Letter

I look out the window throughout day. Dark out there. Flurries on and off. I keep going back and forth about it in my mind: public transportation or bike? I have a ticket to see Marc Ribot play in Evanston. It’s a fifteen mile ride. Arguments against taking CTA: three transfers, masked the whole way, dealing with plague-time meshugas, slower than biking it. Arguments for: it’s cold out. Might snow. Laziness.

I often hate buying advanced tickets to events because I never know where I’ll be mood-wise day of. In this case, it’s been booked for months. I love Ribot. He’s one of those guys who looks like he’s been pummeled by his long tangle with music and come out the other side with the scars and lumps to prove it. First thing I probably heard was Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs, but the guy has done so much before and after that record.

It’s ridiculous that I’m even considering not going. Guy’s not gonna be around forever. Can’t miss these opportunities. I look out the window again. No precipitation visible. Bike it is.

Archer to Loomis, cut over to Racine, then Ogden, Elston, Cortland, Southport, and Clark to the city limits. Chicago Ave the rest of the way. The weather’s no bother because the wind’s easy. It’s not the cold that’s ever a problem on the bike; it’s the damn wind. I listen to podcast interviews as I ride. It makes the time and distance disappear. I’m in Evanston in no time, though it’s actually taken nearly an hour and a half.

A couple hours later I’m back out on Chicago Avenue. It’s time to head home. I briefly consider hauling the bike up to the Purple Line, but the mental picture of standing and blocking a train door stop after stop puts it out of my head.

I flick on the music player and start pedaling south.

I have no concept of time. It’s all happening right now, whatever you mention. Even if you tell me it’s years away. Even if you’re thinking out loud, never intending to follow through, as soon as the idea/plan/date leaves your lips, to me it’s set in stone. I have to mechanically walk myself back from the brink multiple times a day because of things I hear, read, and see. It gets exhausting.

Recently, a friend refused to believe I wasn’t mad at her for often being late. I kept telling her that I’d long since gotten used to it. That it was part of the deal, if we were to remain friends. She kept insisting she was sure I still got angry every time. If I’m put out by any part of it, it’s that I keep expecting her to be on time, knowing full well she won’t be. That’s on me. Also, of course, I’m perpetually early, so I’m always waiting.

I fixate on signposts. Like packages that are delayed, upcoming events, trips, deadlines. They all push against one another to be topmost in my consciousness. Then, halfway through them happening, they are already being erased and forgotten, ceding their place to the next thing in line. Is it all just about the anticipation? The thing is that I’m most at peace when not looking forward at all.

The times I’m least tormented by time is when I’m working. Half hours morph into seconds when it’s going right. If I’m into what I’m doing, what comes next or what came before doesn’t even occur to me. So why can’t the rest of life be a little more like that?

My day can be ruined because a package doesn’t arrive as promised. Never mind that what I’m waiting for isn’t time-sensitive in the least. What possible difference does it make that I listen to that record tomorrow rather than today, that I read this book next month instead of this moment? How do I stop caring about things that don’t matter?

The fucked-up Catch-22 of it is that this fixated urgency makes me good at what I do. If I didn’t feel with every fiber of my being that this brush stroke or that phrase is crucial, the only thing that matters, I wouldn’t know how to do anything.

It’s only the rest of the day and night that this is no way to be. The parts where there are other people, most of all. I sit waiting, turning myself inside out because what I’m waiting for would be done this instant if I was doing it. But I know if I’m allowed to do as I want and think I need, it would mean yet another person cut out of my life. Because the only way to deal with others is to compromise. To not act on certain impulses.

I know too that this instinctive certainty of mine often betrays me. I’m wrong a lot, yet the complete confidence is the thing that lets me continue to put one foot in front of the other. Knowing full well that inertia will slam me into wall after wall.

Is everyone this way? I’ve never been anyone else, so I have no idea.

—Here’s Barry Gifford doing q&a after a screening of Roy’s World at the Music Box.

I text my brother from a rest area somewhere near Ithaca, NY that I’m on schedule to arrive at his new house by dinnertime. I’ve written out every turn once I get off I-90 in my notebook and have consulted it multiple times. I pride myself on navigating without the crutch of GPS. I never get lost. That’s what I tell anyone who will listen.

When planning the ride east a few weeks before, I ask my brother to crash at his new place in Western Massachusetts. He and his wife moved there a few months back and he’s started a new teaching job in the area. I’ve only seen the house on the realtor’s site. He texts me a few days later and asks if I know a woman named Rachel. She’s a fellow teacher in his district. They met via Zoom and she asked, noting his unusual surname, whether we were related. At first her name rings no bells, but then I ask if she’s married to Chris.

I met Chris through his brother Mike, who was dating my manager at Pearl Art & Craft in Chicago in 1997. We were all in the art/music scene around Wicker Park back then. Both brothers moved to the East Coast and got responsible adult-type jobs ages ago. I haven’t seen Chris in several years. I met Rachel only once, at their wedding near Buffalo eighteen years back. Now they’re awaiting my arrival at my brother’s place.

I know something’s off when I pass the first exit on the Mass Turnpike. Miles and miles crawl by with no way off, when I know I should be turning north. I text Boris to start eating without me. By the time I ascertain my actual location, I’m 30-40 miles off track.

There’s no cell reception in most of Western Massachusetts and nothing but winding two-lane country roads, so by the time I arrive, it’s two hours after my ETA. I catch up with Chris a few minutes before he and Rachel have to leave to relieve their babysitter. It’s the boonies, so they have a 45-minute drive and it’s nearing midnight.

Everybody has a laugh when I point out that there’s been an imposing portrait of Chris’s brother in Boris’s childhood bedroom for about twenty years. Now Mike lives a mile or two back on the same road as Boris. Maybe they’ll make friends.

On the way back home from visiting with my folks, I make plans to grab lunch with Gil in New Jersey, not far from his home. I’d thought that I’d be coming from Western Mass rather than Boston that morning, so Gil asks me to text when I hit the bridge formerly known as Tappan Zee. Trouble is that I wrote out directions from Boston. I end up at a weird alternate universe outpost called the Vince Lombardi Rest Area, which has every kind of junk food and souvenir, but no public wi-fi. Gil patiently waits the extra hour for me to blunder my way to the correct location and we have a nice lunch, followed by a visit to an art supply store.

As we eat, I wonder aloud whether the fact I got lost twice in one trip heralds a new phase in my life. Early onset Alzheimer’s, perhaps. Though, to my credit, in both instances, I was able to retrace my steps and see where I went wrong. My brother had teased me about not having a smartphone, but at no moment during either period of aimless wandering did the prospect of getting back to that nightmare cross my mind. I felt bad that I was keeping people waiting, but otherwise, I was pretty at peace not knowing where the hell I was.

I’m looking forward to when they take my license away, so automobile navigation will cease to be an issue. Then, the true wandering can begin.