There Was Nothing Wrong With His Life, Really

He’d sit up in the darkness staring across the inlet at the lighthouse on its pile of rocks, tossing its feeble light out into the fog rolling in off the lake. It was a ridiculous and hokey metaphor for exactly where he was in his life, but, what the hell, it was oddly comforting.

The Charley Patton, the Robert Johnson, the Skip James records, they sort of cancelled out the lighthouse, but that was the way he lived in the world; that was how he did things and tried to keep the darkness and light of the world in proper proportion.

For at least twenty years, since the first from his ever shrinking circle of friends and acquaintances started dropping dead from cancer, he fretted his way to the butt-end of every cigarette. Something was growing in his lungs; there was some persistent corrosion in his throat, a tightness in his chest. That nonetheless didn’t stop him from working nervously through his pack a day.

There was nothing wrong with his life, really. The things that had happened to him and the things that would happen to his body were things that happened to all sorts of people all the time. Plenty of people had it a whole lot worse, he knew that.

Yet it was an American’s particular prerogative to be miserable when there was really not that much to be miserable about. There was no form of self-pity that could not be romanticized, justified, and otherwise celebrated. That was why he loved the blues; it was so thoroughly American. European music might be tragic, might be romantically tragic, but the blues were full of the vaguest, most saturated sorrow, full of fear and pure, plain, fucked-up self-pity. They made that lighthouse feel like nothing more than the sad, distant metaphor it was, and most nights he could imagine himself crawling through the darkness for days, for months, fumbling his way toward that light, or praying for that light to find him, but somehow never quite managing to get there.

And there was no getting around it: he loved that warm, woozy feeling of drifting in the darkness, just as he loved knowing that the light was out there across the way, vigilant, there not as welcome but warning, a beacon whose job was to push him further out to sea.