The Magnificent Death (1)

Like many introverts, you find serenity in nature. Retreating into the woods, the hills or simply out on the lake fishing. Leaving the company of people. Entering a better place.

Drugs and alcohol once took you away from people. False prophets, malicious guides into dangerous places, they drew you inward. Left you there. Isolated. Like they say in AA, your brain is a very dangerous neighborhood.

So you go outside. Marin County has so many trails. Within minutes you are free. In nature means you’re never alone, even by yourself. It’s both hard to explain yet obvious. Solitude is company. You hike. You walk. You stand perfectly still. You can feel yourself breathe. No more waiting to exhale. Not here. The monumental redwoods and fragrant cypress are profound company. Called “The Sleeping Giant” by locals, Mt. Tamalpais lords over you like a sentinel.

Exaltation. Elevation. No matter the circumstances, if you open the door you will always feel better. It never fails. Misery comes when you forget that it’s here.

To be continued…

True Crime

-The author, Karl Ove Knausgaard

Perhaps the greatest joy of reading, beyond escaping into the story itself, was discovering your self in another person’s words and worlds. Realizing that you were not too idiosyncratic. Not unusually unusual. That others, a certain few, thought as you did, felt things deeply or, as likely, not at all. These characters possessed your attributes and defects. They were outcasts. Geniuses. Drunks. Fathers. Husbands. Monsters too. Books opened doors where before you’d only glimpsed through keyholes. They validated you, even if in unsavory ways. Bram Stoker’s Dracula seduced you as the vampire seduced his prey. Inflamed by Ayn Rand’s iconoclastic hero Howard Roarke, who steadfastly zigged against a tide of mindless zagging. Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea beguiled you. “Fish… I’ll stay with you until I am dead.” Your heart beat madly as Kurtz’s in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. You, too, were “loyal to the nightmare of your choice.” Here, finally, was the other. Here finally were you.

Most recently, you’ve been reading (more like devouring) the auto-fiction of Norwegian writer, Karl Ove Knausgaard. His epic and massive series, My Struggle is, for you, nothing short of transcendent. Beyond memoir, Knausgaard vivisects his persona, revealing the truth about himself and those in his orbit, with intense clarity and unimaginable attention to detail; it is an autopsy of self, but never dour. On the contrary it is lightness itself, like a bright conversation. Somehow, someway, he illuminates the mundane, making it into something incandescent. Hard to explain but easy to feel. Brutally frank, regardless of the pain and embarrassment his admissions ultimately caused to both the author and those closest to him; his revelations strike you as necessary, even inevitable. In doing so, Knausgaard may have enraged his loved ones (you have read as much online), but he helped you to understand yourself, your defects and virtues, as never before. You relate to so many passages, choosing one is like picking out a goldfish at the pet shop. This, from his book Spring (part of a series he wrote just after My Struggle), speaking to his infant daughter:

I’m not good enough at talking to people to have close friends, and then there is also that I spend all my time on myself, which people notice, of course, so that no one takes that extra step. If someone does attempt to get closer, I usually withdraw into myself. That’s how your father is, a little shy of people, not necessarily because I want to be that way, but because that’s what I have become, and because that life, alone in front of the keyboard and the computer screen, is easier.

You could have written this to your daughters, every word. “It’s not a good quality,” he writes, “but it will become part of your life…I am writing this as an apology to you.”

Not sorry enough to change, however. And neither shall you. Some of it is laziness born of fear –call it wariness- but your questionable behavior, you’ve come to realize, is merely accepting the things you cannot change. Knausgaard is, at his core, an introvert and a narcissist, And so dear boy are you.

Interestingly and regrettably, it is precisely these two traits that define so many notorious killers. Ever since reading Truman Capote’s seminal book, In Cold Blood, you’ve identified with pathological murderers and are drawn to the genre because of it. In particular, it is the serial killer you find most compelling. Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. Zodiac. Like the vampires you adored as a youth, here were real-life loners who craved attention in the worst way possible. Introverted and narcissistic, each man was an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. Their cruel egos got the better of them. It stopped others cold.

Online ‘self-disclosing’ has a creepy vibe but it can also be a revelatory experience.

“And then when I was nine…”

According to a recent story in USA Today, more and more people are disclosing what used to be considered very private and personal information via social media precisely because of social media. The example given was of a woman who posted the happy but early news of her pregnancy (too soon?) followed by the sad news of her miscarriage (too much?), both on Facebook. She claimed to have received considerable relief from the outpouring of comments from all of her ‘friends.’

I don’t doubt it. I’m a big sharer as well; that is on Facebook, Twitter and, in particular, this blog. I derive considerable satisfaction from (your) support, compassion or just plain laughing along to popular culture’s flotsam and jetsam.

But that’s not me in real life. I’m an introvert. I like reading, writing, running and fishing. You do the math. Before social media, I pretty much kept to myself. I had more acquaintances than friends and I didn’t communicate with my extended family on a regular basis. And I most certainly did not share personal information with anyone other than maybe my wife or shrink. Even then I held on to stuff. Still do.

We’ve all heard how the Internet is supposedly keeping us from real interaction with our fellows, intimacy with our loved ones, et-cetera… But for me it’s kind of the opposite; I find it easier to share online than I ever did and do in real life. As a writer and an introvert, blogging and micro-blogging are a godsend.

I know what you’re thinking: lots of nerdy introverts find relief on the Internet, some of them pathologically. And I agree that this can be a dangerous rabbit hole. We all have read those stories. Or know people…

That’s why I appreciated the USA Today story: because it went the other way. It showed a real ‘live’ benefit to socializing online, as opposed to yet another screed about the perils of Facebook.