Prologue:
Why now? Why here? Why THE INTERNET? Why is your room a mess? Why Modest Mouse? Why Joan Didion? Why toothpaste, why cigarettes, scissors, the words 'yes' and 'no', why frayed ragamuffin 'chic', why snacks -- so many snacks, specifically -- why make-up? Round your lips and try to taste the flatness in the universe's most useless word: wuh-huh-ayyyyyy. Why don't you look up how to say 'why' in other languages, buddy? That might be more inclusive. Undoubtedly more poignant, somehow.
The movie Notting Hill and a Joan Didion essay on Hollywood and people wearing shoes bound up in plastic bags on the subway have got me thinking about every single one of you, which is to say, myself. What's everyone doing when they're zoning out or into something, regarding objects passing? I have never run into anyone subconsciously. I also don't read UsWeekly, but that's probably because I'm too poor to buy magazines. How many therapists per capita? I know we can't see the same things. There's no way. But if I am all of this, what might you be?
Where else would I live but inside of my head?
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Say Hello to Steve Perry for me if you ever get to heaven!!!
Why You Might Miss High-School:
You might miss high-school because somebody was always coming to pick you up there. You might miss high school because expectations were so low on Friday nights. You might miss high school because even the looming threats and things to look forward to were still all at heart kitschy attempts, dry runs, glib rehearsals. You might miss high school because once upon a time you had a bed that knew you, I mean your body across planes of time, better than anyone else ever has or will know you.
I don’t miss high school. It ended three years ago, and it wasn’t better than the years since. I have already begun to remember it in wide, un-specific swathes. Long hallways are contracting -- soon Montgomery Blair High will all have taken place along one fuzzy aisle with three motivational posters repeated every few paces, like a cartoon backdrop.
You don’t miss high school because it is way, way too late. That is not even an acceptable thing to think aloud at this point in your life. You like finding your own way home in the dark, and fucking up with panache and gravity. You like your independence, you love your independence, the things around you are evidence of choices you have made. If you don’t like what you see in a grand sense years out of high-school, the ball’s in your court. And that is so fabulous, right.
Why You Won’t Sleep With That Guy:
Because these are the only possible outcomes you predict:
a) Lying there, you will be so not a mystery. Just a person, making a person’s sounds, in a person’s skin. He will see this and you will lose something important.
b) Lying there, you’ll trip green and go, go go. This will be humiliating for everyone. Your friends will make the worst faces and you will feel powerless and small.
c) Lying there, you’ll know this was never going to be the answer. You have Lied, Lying there.
d) Lying there, you’ll get your answer: no.
But Actually, Why:
Recently, I have kind of started believing that I’m smarter than everyone else I know. I am, after all, reading Infinite Jest. I read Infinite Jest on the subway. Other people around me read those Stiegg Larrson books that dominate airport bookstores.
I know this is a toxic (and more importantly, wrong) worldview. I know with all of some sleeping part of my intellect, really, that there are many people in the world who are more intelligent than I will ever be. I even know some of these people. I presume the others are scientists and philosophers and political analysts. But lately I’m preoccupied with this duality of rational mind and ego; the chasm-ic difference between what I find logical and what I, fully knowing ‘what is logical’, believe nonetheless, is unsettling in a lot of ways. I think the simplest way to put it is that there’s a war going on in my mind and It is the root of every problem I have ever had.
I am selfish, to actually go around judging people for what they read on the daily commute. I am selfish also to spend time trying to convince some imagined audience that I’m actually a good person, and I didn’t really just think that mean thing about the little old lady and her copy of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Here is my selfish theory about the selfishness: people like Lady Gaga and Beyonce who (I assume) have the kind of jet-propelled egos which are consistently opportunistic and usually able to get them whatever they want are not like me; I am not like them. I don’t have the clout to back up my insane self-involvement with action -- instead, the part of my mind that would be spending energy on living up to incredible standards is too busy berating the other for dreaming big (and ugly) in the first place. I have a rotisserie inner monologue going at all times that volleys between the bi-polar and non-productive extremes: ‘I am great’ and ‘I shouldn’t say that.’ This does not make me a good person. I don’t really believe it makes me a bad person either, but at best and honest assessment it makes me lazy, and when traced backwards through everything I whine about it makes me insufferably unsympathetic. People can only whine, tolerably, if they’re doing things. I am patently useless. Stop reading my BLOG!. Stop all the clocks! What I want, actually, is help: how does one ‘get out of one’s head’? A man on the street in Bedford the other day told me that the mind and the emotions were good servants but terrible masters. He smiled at me and called me lovely before making a pitch for his yoga studio. Why didn’t I ask him, ‘what else do I serve?!’?
In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to Kenyon College, he talks at length about My Problem (and I see the irony, don’t worry). It stems (he says) from the admittedly unverifiable but totally rational perspective that one’s problems can only ever be one’s own because one has no context besides one. I think, therefore I am, and therefore whatever I think about you is true. But DFW argues that a liberal arts college education is principally for the derailment of this mentality; that education is all about broadening the mind which is itself, really all about empathy. Acting is also all about empathy. Falling in love is all about empathy. I have lived many years thinking I was empathetic but it’s come to strike me that there’s no way my definition of the word (which is more like concern) is in line with the stuff of true-blue, wanna-get-to-know-you, can-draw-from-many-contexts, well-rounded-human interest. We train ourselves to think this way, he says. And it’s difficult. It’s exhausting, I say, and I’ve tried/I think I’ve tried/No, I’ve really tried/Are you mocking me? And now I’m worried that the extension of my inability to change is actually suicide; that if my definition of the word trying (which is more like teething) won’t take me anywhere, I will simply coil in on myself many times over like Uroburos and rot.
Paraphrasing Tennessee Williams: we use each other, and that’s what we think of as love.
And I think, there must be a way, surely, to explode outward. Even though David Foster Wallace killed himself two years ago, I think.
New Years’ Resolutions:
I want to be a friend, and thus in the world, and thus in the moment, and thus not alone.
I don’t want to want to have Already Lied There Without Actually Lying There.
I want to watch strangers pass and think nothing.
Because it’s easy to bitch about not being in love, and feeling unwanted. It’s easy to feel thrilled and chilled by one’s own capacity for darkness. What’s terrifying (and, I suspect, ultimately an antidote to negative love vibes and general malaise) is forcing deadweight into productivity and forcing self-pity and congratulation into real, absolute care. That is art. That is also how to become great.
I.
Think.
And P.S (Because where would we be without a Peter Pan Complex?):
The Ultimate Guy from way-back-when, from whence sprang all drugs, most illicit nights in cars and aggravated hormones, political subversity, THAT GUY, was on the C train with me leaving the city just now. He was just out of appropriate yelling-range for a crowded car. The girl he was with saw me staring and I quietly begged her to nudge him so I could say something but she didn’t, he didn’t, they got off at Hoyt and I watched them go and I thought profound thoughts.
You might miss high-school because somebody was always coming to pick you up there. You might miss high school because expectations were so low on Friday nights. You might miss high school because even the looming threats and things to look forward to were still all at heart kitschy attempts, dry runs, glib rehearsals. You might miss high school because once upon a time you had a bed that knew you, I mean your body across planes of time, better than anyone else ever has or will know you.
I don’t miss high school. It ended three years ago, and it wasn’t better than the years since. I have already begun to remember it in wide, un-specific swathes. Long hallways are contracting -- soon Montgomery Blair High will all have taken place along one fuzzy aisle with three motivational posters repeated every few paces, like a cartoon backdrop.
You don’t miss high school because it is way, way too late. That is not even an acceptable thing to think aloud at this point in your life. You like finding your own way home in the dark, and fucking up with panache and gravity. You like your independence, you love your independence, the things around you are evidence of choices you have made. If you don’t like what you see in a grand sense years out of high-school, the ball’s in your court. And that is so fabulous, right.
Why You Won’t Sleep With That Guy:
Because these are the only possible outcomes you predict:
a) Lying there, you will be so not a mystery. Just a person, making a person’s sounds, in a person’s skin. He will see this and you will lose something important.
b) Lying there, you’ll trip green and go, go go. This will be humiliating for everyone. Your friends will make the worst faces and you will feel powerless and small.
c) Lying there, you’ll know this was never going to be the answer. You have Lied, Lying there.
d) Lying there, you’ll get your answer: no.
But Actually, Why:
Recently, I have kind of started believing that I’m smarter than everyone else I know. I am, after all, reading Infinite Jest. I read Infinite Jest on the subway. Other people around me read those Stiegg Larrson books that dominate airport bookstores.
I know this is a toxic (and more importantly, wrong) worldview. I know with all of some sleeping part of my intellect, really, that there are many people in the world who are more intelligent than I will ever be. I even know some of these people. I presume the others are scientists and philosophers and political analysts. But lately I’m preoccupied with this duality of rational mind and ego; the chasm-ic difference between what I find logical and what I, fully knowing ‘what is logical’, believe nonetheless, is unsettling in a lot of ways. I think the simplest way to put it is that there’s a war going on in my mind and It is the root of every problem I have ever had.
I am selfish, to actually go around judging people for what they read on the daily commute. I am selfish also to spend time trying to convince some imagined audience that I’m actually a good person, and I didn’t really just think that mean thing about the little old lady and her copy of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Here is my selfish theory about the selfishness: people like Lady Gaga and Beyonce who (I assume) have the kind of jet-propelled egos which are consistently opportunistic and usually able to get them whatever they want are not like me; I am not like them. I don’t have the clout to back up my insane self-involvement with action -- instead, the part of my mind that would be spending energy on living up to incredible standards is too busy berating the other for dreaming big (and ugly) in the first place. I have a rotisserie inner monologue going at all times that volleys between the bi-polar and non-productive extremes: ‘I am great’ and ‘I shouldn’t say that.’ This does not make me a good person. I don’t really believe it makes me a bad person either, but at best and honest assessment it makes me lazy, and when traced backwards through everything I whine about it makes me insufferably unsympathetic. People can only whine, tolerably, if they’re doing things. I am patently useless. Stop reading my BLOG!. Stop all the clocks! What I want, actually, is help: how does one ‘get out of one’s head’? A man on the street in Bedford the other day told me that the mind and the emotions were good servants but terrible masters. He smiled at me and called me lovely before making a pitch for his yoga studio. Why didn’t I ask him, ‘what else do I serve?!’?
In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to Kenyon College, he talks at length about My Problem (and I see the irony, don’t worry). It stems (he says) from the admittedly unverifiable but totally rational perspective that one’s problems can only ever be one’s own because one has no context besides one. I think, therefore I am, and therefore whatever I think about you is true. But DFW argues that a liberal arts college education is principally for the derailment of this mentality; that education is all about broadening the mind which is itself, really all about empathy. Acting is also all about empathy. Falling in love is all about empathy. I have lived many years thinking I was empathetic but it’s come to strike me that there’s no way my definition of the word (which is more like concern) is in line with the stuff of true-blue, wanna-get-to-know-you, can-draw-from-many-contexts, well-rounded-human interest. We train ourselves to think this way, he says. And it’s difficult. It’s exhausting, I say, and I’ve tried/I think I’ve tried/No, I’ve really tried/Are you mocking me? And now I’m worried that the extension of my inability to change is actually suicide; that if my definition of the word trying (which is more like teething) won’t take me anywhere, I will simply coil in on myself many times over like Uroburos and rot.
Paraphrasing Tennessee Williams: we use each other, and that’s what we think of as love.
And I think, there must be a way, surely, to explode outward. Even though David Foster Wallace killed himself two years ago, I think.
New Years’ Resolutions:
I want to be a friend, and thus in the world, and thus in the moment, and thus not alone.
I don’t want to want to have Already Lied There Without Actually Lying There.
I want to watch strangers pass and think nothing.
Because it’s easy to bitch about not being in love, and feeling unwanted. It’s easy to feel thrilled and chilled by one’s own capacity for darkness. What’s terrifying (and, I suspect, ultimately an antidote to negative love vibes and general malaise) is forcing deadweight into productivity and forcing self-pity and congratulation into real, absolute care. That is art. That is also how to become great.
I.
Think.
And P.S (Because where would we be without a Peter Pan Complex?):
The Ultimate Guy from way-back-when, from whence sprang all drugs, most illicit nights in cars and aggravated hormones, political subversity, THAT GUY, was on the C train with me leaving the city just now. He was just out of appropriate yelling-range for a crowded car. The girl he was with saw me staring and I quietly begged her to nudge him so I could say something but she didn’t, he didn’t, they got off at Hoyt and I watched them go and I thought profound thoughts.
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