Diary Entry, 8-26-24

Rejection Machine (The Land of Mohr)

We had a garage sale yesterday and the day before, aka this past weekend (Sat and Sun). We basically put 95% of everything we own out onto the driveway and hoped for the best. We sold a solid chunk of our stuff, including much of the big pieces of furniture. We’re moving to Portland in one week, which is a mix of insane and lovely.

Britney and I agree that Portland is not likely to be “our place” long-term. Of course we’re moving to Spain, most likely in Feb or March, so in roughly six months. Half a year. The crime in Portland freaks Britney out—as always, she did a deep-dive Google Investigation, breaking every aspect of the crime down since 2020, etc—but not me so much. She’s lived her whole life in Lompoc, a small agricultural town of 43,000 nestled in the mountains off Highway One. There is crime in Lompoc but you generally don’t feel it…unless you’re lower-income and in one of the rougher areas of town. (We’re not.)

But I’ve lived all over, in San Diego and Philly and Oakland and San Francisco and New York City, not to mention a hundred other smaller towns in-between. For the love of god I lived in East Harlem, of all places, before and during the early months of Covid-19. That was an experience, let me tell you. Never been so scared or felt so isolated in my life. Terrifying.

But anyway we sold a lot. I have Lord Knows how many books, acquired over the years moving from town to town, chasing one illusory dream after another. I took a few hundred of my favorite books down to my mom’s in Santa Barbara, stowing them in plastic bins in her garage. I saved a few for “now.” (Despite already reading three books currently.) And then, after three full go-overs, I managed to wrangle perhaps 250-300 books which I’m going to sell to a bookstore in Santa Barbara, cause why not? Some of them may have to be donated due to copious notes, marginalia, and reckless highlighting.

We moved a bunch of extra stuff—cooking materials, camping stuff, random detritus—into a corner of our driveway out front and taped a FREE sign to them. A Mexican dude from Santa Maria saw an ad Britney put online for the three decade-old (and formerly expensive!) bookshelves. He came for that and left with those plus a bunch of free stuff. I helped him load his little white truck. Nice guy; very grateful. Hey, if we can help people who really need it, that’s great.

So we’re in a sort of weird limbo moment right now. Between locations. Between states, literally and symbolically. Going from little or no refined culture to an overabundance of it. Lompoc locals are very friendly and generally quite kind, but they and I are from different planets. In some crucial ways it’s similar for me (and Britney) with Portland, but from a different perspective; to wit, the fact that all the “freaks” around the nation seem to end up in Rose City. (A nickname for P-Town.) The moniker “Keep Portland Weird” is a popular sign/sticker for a reason.

And yet, probably I have no “home” and never will, at least not physically in any easy definitive sense. I’ve lived in so many places and eventually I always want to flee. (That probably says something deeper and perhaps more disturbing about myself, I’m sure.) I wrote a whole autobiographical novel years ago called Running Solo. That sort of says it all. I figure eventually I’ll run smack-dab right into myself, and maybe then I’ll be complete. (Or at least I’ll feel complete in some meaningful way.)

Part of my problem has historically been feeling like an outsider. I’ve carried this feeling with me all my life. As a child I felt like an alien around my parents. I don’t know why. It seems unexplainable. It just felt that way. I felt more drawn somehow to my boyhood friends and their parents…but then I’d eventually turn on them, too. I was a little rejection machine. Looking back, I think I felt early abandonment and rejection by my parents. They did not abandon or reject me; probably due to my high sensitivity I simply somehow felt that way from very early on. I remember being maybe eight years old and having this distinct thought: Parents are for suckers; they cannot be trusted.

Throughout my life—it seems like I’ve lived five or six totally complete lives at this point—I’ve never fully ever fit in with any group, and I’ve always been critical, fastidious, judgmental, self-protective, outside the bounds of cool or “in,” and never really “one of them.”

Perhaps that’s what makes me a writer.

Growing up in Ojai I hung out with local kids when I was a boy, but by high school our paths necessarily diverged. They went to Nordhoff, the local public school, and I went to the rich-kid school, Villanova. Sophomore year I got into the snake-filled anarchic pit of punk rock, and I was deep into that, the slimy muck up to my neck, and yet, even then, I felt like the punk “scene” was filled with cliques, none of which I was truly ever a part.

Something seemed to always be “wrong” with me; this was never (or rarely) verbalized but rather signified with vibes, glances, the sensation of annoyance or embarrassment. I didn’t quite dress the right way; I looked too hybrid, a strange mix of punk, surfer, skateboarder and weirdo me. I often said the wrong thing, making frequent faux paus in public. I came from too much money, which was secretly verboten in the punk circles. My tattoos weren’t cool enough. I asked dumb questions. I often got the side-glance, seeming to say, Fuck are you talking about, man?

After high school, I worked and drank and still went to punk shows and surfed and felt alone. I read novels and wrote poetry and short stories in moleskin journals. I lived in cheap, shitty one-bedroom apartments with a friend, sharing the miniscule space between us.

The women I dated were all over the map, but ironically were never punk girls; they always somehow seemed to be kind, thoughtful hippy chicks. There was always an odd, electrifying inner dissonance with me. The constant clashing of interior opposites. As a teen and into my twenties I truly didn’t grasp who I was, what I was, how I operated, how to unpack and understand my latent intelligence, etc. I didn’t grasp yet that I was a writer, or what that even meant.

Even in sobriety—which began in 2010—I was an outsider in AA, in the way I criticized the “higher power” idea and sat in the very back of basement meetings and judged everyone and wore my beat-up leather jacket and thought I was too smart and too cool and too unique and different. (Like most people in AA, I both was and wasn’t.)

In my sober thirties I started dressing more like a mature man and less like a half-hobo, quarter-punk, quarter drifter, quarter intellectual, quarter author. But always I still had my own unique style, voice, flair, both on the page and in how I dressed, talked, lived. People referred to me as intelligent and, always, “intense.” I wanted to skip the cute, lapidary, external bullshit facade and get right to the “meat” of who you were and why. That guy. That was me. (Still is but I’d say I’m running on more like 80% capacity on that now.)

Many friends over the past decade have said things like, There really is no other person I’ve ever met quite like you. I think that’s true. An annoyingly predictable contrarian, I’m also a deep independent thinker and someone who thinks critically to the point of madness. I can never just “pick a side.”

Conformity, the bourgeoise, acceptance of things as they are: These have never been my area of joy or expertise or interest. I’m a fighter, always have been. Ask my mom and she’ll tell you I’ve always done things my way, which equates to The Hard Way. Yet there’s a lot of learning that happens in life when you do things your way. You bump into a lot of walls—and that’s painful—but you sure as shit figure out who you are. I am very confident in myself now—despite simultaneously possessing wildly deep insecurities—largely because I’ve so often taken my own initiative and done things my way, on my own terms.

It's been challenging, of course, because it’s traditionally been a lonely struggle. People tend to fall off along the road when you’re driving 100 mph down a rabidly narrow, twisting dirt road going who knows where. But that’s historically been my path, my nature. Some of it’s genes, but more of it, I think, is my own inherent, “special” nature.

Since the beginning I’ve rejected the status quo, the “normal” path, the trendy choices, the authoritative answer, the religious angle (religious in the broad sense, not just religion but political extremism, conventional lifestyles, middle-class values, etc).

My overall unconscious goal, I believe, since boyhood, has been to achieve some sort of self-satisfied death-denial. Not literal death-denial; if anything I feel my life has been a story of actually facing death. But more in the sense of defying death symbolically via defying social convention, by saying NO as loud as I can, by disagreeing with the notion that you can only be a man or an “adult” (whatever that word means anymore) by getting married, having kids, becoming “part of your community,” by working some dead 9-5 soul-crushing passionless job you hate.

Instead, I have chosen Frost’s “road less traveled” and that has “made all the difference.” There’s something about having guts, about being brave in the face of conformism and mediocrity, about being outside the crowd, outside society on some microscopic level, outside the “norm,” outside of all tribes, that makes me feel alive. The hipsters think they’re unique and different, but they belong to just another “non-conformist-conformist” group, just like the intellectuals and the Wokies and the red-pilled Trumpers and the religious and the conventional, ad infinitum.

The self-styled “oppressed” groups now are, in my view, largely all the same. They act, talk and think the same; they carry the same message of victimhood. Punk rock was the first conformist group I ever [briefly] joined, wearing the costume and everything until one night, junior year of high school, at a show, I gazed around and realized we all looked the same; we were wearing a fucking uniform, no different from the yuppies except in costume design.

Slowly, over time, I shucked my cocoon and flew away, into the nasty, meaty, peat-bogged wilderness that became The Land of Mohr. I don’t think I’m better than anyone; I know I’m not. I do think I’m more of my own man. Not that that’s unique, really, either. In AA we say: “You’re unique…just like everyone else.” True…and not true. Right…and not quite right. I do think it’s accurate to say there are people who follow, people who lead and those of us in-between, the freaks who reject both sides and just do what our hearts, what our inner drives, compel us to do according to our own inner compass. People like Bukowski, Kerouac, Chris McCandless, Zadie Smith, Ottessa Moshfegh, all fit into these categories.

Between the sheep and the gods there lie the wizards of their own destiny.

Speaking of Buk (Bukowski). This morning I started reading his collected letters again, a collection of epistles between 1958 and 1965. In his late thirties, early forties, well before fame. Before his first novel in 1969 at the ripe age of 50. While he was mostly still writing poems and here and there a little short story. He lived an authentic life; the drinking, fighting, fucking and jail were real. He lived that. It reminds me quite a bit of my own past. In 1963—at age 42—he won the “Outsider of the Year” literary award from a small literary magazine called The Outsider in New Orleans. This seems appropriate. He was trying to snatch back literature and writing from the scourges of academia, who’ve always been full of shit when it comes to prose. Buk wanted to remove the refined pretense and snobbery and patrician bullshit and smear the symbolic pages with his genius excrement. A writer—a man—who brought writing back to The People. (Oh, if only we could get that in politics!)

I’m rotting-living flesh like everyone else, aiming towards the inevitable grave which could come any time. We’re all just thinking brains wrapped in dumb meat suits. All of us too “smart” for our own good.

I know I’m not really unique, I’m just too weird and off-the-beaten-path to be so easily skipped over. Buk was also one of these. My resume isn’t that impressive. I don’t have a ton of money. I’m not tall or particularly handsome (though I have my moments). I’m not the best man on Earth. I am deeply flawed. Yet, like some old magical potion that does something unique you can’t quite fully understand, I do bring something unordinary, not typical to the metaphorical table.

What that “thing” is I do not exactly know. And I don’t truly care. It is what it is. Some of it’s a simple inner drive, an ambition, an emotional and spiritual and metaphysical need to punch life in the face, get punched back twice as hard, pick myself up, keep going, find myself, lose myself, attempt always to break free from the cage that is this existence, choose love over hate, joy over depression (when I can), freedom over more cages.

My heart asks one continual question: What if?