The Last Man Shuffle

My Intro to Philosophy professor described Nietzsche's Last Man as "an appetitive creature, roaming from sports bar to sports bar." Either he made this speech several times or he unveiled it only once with the lights dimmed, the curtains drawn, and a thunderstorm raging outside. The image of the Last Man nursing a Bud Light down at TGI Friday's has stuck with me well into my decadent twenties and it haunts me as I find myself roaming from sports bar to sports bar, from coffee shop to coffee shop, doing the Last Man Shuffle, as it were.

The Last Man Shuffle is an exhausting dance. I've caught myself performing it on several continents, so it isn't necessarily endemic to America, though it might be endemic to Americans. Step One: Set aside an afternoon to pursue an artistic venture of your choice. Step Two: Choose one of your three favorite bars or coffee shops as a venue in which to write, sketch, or photocollage. Step Three: Wiggle your ass in a stiff-backed chair for thirty minutes until the urge to leave becomes unbearable. Step Four: Having accomplished nothing, get into your early-90's sedan and either zip off to another coffee shop or bar (where you will encounter the same discomfort) or just head home to twist one off, take a nap, and call it a day. Now you're doing the Last Man Shuffle.

The worst part is that the Last Man, unremarkable though he is, is plagued by artistic delusions. He works a dull job and has ample time to think about what he'd rather be doing, and what he'd rather be doing is creating a work of art so staggeringly brilliant that all of the kids who picked on him in middle school would rip out their own hair and mail him reparation checks for the rest of their miserable lives. The daydream gets him through work. But the moment he punches out, he finds that he'd rather be at home twisting one off. And so the days pass and all that is achieved is a marginal reduction in the Last Man's sexual tension.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes a French torture device called le malconfort, or the little-ease. It wasn't terribly inventive, but I imagine it worked. The little-ease was a small prison cell that was neither long enough for the inmate to lay down, nor tall enough for the inmate to stand up. So it must have been very uncomfortable. Life in a society that is rich in Old Chicagos is probably preferable to le malconfort, but there is the same kind of restriction on one's range of movement. You feel as though you can't stand up and do something truly remarkable - because that could involve failure and financial ruin - but to lie down, twist one off, and call it a day would be a waste of life. And so you drift from sports bar to sports bar, from coffee shop to coffee shop, doing the Last Man Shuffle, and one day you'll write that novel that will bring western civilization to its knees. In the meantime ...

Omaha Gravity

I arrived in Omaha sometime in January, rattled by a white-knuckle out of Guadalajara and half-mad after two days and three nights of shepherding a three-legged kitten through Puerto Vallarta's barrio de crackheads. I slept for a couple weeks and when I awoke, I'd landed a job shelving books at the local library. I bought a gym membership and lost ten pounds I didn't have on me at the time. And life has coasted along in the Nebraska suburbs at a Ford Taurus pace. But the adventure hasn't ended. No, I'm afraid that so long as one has a brain, there is always adventure.

As I may have mentioned, I've been nominated to serve in the U.S. Peace Force. Two-point-two-five years of my roaring twenties lay etherized upon the operating table. A political map of the People's Republic of China is thumbtacked above the Ticonderoga. Sometimes I throw darts, other times I just stare.

My fondest memories from the past three years are some of the dullest. One of the many luxuries afforded to the chronic hobo is the freedom of occasional solitude. I spent a lot of my time abroad running or walking down side streets with an audiobook to keep me company. I got heavy into late night jogging during the Korean rainy season and would run six miles up the side of a small and misty mountain called Unamji, listening to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. "Chapter Seven," announced the narrator in his Welsh brogue as I panted and shivered along the shoulder of a four-lane highway, "The Atomic Bomb."

And Poland. Never have I had so few friends as I did in Poland. I spent the winter indoors, hacking at Polish grammar, boiling kielbasa, making music videos. When it got tolerably warm, I would walk the town from one end to the other, from the Christmas Village in the center to the coaldusty lunar outskirts and back again. I was consuming audiobooks voraciously then. I hiked into the Świętokrzyskie woods listening to Walden and only grudgingly came back out.

These moments seem more adventurous to me than any of the actual globehopping I've done. And the moments which remain fresh in my mind are arbitrary ones, seemingly hand-picked by memory to be void of any significance. I think often of the night Jared Nelson threw two fistfulls of CDs against the dashboard of my Dodge Intrepid and growled, "Keith Petit, you sloppy bastard," while Ramshackle by Beck played low on the stereo. I also think of the weird euphoria I experienced roaming the Daegu University campus at midnight under a full moon with some girl I was supposed to like. It was the first green space I'd seen in eight months. You could hear bottles clinking and Korean frat boys shouting over the hills. This memory almost drowns out the present with its intensity, yet I'm not sure why it's there.

I've quoted this David Foster Wallace passage before, but I will quote it again because I'm senile and loving it:

"... our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home ... imagine [Kafka's] art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens ... and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along."

And this little snippet from Heart of Darkness, which I read the other night, nestled in a naughahyde booth at the Village Inn on Galvin:

"... the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

I have seen strange things, but I've never been much for weaving sailor's yarns out of them, probably because I'm not very good at speaking in general. But I think it's partly that I don't find the plotline of my life all that interesting, and neither does anyone else. Often it's a non-event, or an odd sensation, or something moving in the periphery which fascinates me. Those moments where happiness bubbles out of you like an insupressible steam - where do those moments come from? Where do they go? Where did you come from, Cotton-Eyed Joe?