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I had forgotten what it’s like to sleep without socks on and how much the people in my family love to talk. For the first time, in one year’s time, I took a vacation. I went back to a few of the places I come from and I stayed with my wise, wonderful ol’ grandmother. These are just some of things that I wanted to record in the couple weeks I left behind.

“They’re particularly gay in this one.”
—My grandma, making me watch my first episode of Queer Eye

“Guess what’s coming out?”
—My grandma, turning her phone around to show me a Facebook post about a fake Shawshank Redemption sequel

There’s a Trader Joe’s that just opened up in my unincorporated community of a hometown sometime in my absence. At checkout, I notice someone I recognized in the line behind us: a kid I met in elementary school. We became friends in middle school, and then became removed from each other by high school. In tenth grade, he spread the nudes of one girl he was talking to. Justifiably and hilariously, she called him a “pencil-dicked curry muncher.” Of course, being in high school, you make fun of the whole situation amongst friends, but by yourself—by myself—I just remember feeling horribly sorry for her. I remember her being in my first period physics and second period driver’s ed. She was always nice to me. He’s in considerably worse shape and balding now, so I guess that’s his just deserts. I wonder how often I, she, those days cross his mind.

“Walking is the reason I’m also not on life support.”
Shortly after my grandma told me this, her best friend Nancy died. Nancy who went to UMN with Bob Dylan, smoked like a chimney, and loved the ocean. In the days after her passing, I heard several stories from her and my dad about this woman whom I had only superficially interacted with as a child and teenager. One story goes that one of Nancy’s sorority sisters even dated Dylan.
“She was ready to go.”
“I outlived them all.”

The Caine Mutiny was on while she got the news about Nancy. I wasn’t much use at all when it came to comforting her. I was mostly transfixed by how much May Wynn looked like my grandma as a young woman. I thought back to the photograph on my bedroom wall back in New York. When I first moved into my grandma’s condo after my post-graduation lease ended, she was in Virginia staying with family. There were patterned boxes on the floor next to the head seat at the dining room table. All alone in her house, one of the first things I did was take the time to look through every single printed memory. (At this point, the unshakable idea that I had to move up, and on my own without telling a soul, was almost at its peak: it had never felt more attainable.) I found a photograph with a duplicate, “ / 1957 / Ind. U” written on the back of only one. That’s the one I keep and take with me. That’s the picture that looks like May Wynn, smiling as she looks up from her typewriter. In my grandpa’s old room, the one that I moved into, I find a transparent Kodachrome slide lying in a woven basket. It’s a photo of him and a little girl who’s holding a striped cat: “Christmas 62.” Here, he reminds me of Robert Francis, if he had a more coy, reticently devilish grin that liked to creep out from behind a stoic exterior every now and then. No one knows I took either of these tokens for my self.

It almost pains me to write it, but I was feeling nostalgic. I’ve tried to live life like I would never have any regrets at all, but it didn’t work. I’ve just about removed the last threads of Camus’s existentialism that weaves itself into the minds of annoying, less-than-extraordinary 20-year-old men, unspooling itself until it becomes a twisted, knotted mess of intellectual machismo and melancholic superiority. It was time to cut the cord and let the spool fall where it may. I suppose I agree with Orson Welles now: “I can’t imagine not having a regret about almost everything.” The chance to see your self in a completely different life; to treat your life as one big what-if. But almost contrary to expectation, being back in the past makes me think about the people who only know me now. It’s funny to think that they met a dried husk of that former young man. God, I used to be so cool. I used to write well and have unprotected sex with crazy women. Only kidding. I don’t really wanna go back (and I’m not too cool for Camus).

After the first stop on my Grand Apology/Reunion tour, an extended breakfast with the last two people I saw before I left home, I come back to a clogged toilet. All my old shit is coming back up and I can feel the panic begin to rise inside me as the soiled water inside the bowl rises almost to the top, stopping right before it would spill over onto my grandmother’s white tiles. One flush isn’t gonna wash anything away, it takes a little effort, maybe even getting a little shit on your hands. I don’t know what the plunger would be in this analogy. I don’t know why I’m suddenly going for these rather straightforward conceits, that doesn’t seem very like me. Nevertheless, I carefully got the toilet unclogged and it was all flushed down the pipe in an instant.

“People always go away, so they can forget where they were.”
—Martin, to Christina before she leaves Pittsburgh forever, from Martin (1977, George A. Romero)

“I’ve had one man. Why would I want another?”
—Grandma, filling me in on her septuagenarian neighbor getting a new boyfriend and offering her two cents

“I always thought I was adequate. Maybe that’s the best way to be.”
Grandma tells me that there is a pivotal moment in someone’s life that breaks them and they never quite bounce back from it. At least that’s how she sees it in my family, particularly among her male children. My uncle cut from the Texas Rangers, my father failing to make his middle school basketball team. She swears that’s what did it. That last one didn’t make sense to me at first, that it’d be something so seemingly minor and childish; yet, I think it’s those little letdowns that lead to the most devastating what-ifs. It got me thinking about what my one moment would be—the greatest singular disappointment internalized into an all-encompassing, haunting personal failure. Which one would be it? I’ll tell you exactly what it was. It was the incomplete production of a micro-budget short called Dark Chamber. Before we had a chance to finish shooting, I moved in with Grandma, then I moved away. I still have half a movie around here somewhere. Back “home” I had promise, everyone would come to me for anything related to film or writing. I get to New York and there are thousands just like me. I don’t lament the shattered illusion of my uniqueness (although my first time at Anthology Film Archives was a wake-up call on that front)—no!—I see myself reflected back in all these young people who were the brightest minds from their own shitty suburbs or small towns. They had potential too, and everyone left behind believed they’d make it. Now all I have is waste.

“Everyone has one flaw, and that’s yours!”
—Grandma, on my not being a pet lover

“The sky is trembling and I must leave fast”
—Bob Dylan (1965, “Farewell, Angelina”)
I think they say two weeks is the perfect length for a vacation, that way you can begin to miss home, ready to return to the routine recently refreshed. It was sometime in the second week that the trip down memory lane stopped being a fun carnival ride and started becoming a crushing weight, as the staggering heights of the entire amusement park above started to collapse on top of me. Floating through the Tunnel of Love on a heart-shaped bed unable to move, my gaze unable to point anywhere but up, as skyscraper confections and steel beams crash through the smoke and mirrors into the lazy river around me. My mattress raft, slowly going under from the load, is swirled and spat out the end of the stream onto desert sand, just moments before I would’ve been fully submerged. In the smoldering pile of rubble, I can finally move. I don’t know what to do or what to think. I spin around to flee, and it’s Bob Dylan, the Shadow King, who’s there to catch me—off-guard. He stares into the evacuated hearts of fevered eyes and refuses to speak. As my head races with questions and pleas for help or advice or comfort, my mind feels like it’s tearing itself away from my body. He keeps staring with an ambiguous glare. I go to speak, but cut myself off before any sound touches the air. A mercurial apparition, what I take to be my mind, temperamentally hovers and surges about my frame like a solar flare, as if eager to abstract itself from its tether. He leans forward, ever so slightly, hiding his eyes in his brow and giving me his ear. I’d just like to ask him one thing.

“Do you still have visions of Johanna?”