First time I saw it happen was at a bachelor party in Austin. In the dim edge of some warehouse-of-a-bar where this ex-Navy guy named Ty was making out with a denim-romper chick. Ty was squeezing her jaw with his right hand. His left hand (the one with the wedding ring) was tucked into his back pocket. I went over and poured a beer on his head.
There’s a world where Ty’s a jackass who cheats on his wife all the time. And yeah, Ty is a bit of a jackass, but it wasn’t like that. I know because when he looked at me (beer running down his eyebrows, dripping off his chin) there was an edgy helplessness in his face. The kind of wild eye a stray cat gets when you start waving a lighter at it. You only make that mistake once, you only blow your life up once too. Most people anyway.
The first time you watch somebody blow their life up, the first time you know that’s what you’re seeing, it’s pretty-damn thrilling. I’ve seen it a couple times now. I’ve done it once myself.
How? you ask, well funny shit, there are innumerable ways to self-immolate your day-to-day. You can cheat on your wife. You can drive drunk, quit your job, knock up your boss, take a shit on your boss’ desk, DM a dick-pic to your boss’ wife. Really, you’re only limited by your own imagination.
But you have to have something to blow up. See, if Ty had been a run-around jackass fingering girls in denim-rompers every chance he gets, well then that’s not really blowing his life up, is it? That’s not a crisis moment, it’s a character flaw and it’s about as interesting as Irritable Bowel Syndrome. But if you have a steady life, if everything seems to be sprouting roses, that’s when you can blow the whole goddamned thing to smithereens. And here’s the rabbit in the hat: little did they know it wasn’t a steady life to begin with. It only looked that way from the outside. There was some kind of nagging hole, something loose, like a string dangling from the hem of your favorite t-shirt. Like you know if you tug on that string, the whole thing’s gonna unravel. And you know that you shouldn’t, but the string is. right. there. Right there like that lady’s boss was right there for her on the Coldplay jumbotron or like RFK Jr. was right there for Olivia Nuzzi. Or even right there like the emergency-exit slide was right there for that JetBlue flight attendant way back in 2010 who (after announcing that he was quitting on the plane’s PA system) chugged two beers, pulled the string or lever or whatever it is you pull on an airplane and disappeared onto the tarmac of JFK International Airport.
Not everybody knows about the string, I guess.
The first time you blow your life up, you probably don’t know what the hell is going on. I was pulling on the string for months, maybe even a year or so; stumbling around the city wall-eyed drunk until one of my buddies came up to me and was like ‘dude what the fuck kind of line are you walking?’ —it was my own game of chicken really, two headless-chickens waddling toward each-other at breakneck speed: the comfy life I was aiming toward, big money and back rooms, polite society, my name in all the magazines was barrelling full-speed at the deep-buried fact that I wasn’t so comfy being comfy. So I ran wild like my like late-twenties was a tornado siren. I didn’t have a wife, no kids, no responsibility beyond the responsibility of ‘you’re supposed to want this’ and I only wanted to see how far I could go into the tornado. I looked around at the people who were comfy, living like they were never 27 at all, they were so boring they scared me.
Every morning I’d wake up, walk to Target and take a hangover dump in their nice clean bathroom (I hated how alone I felt at home, that big comfy life staring back at me). Then I’d go out and sleep with somebody I wasn’t supposed to in some place I didn’t belong. It was a shit-where-you-eat deal. A fairy tale story. You know the ogre who rescued the princess? Well, imagine if he was fucking the princess on the side. It was something like that. Sans the crypto beastiality. Please don’t imagine Shrek.
In fact, please don’t imagine anything at all. Let’s get back to the string. Sounds cleaner, doesn’t it? Socrates’ Cave, Boethius’ Wheel, Daddio’s String. A nice clean allegory with a before-and-after. The after here being a sort-of event horizon. The horizon of your nice steady life: the unfolding future that makes you squirm at the thought of it (even though it looks so pretty in the Norman Rockwell pictures). That’s why you pull the string. Because you’re an animal, a stray cat and somebody’s waving a fucking lighter in your face. You’ve developed some instincts, sure. But they’re animal instincts nonetheless.
And after you blow your life up, it’s going to be okay. But it’s gonna be different. You’ll have shards of the old you. I still have old friends who reach out and wish me happy birthday from my old life. I’m happier now, a lot of people are, you know. That JetBlue flight attendant moved to San Diego. He wrote a book. Olivia Nuzzi moved to Malibu. She wrote a book too.
Ty didn’t write a book. Last I heard he was back in the Navy and they were sending him to a proxy war. I guess maybe he’s the exception.
