Chaos is a Friend of Mine

 

I should like to speak about the mess.

The general messes we make–the piles of christmas paper exploding across the living room floor, the pens and pencils strewn across the bedspread, the wood chips and the remnants from underneath the couch–the record, the dust bunnies, the bones, in this case, that are used to keep rhythm. The realm of our emotional train wrecks, derailments and unexpected track switches, the hot messes of our psychological underpinnings, our curious and delectable romantic disasters.

I think that’s what we do, here, is make messes. Create piles of things in one place and move them to another, pick up sticks in our yard and throw them in the woods, move piles of dirt from point a to point b to dig basements and transform the broken hulls of boats into flower pots, leave pools of sweat on the gym equipment, paint stains on our fingertips, imprints of banjos on our inner arms, callouses, wine stains, ashes where our cigarettes had burned. Perhaps the glory and the salvation lie in that mess, somewhere, as scattered and misplaced as the rest of it.

We’d like to think that our lives make some degree of sense–that we’re tapped into something that will lead us forward with invisible reins, the bit in our mouth chiding but not disagreeable. I’m going to venture to guess that none of that is true. Consider the reins eviscerated, the leather corroded by age, use and weather, the horse is lame in his back foot and nobody ever taught me how to ride a horse so what the hell am I doing up here, anyway? What have you got  when the horse dies, when the baby is born, when your heart is broken and your mascara runs down your face in black, blurry lines, by god, you’ve got a glorious mess! Destruction and creation are as bound together as black and white, the mess is unavoidable, beautiful, marvelous…messy.

Here’s a story.

A few weeks back, a large motor yacht ran aground in the harbor where I keep my boat. Just tally on hoed with the green to starboard into the healthy field of exposed sea bottom at low tide on a Tuesday. There’s an old expression–brown, brown, run aground, green green keep it lean, blue blue sail on through–that meant nothing to these deliciously entertaining veterans of the healthy bank account. It turns out anybody can buy a powerboat, literally anyone. 300 horsepower? We accept Visa or Mastercard, yes sir, cash is fine, have a safe voyage, we won’t even bother checking your vision! For the love of Christ.

White person privileged rant aside, once the yacht was aground, the entire crew of six donned offshore, self-inflating, color-coordinated West Marine lifejackets and deployed their center console inflatable by pushing a button and waving their hands around. Once afloat, a line was tossed from the stern of the vessel to the robust 60-something in the tender who proceeded to put the engine of the small boat into gear and attempt to drive with his right hand and tow a 50-foot sport-fishing boat off ground with his left. Astonishingly, it didn’t work, and I started to get nervous they could hear my laughter from across the harbor, so I continued to row my boat backwards on home.

A few days later, after rising at  6 a.m. and immediately immersing myself in Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Declaration of Independence and a few quotations and small speeches from the ever-affecting orifice that was the mouth of Hilter himself, just to get the day started off at a rollicking mental pace, I decided I HAD HAD ENOUGH of this cooped up harbor life, I was going to TAKE TO THE SEA! SAIL INTO THE SUNSET! CAST OFF THE BOWLINES, EXPLORE, DREAM, DISCOVER!

I do live aboard a sailboat. I have impressed my very special personal creative style onto this material possession for over five years. Needless to say, she is one hot mess who’s captain had just read the Declaration of Independence six times in a row and was, potentially, in no shape to tally-fuckin-ho her own goof parade out of safe harbor and onto the high seas, but tally ho I did, indeed. As has become habitual, I readied down below for sea. I lashed everything down with unnecessary vigor, just in case. I readied the bow lines to leave my little boat tied to my anchors and my big boat free as the wind itself. I released the lines expertly and found myself clinging to the bow pulpit with the dingy drifting out from under my feet and Dolphin beaming her lovely way into the wind. As I clung there and then hauled myself aboard with acrobatic athleticism (I shall continue to maintain that vision, thank you), I recall thinking to myself, “my, this is not going terribly well. Never you mind, I’m like a trapped animal in here! I can feel the mangroves closing in, it’s crystal clear waters I crave! And pig roasts! And cannon fire! Yarrr!!!”

Modern piratical mindset intact, I hoisted the mainsail in the harbor, under way, by myself. This is a feat. I flung that boom out to starboard, released that mainsheet, pirouetted around nearby, gawking vessels and turned her bow downwind, we were on our way! Look at the iPhone! Turn on the stereo! Eat a cracker! Drive on the wrong side of the big blue watery road and crash into the ground! Wait, what?

That’s right, I pulled the same dumb shit that the rich, lilac offshore-life-jacket-wearin-croonies I had sat so smugly beside and snickered at weeks before. Red, Right, Return. We sailed onto that mud bottom with style, my God, and I do believe I was even standing stoically in the cockpit as the boat glided, not slammed, to a halt, channel marker to my right, keel stuck in the mud on an outgoing tide with the wind at our backs. As reactive as I have become in my life, this all made immediate and incredible sense to me. I’m a bad ass retard. Sums up my entire existence. The idiocy of the situation was summized, the reality that there was no point in dwelling on any of the stunning collection of mistakes (messes) that added up to my current condition (one large mess) and, instead, I inferred the need to move forward with intelligence and effectivity and prepared to leap in the water and tie a line around the channel marker to haul her ass back from whence she came–the good water.

I didn’t have to do it. Two angels showed up–a man in a dingy and another, smarter, man in a shrimp boat. He backed right up to Dolphin, I leapt aboard with her tow line in my hand, cleated her off on the stern and we smartly pulled her back to safety. I was in my underwear. I am sure it was an experience to write home about for said shrimp boat captain.

Afterwards, as I motored down the channel, markers on the proper side, past the fuel docks who had been at close visual proximity to my maritime shenanigans, someone yelled from the dock, “that was incredible!,” to which I responded, “I totally fucked up! Happens to everyone! Not incredible in the least!”

The point is, we all make mistakes, we all do dumb shit, we all make messes, of ourselves, of our lives, of other people’s feelings, of our own hearts.  What draws the line in the sand is the spirit, the way with which we handle and execute those messes we inevitably make. We’re all born into circumstances, and we all travel through life at a fairly predictable rate–day by day, as the sun appears to rise and fall due to the eternal rotation of the giant rock we stand on all the time. Taking things from one place and putting them in another is all we ever do, anyone, no matter if the thing is money, babies, jars of homemade apple butter, art supplies or the thoughts you carry in your mind. Anything real is messy. Any life well lived generates imperfection. Its those sterile, inhumane, states of apparent perfection that freak me out–give me a tar paper shack in the mess of Central America or a shack in the provocative Ninth Ward of New Orleans over a spotless, Home and Garden mansion, where the emptiness of your soul echoes down the sparkling halls as the underwater lights of the pool highlight the fountain, cascading for no one, anydamnday. If you aren’t making a mess, you are the walking dead.

The mess is inevitable. The product of that mess is what remains within our dictation. Like conductors of the waterfall, we control our own disasters. We can make a mess and cry about it. We can make the same mess over and over and over again. We can harp on our messes, lay our heads down on our own failures at night and allow them to assuage us, killing us slowly, taking the magnanimous being that is Chaos and reducing her to a series of regrets, of shames, of guilts. If we keep progress, heart and freedom at the root of things, our messes will be valuable. If we maintain courage and bravery, our messes will be valiant. If something is inevitable, why not color it passion red, scent it like a lilac, tinge it with glitter, with hope, with coffee stains and 5200? Embrace Chaos with open arms and you may find she gives delicious, consuming hugs, with mango juice dripping down her chin and sand in her crotch, laughing all the way.