Curating The Box

It started like these things always do, with me minding my own business. We were in the middle of our annual New Year’s purge of all the things in our lives that we hadn’t touched, used, or needed in the previous year, 2012 edition. If it sat around for that long and didn’t contribute, it’s gotta go. I was at the epicenter of the disaster area the house becomes during this ruthless expunging of all things redundant, the office. Lindsay always conducts herself with the utmost professionalism during this procedure, allowing no sentimental attachments or wistful trips down amnesia lane to mitigate the lead pipe cruelty with which she discharges her duties. The Germans would be proud. 

Me, I always get sidetracked tinkering with things; reading random articles in back issues of Rolling Stone or some stray comic book I find; perhaps wishing I’d taken advantage of an expired coupon found in the dusty arcology of crap under the desk. I like trying to turn on all the old cell phones that mark the various periods in my life and career with their obsolescence. Blackberry, Motorola Razr, LG Flip Phones, EN-V 1 and EN-V 2; they’re like runes and arcane totems of bygone epochs, archeological curiosities of a fallen civilization. So far the Razr is the winner, still turns on after 4 years of not being charged or connected to service. I’ve read you can still call 911 from any cell phone that turns on, no matter how antiquated. So it survives the purge for another year. You never know.

Probably the worst thing that can happen to me during this process, at least for the sake of efficiency, is finding The Box. I’d guess we all have a version of The Box somewhere in the dusty corners of the messes we curate and call our lives. Mine is a Nike shoebox with black walls and a red top that has survived 20 years and 11 moves across 4 states. As far as I can tell, it still looks exactly the same as the day the shoes came out of it. It appears to be impervious to both the abuses of life and the weight of years. It’s fared better than me, anyway. Inside it is an archive of letters, pictures, journals and memories that constitute the major chapters of my life. They’ve sifted themselves into strata that roughly approximate the chronological march of the different eras they represent. The footprints left of a life gone by.

The pictures are the easiest. You’ve seen a lot of them, of course. I’ve scanned them into binary representations, essentially a picture of a picture, yet another step removed from the reality they once represented. I’ve put them in albums here, messaged some of them to you as calling cards to see if you still remembered, still wanted to know me. That friend request button became a referendum on me as a person, which is more than a little disconcerting. How have we arrived in a world where the pressing of one button can represent the entirety of your being, encapsulated for the review and approval/disapproval of another person? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

If the pictures are the easiest, the journals are the most unbearable. I stopped journaling forever ago, after I compared the angst and existential soul searching from Jr. High to those I was writing in college and my early 20’s. Only the names had been changed. It was disturbing to discover that all the problems were exactly the same, and the only difference was really in the degree of complexity grafted onto the same old BS. So I have to be pretty far down the well to crack those open, and with Lindsay buzzing around the house filling boxes and plastic bags for the numerous trips to Goodwill and the homeless shelter, there’s no time for that sort of navel pondering nonsense. But there’s always time for the pictures. And this time for the letters.

So it was that in January 2012, I found myself at the center of this perfect storm of life circumstances and melancholy mementos. It was the first New Year’s since I’d turned 40, which is kind of a double whammy as many of you can attest to from experience, or empathize with out of your own dread at it’s coming. The natural bent we all have at the New Year to take stock is only magnified by the whole midlife crisis thing, rarely to positive effect. So when I opened The Box and the pictures from my 40^th Shindig were sitting right there on top, it kind of caught me flat footed. Blindsided me with an uppercut before I could get my guard up. There I was, staring back at myself, except 6 months older already. By January, I was headed into my third month of unemployment, and was about twenty cents shy of a quarter. We were behind on a house payment and I had no prospects for work in sight. There were no unemployment benefits by then because I’d been self-employed for a year, so I was picking up the odd weekend graveyard shift running a cash register at a local Subway for minimum wage, servicing drunk college students at 2:00 AM. With a shaved head and 40 pounds of extra weight, my self-worth was on the mat and the ref was already at an 8 count before I even had time to wonder what the hell had happened.

So on that Sunday morning, January 1, I was in a mood to go waaaaay down in The Box. Past the pictures of me jamming guitars with Christian, singing with Dave, hiking with Lang and Kristin, bowling with Sean.  Past the pictures of me with the girl I lost my virginity to the summer I turned 17, Chrystina, or the first girl to break my heart. Down into the letters. The letters are a halfway point between the pictures and the journals, both in the topography of The Box and my own psychological landscape as well. There are relatively few of them, and I’ve always wished that I’d kept more of those over the years. Although to be honest, they’re mostly from people that I wound up letting down or those who did the same to me, so maybe it’s best that there are as few of them as there are.

Owing to an ennui onset by the circumstances in which I found myself, and to the general laziness that is part and parcel of my character, I took the time to really look at that stack of letters for the first time in over a decade, instead of sifting through the avalanche of paperwork in the office like I should have. The contents of The Box, although rarely viewed, are as familiar to me as the contours of the teeth in my mouth. You kind of take those unseen things for granted sitting in their darkened niche, only becoming aware when something foreign intrudes. In this case, it was a thrice folded sheath of light brown recycled paper. Not recognizing the letter from the outside, I had no idea what awaited me.

Seeing the characteristic loops and whorls of a woman’s elegant handwriting on college ruled paper gave me no clue as to who the author was, which really surprised me since I thought I was intimately acquainted with every corner of The Box. Clearly, not so. I actually had to flip it over to see who it was from. As an English Major, she had been so good as to sign and date it in civilized fashion, giving me a touchstone that oriented me in time and space. Glad I was sitting down. This missive had time traveled to meet me from 15 years in the past. I had virtually no memory of every having received it. Not entirely surprising considering that when I originally received it, I was approaching the tail end of an uninterrupted 2,195.5 day bender of 24 hour a day, wall to wall stonerdom. It would be 278 more days until sobriety found me. But that’s another story. 

So I set into that letter with real curiosity. It was from a dear friend who had been one of the right people, in the right place at the right time to help catalyze a fundamental change in my life and personality that has literally defined every minute since; possibly the single biggest turning point in my life. It was like finding the winning lottery ticket to hear from her again. But all was not well in those nostalgic halls of memory. As I said, the letters are almost exclusively from those disenchanted with me, and this was no exception. She was sending me this letter to call me on my shit and tell me what a bad friend I was being. It was excellent. She wasn't shrill, or strident. It was completely open, honest and gutsy. I loved it. She was putting it out there how hurt she was, totally honest and unvarnished, but with this incisive openness that only comes from having balls of solid rock. I was totally blown away; I'm tearing up now just thinking of it. And the worst part was, when she sent it to me back in ‘97, I NEVER RESPONDED. What an ass! Total autopilot zombie moron. Because back then I was so spoiled; my life was filled with all these thoughtful, amazing people. I thought they grew on trees, and of course they don't. They get jobs, get married, have kids, and move away. Idiot!

So there I was, January 1, 2012, minding my own business… Only to realize I hadn’t been minding the business that needed minding at all. In one hand, the photos of my big birthday party, the State of the Union at 40, if you will. These were the people I know now, salt of the earth, every one of them. In the other hand, the words of someone I used to know, and wished like hell that I could know again. Because no one in 40-land would ever have talked to me the way the English Major did. Everyone in 40-land is civilized and diplomatic, politically correct and non-judgmental. The edges are all smoothly polished.  But somebody needs to talk to you like that sometimes. Otherwise you wake up at 40 under the weight of this crazy stone, having lost all care for the things you own; where everything is a copy of a copy of things that used to matter. And when you’re washing dishes at Subway at 2:37 AM on Sunday morning, you got nothing but all the time in the world to think about that.

So that’s why I did it. I made a list of people that I very much wanted to know again, the people who were challenging, funny, sardonic, inspiring, kind, wise, generous, talented, wisecracking, irascible, intelligent, creative and beautifully flawed, and decided to build a family of my own choosing. To add another chapter, another strata, to The Box. That list had 4 names on it. So I pulled out my trusty laptop and typed in the word Facebook for the first time.

I had no idea what I was doing, of course. All I knew about FB was that everyone I knew locally that was on it had either petered out after finding out what their best friend from high school and/or first love was up to these days, or they posted every banal detail of their day on it and used it as another layer of distraction in their lives, just like TV. None of that was of any interest to me. So there I was with my list just blindly groping, trusting in technology to manhandle me through to the place I wanted to be, with no idea how to get there or if there would even be anyone home when I arrived. There almost wasn’t.

Of those 4 names, only 1 came up in any of my diligent searches. If none of them had, I probably would have just dropped the whole thing right then. And nothing would be the same today. But there she was… Lang Sheorn. To the rescue again, just like in ’95. And with her came the whole kit and caboodle.  She was actually the last of the 4 to respond, and that was months later, but because of finding her and her friend list, I found the English Major and she was the first to respond. Kind of fitting that together they would open a new chapter for me… Wheels within wheels.

The rest has come slowly, organically over the last year. Some were added because it was obvious, we’re already friends in regular contact. Some were added because it was expected, work or family. Others are here because they pine for my wife and the occasional tidbits that come here. One of her friends gave me a key piece of advice early on in limiting the number of friend requests I responded to, which I’ve come to see the wisdom in. Some of you saw my name amongst the contacts of our mutual friends and reached out, much to my continual delight. Some arrived because of sleepless nights while I went out of town looking for work, and you responded at 3:00 AM like it weren’t no thang.  And like all of life it has been messy, disappointing, and randomly amazing in unforeseeable ways. Some of the ones I hoped for the most from turned out to be duds who just phoned it in and got deleted. Sadly, even one of the 4. Others who seemed like blast from the past nostalgia contacts have turned out to be the most gracious, hilarious, uplifting friends that I have.

And what a motley group you are.

There are 84 of you now. I know that seems small to many of you (though not all), whose friends number in the hundreds, even one or two whose count is in the thousands. But I followed that one person’s advice (Thanks Suzie) to focus on the quality rather than the count of spectators who just wanted to satisfy their curiosity about how things had “turned out” for me. As though we were all done, and this was the outcome. So instead I’ve ignored two thirds of all requests, and even had a mid-year purge of twenty-some-odd that just weren’t contributing or desirous of my input. In fact, I’m about to dump 5 or 6 more here in a few minutes. Haven’t seen or heard from them in a year? They gotta go. I don’t need tourists to LOL their way through my life.  I’ve had about enough autopilot BS for a lifetime. Haven’t you?

So instead there’s this crazy-quilt ensemble of carpenters, musicians, computer gurus, ship captains, teachers, architects, cops, tattoo artists, accountants, engineers, prison guards, attorneys, weavers, former clients, real estate agents, students, office managers, Marines and even… a parrot. And let’s not forget those English Majors, God love ‘em. From elementary school to college, from church to the psychedelic frontier, ranging from Florida to Alaska, Hawaii to Maine, the Virgin Islands to Chicago, Germany to Canada you hail from every corner of my life’s story. Some are boys, some girls, some gay, some straight, some with serious edumucations, others with blue collar hands of steel. We got us some unemployed ones, some stoner ski bums, married or multiple divorces, home-schoolers, small business owners, a kid that I babysat in High School during the summer for gas money, who’s  now a grown-ass man big enough to easily snap my neck for all the merciless pillow fight beatdowns in the 80’s. Hell, there’s even a millionaire thrown in for laughs.

Some know me as Lawrence, others as Brien, and a couple—the few, the proud—even from the O’B days. From Christians to Jews to Agnostics and Atheists, it’s a big ol’ tent we’re under here. My Marine buddies roll with some serious fire power, while some would like to see those same guns confiscated. We’re Liberal, we’re Conservative, gee-whiz optimists and industrial-grade cynics ranging from 26 to 68 in age. And while I’m perfectly comfortable discussing the Bible, Carlos Castaneda, and the Laws of Thermodynamics, and find myself at ease with the attorneys and the blue collar bruisers I hang with (hell, I’m still friends with both sides of the same divorce), it can be lonely here in the middle. 

Because whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, religious or agnostic, millions agree with you either way. When you find yourself in empathetic agreement with elements of every side, when you see clearly the glaring holes in your own logic and belief system and can never quite buy all the way in to anything, it can feel like you’re a constituency of one. Like the edge of a coin, neither heads nor tails. And as much as I’d love to round you all up and have a huge reunion, I think it’d be a bit of a powder keg up in here.  But here in this single portal I can be with each of you in our respective ways without fear of the matter/anti-matter reaction that would surely ensue at the big roundtable that I actually wish was at the center of our lives together. Oh, well.

Over this past year we’ve had our share of debates, where most of you have been so gracious as to give me the last word, since I’m prone to taking it anyway. Because of you I’ve seen unbelievable displays of art; sublime paintings, breathtaking photography, amazing music, kinetic sculptures and some quantum poetry. We’ve had a ton of laughs, shared embarrassing photos and reminisced about forgotten misadventures and our wasted youths. I sent out a couple dozen mixtape CD’s to friends old and new, like that annoying guy in Jr. High you only wanted to be friends with. I’ve even shared a beer with one of you who was three time zones and two beers ahead of me on a Friday afternoon (Cheers, David D!)

We survived a particularly shrill election cycle, about which the less said, the better. We’ve rooted for each other; weathered national disasters, white-knuckling it through a hurricane lashed night, whether in the teeth of it or powerless to help and just sweating for friends in harm’s way. We cried, grappled and raged at our still raw, shared national tragedy.  Our exchanges were challenging, and comforting; passionate and compassionate as we sought to find meaning in senselessness, and solutions to sickness and evil in our midst.

There have been two phone calls, one with Lang and her sweet Southern lilt (No one says my name like her: “Lorrance”), and one with Elise who has the softest voice ever, in stark contrast with the hardcase she is on FB. There’s been one reunion in real life, with a decades overdue apology tendered, hatchets buried, bridges built. I know I still have a couple more to go, but if Facebook can shine a light of redemption on the worst things I’ve ever done, maybe there’s hope for me yet.  

We’ve added babies to our respective clans, we’ve lost loved ones. There have been divorces, but an engagement as well, and new businesses ventured.  Your kids have become beloved to me as extensions of you in this world as I’ve watched them thrive in dance lessons, or breaking your heart on their first day of school as they’re already growing up too fast. Just knowing that some of my high school friends have kids of their own that are now married…  People 2 years behind me in school, by the way. Yikes!

From that first glimpse into the lives of the original 4, to the fuller experience of this expanding density of souls, one thing has remained consistent. My perception of you and the lives you’ve cobbled together has both challenged and inspired me in my own daily walk. Seeing your beautiful families, your careers, hobbies and passions really drew a line in the sand for me. I looked at you, then looked at me and did not like what I saw at all. Granted, FB is a commercial for the best version of ourselves and our lives that we can present to the world, but even so -if you’re only half as awesome as you seem- I was still deep in the red, and that is a bad feeling, really hard to live with at first. I mean, seriously, have you looked at you lately? You’re pretty sexy.

I can’t tell you how much time I spent hovering over my page in the first few weeks, still unemployed and scratching for every dime I could get my hands on, and looking for those blessed little red squares to help make the day just a little more bearable.  To kill time between logins I started walking, just to get my fat ass off the couch and in some kind of motion. And week after week, I’d strap that iPod and raincoat on and go for long aimless walks that spanned a hundred square blocks, and hundreds more miles of train tracks. And when I got home there was always something new waiting for me.

The days became weeks, which became months, as they are wont to do, and the work began to trickle in again, thanks in large part to somebody’s crossed fingers and in small measure to well-timed networking and fortuitous meetings. The 40 pounds slowly melted off as the miles fell under my ancient Doc Martins. My hair grew back in with more than a few grays. Who knew they could do that while in exile? They hadn’t seen the light of day in 6 or 7 years, so WTF, man? The business continued to grow in fits and starts, I added a couple of partners and employees. I learned the true meaning of stress as I began to swing hammers in the day and sweat the books at night. Confidence, patience and resolve began to take the place of frustration and poverty.

In the interim, we shared. The first chats with long-lost friends were always a mix of breathless exhilaration and typing over each other, essentially generating two parallel conversations at once. Playing catch-up, me trying to be funny and charming, someone worth knowing. Thankfully a chat allows pauses for me to Google things to sound smart. And yet, this is still the best I can do. Sadly, there are limitations to the illusions that technology can generate.

The first post I wrote that wasn’t a laugh or some esoteric rant was just a random observation about the spring cherry blossoms falling from the trees that line one of the corridors I walk down. Your amazing, positive responses were a catalyst that got some wheels turning. Feeling emboldened, I began to write. Some things were published on my page, others were messaged privately, representing huge leaps into the unknown for me. I’m no stranger to writing, I’ve actually been writing a book since sometime in the late 90’s (It should be obvious even to me that I will never finish it, but I keep plugging away) that I’ve never shared with anyone, so sending those couple of essays (Especially to an English Major!) was scarier to me than walking any 3^rd story framing plates could ever be.  That alone has been rewarding beyond anything I could have hoped for, bringing an entirely new dimension to my life. It’s given me boldness to work with a radio producer, and to begin doing some writing and voice work for commercials. Who knows where new paths might lead?

Two things really surprised me this year about you and the FB experience. The first came when I announced that the business had landed our biggest contract ever, which was several times bigger than our previous best. The congratulations were overwhelming. When you post as often as I do (which is more than average, but still a lot less than several of you), you get used to playing for an audience of a dozen or less. I still remember the first thing I posted that got no response at all. It was surprisingly hurtful, which seems ridiculous now. Today I think nothing of it, but that first time… So when responses are low, one gets the impression that the number of people seeing the entries is also low. But when I made that first announcement, which was a huge watershed moment in whether or not we were even going to make it at all as a company, you all came pouring out of the woodwork. People I’d forgotten I had even friended showed up. It was a nice reminder that even in silence we still orbit one another, which is oddly comforting as the days pass. There you are.

The second was a badly worded joke that I made about being depressed and calling an Al-Qaeda fronted suicide hotline. The punchline goes something like -Suicide Hotline Operator: “That is wonderful news! Can you fly a plane?” I received one phone call and a number of concerned messages about my depression. The funniest one was from a client whose bathroom I was remodeling. He wanted to make sure that his project would be finished before I offed myself (You got a heart as big as all indoors, Ray). By far the sweetest thing was that the English Major messaged me at almost 1:00 AM her time, to be sure I was OK. It was all surprisingly affecting, as I suddenly became aware of a safety net I hadn’t known existed.

 And In the end, that’s really why I came.

Not to find out how you “turned out." I hate to ruin the suspense, but at the end of the story, we die. That’s how it “turns out."  And those Entertainment Tonight weekend edition segments on “Where Are They Now?” are just the worst. I have no interest in Before and After versions of you. We’re not some nostalgia band playing our greatest hits here as our best days recede behind.  It only matters who we are now, and who we’re becoming. So although I’ve come a little late to the party, say 10-15 years late in many cases, I don’t want to miss another minute. I don’t care if you’re political, religious, artistic, nerdy or just ornery. I like the articles, the pictures, the memes, the rants, the videos, the songs, the jokes, and the beer recommendations.  Keep the Star Wars, Kitteh, Birthday, Metalfest, Tumblr, YouTube, and  JibJab stuff all a-comin’! I wanted to find myself connected to a real community of engaging people. To find myself in the midst of those who would communicate, criticize, rage, encourage and participate in each other’s lives, rather than phone in some “Workin’ hard, or hardly workin’?” nonsense. The world at large is built by and for those automatons. But this one is built by us. Anything authentic is welcome; good or bad, happy or sad, whimsical or deathly serious. And nothing besides.

It’s been a helluva year. I believe that I failed to mention that the business has tripled in size, and even better, its gross receipts have increased by an order of magnitude. In one year. For a guy who began the year fat, bald and unemployed, it’s been quite a ride indeed. All of these changes are linked in so many ways to finding myself re-inspired, reconnected to something purposeful, rather than just going where the whims of fortune take us. I looked around one year ago and realized that the life I had was the kind you wind up with when the music stops and you just sit in whatever chair remains, with whoever’s left. I guess that’s what happens when you spend too long minding the wrong business.

This year as we begin the ruthless purge yet again, I find that I have way less to be rid of, and more of what’s worth keeping. Another strata, but this time added to an entirely different kind of Box, one that I visit way more often. In this Box the letters are filled with laughter and commiseration, and rather than letting friends down, I try to uplift with every lame joke, bad pun, philosophical pondering and emoticon in my arsenal. ;-) I don’t have everything I want, but I definitely want what I’ve got. And I can’t imagine how I would have gotten here without you.

Yup. A helluva year. No idea how we’re gonna top this one, my friends. But how ‘bout we give it a whirl anyway? You never know.