#i just go absolutely ape shit for anything approaching optimism and long-earned rest that's all!

[july-19th-club]

actually i’m not done talking abt true detective s1 i actually have a lot of thoughts about those last several minutes and how important it was that it ends on a relatively hopeful note. do we know where rust’s going? what the heck this man intends to do now that he’s confronted both his most unfinished work and his greatest source of grief? we don’t, but i think we can safely say that he’s not leaving just to go somewhere and die. in his own sour and half-resigned way, it seems like he’s intending to go get some stuff done in his life, to maybe for once make plans that don’t have anything to do with death and i’m going to put my thoughts on that under a cut bc i started writing and it just kind of got away from me and it’s more or less a whole piece of fiction now

he said something about being a painter if his life had gone differently, and i think maybe that’s what he pursues next. he’s in his fifties now, has spent more of his life as an addict than not, and i imagine that the road toward finding some kind of equilibrium is not simple. if he manages to quit drinking, i don’t think he ever manages to quit smoking. it’s a comfort thing for him, as much as he knows that it’ll be that or some other chemical damage that will get him in the end. he has a silent bet on with himself as to which one it will be, when it finally happens, but it hasn’t yet and so he gets what money he’s saved and goes on a road trip. 

it’s experiences he’s after now: he goes to appalachia, he goes to new york city, briefly, doesn’t really enjoy it, goes on toward the great lakes, goes further. he sees wyoming and the dakotas, the redwood forest region, the coast of maine. canada. it occurs to him that he’s spent his whole life on one side or the other of the contiguous states, never paid much attention to what’s in the middle. he explores. he accumulates memories, knowledge, tries to enjoy it and tries to move from one sight to the next quickly enough that the doubt and disinterest can’t creep back in. tries to appreciate things: the rain. the heat coming up from the asphalt when he stops for some lunch. the stretches where he doesn’t talk to another person for days on end. even tries to appreciate the feeling of being anonymous in a crowd, walking among many other people who are focused on anything but him, tries to see it as a natural part of the things that exist to make up the world and not a poorly-designed set for a badly-written story. and around him it continues to happen. the radio continues to play. the road continues to be long. the sky continues to be huge and filled with stars, and when whatever this is has finished Something may continue, and in it he may have the chance to love and be loved. 

maybe he calls his ex-wife, and maybe she immediately assumes that it’s a goodbye call, because it’s been close to twenty years since they last spoke and she has no illusions about the state of mind he was in at the time. she may be surprised he’s lasted this long, but she agrees to meet him. he shows up sunburnt and long-haired and craggy-looking, but with the same wry face she remembers. he shows her his driver’s license photo, in which he is still sporting a weird-old-man mustache, and she makes fun of it. he tells her everything. turns out, her life has gone in an entirely different direction. where he spiraled, she thrived. eventually she decided to become a foster parent, and perhaps she wound up adopting a girl who comes to live with her as a teenager. the girl is a woman now, and has found a nice girl of her own, and the two of them are considering children, when they’ve got the finances for it. the cycle continues. he is terrified of the concept as he would be of being dropped into a parallel world where none of the loss ever happened. there is no rhyme or reason, and he is still learning how to be optimistic about the certain knowledge that even if there is another world, there’s absolutely no plan. he’s afraid. but he is more afraid of being without family, and this knowledge is sudden but he is sure of it. he meets the adopted daughter and the daughter-in-law. the daughter’s a biochemist, daughter-in-law’s a philosophy major, and they all get on like a house on fire. he can talk with the girls for far longer than claire can about the sort of heady, probably pretentious topics they’re interested in. he moves on after a few visits, but he keeps all of their numbers close. 

he travels. he paints fallingwater. he paints the wallowa valley. watercolors - he likes them better than oils or acrylics, likes the way they soften whatever he uses them to illustrate. he paints whatever he gets interested in, sometimes stopping the truck on the verge of the highway to take out his colors and paint the chicory by the side of the road. he visits a museum to study other artists’ work, gets interested in frederic remington or somebody, goes to rodeos and paints the riders and the swirls of dust. he paints mt. mckinley from memory. he paints his own flashbacks, trying to show how the colors bleed into one another, how the images repeat and revolve. he goes back through texas and louisiana, stops in bars and orders iced tea and paints the bikers. he calls his family more frequently. he calls his one friend, asks to stay updated on people’s lives, acts interested in their affairs even when they call him on a bad day and he has to feign it. one day his families meet each other. he arranges it. they have dinner together and he gives everybody paintings and when marty asks if he’d be interested in consulting on a case or two, just when he’s able to, when he’s not busy or he’s bored, he says yes, he might consider it. he is planning to move closer to his own people, but if he does, he may need the money. he thinks of things in terms of time, now. how much of it may remain, if he is smart with it. how much of it he has already used up. there is a dark, miserable center to the thought that he is careful not to get to close to, because it will swallow up everything a man can build if he’s not paying attention.

when the daughter-in-law is pregnant, the girls ask around for name suggestions. they deliberate for nine months and then some, even after the baby is born and he, more afraid than ever, meets it and lets its small hand clutch his finger like it is the only life preserver in a swallowing sea. what can this tiny creature, just-created, with eyes that look around vaguely but don’t stop, know of doubt or fear or the lifelong drowning conviction that nothing exists for a good reason? all the baby knows is what it experiences, and so he holds it as kindly as he can. with luck, it will grow. it will be one, then two years old, it will learn words, it will begin to move around far faster than its parents can keep up, with luck or perhaps un-luck it will become five and then ten years old and develop convictions and interests and then maybe it will someday be as old as he is and it will still enjoy the world. he holds it with as much hope as he can. 

after a while, they do choose a name, one of his suggestions. miles. as in “to go, before i sleep”.