[494] Mother May I

“Get down on your knees, and tell me you love me.”

You don’t need orders. You don’t need permission. You don’t need a license or a green light. There is no rule book. Nothing’s stopping you.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about celebrity and wanting direction. Say we consider it with relation to the arts. Once musical rules are learned, you can play by them for the rest of your life. You’re constrained by 12 notes and the octaves of your instrument. At the same time now liberated to play as freely and as passionately as you desire; you’re free to interpret and remix and transpose at your creative insistence or leisure. Thus, the famous musician finds an opportunity to breakthrough via rigorous constraint to a language and methodology, then perhaps finds a worthwhile agent or gets noticed by the right people.

Then we might consider the stage. Every inch of your face and body language might be mapped out by a particularly anal playwright. You’re pursuing a deep detachment from yourself in order to get lost in a character, but necessarily so connecting to your depths in order to evoke the proper emotion. To cry on cue or to experience jubilation at the mere suggestions of the writers and directors, I imagine, is both exhausting and exhilarating.

I persistently wonder about the line between “want” and “need.” For every kid I’ve met who’s says “music is my life!” how many exist where that’s actually true? Surely most could give up playing and get by just fine, maybe have a realization or two about how quick they are to hollow statements. For every actor that can passionately describe what characters and stories mean to them and how important they feel with regard to shaping culture and narratives, is it too far-fetched to suggest that many “just want to be famous?”

I’m disappointed that so much about how I’ve been encountering life feels very “cheap.” It’s as if I’m begging for there to be more. I saw some student comedy groups over the last few days. Laughing and making people laugh is pretty important to me. The loudest impression I walked away with was that the whole affair was a kind of desperate self-help group therapy for goofy and insecure kids.

More importantly than my predictable rather “blah and melancholy” perception is how I arrived there. It’s the lack of organization and prestige. It’s the feeling of showing up to a party where everyone knows each other, and they’re mostly tolerating you. It’s the scant to scattered attendance. It’s the blank to matter-of-fact expressions from all the players once they get off stage. It’s the rude behavior of some of the audience. It’s the tables wallpapered with the same promotional flyer with no helpful information on it. The groups seemed to barely intermingle. There were too many points of too much enthusiasm for what seemed rather half-assed.

I think it’s a symptom of the culture more than a particular failure of the organizers, or budding students of comedy. What first made me so intrigued and envious of comedy was the culture. It was hearing stories from old comedians about when they met and what they struggled through. The jokes they told in the parking lot and the stories they won’t bring on stage so they can keep each other out of jail. The funny people who didn’t fit, not because they were “nerds” or “awkward,” but because they’re personality was stuck, like mine feels stuck, to relating to the world in hilariously depressing ways. Maybe they drink their whole life, but they don’t want to kill themselves. Maybe they’ve been through 4 ex-wives, but they know there’s solid bits floating around every fight. It felt real and raw. The structure has to be there, but so does the actual person behind whatever comedian persona.

But what we have today feels like people “acting like an improv group.” They’ve got the 15 top Amazon books on all the games and warm-ups and ways to garner attention or structure a show. They know body contortions and odd language is the nature of the game. The formula definitely spit out some version of “comedy show.”

Let’s move on. The idea is to talk about our mediums and how we abuse them for permission. You can be loud and “different” when you plug into a format. What you never said to your parents you can belt out of your horn or rake across your strings. The manic energy you feel to yell can shake the rafters in your muffin sketch that really took a left turn, oh boy! Your click can help you foster your secret desires to be mean, exclusionary, or manipulative.

It was recently related to me, that from a place of such deep hatred for the general population that exists at fast-food or entry-level jobs, the only thoughts this person was willing to entertain were about manipulating. I know, right!? It wasn’t me carrying on about hating everyone! Score! Hand in hand with that sentiment was the idea that it’s easier to fake it. It’s easier to sit and pretend to like someone as long as you know how to work them for the longer game.

Avid readers at this point might recall my shifts with regard to this behavior. I decided I was going to have friends, much to my chagrin. I didn’t want to play on the hearts and “proper” behavior for cultivating “friendly” interactions anymore. It mostly broke down after months and months of creating events and invitations and trying to start conversations and everyone basically going radio silent. The reality of my novelty and small place in the world became deafening and I retreated back to how I handled life growing up. A lot of moves in the dark that “somehow” end up with me getting everything I want.

It’s not easy to lie unless you’re quasi-damaged. It’s exhausting to act like you give a shit. It’s hard for me to “talk proper” in a way that will coax judgmental and scared rabbit people out of their holes long enough to barely utter how they actually think or feel about something. And practically never is it worth my effort. So I let the fucks fly. I actively engage in the catharsis I find necessary for being remotely functional. The only time I ever seem capable of “mellowing out” is when I can find someone else willing to be honest and brave enough within themselves to carry on in the same fashion. The recognition. The empathy! Yes, it is that fucked and they are that fucking stupid! Want to grab a burger?

I don’t wait for you to like it. This isn’t to be some jaded bad-ass proud little boy cutting himself to emo music, it’s because it’s honest. It’s because it helps. It’s because you have to acknowledge and work with your bottom before you begin to look like you’re making sense speaking towards or attempting to fix anything above it. I don’t need goofy-looking fat kids with “confidence” to express myself, or a script that requires me to touch emotional places in order to express them. I don’t need the suggestion that a dollar an hour more raise is somehow equitable to what I’m worth. I don’t need the engagement and friendship of people too tired and taxed to even send a text back.

And I think that very isolating place of our superficial culture is what people are desperately trying to escape via things like Youtube channels and more clubs and activity classes than they can handle. I think the wave of “attention for the sake of it” has corrupted how and why we do basically anything. Celebrity status has been elevated to a fast track of book deals, talk show appearances, and product lines that will do a damn good job of eating up your time and identity as New Millennial Marketing Group dig in their claws.

Occupy Wall Street seems the loudest example of the scatter-brained, leaderless, overcompensating that underlies the vibe I get from different events or people these days. You have to rely on those Amazon books because you don’t have a mentor. You have to stay distracted because taking the time to write about how lonely or betrayed you feel has never been related to you by someone who’s making it work for them. Selfish and desperate is the name of the game. Guarded, exhausted, and scared the favorite pieces.

The love of what you do or who you’re with doesn’t come from the eggshell walking and pleasantries. Culture is bred from struggle, not distraction. You go to hell and back. You take risks. Some of you don’t make it out alive. There isn’t a formula for being a funny person, an artist, or a human being. People seem to be doing for the sake of doing. Learning for the sake of learning. I think we’re living because we’re alive, and not because we’re constantly figuring out what it even means to say that.