Failure in Madrid

Walking Through Change

Plaza Espana

Plaza de Oriente (near Espana)

Sometimes I feel like a failure. Just the way it goes. Lately this has been the case. Britney and I have been dealing with tension—part of it is simply spending far too much time together the past three weeks—a family member and I have tension related to a misunderstanding, my OCD is off the charts lately, we haven’t gotten a lot of the official Spain stuff done that we need to complete within a certain time frame, I don’t feel like I’m doing nearly enough, we haven’t traveled yet, we’re dealing with money issues, and the cats have been driving us crazy.

Not that I’m really, seriously complaining. I recognize my/our great privilege. Without question. I mean, we’re living in Madrid—a fantastic city—and we don’t even have to work; in fact we legally can’t work on our specific kind of visa, the NLV (Non-Lucrative Visa). We’ve been eating out way too much (part of our money woes), we had to pay six months in advance plus three fucking deposits for our apartment (which is a lovely place with solid views in a trendy part of town reminiscent of Times Square) and we got our asses handed to us by The Tax Man this year since we sold my house in the Bay Area.

On top of all this I’ve been feeling resentful and jealous of other, bigger Substack writers for their success, their growing subscriber lists, their wildly shared and re-stacked Notes, their appreciated posts, and not being published in the bigger places I like and have submitted to, such as The Metropolitan Review.

I know what you’re thinking and you’re right: Calm down, don’t take any of this personally, stop thinking about yourself so much, worrying about your wounded little ego and pride and your wants and needs and fears, etc. Stop focusing on the problem, on the negative and instead focus on all the positive, privileged and good in my life, of which there is a hell of a lot. I agree!!!

And yet: I also have that other side of me. The complain-y, victim-y, whiney side which the other part of me detests. Right now I’ve been reading a brilliant novel: Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. I’ve always wanted to read Greene and finally found this slim 250-page novel in a bookstore in Madrid a couple weeks back. It’s not at all what I expected. For some reason in my mind I’d expected Greene’s style to be more flowery, you know, half-page-long overly precious literary sentences, that sort of thing. But it’s not that at all.

Brighton Rock is about local English mobs, boy gangs, one in particular led by the Catholic and yet terrible 17-year-old “Pinkie,” who is referred to by the author as “The Boy.” The Boy narrates the story. The Boy is fairly nefarious, violent and evil, yet also profoundly innocent and conflicted. He has a misogynist side, for sure. We don’t know much about his background. He is mean, cruel and yet somehow somewhat (sometimes) sympathetic. No easy feat. The novel is a mix of A Clockwork Orange, the film American Graffiti and the classic 1967 novel, The Outsiders. And actually it’s got a LOT (a scary amount, even) in common with my 2000 punk-gang novel, The Crew. (Buy here.)

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Greene

And stylistically, the sentences are often short, brutal and to-the-point. More Bukowski and Steinbeck than Nabokov or Bellow. But many of the lines are rich with depth, emotion, simile, metaphor and meaning. I find myself highlighting frequently. Reading lately is something I crave deeply. I’ve always been a big reader but I suspect that, also, it’s because right now I want to escape.

Emotionally I feel abandoned, alone, sort of spiritually in the fetal position in my own universe. I’m not saying anyone in real life has actually “abandoned me.” It’s just how, at this very precise moment right now, I feel. The beauty of feelings is that they’re never stable; they always change. They’re ephemeral. Tomorrow is another day. Even five minutes from now is a new dimension. This Eternal Moment, as Norman Mailer quipped, is golden, perfect and new.

Today marks exactly 21 days—three weeks—since we arrived in Madrid. It feels like a lot longer. Two weeks in the Air BnB in the Lavapies neighborhood, very different from where we are now, and then one week (feels like a month somehow) in the new place. I think it’s just a mix of trying to adjust, being in a new environment, trying to get done what we need to get done for Spain, having heart-to-heart conversations about what the new division of labor between us will look like, discussing our “power dynamics,” and figuring out what each of our new roles will be.

How we were in Lompoc, where Britney worked a regular fulltime 9-5 job and I didn’t was very different from how we were in Portland, where Britney didn’t work but was constantly busy managing two rental properties, taxes, A/C installation, repairs, etc, and I was walking dogs and doing occasional editing work, and writing on Substack.

And both still again are much different from now, here, Madrid, where neither of us are working and we’re suddenly with each other all the time, day and night, and we’re exploring a new city in a new country altogether and we’re trying to cope, adapt and communicate. No easy feat. Imagine if we had kids thrown into the mix! (Though we do have three extremely needy cats!)

One of the solutions we now realize (duh) is for us to spent more time apart since we’re literally with each other all the time. No matter how much you love someone—and we love each other very deeply—being around another person that much, whether romantic partner, family member or friend, can do a number on you. It doesn’t help that both of us are deep, intense, sensitive people who are only-children who’ve spent most of our lives more or less on our own and alone and being independent. It’s tough.

But I don’t want to leave you with the wrong impression: Things aren’t “bad.” In most ways things are good…but also challenging. But that’s life, right? Nothing in life—either literally or symbolically—is free. Everything involves trade-offs. You open one door and another one closes. Things go really well for a while and then BAM, the fucking wheels fall off. That’s just the mathematics of real life. It’s how it works. The key—which I’ve learned via AA, sobriety, meditation and plain ole life experience and age—is not taking this stuff personally, not making yourself a “victim,” not feeling personally repressed by life. Cause I am not a victim. I am the opposite of that. Very lucky.

It’s true that being me has never been easy. Not in the physical sense or the financial sense or anything like that, but in the psychological, emotional, and ultimately spiritual sense. I am deeply sensitive, vulnerable and wounded. I am not a well-adjusted man. Many people would advise me not to say that, especially not out lout to 2,613 people on Substack. But that’s not how I operate. I tell the truth. I go deep. That’s who I am, what I believe, how I think. Writing—and telling my own gritty truth—is how I process the world. Life is pain for me in many ways. Not all the time. Not everything. I love Britney; I feel incredibly grateful for her. I love our cats. I have reading, writing, travel, friends and family, etc.

But I also have my mind, and that’s a contradictory, complex machine. In AA sometimes people say that you shouldn’t walk around your mind alone, that it’s a “dangerous neighborhood.” I relate to this. It’s challenging because, as a writer, I am naturally intelligent in a certain way (and honestly pretty fucking stupid in many other ways) and I am certainly a deep and critical thinker. This is positive and even necessary for the craft of writing, thinking, understanding complex ideas, history and more. But when it comes to the metaphysical things, aka me and Life, me and God, me and Happiness, me and Other People: That’s a whole different beast.

I recently reread Hemingway’s brilliant 1961 slim memoir, A Moveable Feast, about his 1920s Paris years as a poor unknown writer. It’s a very fun read if you haven’t read it. Highly recommend it. In the memoir he makes several comments about how the only thing that can ruin writing, reading, general happiness, etc, are people. My mom once said this: The world would be better off without people. She said it with a chuckle, perhaps only half serious. But I get it!!! Boy do I get it. This is why I cherish animals so much. People are uncertain, misguided, afraid. They see things—even reality—differently from you (me). They aren’t always totally trustworthy and they sometimes say things they don’t mean. Sometimes they lie, intentionally or not, or take advantage, etc.

The worse part is this: I know that EYE myself sometimes do all these things as well! Because try as I might, I am not more than a weak, frail human being like everyone else: Made of genes and childhood trauma and my social environment and my own unique weird (and in my case aberrant nature). There’s no blame to go around. I am who and what I am. Ditto Britney. Ditto my mom. All of us. We’re all to a certain degree trapped in the amber of our own cosmic reality and being.

All that said, I DO believe in the idea of personal agency, Free Will. I don’t believe in predetermination. However, I also think that we’re all probably much less “free” in the true sense than we’d like to believe. I don’t mean to suggest that I think humans can’t stop themselves from doing things, such as love, hate, rob, rape, murder, etc. But I think it’s much harder than most of us would like to admit. Between genes and childhood (especially the first say 3-5 years of life), my guess is that amounts to something like 65-75% of our behavior and actions. So it’s not that it’s 100%. It’s not that we can’t change or act independently and with agency. It’s just that most of us are facing a fairly Sisyphean task, perpetually pushing the boulder up the hill only for it to fall back down again.

Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Hem’s classic writing advice

Think about being married, having kids, dealing with parents or siblings, etc. How many times have you caught yourself saying, Jesus, I’m just like my father! Or some such thing. How many times have you said something in anger to your spouse only to realize it was exactly how your mom yelled at your dad when you were a kid? Or you’ve done something and realized it’s precisely what was modeled when you were a child. This is our genes and our childhood environment. It’s not about blame. And we all do it. I have zero doubt that if I had a kid I would make many of the same mistakes. And my kids would, too, etc. Family cycles, trauma handed down through the generations. And ALL people have trauma. That’s not special. It’s as common as depression, alcoholism and anger.

Anyway. Spain. I got off track. (But I like going off the beaten path sometimes.) Spain—Madrid—is beautiful and interesting. I took a walk through Plaza Espana last night, along the Palacio Reale and it was gorgeous. I walked alone and it felt good, magical and perfect. It’s not like taking a walk in Lompoc, Santa Barbara or Portland, or even San Francisco or Manhattan. It’s its own strange, mystical and glorious place, and it felt good to walk around at 9pm with the nightlife and the narrow cobblestone streets and the people and the castles and the deep orange sunset.

Sometimes this perfect eternal moment right now…and right now…and right now…just feels so foreign, so psychologically far away, untouchable, unattainable, constantly in flux, changing, because it is, this is true. (That it’s always changing, not that it’s out of reach.) There’s always The Mind to deal with. My mind, anyway. The past and the future, all the things to do both symbolic and concrete, the fear and the shame and the anger and the regret. All of that bullshit.

This is, I realize, The Human Condition. There is no escape minus alcohol, drugs or suicide. I tried all of these before and they didn’t work. Camus describes it all beautifully in The Myth of Sisyphus. Now is a different phase of life. No longer radical and Dionysian, but practical with chunks of wildness in there still. (Who moves to Spain at 42 and 39?) I have always been wild. I have always been contrarian. (Thanks, Dad.) I have always been an outsider and a rebel. But over time these traits have been at least a little bit tempered, sort of, with the coming of age and experience and failure and success and existential war within myself. The trying and the failing and the wanting and the getting…only to discover that what I thought I wanted wasn’t what I wanted at all, or perhaps it was what I wanted but not what I actually needed.

These are complex mathematical life equations. Not everything has an answer in life. Certainly not everything has an easy, simple, binary answer. Life is gray, not black and white. The older I get the more I understand this. The more I fail the more I appreciate it.

And the more love I give the better I can sustain it.