"The Waste Land," Drought, and Memoir

In which I wax meteorological.

Oct 07, 2022

In describing a reading of The Waste Land by Benedict Cumberbatch for the centenary celebration, Anthony Lane (“On the Rocks,” The New Yorker Oct. 3, 2022) comments upon a “festival assistant who was working that day [who] told me that—unlike the paying audience most of whom looked three times her age—she did not know ‘The Waste Land.’ At last: the ideal recipient, as unencumbered as Eliot would wish. After the reading, I asked what had struck her most about the poem. ‘The landscapes,’ she said, without hestitation. ‘The rocks and the rivers. All that dryness.’ Not for her the unreal city, or the mob of languages, but a natural world under clear and present threat.”

The dry sterility of The Waste Land is often compared to the moral decline of Europe following World War I, the decayed moral and ethical questions withered on the vine in the trenches of a world gone mad with war.

My memoir takes place mostly in two places: eastern Kansas with its terrific thunderstorms and potential for tornadoes, and San Diego, with skies so blue and temperatures so steady you can set your watch by them. Say 75 degrees and sunny and you would be describing 350 days of the year.

In 2005, I left Kansas after 14 years, and returned to Southern California, to San Diego, where I stayed until 2018. The majority of my story takes places from 2005-2015 in San Diego. 2007-2009 encompassed the 12th worst drought in California’s history and led to some of the worst wildfires in California’s history up to that time, including a devastating fire in San Diego. 2011-2017 was the longest drought in California history. 2011 and 2014 were the driest years since record-keeping began. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California#2007%E2%80%932009)

The period of 2011 to 2015 were particularly dark in my own life, a descent into madness at the hands of a master manipulator, my own sight jagged and distorted from years of dealing with the lingering effects of living with someone with Borderline Personality Disorder. During those years, I lived in the interior valleys of San Diego, where the heat and dryness were visited upon the very land where I lived.

While I grew up reading about the dry sterility of The Waste Land as the decline of morality, as I was writing my memoir, I woke to the dusty dryness of the poem in my mouth. My own life’s trajectory under these extreme drought conditions mimicked the landscape of The Waste Land.

My life had become analogue to The Waste Land, long before I recognized it.

Soon, I will institute a paid version of my substack when I introduce portions of my memoir. I encourage you to support my efforts as I seek traditional publication. At some point, the text must start paying the rent or I will have to abandon my efforts. Walmart already has too many door greeters.

For now, I ask you to share my work with others as I grow my audience. A larger social media audience will help convince agents and publishers to publish my book.

Thank you for reading My Own Private Waste Land. This post is public so feel free to share it.

What follows are excerpts from my memoir - My Own Private Waste Land - in which I address the meteorological connections to The Waste Land. Or rather, it’s my attempt to capture just what the weather was like during the times I write about.

2004 - Ozawkie, Kansas

16 – Geodetic Center

Didn’t see it
Musing upon my brother’s wreck
Didn’t see it coming

We were trapped by heat. The heat that overwhelms. Thunderstorms bloom like atom bombs in the distance. This heat cracks the earth into deep, dry crevices. This fucking heat.

We piled the dogs into the back of the Rav4 and drove, took SR-24 west as far into the center of the country as we could, into the prairie, to the center of North America. Despite the blasting air conditioning, the dogs panted in the back seat, dripping spit. We don’t talk, there is no music. We drove past the Flint Hills near Manhattan with its prairie grasses that burn each spring, past the largest ball of twine in Cawker City, past nearby Lucas, Kansas and the baroque Garden of Eden where the goth kids pilgrimage, to THE North American Datum, where a small, lonely plaque in a small park surrounded by corn fields on the plains of northcentral Kansas marks the geodetic center. The exact fucking center of North America. The furthest point from the East coast, where QT’s mother lives in Sterling, Virginia, and the furthest point from the West coast, where my family lives in Olympia, Portland, Los Angeles. We lived in the middle of nowhere, separated by half a continent from what we know, from who we are, she to the east, me to the west. And it was hot. A heat that kills. The center cannot hold.

It’s September, and August heat yet clutched the land. The shores of Lake Perry and the river Kaw bore the refuse of summer: cans, wadded napkins, torn condom wrappers, fishhooks, tangled fishing line in the dry rocks. The vacationers had departed. The air was heavy with the throbbing of cicadas, no relief from the noise or heat. Cicada molt stuck to trees, sidewalks, window screens, like abandoned carcasses from a forgotten war. To be alive was to sweat. There was no relief from this death.

November 2012 - La Mesa, California

32 – He Who Was Living Is Now Dead

. . .

Our blogs exploded when the Triad moved in together, and our frequent participation in events led to us becoming well-known in our local kink community.

Despite our sexual antics, life at the base of the foothills was quiet. The sprinkler system didn’t work. The dogs dug at the exposed pipes and chewed them like bleached bones. The fruit trees were stunted. Fruit rotted on the branches and fell, shriveled husks to be picked by birds. Ten miles inland from the ocean was hotter by 10 degrees, and the earth was grassless, dry and cracked. We built our family garden in this parched earth, hoping for the greens of spring. But we had moved in at the beginning of a massive drought.

If there were water . . .
But there is no water.

This is a but a taste of the heat and drought that played in the background of my own story. It’s not be coincidence that I chose The Waste Land as the major structural principle of my memoir. It’s a part and parcel of my life, both interior and exterior.

If you enjoyed this selection, please share it with friends and family, far and wide, so I can continue this journey to traditional publication. Also, please leave a comment. I’d love to know what you think about the selections from my memoir.

My Own Private Waste Land