I’m Just Two Scrambled Eggs Away from Having Everything I Could Possibly Want

             Yesterday began with an all too familiar story about surviving panic attacks at Buddhist meditation retreats and the understanding that roughly fifty student final papers were not going to grade themselves by the end of the day. The understanding regarding the grading triggered a wave of anxiety that cycled itself back into the Buddhist meditation retreat story. The meditation retreat story provoked a certain level of existential dread. Comfort for the existential dread came in the form of knowing that writing matters (at least enough for there to be a required first-year writing course at a state university that demands students complete final papers.)

            The just-passed semester has been a collage of hectic moments usually spent wondering if this writing business (in strictly non-economic terms [for there is certainly no apparent immediate economic upside to lit-paper writing]) is worth the time and nerves required to pursue it. It has been an academic term of ritualistic quad-walking with one’s palms facing the sky in an “I don’t know what I’m doing with myself” stance. It has been a time of considering if there is something, anything, that would make me happier than I am when I’m writing scholarly papers that I know will never be published anywhere at any time (“I bet working in a cubicle isn’t nearly as bad as they make it look in Office Space. And hey, at least those guys never had any homework.” — The shameless things we tell ourselves to make it through just one more assignment that will maybe, just maybe, turn out to be the fated “last” assignment.)

            But, alas, to grade one’s papers one must physically possess one’s papers (i.e., one must have said papers on one’s person in order to mark them with smiley faces or encouragingly constructive comments that always read snarky and elitist.) And the papers were asleep in my office, and my personhood was in my apartment wearing unwashed sweatpants and loathing the weight of final grade entry deadlines. So I drove in to campus, the recently-purchased used-Amazon copy of Stillmatic scratching through my car cabin, and thought about what it is like to wake up groggy and congested at one o’clock in the afternoon on a Monday in mid-December under gray Midwestern drizzle clouds. And it felt bad and strangely alienating in the same way one might feel bad and alienated standing idly by and watching a farmer harvest her crop knowing one had absolutely nothing to do with the maturation of the season’s bounty (one only partakes of the bounty [both visually and nutritionally], making one a disgusting harvest toady with no right to anything delicious and good.)

            And in my late-waking-upedness I hadn’t eaten breakfast, reinforcing the notion that I lack purpose and direction with my chosen life path (one should begin to ask questions about one’s vocation when one can no longer plan and execute a simple feeding schedule, no?) The English building that holds my office in its larynx was naked in the winter wind and abandoned of students off celebrating academic “freedom” with the families who likely pay for the opposite of the freedom. I climbed the cold stairwell alone and imagined the steam coming off scrambled eggs and a hot cup of tea, how these things, their flavors, might help me make sense of an academic life I don’t really recognize I signed up for. And there at the top of the steps was Marcel Duchamp playing chess and living a life I read about in a book sometime last year.

            The iconic, and iconoclastic, Dadaist dropped his flourishing art career to pursue a chess obsession that cost him personal relationships, art-money, and perhaps his wits. An old anecdote placed Duchamp in his Paris apartment every starry night of the year, maniacally solving chess puzzles found in international gaming periodicals. Early in the morning, when he had solved all the puzzles but the final, most difficult one, he would excuse himself from the board (and the genius-ghosts sitting on the other side of it) and wander downstairs, to a small café that propped up his second-story apartment, to eat scrambled eggs alone in a corner booth. Nothing but scrambled eggs, for he believed their protein (or maybe their hidden, hard-boiled potential for life) would inspire him to crack the last chessic riddle. He would eat eggs and smoke cigarettes and, in my imagination, contemplate the life choices one would have had to make in order to be in the position to be living such a life (i.e., to contemplate the things one would have to be not doing in order to have the time to do the things Duchamp was doing/eating/solving.)

            A life that revolved around the obsessive pursuit of artistic harmony (for maybe, in the achievement of the harmonic moment, the genius-ghosts will fly back to where they came from), be it on a canvas or toiletry supply store or sixty-four-squared wooden permacanvas. For a seemingly forever I wanted such a life, with its erratic, passionate idiosyncrasies related to eating times, caffeine intake, and protein life-force. And in the office hallway, with a stomach grumbling scrambled eggs divine, I tasted the life for an out-of-breath moment. It tasted confusion covered in cracked peppercorn and the mist of oak trees sagging in the campus quad. It tasted papercut blood earned deep in the pedagogy pulpit. It was everything I never wanted to feel confusion over. All of it soaked in marble tiles and asbestos-removed ceiling panels the color of Illinois winter.

            It doesn’t take much to curse the things one doesn’t have—the catalog of not-had things is limitless and writes itself into eternity (like a bastard Christmas list). But the breathing in of having everything one needs to live the life one already has: this takes the pain of a botched meditation excursion, a stack of ungraded final papers, a fountain pen dry of bulletproof ink, and a urinal nicknamed “art.”