"Reason Tatters"

I have been so tired this week. When I say so tired, I mean like draggggging my elbows, forearms, backs of my hands, and forehead on the ground as I walk tired. At first, I thought maybe that I was just overwhelmed with all the stuff I have going on. It could be that, but there has to be some emotional baggage I am carrying around that makes my cup spill over before I have had time to pour anything in it. As any sociologist worth their weight in gold, I excavate the root causes until they become clear. So, I have been picking off all the scabs and looking in dark corners to see what is the meaning of this fatigue. Buckle up, you know it’s always a bumpy ride when I start talking about dark corners and scabs.

My talent lies in performing the autopsy of the feelingscape of reconstructing a retrospective to find the meaning. I am blind in the present, flailing like a newborn ewe trying to find its legs right after it’s born. I couldn’t see some of the tragedies surrounding my birthday. I’m not proud to say that I was waiting for the perfunctory text from my father. Honestly, when Lily asked how I felt about it, I was cagey and tried to dodge her question. I still hadn’t gotten my legs under me in this runaway tragedy of a relationship 37 years in. I wish I could be free of the nagging wish that things were different with my own nuclear family. Yet, the dye is cast. The dice are at rest. 

I’m just lucky I have built a family that can pick me up when I feel knocked down by my own ghosts. Lily and Juniper made my birthday so special. We are talking toddler hugs, cake, and the one night a year I will indulge myself in getting to choose takeout. Naturally, it was Peter’s Chinese, a Denver staple for some 35+ years. Honestly, all I ever want to do on a special day is eat. You can take a person out of the Midwest, but you will never take the midwest out of a person. Food has always been very healing and comforting for me and my kin in this way, like so many people from that part of the world.

“And isn’t it ironic, dontcha think,” that I am telling you, dear reader, that I have difficulty with feeling the emotions in the moment after my whole bring on the pain diatribe the other week? I was wondering how much I was tempting the fates with that essay. It sure felt like I was up on a very tall hill in a lightning storm just asking for a good licking. Welp, the licking came and knocked me on my ass. Well, each whooping comes with a lesson. Apparently, I am still that wounded kid who wished he had a real relationship with his dad and his mom was alive for his birthday. “Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you,” doesn’t it? I sure think so.

Tis’ the season for the melancholia to cut deep. The leaves are changing. The autumn equinox is upon us. I have faced that ghost of myself that just a few weeks earlier bought into the great summer delusion that our energy will never give out, that we will never die. Ahh, yes, that great American delusion that dies for me alongside the darkening days, the fading light. No, really, I was just reflecting a few weeks back that I could keep up with “content creation” everyday on the social medias. What a rube! I was drunk on the sun, playing out our culture’s favorite game where we all imagine that we live in an endless summer. Yet, the minute the leaves started changing and the pumpkin spice latte’s started flowing from the goblets of the enchanted, the mirage dissipated. The season of decay is calling me back from my toil to rest like the little country bumpkin I am. Yes, this sleepy time bear must come home to roost. 

And yet, my rest comes with an acerbic side of grappling with my own unwillingness to yield. That’s not entirely accurate. I have given myself a respite from creating for content sake—something that I disdain more than political parties. I have not marched my animate meat sack out in front of the camera on a tripod to create my jump-cut-happy reels to keep the attention of the public. No, I have relented in the pace with which I create such videos for this season of decay. Yet, I am unable to take leave from this series, dear reader. The discipline of writing must continue, lest I fear I will fall off into some catatonic void of nothingness/non-productivity. So Like David Foster Wallace, I give myself no respite. As Foster Wallace once noted in conversation with Charlie Rose:

“If past experience holds true, I will probably write an hour a day and spend 8 hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.”

Yes, even in my attempts to rest from writing, I will chew my knuckles raw worrying about finding these words each week.

My respite from my own internal dialogue this week came when I quested out to my hedge. “Dark star crashes…,” Jerry Garcia’s voice floats through the air out of a tiny bluetooth speaker attached to my handlebars while I am riding on the Sand Creek Greenway. The air is calm and temperature neutral. The light is like a drapery of nectar descending onto the landscape as the the sweet light of early evening deepens. Lost in the beauty of the late summer evening that is unfurling before me. “Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis,” Jerry continues in a touching rendition of dark star from February of 1974 in the Winterland Ball room. For a minute, I am lost in the moment, floating along the top of the gravel trail as the gentle descent along the Sand Creek aids my ride home. I feel light for the first time in days; My shoulders locked back into position and my knuckles not dragging on the ground. It wasn’t any monotheistic religion, spiritual guru, or book that brought me back. It was just naked direct experience on the hedge on two wheels.

I am a broken record. How many times have I said that I have lost trust in “official” pathways of religious and knowledge seeking? I think I have lost track. I am a weaver though, so I am down with building monuments on repetition. In this case, I am building a monument of negation by making it clear what I am opposed to. I’m not down with any of neocolonial churches and their missions, nor am I interested in donning the intellectual straight jacket that academia imposes on its members. I also don’t have any interest in the seemingly endless cascade of folx trying to start spiritual pyramid schemes by selling enlightenment. They all work really hard to sell you a pretty manipulative bill of goods where you have to adopt their world view without really questioning them or their values. I think that’s why I am so interested in discussing stories where I am not proud of how I showed up. I am very interested in sabotaging myself from any one getting confused. You see, I am just as fallible as all of you and am just as lost in the face of the great mysteries as you are. 

In the stead of those manipulative little game loops, I like to go out on the margins in my hedge on tiny quests where “reason tatters.” I know it’s a very stereotypical American approach to say, “Hey, I’m just gonna rely on my own experience on two legs and see where it takes me.” Welp, I am working on being more comfortable in accepting what parts of the American culture I will retain (e.g., distrust of authority, privileging direct experience, welcoming strangers) and those aspects of American culture I want to caste aside (e.g., extractivism, patriarchy, colonialism, racism). Once I set forth what ideals of Americanism I want to move forward with, I can dispense with the exhausting seeking, seeking, seeking for a rootedness in some culture far away from where I was born. No, I can just be a person fighting to build this place into something better. I can just be a person, who like their transcendentalist, abolitionist ancestors, goes out into the world and tries to find unity with the divine while breaking the shackles that bind my brothers and sisters still in chains. That’s much more interesting to me than anything a political party, church, or spiritual guru can sell me.

Questin’ hosses, this is the way! You know, the far off the internet vibe doing hand crafts and riding pedal bikes sorta vibe. The whole reason that I even quest is because of my friend Meredith Graves, SO WE INTERVIEWED HER (INDULGENT AIR HORNS BLARE WITH KHALED YELLING “ANOTHER ONE”)! She is the lord of quest and is quite possibly one of the coolest people on the planet (YES I’M BIASED AND PROUD OF MY FRIEND). She was the lead singer of the band Perfect Pussy, whose record “Say Yes to Love” is as electric as a live wire and as sonically interesting as anything I listen to.

She’s a witch, has met enya, midwifed the Witchstarter program for magic and occult projects at kickstater, a fellow virgo, and a badass handcrafter/baker. How did I do? Did my past writing promo copy for local electronic music shows show through? I apologize 1 million times to Meredith who is probably hating this section. In short, you should listen to Meredith because she’s rad, my friend, and has a lot of cool things to say about the importance and vitality of questing. If this short interview with Meredith doesn’t get you jazzed on that quest life, I may need to check your pulse. Her responses were not edited. In fact, we may ask her to come back to write 10,000 - 50,000 words on questing.

James Gardner (“JG”): What is questing to you?

Meredith Graves (“MG”): At first, ‘questing’ was a private game where I superimposed a fantastic lens over the real world, narrating my daily life to make everyday tasks more bearable and inspire me to remember the magic that always exists in the mundane. It was a funny personal creativity exercise that I figured would be restricted to an existence inside my own head – I’d been indoctrinated with language and tools from TTRPGs (“Table Top Role Playing Games”) after spending a few years working alongside some really brilliant minds in the games industry, and had started to become interested in how games are developed. It has since expanded to include quests-for-quests sake; not just rewriting my to-do list as if I’m a fairytale adventure princess, but actively going out in the world to find strange and miraculous things, and maybe doing some errands on the way if I remember.

JG: What role does questing play in your creativity?

MG: Questing is fundamentally an exercise in active imagination, a way of seeing everything creatively instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, or sequestering creativity to certain acts, or set times. When you adopt a quest mindset, ‘going into the city to get bread and vegetables at the market and buy a box of printer paper when the weather is shitty and I don’t want to go’ becomes ‘cloaking myself against the elements for a long, arduous train journey underwater to visit the village market and restock the cottage larder, before securing a ream of fresh parchment.’ You can see how the second one might motivate you to get up and move, or instill a more exciting mindset that makes the patterns of everyday life more mystical and exciting. 

JG: Does questing have anything to do with your sense of belonging or feelings of inhabiting a space?

MG: Definitely. I live in New York City, which is functionally eighty million zillion tons of energy condensed into a few square miles. When I hear my fellow transplants grousing about the city as if it’s a weird burden, or in any way tiresome or predictable, that’s an immediate red flag. You should never be bored here. The second you leave your apartment, something is going to happen. Every person carries a treasure or secret or bit of information that could change your day or life for the foreseeable future. When life becomes an adventure and each day a quest, you have motivation to remember that everything is exciting and important. 

JG: Do you think that questing and magic have any relationship to one another?

MG: Absolutely. It’s honestly too much to get into here, unless I’m going to take over your newsletter for 10,000 words! I’ll just give a couple of examples for now – for one, if you’ve ever done any sort of spirit-work or deity-work, you know that pacts and relationships often require actions. If you’ve ever had to go across town for special materia, or traverse a crossroads on a certain day of the week to leave offerings, you have quested. But on another note, as I sort of mentioned above, the application of ‘quest mentality’ to your everyday life is a means of consciously adopting a magical mindset to transform your experience, emotions, opinions, surroundings. I’ve often found that, when you go out looking for magic, you will find it in some form - that’s questing.

JG: Has questing shaped your own conception of how you think about yourself? If so, how?

MG: Yes, in many ways -- but I think, on a very simple level, this fun practice has reminded me that I am capable of more than the expectations I place on myself, or those placed on me by others. Approaching everyday life and responsibilities in a creative way, from the perspective of someone playing an RPG or writing a magical fantasy novel, is a fun way to remind oneself that the brain is a tool as well as a creative medium, and that you are in control of your mind in myriad ways -- beyond those often coached into us as folks with OCD and related spectrum disorders. It's not always about micromanaging your every thought to prevent an episode or meltdown, sometimes it's about making room for excitement, or adventure, and that can be just as helpful. Additionally, I've come to realize the ability to narrativize or co-create my everyday mundane reality is actually a powerful gift, for which I give great thanks to the Field and my spirit connections; as an extremely sober adult who is borderline ascetic in so many ways, having a way to superimpose a more diffuse magic over the total of my life, rather than doing anything with the goal of escaping from it, is a tremendous blessing, and has reminded me that I am received in my intentions by a universe who wants me to be well. 

JG: What is your favorite quest you have gone on? Why?

MG: I wish I could remember every quest I’ve ever been on and choose one favorite! Recently I had an enjoyable one when I had to jet around to three boroughs in a big loop to pick up specific items before a holiday shut down lots of businesses for a long weekend. I strapped my little old lady dog into her carrier and we set off. In seven hours of questing, four were spent on public transit, enough to make anyone a little loopy - but at various points we ended up in totally new neighborhoods, including one on the edge of a forest (not something you see every day in Brooklyn), exploring community gardens, eating wild raspberries in the sun, picking up special Icelandic wool and giant blueprints. Helen got lots of treats and attention everywhere we went. When you adopt elderly dogs, every day carries this subtle hint of sand running down an hourglass, so memories like this feel particularly important. I don’t know how long she’ll be with me - hopefully another 10 years at least, of course - so the real goal is to make every day exciting, comfortable and special, because she deserves it. 

JG: Do you have a soundtrack for questing, such as a self-made mixtape or album, that you listen to while questing?

MG: Not one specific soundtrack, but I do often ‘score’ my quests – listening to music that adds to the headspace or theme of the whole jaunt. Yesterday it was King Geedorah, the day before it was Ravel, so there’s no rhyme or reason except following a feeling! 

You know why you should do interviews with your friends? Aside from your own direct experience, they are about the next best way to learn about the world in a safe way. When someone cares about you enough to be your friend, that’s when you know you can trust their take. They aren’t trying to convince you of anything for their own selfish motives. They just want you to thrive. I can get down with knowledge passed down in that lovely cocoon of trust and respect, but, I DIGRESS. I hope you have a great one, dear reader.

Best,

James

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