Grabbing the Bull's Tail When It Shows Up
Reinventing a life requires attention paid to those days when you feel *slightly* less disposable
At this point in my fifty-six years and both multiple career paths and divorces I don’t need to write another essay about reinvention. I can simply go back and read about any one of them from past reinventions.
The First Step to Reinvention
Life Hacks in The Pursuit of Surviving the Leap from the Cliff
Starting Over... And Over Again
Puppet, Pauper, Pirate, Poet, Pawn & King
Christ, I’ve reinvented myself so many times I may as well list it as a skill set on my resume and LinkedIn profile. Some of these shifts were due to choice—a different job, the call of wanderlust, the need for the new. Others were forced upon me—divorces, death in the family, betrayal by a colleague. Whichever the case, starting over is becoming my go-to superpower (just behind to my inability to shut up in most situations and my ability to eat whole bricks of cheese in one sitting). It’s so common, in fact, that it’s arguable whether I’m reinventing at all. Perhaps I’m just evolving and each iteration is merely one more level up.
It occurs to me that the one element of, say, the archetype of myself that I’ve never taken the time to shape is my fondness for having a partner. I love women. Like Johnny Lawrence in Cobra Kai I’m a bit of a throwback. “Breasts” are scary; “titties” are fun. I’ve had three marriages that fizzled out or exploded and one long term relationship that was doomed from the start and I think the next chapter of my life needs to be that of confirmed bachelor.
Even now, only six months from the discovery that my wife had been selling herself on the Las Vegas Strip for the past three years, I’m looking around, assessing potential dates, thinking about romance, wondering what sex that is not disappointing might feel like again. This despite the tonnage of trust issues I now carry around like a Sisyphean boulder. I’m thinking that perpetually single may be the way to go for the next, say, decade.
One of my personal life hacks is the internal monologue of my own Great Santini. For context, The Great Santini is a 1979 film starring Robert DuVall as a monster of a father who barks and belittles his son to make him tough. I have my version locked down in a cellar below my medulla oblong at a that screams at me when I’m feeling down or unmotivated. “C’mon, you fucking pussy! Get up offa yer sorry ass and stop your moping, you sad sack of shit!” He has been effective over the decades in doing exactly what he intends—getting me to shake off the blues, preventing any self pity, and getting things done.
Due to either my age or the enormity of the last six months in terms of emotional carnage, he ain’t getting it done like days of yore. The switch has been to be observational to my mental state and work when the bull’s tail is right in front of me and relax when it isn’t. There are more good days than bad, more days when I wake up ready to take things on with a nearly maniacal focus but there are also days when I wake up reluctantly and can’t find anything but a lump of crap in the form of a human body, pondering my own value and the point of existing even another day. On those days, it’s best to sleep or read or just stare off into the distance.
Rather than bully myself into action, I’m seeking inspiration.
It’s interesting where I find it. My buddy Joe coming to grips with his teaching in Chicago and, instead of worrying about how the institutions he works for have squandered his enormous talents, finding his way into truly enjoying what it is he does and planning trips around the world. It’s watching my dad grind his way through dialysis, unhappy and in pain all the time but somehow and for some reason dedicated to breathing at least one more day despite the agony of simply getting up out of a chair. It’s in the conversation I have with the seriously overweight guy in the YMCA as he talks about his determination to drop his weight and get in shape because his brother died from COVID because he was likewise obese and it it killed him.
I’m also doing that thing I do when I stare deep into my failures and find something—anything—that can help me now out the dying embers of mistakes. I find some inspiration from Alice, the long-term relationship doomed from day one, in that she had a quote that, while she didn’t always observe it in her life, has an impact on mine today. From the poet Mary Oliver comes this suggestion: “Pay Attention. Be Astonished. Tell About it.”
So I’m doing my level best to pay attention—to the world, to my odd personal trajectory, to my seemingly impeccable timing in life. I’m letting some of things I see astonish and amaze me. And, in lieu of telling about them, I’m writing about them (which is like telling for the newly single and not seeking).