Commentary on “An Autobiography of Usefulness”: An Autobiography of Commentary

Anyway, I agreed to write something about “An Autobiography of Usefulness” and I am in fact honored to do so while at the same time I am filled with drag and hassle and last night’s jars of Jim Beam and so to avoid that thick brow throb caused equally by the misery of a late April’s instant blizzard and the difficulty of manifesting clarity and sincerity, I find myself, as always, trying to write cleverly and evasively, to write, for example “An Autobiography of Commentary.”

Because isn’t that all we writers do anyway? I mean, besides the hanging-over and the chin-scratching and the clueless preambling to monologues upon which the fate of the orbiting globe depends. I mean, all we actually do is comment, though from commenting may come questioning.

This is problematic for me, for as a carpenter I deal mostly in lines, am a linear man, and in lines, or at least line segments, there are no questions, just straight here to there. Well, one robin-song morning in high school when I was learning the trade, I came downstairs crying. Who knew what that was about. I didn’t ask. It was summer, which for me involved only a few simple things: coordinating the parents’ brief absences with the girlfriend’s brief visits, unbending nails and stripping screws, bathing a couple hours a day in Speedo and goggles and chlorine, mountain biking, and also memorizing Dave Matthews’s lyrics. I had it all. I even had a car. I thought about calling in sick but didn’t.

After dinner that night, my hands severed cleanly from my wrists, rifled through drawers and came out with paper. What’s this, I thought. Then, bloodlessly, without sutures, we reunited. I sat and jotted about my boss, the color flannel he wore. The running shoes he changed at lunch. The hymns he hummed. We were building a house on the ocean.

In a minor rain, he liked to say, “It’s clearing up where I’m going.”

And when he heard my tentative hammer, “Tip tap taperoo, Matty.”

Later, in the midst of another note-taking night I was like, who cares about my sweet proselytizer boss or my days or me and I broke the pencil in two, whittled the shards into kindling and with them set a bonfire beneath my notebook, got into bed and read some Emerson.

He was rarely invigorating. I read one heavy page a night until it was time to go to college, which I did, absolutely Self Reliant and all that, and where I considered starting a column for the paper about nothing, like Seinfeld, only better. There was so much to say about walking the hypotenuse across the greens, or the big plastic frat houses, or dining-hall tray design. Well, I never got organized for it. Seinfeld, as I reconsidered, seemed actually to be about something even if I couldn’t get my hammer to it. Plus, who besides myself, who was at that time hanging out exclusively with the ancient Indian Father of Emptiness, Nagarjuna, would care about nothing. I think that’s why my thesis deconstructed his deconstructive logic. Because my subject was nothingness, writing anything made me genius.

I wrote: feelings are impossible because they depend upon a feeler. And there is no me to feel. No feeler, no feelings.

My girlfriend read it all patiently.

Then she said, “So you don’t love me?”

I was in a tight spot, our relationship and my intellect both being at stake. I said, “I would certainly love you if I was. Or am.”

She told me to leave, and I guess I did. All the toenail and heartbeat and salt and consequence that she was talking to went out into the night, drank a keg of beer, and pegged some snow and iceballs at the frats and their cool cool membership.

Since then, nothing’s changed. It’s just that now, in Laramie, Wyoming, I’m ten years older, married, and the membership at which I hurl snowballs...