness would start to show, if you know what I mean. He’s the kind of uncle who’s super fun to visit. You see a little bit of his world, you get a little bit of his vibe, you see the unusual things he’s dedicated his life to, the essential structure of days that he’s been using since a pretty young age. I don’t know anyone else like him, that’s for sure.
Biographer 1 (cont.)
It wasn’t until he was much older that Dustin achieved some recognition for the work he was doing at 28. The work he was doing took many forms, and all of them were a little odd. Client work had him stretched in many directions, creatively speaking, and writing as personages which, while outrageously profitable, were only sporadically occupied with the heart or the spirit. Moneylenders of various types; data scientists; healthcare providers; self-help gurus — vocations that straddled the line between sinful and graceful. Necessary services that went for a premium.
Each of them wanted their corporate communications to center on the meaning behind their service. Dustin could see the potential for meaning in acts of business, and could therefore fulfill this directive.
At least half of his mind lived in his other work, his pure creative work, which, when asked, he described as his “life’s work.”
(How do we know our “life’s work”? We know what brings us joy. What’s to say what brings us joy will do the same for anyone else?)
Past 9 p.m., when all else had been put to bed, when the sky was dark and sleep was imminent, he’d write microscript in handmade books. He’d write about things that had actually happened to him in language that alternated between pure narrative and pure poetry. The former was fairly easy to read, the latter took heavy lifting. As with many “difficult” texts, Dustin’s most dedicated readers insist that there’s value in the lifting. All others scratch their heads.
Biographer 2 (Literary Sympathizer)
As a business writer, Dustin cut his teeth on obscure topics — mortgage subservicing, data analytics, equity compensation; the kinds of phrases that, during his English degree, would have unleashed in him a torrent of dialectic on the absurdity of corporate America. (No one ever said corporate America was anything short of absurd; it’s an absurdity that powers almost four million square miles of land.)
Relatively early in his freelance tenure, he gravitated toward first-person articles, so-called “thought leadership” pieces which centered on a particular industry topic from a particular business leader’s point of view. The purpose: Distill the writer’s wisdom; express it in a voice at once faithful to their speech habits, rhythmic as a bass drum, and light on polysyllabic terms. Dustin saw that this writing was effectively the meeting-place between him and the external world.
The “external world” meant the synthesized expectations of every literate person in America. What kind of writing they shied away from, what kind of writing they wanted more of, what kind of writing invigorated them with both challenge and payoff. While, when telling people about his work, Dustin was careful to lightly disparage it, positioning himself as someone who “knew better,” he also recognized that this was the kind of apprenticeship most literary thinkers never got. They never had to write for people whose literary expectations differed from their own. They mostly wrote for other clinicians, like theoretical physicists trying to outstrip each other’s formulae. They thus created tiny societies with few citizens and no extra room.
In his day-to-day experience, Dustin equally resented and relished this literary compromise: the engine of his livelihood.
Biographer 3 (Poetic Obit)
Dustin never got what he wanted, which was broad-scale recognition for his pure creative acts. With his friends, family, and lovers, he would talk about this unfulfilled desire wistfully but whimsically, echoing some “You can’t always get what you want” or “Love the one you’re with” or “…make lemonade”-type homily. There was truth in each of these and also truth in the opposite, which was that he’d failed — failed to do something that had no instruction manual, no set criteria, no objective metrics for success.
He lived on the bronze edge of failure, fired by its factuality, gazing into orchards of memories whose fruit he licked and gnashed. Failure was gorgeous and fertile. Failure was a long, slow torture. Failure was many things, and he told everyone he could about it, as he’d always told everyone he could about everything that happened to him, in language both frank and fantastical.
From the moment I wake up, I’m telling myself stories about this. This. I want to preempt the story of my life, whichever way it goes. By telling it in advance, I imagine I’ll be able to say Knew it whenever what happens happens.
I want to declaw failure. I want to decarbonate success. I want to stay the storyteller, the hip protagonist, the main character not thrashing inside his narrative straitjacket.