Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber

Author:Mark Haber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffee House Press

III

Bogotá or Berlin, says Marcel, Bogotá or Berlin, he repeats, he can’t decide which, says he can’t choose between the two cities and where he wants to live, says something else about house music, I think, or warehouses that double as dance clubs, I think, but grinding the coffee, a Mexican roast, it’s difficult hearing Marcel, difficult understanding what he’s saying about his decision to move to either South America or Europe, meaning Bogotá or Berlin, places, he explains, which embrace the young artist, places where a young person like himself is encouraged to create: music, writing, painting, dancing, whatever they love, and get by, not like here, he says, not like here at all, because attempting to make art in America is an uphill battle, he says, a fool’s errand, he adds, not only is everything against you like the structure and the culture, but also the structure of that culture, dead set against you, and people too, because people in general want you to fail so they can feel superior in their decision not to pursue what they love and then tell you later how you were being young or selfish, or both, and it’s time to wake up they’ll say, time to face the music, they’ll also say, meaning it’s time to anesthetize your soul, time to spend your life ignoring or neglecting your soul in order to work, because nothing makes people feel better than the realization they’ve made the right decision, nothing better than feeling superior, that they’re intelligent and pragmatic while you’re reckless and foolish, in short, unserious, because most people are convinced that caring about art, thus the soul, is the pinnacle of folly, and for them nothing is better than knowing you’re slowly dying right alongside them because nobody wants to die alone and Jesus, I think, I agree, but I’m not going to say so because I’ve already learned that lesson and it’s a lesson taught through pain and experience and acknowledging these truths will only spur Marcel into making the same decisions as his father, and the water is beginning to boil and the coffee is ground and for a moment everything is okay, for this fleeting moment, I think, my nerves are calm and I steep the coffee, smell the coffee, a Mexican roast, and eventually I walk into the third bedroom with the coffee while avoiding my dead wife’s closet because leaving the kitchen it’s impossible to fully circumvent my dead wife’s closet, in fact each time I enter or exit the kitchen I’m faced with the door to my dead wife’s closet (still ajar) followed by the rolltop desk containing my work-in-progress, meaning my book yet-to-be-written, just a thousand false starts and suddenly I laugh, click my tongue, sit before the rolltop desk, and jot down A Thousand False Starts on a slip of paper, A Thousand False Starts as a potential title for my book-length essay because it’s easily the most emblematic title I’ve come up

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