Monday, September 27, 2004, 8:23am
Monday, September 27, 2004, 8:23am
On a cool and nearly cloudless autumn morning we rattle and flat-wheel-thump our way east through Framingham Station. Soon, at perhaps 40mph, the thumping of the wheel blurs into the rest of the mechanical cacophony of the train where past West Natick the roar is making this newer single-decker car sound and feel a lot more like the old blue seat cars of the 4:10pm Worcester Express. The public address system is new and as the train pulls out of Natick Station, Norm makes a clear announcement for the next station stop at Wellesley Square.
West Natick is a newer part of town, and when the MBTA restarted the commuter rails in the early 1980s, I’m guessing they added the West Natick Station near the Framingham border to keep commuters from parking in the already-clogged downtown business district – at least that was the rationale for placing Ashland Station a mile west of Main Street.
From what I understand, continuous service from Boston to Worcester lasted from the early 19th century until overwhelmed by gas-guzzling automobiles in the 1950s. After the Yom Kippur War and OPEC oil embargos in the mid-1970s passenger train lines were reopened nominally as way to save energy, reduce air pollution and limit traffic congestion. Also it might have been a cultural phenomena looking back to an age when cities were destinations of commerce and culture rather than places from which to flee – as had been the case since World War II. Yet in reality, as close as I can tell, the central impetus for the renewal of commuter rail service was the simple availability of federal money in the hands of aging transit authorities such as the MBTA hoping to extend their organizational reach. Nowadays, with no grand missions as a guiding light, the running of the trains is little more than unabated institutional inertia and individual habit.
Despite a reliable ride this morning, melancholy has returned. At its root, this hasn’t sprouted from signs of the cold and darkness to come announced by flashes of autumn orange speckled among passing tree limbs. That is the old excuse I once gave to the syndrome greeting me each September for as long as I can remember. Perhaps I realize that I’ve packed up my old cherry-wood 8×10 inch Burke and James view camera for the last time – wrapped carefully into boxes ready for shipment to California where it may see sheet film for the first time in 20 years. Maybe also it is because I’ve also listed my Calumet 4×5 inch camera on eBay alongside a really nice 200mm f/2.8 telephoto lens from my 35mm Canon SLR camera system. I hardly ever used the 4×5 but the telephoto has a lot of personal history including long hikes through the Alps. Like so many of my lenses it has an even longer history collecting dust, and the last time I used it was at some air show at Hanscom Air Force Base a year before Jenny died.
Last night I finally found my 8×10 sheet film holders after several weeks of occasional digging. It seems that when I dragged the Burke and James out from its crypt in the basement I also grabbed a bag with the holders inside without noticing or remembering and the whole time they’ve been sitting directly under the growing pile of stuff to sell.
Man-o-man I’m losing it!
Looking for shipping boxes last night I also found an old photo album that predates any camera equipment placed recently on eBay. These were photos made when I was about 20 years old and I do not recognize myself – or better said, I don’t look much like that anymore. I’m almost 50 now and these days the face I see in the mirror is much too close to my dad’s face at this age for comfort. Add a few more pounds and thinning hair and the resemblance would be frightening.
I’m still stuck on the notion of cleaning out everything I own of material value – last night I even found a guy on craigslist who will haul away old computers and anything related, so I can finally get rid the growing pile if ancient PCs in the basement – much of which I can’t toss out curbside anymore because of the mercury content in CRT screens. Today I spent a few moments pricing telescope equipment on eBay. Once I run out of cameras to sell I’ve still got a few brand name eyepieces and other accessories that might be worth a few bucks. I’m guessing these will fetch a better price now than at some future estate auction when nobody knows their truer functions. Most of this telescope hobby has resulted in some really weird equipment, mainly half-built custom designs that served some long-forgotten purpose in a development project. That pile should go in the trash.
I do have my hopeful moments. Lately, though, I mostly feel a mad rush to get things wrapped up before some plug in my head comes unglued. If I ever wind up in an Alzheimer’s ward this journal could be shown as log of early symptoms. More likely my simple autumn depression is getting the better of me or some unnamed variant of this syndrome. Rather than any sort of steady air supply the medication is more like a passing whiff of oxygen, and sometimes my frenzied pace has me wondering if the official diagnosis of depression really describes the pathology at all. The frenzy is like a magnetic storm building up on the surface of the sun in the form of a relatively calm and dark spot only to let go with a burst of x-rays and particles heaved deeply into space until colliding with the incoming flux from all other stars at the edge of our solar system far beyond Pluto. At least that’s the image darting into mind.
The Leica M4 and Summicron 50mm lens should be back in about a month from their cleaning in California – that is, if the camera made it to the shop before my contact headed off to Europe for a month. Otherwise the camera will be spending the next four weeks atop some in-basket before anyone looks at it. After all the effort to get the thing shipped, I never did check last Friday to see if the package arrived on time. When I consider how the combo is worth at least $1,200 it’s odd how I’d forget a detail like that.
More images pull on my attention…
Wednesday night Randy will be asking again if I’ve made any progress on my Thief campaign. Shadowspawn, as he is known in the Thief community, is one of my main design collaborators, and it’s unusual for me to spend more than a week without reporting good progress. But it’s been nearly six weeks since I began this journal and I haven’t even touched the database. That’s totally crazy because I began to write as a way of discussing and loosening logjams in my game-design – not to build up even more.
Around four years ago I got seriously burnt out on this project – right after I built what was to become the first chapter. Like I did then I might get interested again after a short time away from the editor. But I’m beginning to have my doubts as the usual appeals and begging from diehard players has little effect. Maybe that’s one reason I’m working so hard to clean up my life – if the residue of old hobbies is sold on eBay perhaps I can focus my attention on this one last project before the energy runs out for good. This story about Alisha was supposed to be just that – my last project. Then I could say that I’d created all I ever wanted to create, and finally end the madness of incessant hobbies for good.
I would give up right now, except that I can’t just stop with the final chapter of a five-year game design project half done. That would be like digging a grave and never burying the corpse. I’m in a giant tug of war here. I don’t want to quit and I don’t want to finish all the same. Something has to yield because I can’t take the stress much longer.
I’m not sure why I need to pull in the direction of quitting. Pulling away like this itself is a hugely draining obsession and it would be less work to give into the work rather than avoid the work. Yet there’s more to it than avoiding hobby projects. Sometimes when it becomes clear that I won’t reach an ideal target, I lose energy and bring the project to an early conclusion before it becomes the mess I expect – sometimes trashing whatever I’ve made – or giving it away, or selling it cheap, or letting it collect dust in some drawer. I am not a perfectionist in the sense that things have to be done right (although that helps). I am interested in finding a solution that feels right with no emotional holes or inner doubts. And eventually my uncertainty about missing the mark raises so much anxiety that I have to quit.
The wreckage of the last project has always been rescued by some new project taking its place – but the recurring message from the endless rubble has become too hard to ignore. The longer I keep pushing hobbies as way to feel good about myself the more frenzied I will feel overall as I leap from one to the next, with ever more energy drained, and ever less satisfaction. So I’d much rather fold the effort into one last simple process and then yank out the plug at the end with no more projects, no more shit lying around that could be turned into a project, no new game software, or telescopes, or computers, or sound systems, and all the other things I use and design and make as simple coping mechanisms.
These days I am beginning to transcend quitting individual projects and instead feel myself leaning towards quitting the whole notion of filling time this way. If I had to guess I’d say that I only have a few more months left before the storm has left me entirely drained. But I can’t be sure. It may come sooner or later, or perhaps with drugs and therapy I might shake this off and find normality by pushing right through the heart of this tempest to create like other people create with satisfaction at the end – and not the desire to burn the whole thing in a fire pit.
At least this journal gives me something to do that involves no new equipment. And it can keep me busy until I have nothing left to sell, throw out, or give away. Maybe that’s why I’m here. It puts my sicko creative process on hold for a while and once I’m done wrapping up everything else that needs to end, I can quit the writing as well, delete all the backups, reformat the disc, and be totally free.
