Balckwell Rising!

As they say today, so they will say tomorrow: “A few days in the woods will reinvigorate many a weary man.”

After an April and a May that were about as stressful as I will allow a month to get, it was certainly a relief to free myself from familiar sights and the familiar thoughts they engender. In April, I published my first novel; in May, I dealt with the consequences of throwing all else to the wayside during the preparations for publishing my first novel. All in all, the work itself is but a small part of the pie; the real stress comes from the time spent not working but thinking about working. And not just thinking about working, but thinking about whether the work is good, is beneficial, is successful, etc, etc. Imagine you had a pair of wired earbuds in your pocket, then after a few days you added a second set, and so on, and so on, until by the end of a few weeks you have a tangled knot such that would make even the great Alexander shudder.

The woods are the knife that cuts through the tangle. At the end of the day, there really is nothing to it. The great thing about problems that aren’t real is that when you ignore them for a few days, they tend to disappear. I left a window open at home, and when I returned, all the worries that had coated the walls of my apartment like a layer of dust had simply flown away. A full day of laundry later, and life is as clean as a whistle. We even have a new, larger fridge, with a freezer capable of handling the never-depleted pile of sfiha infinitely replenished by my mother-in-law. What more could a man ask for!

Yes, I have returned with a wide open heart and a mind full of leaves and birds. I have been reading Dersu the Trapper, the memoir of one Vladimir Arseniev, upon which one of my favourite films, Dersu Uzala, is based. Of course, my time in the woods was nothing like his weeks-long treks in the Siberian taiga, hiking through the rain and the flies, fording rivers, and meeting with hunters, trappers, and ginseng-farmers along the way. My time was much more pleasant, full of creature-comforts: coolers full of fresh food (and beer); a propane-powered stove and artificial fire (campfires being banned early this year due to multiple entire provinces being on fire); and of course, a car with which to easily conduct all of these materials along with my person as far as I needed to go. And yet, of course, what Arseniev lacked in comfort he gained in the sublime, of which but a small part he can transfer to me in the form of his book. But I will take what I can get, for, as he says, the flies of the taiga alone are enough to ”drive an impatient, nervous, or irritable man to distraction,” and I am unfortunately all three of those things.

The book, combined with my feeble-yet-effective attempt at “getting away from it all,” have put me into a mood that I must appreciate while it lasts, for a man can not live his whole life as if he was encamped in the woods. He can not, because he will not allow himself, and I recognize that in time, I will return to being my own worst enemy. What had built up during those two years will build up again, slowly but surely, and this relaxed, attuned mood will be less than a memory.

A few weeks ago, I proved once again that searching for a job will in fact not kill me, but I have not yet re-proven that searching for a job will in fact get me a job. Morrissey once sang, “No I’ve never had a job, because I never wanted one.” Later in the same song, he says, “No I’ve never had a job, because I’m too shyyy.” Whether the first reason informs the second, the second the first, or each reason exists independently of the other, is unclear. However, both reasons are equally solid, to my mind. Unfortunately, my mind is not the only mind.

With that last paragraph, we have re-introduced a slight amount of pressure. I had forgotten over the weekend that I had been looking for a job. Now, I have remembered. I have placed the headphones in my pocket. Right now, they’re perfectly untangled; I could pull them out and put them straight in my ears. But a little nudge here and a little nudge there, and they will soon work their way into a knot. Oh! I need to finish the Balckwell’s Books episode for this month. There’s another set of headphones. I need to write another essay after this one. Another headphone.

Yes, I know, I should just switch to Bluetooth. I just wanted to use this analogy once before it becomes totally irrelevant.

Perhaps I am being too fatalistic. It is not as if I never learn anything from my experiences. With time, I have become a more composed individual on the whole, with my dips into decomposition becoming shorter, tamer, and more infrequent. Perhaps I can carry some of this relaxed mood with me for a while, consciously, by refusing to revert to my same old ways just because I am back in the same old place. The place has changed, after all: there’s a new fridge in the kitchen. Perhaps my mind has changed in the same way: nothing drastic, but one small, little change that makes life one small, little bit easier.