Recently, I was traveling in Ohio, to visit both of my brothers, where with some stroke of coincidence they both attend university (Kenyon College, and Oberlin College, respectively). It was a great trip. I got to see stuff (including the ancient Alligator Mound I learned about in Lucy Ellmann’s expansive Ducks Newburyport), meet people (The Finest Collegiate Minds of our Generation!) and, disconnect from all of my usual Earthly and Bodily Concerns.

I consider myself a generally anxious person. While I don’t think that distinction means much in an age where it feels like at least 50% of the people I interact with consider themselves generally anxious people, part of what that means to me is that at any given moment I am probably trying my hardest to get on the leaderboard of my Thought Pinball Machine, ricocheting my focus from flappers labelled ‘Income’ and ‘Expenses’ to rubber-banded bumpers labelled ‘Body damage you’ve sustained,’ ‘Emotional damage you may have caused,’ and ‘Tasks you’re worried you’ll forget to do but not worried enough about to write down.’ I don’t know if every anxious person thinks this way, but this is at least how my garden-variety brain functions.

In efforts to evict this tiresome arcade game from my head, when I’m at home I usually subject myself to a fairly strict regimen of all the sort of neo-conservative-inspired self help that is theoretically both good for your mental and physical state, but also good for allowing your employer to extract maximal value from your body and brain. What am I talking about? All the usual Instagram graphic fodder. Going to therapy, eating healthy, taking your vitamins, exercising regularly, sleeping at regular intervals, sunlight, and ‘reading’¹. To be clear, I do think all of these things are good things to emphasize in a healthy life, but I also hold a little skepticism at the way they’ve been proliferated to society as a cure for any and all malaise.

Ironically, my trip to Ohio underscored how valuable for the old mental it can be to remove myself from all these habits and just fucking live. I left my vitamins on my kitchen counter, tried to not think about my diet, certainly didn’t exercise and stayed up too late playing video games. And I felt good! I felt free! As the trip was coming to a close on Saturday night, I was struck by how intensely I didn’t want to go home.

I have a nice life in Brooklyn, with a job I don’t completely hate and friends and a girlfriend and some cats in a perfectly acceptable apartment in a trendy neighborhood that in many ways functions as a playground for mid-20s with disposable income (hey, that’s me!). Normally, I’m dying to get home, to see everyone, to not miss out on any more plans, and get back into my routine. But this time, as I sat up with my brother Thomas and three of his four roommates (‘the boys’) as they filtered back into the apartment from their various spring break plans, I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to this life, of bringing the pinball machine out of it’s short term storage and back into the foyer of my mind, all plugged in, and lit up and impossible to avoid playing. That’s probably a subject for deeper probing.

While I sat on the couch, absently tossing a ball with one of the aforementioned roommates, and falling into an existential stupor, the last roommate to arrive, Luca, showed up. He’s a tall guy, with a long face that holds a sweet smile frequently flashed and a scraggly crop of facial hair he assured everyone he was ‘going to shave off right away’ immediately after arriving. He’d spent the day driving from Vermont to Gambier, Ohio, a drive I think is pretty long. He seemed tired, but the reunion with friends brought him some energy and he quickly began recounting the adventures of his own Spring Break. Among them, a quick 24 hour trip to Bennington College (Shoutout to Donna Tartt and Brett Easton Ellis!).

On this expectedly eccentric Vermont Campus, he told us of a coffee shop he entered where, upon ordering a latte (or something), the barista had looked up and asked ‘Do you have a vessel?”

Immediately I thought of my favorite Mad Men episode ending from the Season Five finale, when a stranger turns to Don during yet-another one of his brooding moments in a Manhattan Bar and asks him, on behalf of a friend, if he is alone. As in the Mad Men episode, Luca did not reveal what happened next. In his retelling, he emphasized the (understandable) annoyance that this coffee shop did not offer paper coffee cups, instead forcing you to rent a mason jar if you didn’t bring your own coffee vessel.

For me, already wrapped up in my internal pondering, this question took on a larger meaning, although I am still not sure what that meaning is. I think of my body, of my mind, both of these are vessels to me. I think I have access to them as well. So, if this barista had asked me I think I could reasonably answer in the affirmative. This may have resulted in my untimely death via coffee-boarding, but it is also objectively true. What they didn’t ask, and what I think might be a more valuable question, is ‘Do you have an empty vessel’ (Yo, what’s good Peter Brook). To this, I am not sure. I am tired of my previous pinball metaphor, but with deluge of habits and routines I structure my life around, I think my body and mind are rarely empty vessels. If my basic understanding of Dharmic religions are to be believed, this is not a good thing. In pursuit of removing my stream of anxiety-thought, I may have simply replaced them with a new stream of anxiety thoughts that I or my therapist or my parents or society writ large have deemed ‘healthy things to concern oneself with.’ And I wonder if that is in fact much better!

I do not pretend to have all, some, or even any of the answers to this question. I certainly enjoyed emptying my vessel in Ohio (pause), and will be making an effort to pursue more vessel emptying in the near future. Spring is in full swing and I hope it should be easier in these coming months. Anyway, I am going to go back to swapping between the new Waxahatchee and Adrianne Lenker albums and enjoying some sunlight. This is my first time blogging, and I don’t feel like editing it really, so please excuse any mistakes. I also have no idea what the identity of this site will be, but I certainly don’t intend for all of it to be this introspective faux-deep stuff. I’ll probably write about my sourdough starter next, but who knows. Stay safe out there.